Madame Bovary

When the first cold days set in Emma leaves her bedroom for the sitting-room — a long apartment with a low ceiling, a large bunch of coral spread out against the looking-glass on the mantelpiece. Seated in her armchair near the window, she can see the villagers pass along the pavement. Twice a day Leon goes from his office to the Lion d'Or. Emma can hear him coming from afar; she leans forward listening, and he glides past the curtain, always dressed the same way, without turning his head. But in the twilight, her chin resting on her left hand and her embroidery fallen on her knees, she often shudders at the apparition of this shadow suddenly gliding past. She gets up and orders the table to be laid. Homais calls at dinner-time — skull-cap in hand, on tiptoe, always repeating the same phrase: 'Good evening, everybody.' He takes his seat between the pair, asks the doctor about his patients, then talks of what was in the paper, which by this hour he knows almost by heart. The subject becoming exhausted, he remarks on the dishes before him — aroma, osmazome, juices, and gelatine — with his head fuller of recipes than his shop of jars. At eight o'clock Justin comes to fetch him to shut up the shop. Homais gives the boy a sly look, especially if Felicite is there, for he has half noticed that his apprentice is fond of the doctor's house. 'The young dog is beginning to have ideas,' he says. At the Sunday soirees — not many people come, Homais's scandal-mongering having alienated the respectable persons of Yonville — Leon never fails to be there. As soon as he hears the bell he runs to meet Madame Bovary, takes her shawl, and puts away under the shop-counter the thick list shoes she wears over her boots when there is snow. First they play trente-et-un; then Homais plays ecarte with Emma while Leon stands behind her chair, giving her advice. Standing with his hands on the back of her chair he sees the teeth of her comb biting into her chignon. With every movement she makes to throw her cards the right side of her dress is drawn up. From her turned-up hair a dark colour falls over her back, growing gradually paler, losing itself little by little in the shade. Her dress falls on both sides of the chair, puffing out full of folds, reaching the ground. When Leon occasionally feels the sole of his boot resting on it, he draws back as if he has trodden upon someone. When the card game is over, Homais and Charles play dominoes. Emma moves to the table and turns over the leaves of L'Illustration, her ladies' journal. Leon sits near her; they look at the engravings together and wait for one another at the bottom of the pages. She begs him to read her the verses; Leon declaims them in a languid voice, carefully giving a dying fall in the love passages. But the noise of the dominoes annoys him. Soon the three hundred are finished and the men stretch out in front of the fire and fall asleep. The fire dies in the cinders; the teapot is empty; Leon is still reading. Emma listens, mechanically turning the lampshade, on the gauze of which are painted clowns in carriages and tight-rope dancers with their balancing-poles. Leon stops, pointing with a gesture to his sleeping audience. Then they talk in low tones, and their conversation seems the more sweet to them because it is unheard. Thus a kind of bond is established between them — a constant commerce of books and romances. Monsieur Bovary, little given to jealousy, does not trouble himself about it. On his birthday he receives a beautiful phrenological head, all marked with figures to the thorax and painted blue — an attention of the clerk's. Leon shows him many others, even doing errands for him at Rouen; and a novelist's book having made the mania for cactuses fashionable, Leon buys some for Madame Bovary, bringing them back on his knees in the Hirondelle, pricking his fingers on their hard hairs. She has a board with a balustrade fixed against her window to hold the pots. The clerk, too, has his small hanging garden; they see each other tending their flowers at their windows. Of all the windows in the village, one other is yet more often occupied: on Sundays from morning to night one could see at the dormer-window of the garret the profile of Monsieur Binet bending over his lathe, whose monotonous humming could be heard as far as the Lion d'Or. One evening on coming home Leon finds in his room a rug in velvet and wool with leaves on a pale ground. He calls Madame Homais, Monsieur Homais, Justin, the children, the cook — everyone wants to see this rug. Why did the doctor's wife give the clerk presents? It looked queer. They decided that she must be his lover. He made this seem likely, so ceaselessly did he talk of her charms and her wit. Binet once roughly answered him: 'What does it matter to me since I'm not in her set?' Leon tortured himself to find out how he could make his declaration to her, always halting between the fear of displeasing her and the shame of being such a coward, weeping with discouragement and desire. Then he took energetic resolutions, wrote letters that he tore up, put it off to times that he again deferred. Often he set out with the determination to dare all; but the resolution deserted him in Emma's presence, and when Charles, dropping in, invited him to jump into his chaise to visit some patient in the neighbourhood, he at once accepted, bowed to madame, and went out. Her husband — was he not something belonging to her? As to Emma, she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings — a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss. She did not know that on the terrace of houses it makes lakes when the pipes are choked, and she would thus have remained in her security when she suddenly discovered a rent in the wall of it.