Madame Bovary (6 page)

This could not be as far as Charles went. Madame was emphatic. Ashamed, or, rather, tired out, Monsieur gave in without a struggle, and they waited one more year until the boy had made his first communion.

Another six months went by; and, the following year, Charles was finally enrolled in the school in Rouen, taken there by his father himself, toward the end of October, at the time of the Saint-Romain fair.

It would be impossible by now for any of us to recall a thing about him. He was a boy of even temperament, who played at recess, worked in study hall, listening in class, sleeping well in the dormitory, eating well in the dining hall. He had as local guardian a wholesale hardware dealer in the rue Ganterie, who would take him out once a month, on a Sunday, after his shop was closed, send him off to walk along the harbor looking at the boats, then return him to the school by seven o’clock, before supper. In the evening, every Thursday, he would write a long letter to his mother, with red ink and three pats of sealing wax; then he would review his history notebooks or read an old volume of
Anacharsis
that was lying around in the study hall. Out walking, he would talk to the servant, who, like him, was from the country.

By dint of applying himself, he stayed somewhere in the middle of the class; once he even earned a first honorable mention in natural history. But at the end of his third year, his parents withdrew him from the school in order to have him study medicine, convinced that he would be able to go on alone to the baccalaureate.

His mother chose a room for him, on the fifth floor, overlooking the Eau de Robec, in the home of a dyer she knew. She concluded the arrangements for his room and board, procured some furniture, a table and two chairs, sent home for an old cherrywood bed, and bought, as well, a little cast-iron stove, with the supply of wood that was to warm her poor child. Then she departed at the end of the week, after a thousand injunctions to behave himself, now that he was going to be abandoned to his own care.

The curriculum, which he read on the notice board, made his head swim: a course in anatomy, a course in pathology, a course in physiology, a course in pharmacy, a course in chemistry, and one in botany, and one in clinical practice and one in therapeutics, not to mention hygiene and
materia medica, names with unfamiliar etymologies that were like so many doors to sanctuaries filled with solemn shadows.

He understood none of it; though he listened, he did not grasp it. He worked nonetheless, he possessed bound notebooks, he attended all the lectures, he never missed a hospital round. He accomplished his little daily task like a mill horse, which walks in circles with its eyes covered, not knowing what it is grinding.

To spare him expense, his mother would send him each week, by the carrier, a piece of roast veal, on which he would lunch in the morning when he returned from the hospital, stamping his feet against the wall. Then he would have to hurry to his classes, in the amphitheater, in the hospital, and return home along all those streets. In the evening, after the meager dinner provided by his landlord, he would go back up to his room and back to work, his damp clothes steaming on his body, in front of the red-hot stove.

On fine summer evenings, at the hour when the warm streets are empty, when servant girls play at shuttlecock in front of their doors, he would open his window and lean on his elbows. The stream, which makes this part of Rouen into a kind of sordid little Venice, flowed past below him, yellow, violet, or blue, between its bridges and its railings. Workmen, squatting on the bank, washed their arms in the water. On poles projecting from the tops of attics, hanks of cotton dried in the air. Across from him, beyond the rooftops, extended the great, pure sky, with the red sun going down. How good it must be out there! How cool under the beech trees! And he would open his nostrils wide to breathe in the good smells of the country, which did not reach him.

He grew thinner, his body lengthened, and his face took on a sort of plaintive expression that made it almost interesting.

Quite naturally, out of indifference, in time he released himself from all the resolutions he had made. Once he missed the hospital rounds, the next day his class, and, savoring this idleness, gradually he did not return.

He acquired the habit of going to taverns, along with a passion for dominoes. To shut himself up every night in a grimy public room, in order to tap on a marble table with little mutton bones marked with black dots, seemed to him a precious assertion of his freedom, which raised him in his own esteem. It was like an initiation into the world, an
access to forbidden pleasures; and as he went in, he would put his hand on the doorknob with a joy that was almost sensual. Then many things that had been repressed in him opened up; he learned songs by heart and sang them to his lady friends, he developed an enthusiasm for Béranger, knew how to make punch, and at last experienced love.

Owing to this preparatory work, he completely failed his public health officer’s examination. They were waiting for him at home that very evening to celebrate his success!

He set off on foot and stopped at the entrance to the village, where he sent someone to get his mother, told her everything. She made excuses for him, shifting the blame for his failure to the unfairness of the examiners, and steadied him a little, taking it upon herself to sort things out. Only five years later did Monsieur Bovary know the truth; it was old by then, he accepted it, incapable, moreover, of supposing that any man descended from him could be a fool.

Charles therefore set to work again and prepared, unremittingly, the subjects for his examination, for which he learned all the questions by heart in advance. He passed with a fairly good grade. What a great day for his mother! They put on a grand dinner.

Where would he go to practice? To Tostes. There was only one elderly doctor there. For a long time, Madame Bovary had been waiting for him to die, and the old gentleman had not yet breathed his last when Charles was installed across the road, as his successor.

But it was not enough to have raised her son, seen to it that he got his medical training, and discovered Tostes for his practice: he needed a wife. She found him one: a bailiff’s widow from Dieppe, who was forty-five years old with an income of twelve hundred livres.

Although she was ugly, thin as a lath, as thick with pimples as the spring is with buds, Madame Dubuc certainly had no lack of suitors to choose from. To achieve her ends, Mère Bovary was obliged to supplant them all, and she very skillfully foiled even the intrigues of a pork butcher favored by the clergy.

Charles had foreseen in marriage the advent of a better situation, imagining that he would have more freedom and would be able to do as he liked with himself and his money. But his wife was the one in charge; in company he had to say this, not say that, eat no meat on Fridays, dress as she expected, pester at her command those clients who had not paid. She
would open his letters, spy on his movements, and listen to him, through the wall, when he saw patients in his office, if they were women.

She had to have her hot chocolate every morning, she wanted endless attention. She complained incessantly about her nerves, about her chest, about her spirits. The sound of footsteps was painful to her; if people left her, the solitude would become loathsome to her; if they came back, it was to see her die, no doubt. In the evening, when Charles returned home, she would take her long, thin arms out from under her sheets, put them around his neck, and, having made him sit down on the edge of the bed, begin telling him about her troubles: he was forgetting her, he loved someone else! They had told her she would be unhappy; and she would end by asking him to give her some tonic for her health and a little more love.

One night, at about eleven o’clock, they were awoken by the sound of a horse stopping just in front of the door. The maid opened the attic window and conferred for some time with a man who had remained below, in the street. He had come to fetch the doctor; he had a letter.
Nastasie
went down the stairs, shivering, and undid the lock and the bolts one by one. The man left his horse and, following the maid, entered immediately behind her. He drew from inside his gray-tufted wool cap a letter wrapped in a scrap of cloth and presented it delicately to Charles, who leaned his elbow on the pillow to read it. Nastasie, next to the bed, was holding the light. Madame, out of modesty, remained turned toward the space between the bed and the wall, showing her back.

This letter, sealed with a little seal of blue wax, begged Monsieur Bovary to go immediately to the farm called Les Bertaux to set a broken leg. Now, from Tostes to Les Bertaux it is a good six leagues cross-country, going by way of Longueville and Saint-Victor. The night was dark. Madame Bovary the younger was afraid her husband would have an accident. So it was decided that the stableboy would go on ahead. Charles would leave three hours later, when the moon rose. They would send a boy to meet him, to show him the road to the farm and open the gates in front of him.

At about four o’clock in the morning, Charles, well wrapped in his cloak, set off for Les Bertaux. Still drowsy from the warmth of his sleep, he
swayed to the peaceful trot of his mare. Whenever she stopped of her own accord in front of one of those holes edged with brambles that farmers dig alongside their furrows, Charles, waking with a start, would quickly recall the broken leg and try to summon up what he remembered of all the fractures he knew. The rain was no longer falling; day was beginning to dawn, and on the branches of the leafless apple trees, birds were perched motionless, ruffling their little feathers in the cold morning wind. The flat country spread out as far as the eye could see, and the clumps of trees around the farms formed patches of dark violet at distant intervals on that vast gray surface, which vanished, at the horizon, into the bleak tones of the sky. Charles, from time to time, would open his eyes; then, his
mind tiring and sleep returning of itself, he would soon enter a sort of somnolence in which, his recent sensations becoming confused with his memories, he would see himself double, at once student and married man, lying in his bed as he had been just now, crossing a surgical ward as in the past. The warm smell of the poultices would mingle in his head with the tart smell of the dew; he would hear the iron rings of the bed curtains running on their rods and his wife sleeping … As he was passing through Vassonville, he saw, by the side of a ditch, a young boy sitting on the grass.

“Are you the doctor?” asked the child.

And at Charles’s answer, he took his wooden shoes in his hands and began to run in front of him.

The officer of health, as he went along, learned from what his guide said that Monsieur Rouault must be an extremely well-to-do farmer. He had broken his leg the evening before, as he was returning from
celebrating Twelfth Night
at the home of a neighbor. His wife had been dead for two years. He had only his
young lady
living with him; she helped him run the house.

The ruts became deeper. They were approaching Les Bertaux. The little boy, gliding through a hole in a hedge, disappeared, then reappeared at the far end of a farmyard to open the gate. The horse was slipping on the wet grass; Charles bent low to pass under the branches. The watchdogs in the kennel were barking and pulling on their chains. When he entered Les Bertaux, his horse took fright and shied violently.

It was a prosperous-looking farm. In the stables, one could see, through the open upper halves of the doors, great workhorses feeding tranquilly from new racks. Along the sides of the buildings extended a large dung
heap, steam was rising from it, and, among the hens and turkeys, five or six peacocks were scratching about on top of it, a luxury in a Caux poultry yard. The sheepfold was long, the barn was lofty, with walls as smooth as a hand. In the shed were two large carts and four plows, with their whips, their collars, their full harnesses, whose blue wool fleeces were dirtied by the fine dust that fell from the lofts. The yard sloped away upward, planted with symmetrically spaced trees, and the cheerful din of a flock of geese resounded near the pond.

A young woman in a blue merino dress embellished with three flounces came to the door of the house to receive Monsieur Bovary, whom she showed into the kitchen, where a large fire was blazing. The farmhands’ breakfast was bubbling all around it, in little pots of unequal sizes. Damp clothes were drying inside the hearth. The fire shovel, the tongs, and the nose of the bellows, all of colossal proportions, shone like polished steel, while along the walls extended an abundant array of kitchen utensils, on which glimmered unevenly the bright flame of the hearth, joined by the first gleams of sunlight coming in through the windowpanes.

Charles went up to the second floor to see the patient. He found him in his bed, sweating under the covers, having hurled his cotton nightcap far away from him. He was a stout little man of fifty, with white skin and blue eyes, bald in front, and wearing earrings. He had by his side, on a chair, a large carafe of eau-de-vie from which he would help himself from time to time to keep up his courage; but as soon as he saw the doctor, his excitement subsided, and instead of swearing as he had been doing for the past twelve hours, he began to groan feebly.

The fracture was simple, without complications of any kind. Charles could not have dared to hope for an easier one. And so, recalling his teachers’ manners at the bedsides of the injured, he comforted the patient with all sorts of lively remarks—a surgeon’s caresses that are like the oil with which he greases his scalpel. For splints, they went off to fetch, from the cart shed, a bundle of laths. Charles chose one, cut it into pieces, and polished it with a shard of window glass, while the maidservant tore up some sheets to make bandages, and Mademoiselle Emma worked at sewing some pads. She was a long time finding her needle case, and her father grew impatient; she said nothing in response; but, as she sewed, she kept pricking her fingers, which she then raised to her mouth to suck.