Madame Bovary

This chapter — Part Three, Chapter VII — traces Emma's frantic descent as the machinery of legal seizure closes around her and every avenue of rescue collapses one by one. The morning after the distraint notice, Emma endures the arrival of Maître Hareng, the bailiff, and two assistants. With professional politeness bordering on obscenity, Hareng moves through the house cataloguing everything — the plates, saucepans, chairs, and candlesticks in the kitchen; the nick-nacks in the bedroom; her dresses and linen. Flaubert frames the procedure as an autopsy: "her whole existence to its most intimate details, was, like a corpse on whom a post-mortem is made, outspread before the eyes of these three men." The violation reaches its worst in the attic, where Emma keeps Rodolphe's letters locked in a desk. Hareng tips the papers out with his coarse, slug-like fingers — ostensibly checking for hidden valuables — and Emma's revulsion is physical, the intimacy of those pages profaned by his touch. When the men finally leave, Félicité returns and a man in possession is quietly installed under the roof, a legal agent who will live in the house until the debt is satisfied. That evening Charles sits by the fire, seemingly careworn; Emma watches him in anguish, reading accusation in every line of his face, though he suspects nothing. When the man in the attic stirs and Charles asks if someone is walking upstairs, Emma tells him it is only a window left open. On Sunday she goes to Rouen. She canvasses every broker whose name she knows; some laugh at her, all refuse. At two o'clock she goes to Léon's lodgings. He is embarrassed by her presence — his landlord dislikes him having women there — so they retreat to their usual room at the Hôtel de Boulogne. There Emma, very pale, clasps both his hands and asks him for eight thousand francs. He protests the impossibility; she calls him a coward and urges him to use his position at the notary's office as security, or to borrow from wealthy acquaintances. She even looks at him with a burning, lascivious intensity that implies he might steal the money from his employers' accounts — an invitation he recoils from. He leaves for an hour and returns with nothing, then lies that a rich friend named Morel may come tonight. Emma barely registers this false hope. He presses her lifeless hand and flees. At four o'clock, mechanically obeying old habits, she boards the Hirondelle back to Yonville. On the Place du Parvis in Rouen she passes the cathedral and is overwhelmed by memories of the day she first entered it, full of hope; she walks on weeping. A tilbury sweeps past, driven by a man in sable furs — she is nearly certain it is the Viscount from the Vaubyessard ball, but the carriage disappears before she can be sure. The encounter leaves her more desolate than before, everything within and around her abandoning her. At the Croix-Rouge she finds Homais supervising the loading of pharmaceutical boxes onto the coach, carrying cheminots — small Norman loaves — for his wife. Homais holds forth at length when the blind beggar appears at the foot of the hill, diagnosing his condition with mock expertise and dispensing a few coins along with medical advice. When the coachman Hivert demands the blind man's usual song in return, the man obliges with a hideous, dog-like howl. Emma, in disgust and a kind of reckless defiance, throws him a five-franc piece — her last coin — and feels it to be magnificent. The next morning she is woken by noise in the Place. A crowd has gathered around the market to read a yellow poster: a public notice that all her furniture is for sale. Justin tries to tear it down and is seized by the rural guard. Félicité brings Emma the poster torn from their door. After a quarter-hour of mutual silence, the maid suggests that Emma go to Monsieur Guillaumin, the notary, whose servant has let slip that he finds Madame Bovary attractive. Emma dresses in her black gown and hood and takes the path by the river to avoid the crowd. Guillaumin's dining room impresses her — its porcelain stove, silver chafing-dishes, oak-stained walls hung with reproductions of Steuben's "Esmeralda" and Schopin's "Potiphar," its scrupulous English cleanliness. "Now this," she thinks, "is the dining-room I ought to have." The notary himself — in a palm-leaf dressing-gown, brown velvet cap, three carefully arranged curls disguising his baldness — is all elaborate courtesy. But Emma does not know what she has walked into: Guillaumin is secretly in league with Lheureux, having supplied the linendraper with capital for mortgages and receiving a share of the proceeds. He knows the full history of Emma's debts better than she does. He listens to her story with deliberate vagueness, eating his cutlet, pressing her feet toward the warm stove, brushing his knee against her boot. His hand travels up her sleeve. When she finally asks for money he declares himself sorry he hadn't managed her fortune all along — and then slides to his knees, confessing his love. Emma recoils, flushed with rage: "You are taking a shameless advantage of my distress, sir! I am to be pitied — not to be sold." She walks out. Behind her, Guillaumin sits stupefied, consoled only by the sight of his embroidered slippers. She runs from him burning with rage and indignation, "a spirit of warfare" transforming her — she could spit on all men, crush them, the hate choking her gives something almost like satisfaction. Back home, Félicité meets her at the door. Emma goes through every name in Yonville: impossible, they will not. She rehearses in her mind the scene of confessing everything to Charles — his tears, his forgiveness — and the thought of his magnanimity, which she cannot bear, exasperates her past endurance. She hears Charles's horse in the alley and flees out the back way to the square. She is seen entering Binet the tax-collector's garret by the mayor's wife and Madame Caron, who watch from a neighboring attic through a gap in hanging linen. They observe Emma pacing, handling objects, pressing closer to Binet; whatever she proposes is so shocking that Binet — a man who fought at Bautzen and Lützen — recoils as from a serpent, crying "Madame! what do you mean?" The two ladies are scandalized. Emma disappears up the Grande Rue and collapses at Nurse Rollet's cottage, sobbing, unlacing her dress, lying on the bed in a daze. She sends the nurse to fetch Léon from her house, convinced he will have the money. She waits, pacing the garden, watching the gate. The nurse returns: no one is at the house; Charles is weeping, calling for his wife. At that moment, like a lightning flash, the thought of Rodolphe strikes her. He is generous, good, delicate — and she knows how to reawaken in him what was once between them. Not pausing to recognize she is hurrying toward the man whose abandonment enraged her, not conscious of what she is offering, she sets out across the fields toward La Huchette.