The Cathedral Seduction — Madame Bovary

Léon, while studying law, goes often to the dancing-rooms, where the grisettes think he has a distinguished air. He is careful with his quarter's money and with his professors. Excess frightens him as much as it bores him. Under the lime trees of the Luxembourg he lets his Code fall, and Emma comes back, but other desires have been growing over that memory. Then he sees her again after three years, a country doctor's wife, in a city where he now knows how to move. The confidence he would not risk on a rich Paris woman comes easily with her. After the opera he follows the Bovarys. The next day he visits Emma at the inn.

They sit alone and rebuild the past they wish they had lived. She speaks of her illness, which almost killed her. He says that one evening he made his will and asked to be buried in the velvet-striped rug she had given him. When she asks why, he says it is because he loved her. Her face clears as if weather had crossed it. Speech thins the feeling even while it pleases them. He bends and kisses her neck. She laughs, calls him mad, then looks at him with an icy dignity that stops him on the threshold. He whispers tomorrow. She nods and vanishes into the next room like a bird. That night she writes a long letter cancelling the meeting. She has no address for him, so she decides to put the letter in his hand herself.

In the morning Léon varnishes his pumps, puts on white trousers and a green coat, empties his scent into a handkerchief, curls his hair and uncurls it, and waits at the cathedral. Emma tries to pray. The guide will not stop. He names Pierre de Brézé, Louis de Brézé, and Diane de Poitiers, dates of battles and tombs, and he asks whether anyone has seen a more perfect picture of annihilation. Léon bites his lip and pays the guide to leave. Outside he calls a cab, pulls Emma in, and when she says it is improper he tells her that in Paris people do this. The blinds stay down. The cab drives for hours through Rouen. The driver tires. People stare. A bare hand throws torn scraps of the cancellation letter out of the window, and they land on a field of red clover. About six o'clock the carriage stops in a side street of the Beauvoisine quarter. A woman gets out with her veil down and does not turn her head.