The Final Reckoning — Madame Bovary

Emma walks through melting snow towards La Huchette, asking herself what she will say and how she will begin. The thickets, the lime avenue, and the château bring back the first tenderness, and her poor heart opens as if this were love and not a debt. A warm wind blows. Snow drops from the buds. The dogs bark in the kennels and bring no one out. She finds Rodolphe charming at first. He holds her hands as in the old days. Then she asks for three thousand francs to stop the sale of her things. His face hardens. He says he has not got the money. She points at the silver, the clocks, the guns. He refuses again, calmly, and the pity in his manner is worse than anger. On the way out the walls seem to tremble and the ceiling to crush her. She breaks her nails on the lock of the ha-ha. A hundred steps farther she turns. The château is still impassive, park, gardens, three courts, every window shut to her. The ground feels softer than the sea. Her thoughts go off like fireworks: her father, Lheureux's closet, the room at home. She is afraid she is going mad, and she pulls herself back only far enough to reach the village.

At Homais's shop she tricks Justin into unlocking the little room upstairs. She climbs to the blue jar of arsenic on the third shelf, eats the white powder, and tells the boy to say nothing or the blame will fall on his master. At home she writes to Charles that he must accuse no one. When he asks what is wrong she tells him to wait until tomorrow. The sickness comes on fast. He reads the letter and cries out that she has been poisoned. Homais loses his head and makes more than fifteen drafts to Canivet and to Doctor Larivière. Hippolyte rides for Neufchâtel. Justin spurs Charles's horse until it is left foundered on the hill at Bois-Guillaume. Charles opens his medical dictionary and cannot read it. The lines dance. Homais says an analysis must be made. Charles shows the letter. It is arsenic. He sinks onto the carpet with his head against the bed and asks who drove her to it. She says it had to be.

Larivière arrives and hears the case between mouthfuls, while Homais talks of stuffed trotters and siccity in the pharynx and cannot say where she got the poison. Justin, bringing in a pile of plates, drops them all when the arsenic is named. Canivet, so loud at the club-foot, is modest now. He had been lectured for his emetic, and he smiles approval at the greater doctor. The priest gives the last rites. Charles kneels. In the street the blind man sings that the wind is strong this summer day and her petticoat has flown away. Emma sits up, cries out at his face against the night, and laughs a frantic, despairing laugh. She falls back upon the mattress. She was dead.