Madame Bovary

On a Sunday afternoon in February, with snow falling, they all go to see a yarn-mill being built in the valley — Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais, and Leon, with Napoleon and Athalie brought along for exercise and Justin carrying the umbrellas. The mill is nothing: a great piece of waste ground, rusty break-wheels, an unfinished building through whose joists the sky can be seen, a bunch of straw with tricoloured ribbons fluttering in the wind. Homais computes the strength of the floorings and regrets not having a yard-stick such as Binet possesses for his own special use. Emma has taken Leon's arm. She turns and sees Charles: his cap drawn down over his eyebrows, his two thick lips trembling, which added a look of stupidity to his face; his very back, his calm back, was irritating to behold. Then Leon steps forward — the cold that makes him pale seems to add a more gentle languor to his face; between his cravat and his neck the somewhat loose collar of his shirt shows the skin; the lobe of his ear looks out beneath a lock of hair; his large blue eyes, raised to the clouds, seem to Emma more limpid and more beautiful than those mountain-lakes where the heavens are mirrored. Napoleon precipitates himself into a heap of lime to whiten his boots. A knife is wanted to clean them; Charles offers his. 'Ah!' she says to herself. 'He carried a knife in his pocket like a peasant.' That evening, alone in bed looking at the clean fire, the comparison re-begins with the clearness of a sensation almost actual. She sees Leon standing up, one hand behind his cane, holding Athalie who sucks a piece of ice. She cannot tear herself away. She pouted out her lips as if for a kiss: 'Charming! Charming! Is he not in love? But with whom? With me?' All the proofs arose before her at once; her heart leapt. Then began the eternal lamentation: 'Oh, if Heaven had not willed it! And why not?' When Charles comes home at midnight she asks carelessly what happened that evening. 'Monsieur Leon went to his room early.' She could not help smiling, and fell asleep, her soul filled with a new delight. The next day at dusk comes Monsieur Lheureux the draper — born a Gascon but bred a Norman, grafting southern volubility onto the cunning of the Cauchois. His fat beardless face is dyed by a decoction of liquorice; his white hair makes his small black eyes more vivid. Polite to obsequiousness, he holds himself perpetually bent in the position of one who bows. He lays out his wares: embroidered collars, Algerian scarves, English needles, straw slippers, eggcups in coconut wood carved by convicts. He filliqs the silk of the scarves with his nail; in the green twilight the gold spangles scintillate like little stars. Emma declines. He replies unconcernedly: 'We shall understand one another by and by.' Then quietly, leaning close: 'I could give you some money, if need be... I shouldn't have to go far to find you some, rely on that.' He closes the door gently. Emma has her dinner served in her bedroom on a tray by the fireside. 'How good I was!' she says to herself, thinking of the scarves. She hears steps on the stairs. It is Leon. She grabs the first pile of dusters to hem. The conversation languishes; he turns an ivory thimble-case in his fingers; she stitches in silence. At last he mentions going to Rouen and asks whether to renew her music subscription. 'No,' she says. 'Why?' 'Because —' and pursing her lips she draws a long stitch of grey thread. He asks if she is giving up music. 'Have I not my house to look after, my husband to attend to, a thousand things, many duties that must be considered first?' She looks at the clock. Affects anxiety about Charles being late. Two or three times she repeats: 'He is so good!' On the following days everything changes. She takes interest in the housework, goes to church regularly, is severe with her servant. She takes Berthe back from the nurse and when visitors call undresses her to show off her limbs, declaring she adores children. When Charles comes home his slippers are warming by the fire; his waistcoat never wants lining; in the cupboard the night-caps are arranged in piles of the same height. When Leon sees Charles by his fireside after dinner — hands on his stomach, feet on the fender, cheeks red with feeding, eyes moist with happiness, the child crawling on the carpet, and this woman with the slender waist coming behind his armchair to kiss his forehead — he says to himself: 'What madness! And how to reach her!' And thus she seemed so virtuous and inaccessible that he lost all hope. But by this renunciation he placed her on an extraordinary pinnacle — she stood outside those fleshly attributes, and in his heart she rose ever farther from him after the magnificent manner of an apotheosis that is taking wing. Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paler, her face longer. With her black hair, large eyes, aquiline nose, her birdlike walk, and always silent now, she seemed to be passing through life scarcely touching it, bearing on her brow the vague impress of some divine destiny. Near her one felt seized by an icy charm, as we shudder in churches at the perfume of flowers mingling with the cold of marble. Homais said: 'She is a woman of great parts, who wouldn't be misplaced in a sub-prefecture.' But she was eaten up with desires, with rage, with hate. She was in love with Leon and sought solitude to delight in his image. She rose after he left to watch him in the street, invented excuses to go to his room, envied Madame Homais for sleeping under the same roof. The more she recognised her love, the more she crushed it down. Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires. She would have liked Charles to beat her, that she might have a better right to hate him. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an imbecile insult. She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in a low voice with flowing tears. 'It is the nerves,' she told Felicite. 'Do not speak to him of it.' Felicite told her of La Guerine, Pere Guerin's daughter, the fisherman's daughter at Pollet, who was so sad that she would go alone to the sea-shore, and the customs officer going his rounds often found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle. After her marriage, they said, it went off. 'But with me,' replied Emma, 'it was after marriage that it began.'