Madame Bovary

The morning after the dinner, Emma in her dressing-gown sees Leon on the Place below, nods quickly, and reclos the window. Leon waits all day for six o'clock, then goes to the inn and finds no one but Binet. The dinner had been a considerable event for him; he had never till then talked for two hours consecutively to a lady. At Yonville he is considered well-bred: paints watercolours, reads music, talks literature after dinner. Homais respects him for his education; Madame Homais likes him for his good-nature with the children. Besides the servant there is Justin, the chemist's apprentice, a second cousin of Homais, taken into the house from charity. Homais proves the best of neighbours to the Bovarys, but there is a plan underneath his cordiality. He had infringed the law forbidding persons without a diploma to practise medicine, and after certain anonymous denunciations was summoned to Rouen to see the king's procurer — the magistrate receiving him standing, ermine on shoulder and cap on head. In the corridors Homais heard the heavy boots of gendarmes, and like a far-off noise great locks that were shut. He saw dungeons, his family in tears, his shop sold, all the jars dispersed; and was obliged to stop at a cafe and take a glass of rum and seltzer to recover his spirits. The fear has not faded. Gaining over Monsieur Bovary by attentions is to earn his gratitude and prevent his speaking out later on. Charles is dull; patients do not come. Money worries him: the entire dowry — over three thousand crowns — has slipped away in two years, and the plaster cure fell from the coach at Quincampoix and was dashed into a thousand fragments on the pavement. A pleasanter trouble comes: his wife's pregnancy. He watches her languid walk, her figure without stays turning softly on her hips, calls her little mamma, wants to make her dance, half-laughing half-crying. Now he wanted nothing. He knew human life from end to end, and he sat down to it with serenity. Emma, unable to spend as she would have liked — a swing-bassinette with rose silk curtains, embroidered caps — gives up the trousseau entirely and orders it from a village needlewoman without choosing anything. Her affection was, perhaps, from the very outset attenuated. She had hoped for a son — strong and dark, called George — like an expected revenge for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least, is free; he may travel over passions and countries, overcome obstacles. But a woman is always hampered. Her will, like the veil of her bonnet held by a string, flutters in every wind. She was confined on a Sunday at about six o'clock, as the sun was rising. 'It is a girl!' said Charles. She turned her head away and fainted. During her recovery she tries out names — Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala, Galsuinde, Yseult, Leocadie. Homais reports that Leon wonders why they do not choose Madeleine; Madame Bovary senior cries out against the name of a sinner. Homais himself prefers names recalling great men: his four children are Napoleon for glory, Franklin for liberty, Irma a concession to romanticism, and Athalie a homage to the greatest masterpiece of the French stage. At last Emma remembers hearing the name Berthe at Vaubyessard; from that moment it is chosen. Homais stands godfather, his gifts all products from his establishment: jujubes, racahout, marshmallow paste, sugar-candy. At the christening dinner Homais sings 'Le Dieu des bonnes gens'; Leon sings a barcarolle; old Bovary senior insists on having the child brought down and baptizes it with champagne poured over its head. This mockery of the first sacrament makes the Abbe Bournisien furious; old Bovary quotes La Guerre des Dieux; the cure threatens to leave; the ladies implore; Homais intervenes; and the priest sits back down and quietly finishes the coffee in his saucer. Bovary senior stays a month, dazzling the village with a policeman's cap with silver tassels, drinking brandy on his son's account, using up Emma's eau-de-cologne, and sometimes seizing her waist on the stairs: 'Charles, look out for yourself!' Madame Bovary senior, alarmed, hurries their departure. One day Emma is seized with the desire to see her little girl, put to nurse with the carpenter's wife at the edge of the village. At mid-day Leon comes out of a neighbouring door with a bundle of papers. She says she is going to see her baby but is growing tired. 'If —' says Leon, not daring to go on. 'Have you any business to attend to?' On his answer, she begs him to accompany her. That same evening Madame Tuvache, the mayor's wife, declares that Madame Bovary was compromising herself. The path to the nurse's turns left toward the cemetery, bordered by privet hedges in bloom, speedwells, eglantines, sweetbriar. The two walk side by side slowly, she leaning upon him, he restraining his pace to hers; a swarm of midges flutters in the warm air before them. They recognise the nurse's house by an old walnut-tree. She appears with two babies: Berthe, and a puny scrofulous boy, the son of a Rouen hosier whose parents are too occupied with business to care for him. The room: a large bed without curtains, a kneading-trough, hob-nailed shoes in a row, a bottle of oil with a feather in its mouth, and nailed to the wall with six wooden shoe-pegs, the last luxury of the apartment — a 'Fame' blowing her trumpets, cut from a perfumer's prospectus. Emma picks up Berthe and rocks her softly, singing. Leon walks up and down; it seems strange to see this beautiful woman in her nankeen dress amid all this poverty. Then she puts the little girl back — who has just been sick over her collar. The nurse embarks on her campaign: soap from Camus the grocer, then coffee, then at the garden gate — with curtseys and sighs about her husband's cramps — a jar of brandy to rub the baby's feet: 'they're as tender as one's tongue.' Once rid of the nurse, Emma takes Leon's arm. She walks fast then more slowly, her eyes resting on his shoulder; his frock-coat has a black-velvety collar, his brown hair falls over it carefully arranged. She notices his nails — longer than one wore them at Yonville; he keeps a special knife in his writing desk to trim them. They return by the water-side. Long thin grasses spread on the limpid current like streaming hair; an insect rests on the leaf of a water-lily; the sun pierces small blue bubbles; branchless old willows mirror their grey backs in the water. The walls of the gardens are hot as conservatory glass; with the tip of her open sunshade Madame Bovary crumbles wallflowers into yellow dust as she passes; a spray of honeysuckle catches in its fringe and dangles a moment over the silk. They speak of a troupe of Spanish dancers expected at the Rouen theatre. 'Are you going?' 'If I can.' Had they nothing else to say to one another? Yet their eyes were full of more serious speech. It was the whisper of the soul, deep, continuous, dominating that of their voices. Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know. At her garden gate Madame Bovary opens it, runs up the steps, and disappears. Leon returns to his office, glances at the briefs, then takes his hat and walks out to La Pature at the top of the Argueil hills. He throws himself on the ground under the pines and watches the sky through his fingers. 'How bored I am! How bored I am!' Guillaumin in gold-rimmed spectacles understands nothing of mental refinements; Madame Homais, gentle as a sheep, thirty years old to his twenty, he never once thought might be a woman for another. But from the general background of all these human faces Emma's stood out isolated and yet farthest off; for between her and him he seemed to see a vague abyss.