Madame Bovary

Before the Bovarys arrive, Flaubert gives us Yonville-l'Abbaye entire — a market-town twenty-four miles from Rouen, at the foot of a valley watered by the Rieule. Seen from the top of the Leux hill, the river divides the valley into two distinct regions: all on the left is pasture land, all on the right arable. The water flowing by the grass divides it with a white line, and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver. Here we are on the confines of Normandy, Picardy, and the Ile-de-France — a bastard land whose language is without accent and its landscape without character. It is there that they make the worst Neufchatel cheeses of all the arrondissement. A new cross-road was built in 1835, but Yonville-l'Abbaye has remained stationary in spite of its 'new outlet.' Instead of improving the soil, they persist in keeping up the pasture lands. The lazy borough, growing away from the plain, has naturally spread riverwards, sprawling along the banks like a cowherd taking a siesta by the water-side. The architectural tour of Yonville is Flaubert's quiet comedy. The first houses have thatched roofs, like fur caps drawn over eyes, reaching down over a third of the low windows whose coarse convex glasses have knots in the middle like the bottoms of bottles. Then comes the notary's house — the finest in the place — beyond a grass mound ornamented with a Cupid, his finger on his lips, two brass vases at each end of a flight of steps. The church nearby has a wooden roof beginning to rot, and a statuette of the Virgin clothed in a satin robe with red cheeks, like an idol of the Sandwich Islands. The town hall is a sort of Greek temple constructed 'from the designs of a Paris architect,' its dome crowned by a Gallic cock resting one foot on the Charte and holding in the other the scales of Justice. But that which most attracts the eye is the chemist's shop of Monsieur Homais, opposite the Lion d'Or inn. In the evening its argand lamp is lit up and the red and green jars throw far across the street their two streams of colour; the shadow of the chemist leans over his desk as if in Bengal lights. His house from top to bottom is placarded with inscriptions: 'Vichy, Seltzer, Barege waters, blood purifiers, Raspail patent medicine, Arabian racahout, Darcet lozenges, Regnault paste, trusses, baths, hygienic chocolate.' The signboard bears in gold letters 'Homais, Chemist.' At the back of the shop, behind the great scales, the word 'Laboratory' appears on a scroll above a glass door, which halfway up repeats 'Homais' again in gold on a black ground. Beyond this there is nothing to see at Yonville. The single street, a gunshot in length, stops short at the turn of the highroad. At the time of the cholera, in order to enlarge the cemetery, a piece of wall was pulled down and three acres purchased; but the new portion is almost tenantless. The keeper — who is at once gravedigger and church beadle, making a double profit out of the parish corpses — has taken advantage of the unused ground to plant potatoes there. 'You live on the dead, Lestiboudois!' the cure at last said to him one day. This grim remark made him reflect; it checked him for some time; but to this day he carries on the cultivation of his little tubers, and even maintains stoutly that they grow naturally. Since the events about to be narrated, nothing in fact has changed at Yonville. The tin tricolour flag still swings at the top of the church-steeple; the chemist's foetuses rot more and more in their turbid alcohol; and above the big door of the inn the old golden lion, faded by rain, still shows passers-by its poodle mane. On the evening the Bovarys are to arrive, Widow Lefrancois, landlady of the Lion d'Or, is sweating great drops over her saucepans. Tomorrow is market-day; meat must be cut beforehand, fowls drawn, soup and coffee made, and the boarders' dinner seen to as well. The billiard-room echoes with bursts of laughter; three millers in a small parlour are calling for brandy; the wood is blazing; the brazen pan hissing; on the long kitchen table, amid quarters of raw mutton, rise piles of plates rattling with the shaking of the block on which spinach is being chopped. From the poultry-yard comes the screaming of fowls whose necks are being wrung. Warming his back at the chimney, in green leather slippers and a velvet cap with a gold tassel, is a man slightly marked with small-pox whose face expresses nothing but self-satisfaction — as calm as the goldfinch suspended above him in its wicker cage. This is Monsieur Homais, the chemist. He and Madame Lefrancois are in the middle of a quarrel about the billiard table, which he insists she should replace with a modern one — narrow pockets, heavy cues, no more hazards. 'Just look at Tellier!' he says. The landlady reddens with vexation. She has no intention of changing a table that comes in so handy for folding the washing, and on which, in hunting season, she has slept six visitors. Madame Lefrancois mentions her two regular boarders: Binet and Leon. Binet arrives on the stroke of six — not a minute late, not a minute early — a former carabineer turned tax-collector, wearing a blue frock-coat falling in a straight line round his thin body. He has a bald forehead flattened by the constant wearing of a helmet, fair whiskers framing his long wan face like a garden border, and a habit of turning napkin rings on his lathe at home, with which he has filled up his house with the jealousy of an artist and the egotism of a bourgeois. He goes directly to the small parlour and does not utter a word. Leon, by contrast, sometimes comes at seven or half-past and doesn't look at what he eats. 'Such a nice young man! Never speaks a rough word!' When the cure appears at the kitchen door — a rubicund, athletic man in black — to retrieve an umbrella he forgot at the Ernemont convent, Madame Lefrancois offers him a thimbleful of cassis or a glass of wine. He declines very politely and leaves for the church, where the Angelus is ringing. The moment his footsteps fade across the square, Homais declares his refusal to take refreshment 'the most odious hypocrisy' — all priests tippled on the sly and were trying to bring back the days of the tithe. The landlady defends her cure. Homais is not to be deflected. He launches into his profession of faith: 'I have a religion, my religion, and I even have more than all these others with their mummeries and their juggling. I adore God, on the contrary. I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be.' He does not need to go to church to kiss silver plates and fatten good-for-nothings who live better than he does. 'My God! Mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I am for the profession of faith of the Savoyard Vicar, and the immortal principles of '89! And I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days — things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws.' He ceases, looking round for an audience, having for a moment fancied himself in the midst of the town council. But the landlady is no longer listening. She hears a distant rolling — a carriage mingled with the clattering of loose horseshoes — and the Hirondelle stops at the door. It is a yellow box on two large wheels, its small panes rattling in their sashes, retaining here and there patches of mud amid old layers of dust that not even storms of rain have washed away, drawn by three horses, its bottom jolting against the ground on downhill runs. Hivert the coachman, who serves as Yonville's errand-runner — bringing rolls of leather for the shoemaker, old iron for the farrier, a barrel of herrings for his mistress, caps from the milliner's — has been delayed. An accident: Madame Bovary's greyhound had run across a field. They had whistled for her a quarter of an hour; Hivert had even gone back a mile and a half. But it had been necessary to go on. Emma had wept, grown angry, and accused Charles of this misfortune. Monsieur Lheureux, a draper who happened to be in the coach with her, had tried to console her with a number of examples of lost dogs recognising their masters after long years — one who had come back to Paris from Constantinople, another who had gone a hundred and fifty miles in a straight line and swum four rivers, and his own father's poodle, which after twelve years of absence had all of a sudden jumped on his back in the street as he was going to dine in town.