Madame Bovary

This final chapter — Part Three, Chapter XI — follows Charles's disintegration after Emma's death and closes the novel with Flaubert's most devastating irony. The next day Berthe is brought home. She asks for her mamma; they tell her she has gone away and will bring back toys. The child asks several times more, then forgets. Her gaiety breaks Charles's heart. Money troubles resume at once: Lheureux presses Vincart again, and Charles pledges exorbitant sums rather than allow the smallest of Emma's things to be sold. His mother, exasperated, leaves the house after they quarrel. Then everyone moves in to take advantage. Mademoiselle Lempereur presents a bill for six months of piano lessons Emma never took — there had been an arrangement between the two women. The circulating library demands three years' subscriptions. Mere Rollet claims postage for twenty letters: "Oh, I don't know. It was for her business affairs." With each debt paid, Charles thinks he has reached the end; new ones follow without pause. Félicité begins wearing Emma's gowns — not all of them; Charles has kept some and goes to look at them in the dressing-room. She is about Emma's height, and often, seeing Félicité from behind, Charles cries out "Oh, stay, stay!" At Whitsuntide Félicité runs off with Theodore, stealing what remains of the wardrobe. Around this time the widow Dupuis announces Léon's marriage to Mademoiselle Leocadie Leboeuf. Charles, among his congratulations, writes: "How glad my poor wife would have been!" One day wandering in the attic he feels a pellet of paper under his slipper. He opens it: "Courage, Emma, courage. I would not bring misery into your life." Rodolphe's letter, blown from between some boxes. Charles stands motionless in the very spot where Emma once stood in despair thinking of dying. He sees the small R at the bottom of the second page, recalls Rodolphe's attentions and his sudden disappearance — but the respectful tone of the letter reassures him. "Perhaps they loved one another platonically," he tells himself. Charles is not the kind of man who goes to the bottom of things; his vague jealousy dissolves into the immensity of his grief. He concludes that everyone must have adored her, all men must have coveted her; this only makes her more beautiful to him. He adopts her tastes — patent leather boots, white cravats, cosmetics on his moustache; he signs notes of hand as she did. "She corrupted him from beyond the grave." He sells the silver piece by piece, then the drawing-room furniture. Every room is stripped except her bedroom, which remains exactly as it was. Each evening after dinner he goes up, pushes the round table in front of the fire, draws up her armchair, and sits opposite it with a candle burning and Berthe beside him painting prints. He suffers to see the child so badly dressed — laceless boots, pinafore torn to the hips — but her prettiness, her fair hair falling over rosy cheeks, brings him a happiness mingled with bitterness "like those ill-made wines that taste of resin." If his eyes fall on Emma's workbox, a ribbon, or a pin left in a crack of the table, he begins to dream and looks so sad that Berthe becomes sad as well. No one visits. Justin has fled to Rouen, where he is a grocer's assistant. Meanwhile Homais wages a six-month campaign of newspaper editorials against the blind beggar, concocting anecdotes of accidents attributed to the man's presence on the hill. The man is eventually committed to an asylum for life. Emboldened, Homais expands into books — General Statistics of the Canton of Yonville — philosophy, and social questions. He affects the artistic style, smokes, buys Pompadour statuettes, and wears a hydro-electric Pulvermacher chain that so dazzles Madame Homais she feels her ardour redouble. After two trips to Rouen and a hundred examined designs, Charles settles on a mausoleum with a spirit bearing an extinguished torch. Homais, after much deliberation, supplies the inscription: Amabilem conjugem calcas — "Tread upon a loving wife." A strange thing happens: though Charles thinks of Emma constantly, he finds himself forgetting her. The image fades despite all efforts to retain it. Yet every night he dreams of her — always the same dream, drawing near her, and when he is about to clasp her she falls into decay in his arms. Financial ruin deepens. Lheureux refuses to renew bills; Charles mortgages his mother's property; they quarrel over Emma's shawl and finally break. His mother takes Berthe. The child has begun to cough and has red spots on her cheeks. One day Charles opens the secret drawer of Emma's rosewood desk, which he had always delayed from a kind of sensuality. All Léon's letters are there. He devours them, then ransacks every drawer, corner, and crevice, sobbing, crying aloud, distraught. He kicks open a box; Rodolphe's portrait flies into his face amid the scattered love-letters. People say he has shut himself up to drink. He is sometimes seen over the garden hedge — long-bearded, shabbily clothed, weeping aloud as he walks up and down. On summer evenings he takes Berthe to the cemetery and they come home at nightfall. He meets Rodolphe at the Argueil market — selling his horse, his last resource. Both go pale. Rodolphe invites him for a beer. Charles gazes at his face seeing something of Emma in it; he would have liked to have been this man. Rodolphe fills silence with agricultural talk. A moment of sombre fury rises in Charles, then fades. "I don't blame you," Charles says at last, his head in his hands, with the resigned accent of infinite sorrow. "No, I don't blame you now." He adds the only fine phrase he ever made: "It is the fault of fatality!" Rodolphe, who had managed the fatality quite deliberately, finds this offhand, comic, and a little mean. The following afternoon Charles sits in the garden arbour. Rays of light filter through the trellis; vine leaves throw shadows on the sand; jasmine perfumes the air; Spanish flies buzz round the lilies. He is suffocating like a youth beneath vague love influences. At seven o'clock Berthe comes to fetch him for dinner. His head is thrown back against the wall, his eyes closed, his mouth open. In his hand is a long tress of black hair. She pushes him gently, thinking he wants to play. He falls to the ground. He was dead. Canivet's post-mortem finds nothing. When everything is sold, twelve francs seventy-five centimes remain — enough to send Berthe to her grandmother. The grandmother dies the same year. Old Rouault is paralysed. An aunt takes the child in. She is poor, and sends her to a cotton factory to earn a living. Since Bovary's death, three doctors have tried and failed at Yonville; Homais has destroyed each one. He has an enormous practice; the authorities treat him with consideration; public opinion protects him. He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.