Madame Bovary

One Thursday Emma was surprised to find Homais in the kitchen of the Lion d'Or, wrapped in an old cloak and carrying his establishment's foot-warmer, off to see the places of his youth in Rouen. He dragged Leon to the large Cafe de la Normandie, where, intoxicated with the Pommard wine and an omelette au rhum, he propounded immoral theories on women — chic above all else — and launched into an ethnographic digression: the German vapourish, the French licentious, the Italian passionate. Emma waited three-quarters of an hour, then spent the afternoon with her face pressed against Leon's office window. Even when Leon escaped at last and ran to the hotel, Homais followed to the door. Then a servant appeared to call Leon back. Emma's fury was absolute — incapable of heroism, weak, banal, more spiritless than a woman, avaricious, cowardly. She detested him. Growing calmer, she acknowledged she had perhaps calumniated him. But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt sticks to our fingers. The affair was waning. In her letters Emma wrote of flowers, verses, the moon and stars — naive resources of a passion striving to keep itself alive by all external aids. She would promise herself a profound felicity on her next journey, then confess she felt nothing extraordinary, then return more inflamed than ever, undressing brutally, tearing the thin laces of her corset. Yet something vague and dreary glided between them subtly as if to separate them. Leon, seeing her so skilled, thought she must have passed through every experience of suffering and pleasure; what had charmed him once now frightened him a little. He turned coward, like drunkards at the sight of strong drinks, when he heard the creaking of her boots. She, in turn, tied a medal of the Virgin round his neck and inquired like a virtuous mother about his companions. One day, having parted early, Emma walked along the boulevard and saw the walls of her old convent. She sat on a bench in the shade of elms. All the past repassed before her — the first month of marriage, the rides in the wood, the viscount, Lagardy — and Leon appeared to her as far off as the others. 'Yet I love him,' she said to herself. No matter. She was not happy — she never had been. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety. Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage. She longed for some catastrophe that would bring about their separation, since she had not the courage to make up her mind herself. She none the less went on writing him love letters; but whilst she wrote it was another man she saw — a phantom fashioned out of her most ardent memories and her finest reading, so real and tangible that she palpitated, wondering — lost, like a god, beneath the abundance of his attributes. The house was growing dreary. Tradespeople left with angry faces; Berthe wore stockings with holes; handkerchiefs lay about on the stoves. Charles walked in the garden with Berthe on his knees, trying to teach her to read, breaking privet branches to plant trees in the beds. Emma stayed in her room burning Turkish pastilles, having banished Charles to the second floor, reading extravagant books full of orgies. Or else consumed by that inner flame to which adultery added fuel, she threw open her window, shook loose her masses of hair in the wind, and gazing at the stars longed for some princely love. At Mid-Lent she went to a masked ball in velvet breeches, red stockings, a club wig, and three-cornered hat. She danced all night to the wild trombones. At the end she found herself on the theatre steps with some of Leon's comrades; they went to a fourth-floor room in a harbourside café. A clerk, two medical students, a shopman — what company for her. The women she soon perceived were of the lowest class. Her head was on fire, her skin ice-cold; she smelt the punch and the cigars and fainted. Day was breaking over the St. Catherine hills, a great stain of purple in the pale horizon, the livid river shivering, the street lamps going out. She slipped away, crossed the boulevard to the Croix-Rouge, and threw herself on the bed in the little room with the Tour de Nesle pictures. Hivert woke her at four. At home, behind the clock, was a grey paper. She read: 'Within twenty-four hours, without fail — to pay the sum of eight thousand francs.' A judgment, a writ of distraint on her furniture and effects. Lheureux, she thought, wanted to frighten her. But by dint of buying and not paying, of borrowing, signing bills, and renewing bills that grew at each falling-in, she had prepared a capital for Monsieur Lheureux which he was impatiently awaiting for his speculations. She presented herself at his shop with an offhand air. He folded his arms: 'My good lady, did you think I should go on to all eternity being your purveyor and banker, for the love of God?' He read from his ledger — August 3rd, two hundred francs; June 17th, a hundred and fifty; March 23rd, forty-six — then the bills signed by Bovary, then the renewals. She implored him; she pressed her pretty white hand against his knee. 'There, that'll do! Anyone'd think you wanted to seduce me.' Then he drew from his strong box the receipt for eighteen hundred francs she had signed when Vincart discounted the bills. 'Do you think he'll not understand your little theft, the poor dear man?' She collapsed. He walked up and down repeating: 'I'll show him! I'll show him!' Then, in a soft voice: 'It isn't pleasant — but no bones are broken. Since that is the only way left for you paying back my money.' She wrung her hands: 'But where am I to get any?' — 'Bah! When one has friends like you!' — 'I implore you, Monsieur Lheureux, just a few days more!' — 'There! Tears now!' — 'You are driving me to despair!' — 'What do I care?' And he shut the door.