Madame Bovary

This chapter — Part Three, Chapter VIII — is the novel's climax: Emma's visit to Rodolphe, her theft of arsenic from Homais's pharmacy, and her death. Walking across the fields toward La Huchette in the fading afternoon, Emma feels all the sensations of her first tenderness for Rodolphe return. A warm wind blows; snow melts from the buds to the grass. She enters through the familiar park gate, moves up the lime-tree avenue, climbs the straight staircase to his room at the top of the corridor. Her strength nearly deserts her at the lock. She goes in. He is at the fire, feet on the mantelpiece, smoking a pipe. Their reunion begins with romantic nostalgia — her bitterness at his leaving, his vague philosophical excuses, her willingness to half-believe them. Their fingers interlock as they did at the agricultural show; she sinks against his breast, coaxing him with dainty words. He kisses her eyelids. She bursts into tears; he mistakes them for love and kneels at her feet. Then she asks him for three thousand francs. His face changes. He gets up slowly and says, with calm finality: "Dear madame, I have not got them." Flaubert notes he was probably not lying; but the effect on Emma is catastrophic. She sees through him instantly and turns with fury on every sign of his wealth: the embossed carabine on the wall, the buhl clock inlaid with tortoise-shell, the silver-gilt whip-charms, the liqueur-stand. "When one is so poor one doesn't buy a clock inlaid with tortoise-shell," she says, touching each object. She takes two gold cufflinks from the mantelpiece and hurls them at the wall, their chain breaking. Then comes her great denunciation — two years of the "most magnificent, sweetest dream," the journey they planned, the letter that tore her heart — all of it thrown in his face. He answers once more, with the calm of resigned rage: "I haven't got them." She goes out. Outside, stumbling through the dead leaves, she breaks her nails against the gate lock. A hundred steps beyond she stops and turns. The impassive château stands behind her. A hallucinatory crisis seizes her: the earth beneath her feet feels more yielding than the sea; the furrows become immense brown waves; fiery spheres explode in the air and each contains Rodolphe's face, multiplying, pressing upon her. Night is falling; crows fly. Then the lights of Yonville appear through the fog and she recovers, running down the hill in what Flaubert describes as "an ecstasy of heroism, that made her almost joyous." She enters Yonville by the back of Homais's pharmacy, avoiding the bell at the front. She finds Justin in the kitchen and asks him for the key to the upstairs storeroom — the Capharnaum, labeled on the wall. He hesitates; she invents a story about rats keeping her from sleeping, then tells him not to bother Homais. He follows her upstairs. She goes straight to the third shelf — her memory is exact — seizes the blue jar of arsenic, tears out the cork, plunges her hand in, and begins eating the white powder. Justin cries out; she silences him: "Say nothing, or all the blame will fall on your master." Then she walks home, suddenly calm, "with the serenity of one that had performed a duty." Charles has returned to find her gone; he has sent Félicité in all directions. When Emma comes back she sits at her writing-table, writes a letter, seals it slowly, notes the date and hour, and tells Charles to read it tomorrow. She lies down. The symptoms begin: a bitter taste, then thirst, then an icy cold creeping from her feet toward her heart. She vomits. Charles notices white sediment at the bottom of the basin and presses her stomach; she screams. Convulsions follow. Her face turns bluish, her pulse almost imperceptible. He tears open the letter: "Accuse no one." He runs into the street crying "Poisoned! poisoned!" The news sweeps through Yonville. Messengers race to Neufchâtel for Canivet and to Rouen for Dr. Larivière. Canivet arrives first and orders an emetic. Emma vomits blood; her lips draw back; her whole body is covered with brown spots; her pulse slips beneath the fingers like a nearly-breaking harp-string. She screams, curses the poison, implores it to be quick. Then a post-chaise with three horses abreast tears around the corner: Dr. Larivière. Flaubert devotes an extended passage to this near-mythic figure — a physician of Bichat's generation, fanatical in his art, disdainful of honors, fatherly to the poor, feared for the penetrating intelligence that dissected every lie. His glance, says Flaubert, "more penetrating than his bistouries, looked straight into your soul." He examines Emma, shrugs, takes Canivet aside, and tells Charles quietly: "There is nothing more to be done." He leaves, pausing only to arrange matters with Canivet. What follows is one of Flaubert's most withering satirical passages: Homais corrals Larivière into an elaborate breakfast at his house, displaying his medical erudition at length while the great man tolerates him with barely concealed contempt. When Justin drops a stack of plates, Larivière glances at him — and the reader understands that Larivière knows exactly where the arsenic came from. Abbé Bournisien arrives with the holy oil. Homais, true to his principles, compares priests to ravens attracted by the smell of death, but follows him back to the house. The room has been arranged for the last rites. The priest administers Extreme Unction, anointing each sense in turn: the eyes that coveted worldly pomp, the nostrils greedy of warm breezes and amorous odours, the mouth that uttered lies and cried out in lewdness, the hands that delighted in sensual touches, the feet so swift in running to satisfy desires. Emma, seeing the violet stole, seems momentarily transported — finding again something of the mystical voluptuousness of her girlhood faith. She stretches her neck and presses her lips upon the crucifix with the fullest kiss of love she has ever given. After the sacrament she briefly seems calmer. She asks for her looking-glass. She bends over it; great tears fall; she turns away and falls back upon the pillows. Her breathing becomes rapid and labored; her tongue protrudes; her eyes roll and grow pale like two lamps going out. Charles kneels with his arms outstretched, pressing her hands, shuddering at every beat of her heart. The priest prays faster; his Latin mingles with Charles's stifled sobs. Then from the pavement below rises the blind man's raucous voice, singing his lewd song — the same beggar Emma threw her last five francs to on the Hirondelle. Emma raises herself like a galvanised corpse, hair undone, eyes fixed. She recognizes the voice and begins to laugh — an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh — as though she sees in that hideous face standing out against eternal night the final, fitting mockery of everything she had dreamed. She falls back in a convulsion. She was dead.