Madame Bovary

The Hirondelle stops and Emma gets out first. Charles has to be woken from his corner, where he has slept soundly since night set in. Homais introduces himself — charmed to have been able to render them some slight service, his wife being away — and invites himself to dine with them. When Madame Bovary reaches the kitchen she goes straight to the chimney. With the tips of her fingers she catches her dress at the knee, pulls it up to her ankle, and holds out her foot in its black boot to the fire above the revolving leg of mutton. The flame lights up the whole of her, penetrating with a crude light the woof of her gown, the fine pores of her fair skin, even her eyelids, which she blinks now and again. A great red glow passes over her with the blowing of the wind through the half-open door. On the other side of the chimney a young man with fair hair watches her silently. This is Leon Dupuis, clerk at the notary Guillaumin's office, the second regular boarder at the Lion d'Or. He is a good deal bored at Yonville and frequently puts back his dinner-hour in hope that some traveler might come to the inn with whom he could chat in the evening. On days when his work is done early, he has to endure from soup to cheese a tete-a-tete with the silent Binet. He accepts with delight the landlady's suggestion that he dine in company with the newcomers. He lodges in a small room on the second floor of Homais's house, overlooking the Place. They pass into the large parlour where Madame Lefrancois, for the purpose of showing off, has had the table laid for four. Homais asks to keep on his skull-cap for fear of coryza, then launches into a comprehensive account of the local medical climate — enteritis, bronchitis, bilious affections, intermittent fevers at harvest-time, and a great deal of scrofula due to the deplorable hygienic conditions of the peasant dwellings. He enumerates the thermometer readings in three different scales, describes the winds from the forest of Argueil, the aqueous vapours given off by the river and the considerable number of cattle in the fields, nitrogen and hydrogen, miasmata — and this heat, he says, finds itself perfectly tempered by the south-eastern winds which, having cooled themselves passing over the Seine, reach them sometimes all at once like breezes from Russia. Emma, cutting across him, asks Leon whether there are walks in the neighbourhood. There is a place called La Pature on the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest, he tells her. Sometimes on Sundays he goes there with a book to watch the sunset. 'I think there is nothing so admirable as sunsets,' she says. 'But especially by the side of the sea.' 'Oh, I adore the sea!' says Leon. Does it not seem to you, she continues, that the mind travels more freely on that limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal? Leon agrees, and extends it to mountains — a cousin who travelled in Switzerland told him one could not picture the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. He mentions a celebrated musician who was in the habit of playing the piano before some imposing site the better to inspire his imagination. 'You play?' she asks. 'No, but I am very fond of music,' he replies. Homais interrupts to inform Emma that Leon was singing 'L'Ange Gardien' ravishingly in his room the other day — he heard it from the laboratory. Leon blushes. The conversation turns to books. Leon says what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning. Emma fixes her large black eyes wide open upon him. 'One thinks of nothing,' he continues; 'the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.' 'That is true! That is true?' she says. Has it ever happened to her, Leon goes on, to come across some vague idea of one's own in a book, some dim image that comes back from afar, as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment? She has experienced it. That is why, he says, he especially loves the poets — verse more tender than prose, moving far more easily to tears. 'Still in the long run it is tiring,' Emma replies. 'Now I, on the contrary, adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in nature.' Unconsciously, Leon has placed his foot on one of the bars of the chair on which Madame Bovary is sitting. She wears a small blue silk necktie that keeps up like a ruff a gauffered cambric collar, and with the movements of her head the lower part of her face gently sinks into the linen or comes out from it. Thus side by side, while Charles and the chemist chat, they enter into one of those vague conversations where the hazard of all that is said brings you back to the fixed centre of a common sympathy — the Paris theatres, titles of novels, new quadrilles, and the world they did not know; Tostes, where she had lived, and Yonville, where they were. Homais, catching the word 'library,' offers his own: composed of the best authors — Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter Scott, the Echo des Feuilletons — and in addition he receives the Fanal de Rouen daily, having the advantage of being its correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchatel, Yonville, and vicinity. They have been at table two and a half hours. When coffee is served Felicite goes to ready the new house, and the guests raise the siege. Madame Lefrancois is asleep near the cinders. The stable-boy — bits of straw in his red hair, limping with his left leg — is waiting with a lantern, carrying the cure's umbrella in his other hand. The town is asleep; the pillars of the market throw great shadows; the earth is all grey as on a summer's night. The doctor's house is only some fifty paces from the inn, so they say good-night almost immediately. As soon as Emma enters the passage she feels the cold of the plaster fall about her shoulders like damp linen. The walls are new and the wooden stairs creak. In their bedroom on the first floor a whitish light passes through the curtainless windows. She catches glimpses of tree tops, and beyond, the fields half-drowned in the fog that lies reeking in the moonlight along the course of the river. In the middle of the room, pell-mell, are scattered drawers, bottles, curtain-rods, gilt poles, mattresses on the chairs and basins on the ground — the two men who brought the furniture have left everything about carelessly. This was the fourth time that she had slept in a strange place. The first was the day of her going to the convent; the second, her arrival at Tostes; the third, at Vaubyessard; and this, the fourth. And each one had marked, as it were, the inauguration of a new phase in her life. She did not believe that things could present themselves in the same way in different places, and since the portion of her life lived had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.