Far from the Madding Crowd Ch. 45 Summary

Summary

After Bathsheba has run out, Troy covers the dead from sight, lies down dressed on the bed, and waits for morning. Hardy goes back over the day he has had. Troy had twenty pounds from his wife and seven pounds ten of his own, twenty-seven pounds ten in all, and drove to Casterbridge to meet Fanny on the bridge at ten. He sat on the parapet while the clocks struck, and nobody came. At that moment she was being dressed in her grave-clothes at the Union. At eleven he decided she had broken her word for the second time, and drove on to the Budmouth races, where, haunted by her face and by Bathsheba’s reproaches, he kept his vow not to bet. Only on the road home did it occur to him that she might truly have been ill.

At first light he walks to the churchyard and marks a newly dug empty grave, the one dug the day before for Fanny. In Casterbridge he goes into a stone-mason’s yard and says he wants as good a tomb as can be had for twenty-seven pounds, which is all the money he has, and that he wants it at once. He takes the best they have in stock, a marble headstone with footstone and coping, has the name cut that day, and sees it sent off to Weatherbury. Hardy says he goes about it like a child in a nursery, and the mason wonders at a customer with not a shred of mourning on him.

That night he carries a heavy basket back to the churchyard and, by the light of a lantern, plants flower-roots in the grave: snowdrops outside the coping, lilies and forget-me-nots over her heart. Hardy, with a faint smile, notes that Troy sees nothing absurd in it, since he draws his habits from both sides of the Channel, with English stiffness on one side and, on the other, a French blindness to the point where sentiment turns mawkish. Then a drop of rain puts out the candle. He leaves the finishing for daylight and lies down on the bench in the church porch. The tomb stands white in the dark, and the man who paid for it is asleep.

In this chapter:Terms Characters Key Quotes Modern Story

Why This Matters

Testing Remorse by Timing

Late flowers can be real feeling and still be useless repair. Troy spends every penny on marble and bulbs after Fanny dies alone in the Union.

When someone offers grand amends after harm is irreversible, ask what they would have done on an ordinary Tuesday when you still had options.

This chapter

Inside the Mind: Troy

He waited on the bridge with the money while she was already being laid out in the Union. The grief that follows is real, and it is grief for a timetable. Marble and bulbs can mourn a missed hour. They cannot mourn the years he did not hold her while she could still walk. Late splendour is easier than an ordinary Tuesday.

Continue this thoughtFanny Is the Past the Present Cannot Hold

Coming Up in Chapter 46

Hardy opens on the carved stone gurgoyles of Weatherbury church tower, one of them a wrinkled, grinning creature that has laughed at the landscape for four hundred years. Troy sleeps in the porch as the rain thickens. The gurgoyle spits, and a stream begins to fall across the churchyard towards Fanny Robin’s new grave.

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Chapter 45

Troy Buys a Tomb for Fanny

TROY’S ROMANTICISM When Troy’s wife had left the house at the previous midnight his first act was to cover the dead from sight. This done he ascended the stairs, and throwing himself down upon the bed dressed as he was, he waited miserably for the morning. Fate had dealt grimly with him through the last four-and-twenty hours. His day had been spent in a way which varied very materially from his intentions regarding it. There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct—not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which…

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Troy Buys a Tomb for Fanny

Summary

Why This Matters