Madame Bovary

Chapter 5 opens with Flaubert's inventory of the Tostes house — and the inventory is a verdict. Canary yellow wallpaper puckered over badly stretched canvas. White calico curtains with a red border. A clock with a head of Hippocrates between two candlesticks. In the consulting room, volumes of the Dictionary of Medical Science, uncut, their bindings worn from successive resales. The smell of melted butter seeps through the walls during appointments; in the kitchen, you can hear patients coughing on the other side. Off the yard, a large dilapidated room serves as wood-house, cellar, and pantry. This is the life Charles has built. Emma goes upstairs to inspect the bedroom. On the secretary near the window, a bouquet of orange blossoms tied with white satin ribbons stands in a bottle. It is a bride's bouquet — the other one's. She looks at it. Charles notices, takes it, and carries it up to the attic. Emma, sitting in an armchair while her things are arranged around her, thinks of her own bridal flowers packed in a bandbox, and wonders, dreaming, what would be done with them if she were to die. It is her first afternoon in her new home. In the days that follow she redecorates: new wallpaper, repainted staircase, garden seats around the sundial. She asks about installing a fountain with fish. Charles, knowing she likes to drive, finds a second-hand dogcart and has it fitted with new lamps and a striped leather splashboard so it almost passes for a tilbury. He is completely happy. Flaubert catalogues his contentment with the same precision he used on the house: a meal together, an evening walk, the sight of her straw hat hanging from the window-fastener. In the mornings he lies beside her watching the sunlight sink into the down on her cheek, studies the changing colours of her eyes — black in shadow, dark blue in daylight, darker at the centre — and sees himself reflected in miniature in their depths. When he leaves for his rounds, she leans from the window between two pots of geranium in her dressing gown, picks a scrap of flower or leaf from her mouth and blows it down at him. It turns in the air, describes semicircles like a bird, and catches in the mane of the old white mare below. Charles throws her a kiss from horseback; she answers with a nod and shuts the window. He rides out along the dusty highroad, sun on his back, morning air in his nostrils, "re-chewing his happiness, like those who after dinner taste again the truffles which they are digesting." He reviews his life: school, where richer boys jeered at his accent and his clothes; medical training, where his purse was never full enough; fourteen months with the widow, whose feet in bed were cold as icicles. Now he has this beautiful woman for life. The universe, for Charles, does not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat. He reproaches himself for not loving her enough. He turns his horse around, gallops back, runs upstairs on tiptoe, and kisses her back while she is dressing. She gives a cry. He cannot stop touching her things — her comb, her ring, her fichu. He gives her great kisses on her cheeks, or a row of small kisses along her bare arm from fingertip to shoulder. She puts him away half-smiling, half-vexed, as you do a child who hangs about you. Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed had not come, so she decided she must have been mistaken. Emma tries to determine what one means exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture — words that had seemed so beautiful in books.