Madame Bovary

This chapter — Part Three, Chapter IX — covers the hours and days immediately following Emma's death: the vigil, the preparations, and the arrival of old Rouault. Charles's first response is a kind of stupefied disbelief. When he sees Emma is no longer moving, he throws himself upon her crying "Farewell! farewell!" Homais and Canivet drag him out. He is led downstairs, weaker than a child, and left in the sitting-room staring at the floor with an idiotic look. Homais, returning home, is accosted on the Place by the blind man who has dragged himself all the way to Yonville hoping for his promised antiphlogistic pomade. Homais dismisses him brusquely: he has letters to write, a soothing potion to prepare for Bovary, and a cover story to fabricate — for the Fanal he invents the fiction that Emma accidentally mistook arsenic for sugar while making a vanilla cream. Back at Bovary's, he attempts conversation to distract Charles — horticulture, the fine days coming — and draws aside a window-curtain to announce that Monsieur Tuvache is passing. Charles repeats the words like a machine. When the funeral arrangements must be discussed, it is Bournisien who finally persuades him. Charles goes alone to his consulting-room and writes out his wishes: Emma is to be buried in her wedding-dress, white shoes, and a wreath; her hair spread over her shoulders; three coffins — oak, mahogany, lead; a large piece of green velvet over all. When Homais protests the velvet as a superfetation and mentions the expense, Charles turns on him: "You did not love her. Go!" Bournisien takes Charles for a turn in the garden and speaks of God's greatness, the necessity of submission. Charles bursts out in blasphemy: "I hate your God!" The priest sighs that the spirit of rebellion is still upon him. Charles strides along the garden wall, grinding his teeth, raising looks of malediction at a sky in which not so much as a leaf stirs. A fine rain falls; he eventually retreats to the kitchen. At six o'clock the Hirondelle arrives on the Place and he watches all the passengers get out one by one, leaning his forehead against the windowpane. Félicité lays a mattress for him in the drawing-room; he collapses onto it and sleeps. That evening Homais returns to sit up with the body, bringing three volumes, a pocket-book for notes, camphor, benzine, aromatic herbs, and a jar of chlorine water against miasmata. Two large candles burn at the head of the bed. Bournisien is already there. The two men fall almost immediately into theological dispute — Homais insisting that if God knows all our needs, prayer is pointless; Bournisien that prayer is a Christian duty; Homais citing Voltaire and the Encyclopédie; Bournisien citing scripture. They grow warm, grow red, speak simultaneously without listening, come close to insulting each other. Charles keeps appearing upstairs, drawn by a fascination he cannot resist. He stands opposite Emma and loses himself in contemplation that gradually ceases to be painful. He recalls stories of catalepsy and magnetism and once bends close to cry, in a low voice: "Emma! Emma!" His breath makes the candle-flames tremble. At daybreak Madame Bovary senior arrives. Charles embraces her and weeps again; she speaks of funeral expenses; he becomes so angry she falls silent and is commissioned to go to town to buy what is needed. The afternoon passes with Berthe sent to the Homais house and Charles receiving evening visitors — a semicircle of neighbours who sit with lowered faces, swinging a crossed leg, uttering occasional sighs, each inordinately bored and none willing to be the first to go. The women dress Emma in her wedding-gown and draw down the long stiff veil to her satin shoes. When they raise her head to put on the wreath, a rush of black liquid issues from her mouth. Homais, summoned to help, delivers a speech about his hospital days and his intention to leave his body to science. The theological debate between him and Bournisien resumes — this time on the celibacy of priests — until one by one both men fall asleep in their chairs, snoring opposite each other with protruding stomachs and puffed-up faces, as motionless as the corpse beside them. Charles comes in without waking them. It is the last time; he has come to say farewell. He watches the wax drip from the candles onto the bedsheets. Emma's satin gown shimmers white as moonlight. It seems to him she dissolves outward into everything around her — the silence, the night, the passing wind, the damp odours from the ground. Then memories begin: the garden at Tostes, the streets of Rouen, the threshold of their house, the yard at Bertaux, the laughter of boys under apple-trees. Her perfume fills the room; her dress seems to rustle in his arms with a noise like electricity. Wave after wave of despair follows. Then a terrible curiosity seizes him: slowly, with trembling fingertips, he lifts her veil. He utters a cry of horror that wakes the other two, who drag him back downstairs. Félicité comes to say he wants some of her hair. Homais, scissors in hand, trembles so badly he pierces the skin of her temple in several places before cutting two or three great locks at random, leaving white patches in the beautiful black hair. Toward four in the morning Homais can hold out no longer and declares he needs some sustenance. The priest needs no persuading; he goes to say mass, returns, and the two men eat and drink together, giggling slightly without knowing why — that vague gaiety that rises after long sadness. At the last glass Bournisien claps Homais on the shoulder: "We shall end by understanding one another." In the passage they meet the undertaker's men arriving. Charles endures two hours of the hammer resounding against wood. Next day Emma is lowered into her oak coffin, fitted into the mahogany, fitted into the lead; the gaps stuffed with mattress wool. All three lids are planed, nailed, and soldered. The bier is placed outside the door; Yonville flocks around. Old Rouault arrives and faints on the Place when he sees the black cloth.