Madame Bovary

Six weeks pass. Rodolphe does not come. He had calculated: if she loved him from the first day, absence will only intensify it. When he finally enters her room he sees Emma turn pale — and knows he was right. The small muslin curtains deepen the twilight; the gilding of the barometer shines in the looking-glass between the meshes of the coral. He sits on a footstool at her side and says simply that he did not want to come back. Why? 'Can you not guess?' He looks at her so hard she lowers her head, blushing. 'Emma!' 'Sir,' she says, drawing back. He hides his face in his hands: 'Madame Bovary! All the world calls you thus. Besides, it is not your name; it is the name of another!' Then: 'At night — every night — I arose; I came hither; I watched your house, its glimmering in the moon, the trees swaying before your window, and the little lamp, a gleam shining through the window-panes in the darkness. Ah! you never knew that there, so near you, was a poor wretch!' She turns towards him with a sob. 'Oh, you are good!' 'No, I love you, that is all.' He glides from the footstool to the ground — but hears wooden shoes in the kitchen and notices the door is not closed. He rises, proposes a tour of the house; Charles arrives at that moment, flattered at being called 'doctor' and goes obsequious. Rodolphe smoothly asks whether riding might be good for madame's palpitations. Charles is delighted with the idea. Emma objects — no horse, no habit. 'You must order one,' says Charles. The riding habit decides her. The next day at noon Rodolphe appears with two saddle-horses, one with pink rosettes at its ears and a deerskin side-saddle. He wears high soft boots and a great velvet coat with white corduroy breeches. Justin escapes from the chemist's to watch Emma start. Homais offers safety advice. Felicite drums on the windowpane for Berthe; Emma waves her whip to the child. 'A pleasant ride! Prudence! above all, prudence!' cries Homais, flourishing his newspaper as they disappear. As soon as she feels the ground, Emma's horse sets off at a gallop. Her figure slightly bent, hand well up, right arm stretched out, she gives herself up to the cadence of the movement. At the top of a hill the horses stop and her large blue veil falls about her. Early October: fog over the land, Yonville from the height an immense pale lake sending off its vapour. The tall lines of poplars rise like a beach stirred by the wind. The earth, ruddy like the powder of tobacco, deadens the noise of their steps; the horses kick fallen fir cones with the edge of their shoes. Rodolphe leans forward to remove ferns from her stirrup; at other times, pushing aside branches, his knee brushes her leg. They dismount. Emma walks ahead on the moss, but her long habit gets in her way; Rodolphe, walking behind, sees between the black cloth and the black shoe the fineness of her white stocking, that seems to him as if it were a part of her nakedness. Through her veil, that falls sideways from her man's hat, her face appears in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure waves. They sit on the trunk of a fallen tree. Rodolphe speaks calmly, seriously, melancholy. At the words 'Are not our destinies now one?' Emma says 'It is impossible!' and rises to go. He seizes her by the wrist. She gazes at him with an amorous and humid look, then says hurriedly: 'Where are the horses? Where are the horses?' He advances with outstretched arms, teeth set. She recoils trembling: 'Oh, you frighten me! You hurt me! Let me go!' He changes back immediately — respectful, caressing, timid — and speaks of her as a Madonna on a pedestal, lofty, secure, immaculate. He draws her farther on to a small pool where duckweeds make a greenness on the water, faded water lilies motionless between the reeds, frogs jumping away at the noise of their steps. 'I am wrong! I am mad to listen to you!' 'Why? Emma! Emma!' 'Oh, Rodolphe!' — she leans on his shoulder, throws back her white neck swelling with a sigh, and hiding her face, gives herself up to him. The shades of night are falling; the horizontal sun passing between the branches dazzles the eyes. Here and there in the leaves trembled luminous patches, as if hummingbirds flying about had scattered their feathers. Far away, beyond the wood, she heard a vague prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in silence heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his lips, was mending with his penknife one of the two broken bridles. They return by the same road. Nothing around them seems changed; and yet for her something had happened more stupendous than if the mountains had moved in their places. On entering Yonville she makes her horse prance in the road; people look from windows. At dinner Charles has bought her a cob — a hundred crowns, at Monsieur Alexandre's — thinking it will please her. She nods, then asks if he is going out that evening, and as soon as she is rid of him shuts herself in her room. She sees herself in the glass: never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. She repeated: 'I have a lover! a lover!' delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. The lyric legion of adulterous women from her novels began to sing in her memory with the voice of sisters. She became as it were an actual part of these imaginings. Ordinary existence appeared only afar off, down below in the shade, through the interspaces of these heights. The following day they meet in the shed of a wooden-shoe maker in the forest — walls of straw, roof so low they had to stoop, seated on a bed of dry leaves. From that day they wrote every evening. Emma left her letter in a fissure of the wall at the end of the garden by the river; Rodolphe fetched it and left another, which she always found fault with as too short. One morning when Charles goes out before daybreak Emma dresses quickly and slips down to the waterside. She crosses ploughed fields in which she sinks and stumbles, clings to tufts of faded wallflowers on the slippery bank, is afraid of the oxen, begins to run — and arrives at La Huchette out of breath, with rosy cheeks, breathing out from her whole person a fresh perfume of sap, of verdure, of the open air. It was like a spring morning coming into his room. The drops of dew hanging from her hair formed, as it were, a topaz aureole around her face. She examined his apartment, combed her hair with his comb, looked at herself in his shaving-glass, put his big pipe between her teeth. It took a good quarter of an hour to say goodbye. But one day, arriving unexpectedly, she saw him frown. At last he declared with a serious air that her visits were becoming imprudent — that she was compromising herself.