Madame Bovary

They began to love one another again. Often, even in the middle of the day, Emma suddenly wrote to him, then from the window made a sign to Justin, who, taking his apron off, quickly ran to La Huchette. Rodolphe would come; she had sent for him to tell him that she was bored, that her husband was odious, her life frightful. In the kitchen, Justin lingered watching Félicité iron the women's clothes. He took down Emma's boots from the shelf — coated with the mud of the rendezvous, that crumbled into powder and rose gently in a ray of sunlight. Emma accumulated expenses without limit. Charles disbursed three hundred francs for a wooden leg for Hippolyte — cork-topped, spring-jointed. Hippolyte found it too handsome for daily use and asked for a plainer one; Charles defray that expense too. When he heard from afar the sharp noise of the wooden leg, he at once went in another direction. It was Monsieur Lheureux who had undertaken the order, and this gave him an excuse for visiting Emma. He chatted about Paris goods, made himself obliging, never asked for money. She wanted a riding-whip with a silver-gilt handle for Rodolphe; the week after Lheureux placed it on her table. When his bill arrived — two hundred and seventy francs — all the drawers were empty. She put him off until Derozeray's account came, paid fourteen napoleons, and kept the small change. 'Pshaw! He won't think about it again.' Besides the riding-whip, Rodolphe received a seal engraved with the motto Amor nel cor, a scarf for a muffler, and a cigar-case exactly like the Viscount's that Charles had once picked up in the road and Emma had kept. These presents humiliated him; he refused several; she insisted; he ended by obeying, thinking her tyrannical and overexacting. Then she had strange ideas. 'When midnight strikes, you must think of me.' If he confessed he had not, there were floods of reproaches that always ended with the eternal question — 'Do you love me?' — 'Certainly!' — 'You haven't loved any others?' — 'Did you think you'd got a virgin?' he exclaimed laughing. Emma cried; he tried to console her with puns. He had so often heard these things that they did not strike him as original. Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. Human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars. He made of her something supple and corrupt. Her soul sank into this drunkenness, shrivelled up, drowned in it, like Clarence in his butt of Malmsey. By the mere effect of her love her manners changed — her looks grew bolder, her speech more free; she even committed the impropriety of walking out with Rodolphe, a cigarette in her mouth, as if to defy the people. Those who still doubted doubted no longer when one day they saw her getting out of the Hirondelle, her waist squeezed into a waistcoat like a man. Madame Bovary senior, taking refuge at her son's after a fearful scene with her husband, was not the least scandalised. There were quarrels — especially one over Félicité, whom the mother-in-law had surprised in company of a man who quickly escaped through the kitchen. Emma began to laugh. 'Where were you brought up?' she asked, with so impertinent a look that Madame Bovary senior demanded an apology or she would leave. Charles knelt to his wife, imploring her to give way. She held out her hand with the dignity of a marchioness: 'Excuse me, madame.' Then went upstairs and threw herself flat on her bed and cried like a child, face buried in the pillow. She made the agreed signal — a scrap of white paper fastened to the blind. After three-quarters of an hour he appeared outside. She threw herself into his arms. 'Save me! Take me away — I can bear it no longer!' He lost his head: 'What do you wish?' 'We will take Berthe — it can't be helped!' 'What a woman!' he said to himself, watching her run back into the garden. Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this period — that indefinable beauty that results from joy, enthusiasm, and success. Charles, coming home late and not daring to wake her, gazed at Berthe's cot and dreamed of the future — boarding-school, a small farm, shares, the day mother and daughter would be taken from a distance for two sisters. Emma, pretending to sleep, was already elsewhere: carried away at the gallop of four horses to a fishing village with brown nets drying in the wind, to a flat-roofed house by the sea, with gondolas, hammocks, and star-spangled nights. She ordered a large lined cloak, a trunk, and a travelling bag from Lheureux, pressing her watch into his hands as deposit. The plan was fixed: the 4th September, a Monday. She would leave as if going on business to Rouen; Rodolphe would have booked the seats, procured the passports, written to Paris for the mail-coach through to Marseilles, then a carriage to Genoa. The child was never mentioned. Rodolphe avoided the subject; perhaps he no longer thought about it. But he wanted two more weeks to arrange some affairs, then another, then said he was ill, then went on a journey. The month of August passed. At length the Saturday before arrived. Rodolphe came earlier than usual. They sat on the kerb-stone of the terrace wall. The full moon, purple-coloured, rose at the end of the meadow between the branches of the poplars, then appeared dazzling in the empty heavens and let fall upon the river a great stain that broke into an infinity of stars. Emma, eyes half closed, breathed in the fresh night wind. 'There is still time,' he cried. 'Reflect — perhaps you may repent.' 'Never! What ill could come to me? There is no desert, no precipice, no ocean I would not traverse with you.' She passed her hands through his hair, repeating in a childlike voice, despite the big tears falling: 'Rodolphe! Rodolphe! dear little Rodolphe!' Midnight struck. He rose to go. 'You have the passports?' — 'Yes.' 'You are forgetting nothing?' — 'No.' 'Till to-morrow then!' She watched him go. He did not turn round. She ran after him, leaned over the water's edge between the bulrushes — 'To-morrow!' He was already on the other side of the river and walking fast across the meadow. After a few moments he stopped. When he saw her white gown gradually fade into the shade like a ghost, his heart beat so violently that he leant against a tree lest he should fall. 'What an imbecile I am!' he said with a fearful oath. 'No matter! She was a pretty mistress!' And immediately her beauty came back to him. For a moment he softened; then he rebelled. 'After all — I can't exile myself — have a child on my hands. And besides, the worry, the expense! No, no, a thousand times no! That would be too stupid.'