Madame Bovary

Chapter 7 opens with a sentence of quiet irony: Emma thinks "sometimes" that this was the happiest time of her life — the honeymoon, as people called it. Flaubert immediately shows the trap in that thought. To truly taste a honeymoon's sweetness, she would have needed to fly to lands with sonorous names, ride in post chaises behind blue silk curtains, hear goat bells echo off mountains, breathe lemon groves at sunset, look at stars from villa terraces. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil that cannot thrive elsewhere. She believes happiness is geographical — that you simply need to get to the right place. She has not got there. She would have liked to confide her uneasiness to someone. But how to tell something as formless as clouds, as shifting as wind? Words failed her — the opportunity, the courage. If Charles had only guessed it — if his look had once met her thought — it seemed to her that something would have poured out from her heart, as fruit falls from a tree when shaken. But as the intimacy of their life deepened, the gulf between them widened. Flaubert then catalogues Charles's specific inadequacies with the same precision he used on the Tostes house. His conversation is commonplace as a street pavement — everyone's ideas troop through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought. He never went to the theatre in Rouen to see the Paris actors. He cannot swim, fence, or shoot. One day he cannot explain a term of horsemanship she has come across in a novel. A man, Emma reasons, should know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion. But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him. Charles, for his part, is delighted with her. He stands bolt upright watching her draw, eyes half-closed, rolling little bread-pellets between her fingers. The piano strikes him as miraculous — the faster her fingers move, the more he wonders. He has her two pencil sketches framed in very large frames and hung on the sitting room wall by long green cords. People returning from mass see him at his door in his wool-work slippers. He comes home late — ten o'clock, midnight sometimes. Emma waits up and serves him because the servant has gone to bed. He eats boiled beef and onions, picks at cheese, munches an apple, empties his water-bottle, goes to bed, lies on his back, and snores. In the morning his hair is tumbled pell-mell about his face, whitened with pillow feathers. He wears thick boots with two long creases running obliquely over the instep. "Quite good enough for the country," he says. His mother comes to visit and sides against Emma — too fine for their position, wood and sugar and candles disappearing as at a grand establishment. The two women exchange "daughter" and "mother" all day long, in voices trembling with anger beneath gentle words. Madame Bovary senior watches her son's happiness in sad silence, like a ruined man looking through the windows at people dining in his old house. When she leaves, Charles timidly repeats one or two of her milder observations to Emma. Emma proves him wrong in a word and sends him off to his patients. Emma tries to manufacture love. She recites passionate rhymes by moonlight in the garden, sings him melancholy adagios. She finds herself as calm after as before, and Charles seems no more moved. She strikes the flint on her heart and gets no spark. Eventually she persuades herself without difficulty that Charles's passion is nothing very exorbitant. His embraces become regular, timed, predictable — one habit among other habits, looked forward to, like a dessert, after the monotony of dinner. A gamekeeper whom Charles has cured gives Emma a little Italian greyhound named Djali. She takes her walking at Banneville, near a deserted pavilion with rotting shutters on rusty iron bars, to get away from the eternal garden and the dusty road. Her thoughts wander aimlessly at first, like Djali running after yellow butterflies, chasing shrew-mice, nibbling poppies on the edge of a cornfield. Then gradually, sitting on the grass and digging at it with little prods of her sunshade, Emma says to herself: "Good heavens! Why did I marry?" She imagines other men she might have met — handsome, witty, distinguished. She pictures her convent companions living in town, with the noise of streets, the buzz of theatres, the lights of ballrooms, lives where the heart expands and the senses bourgeon. But her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart. She remembers prize days at the convent — mounting the platform in her white frock and prunella shoes to receive her little crowns, gentlemen bending over to congratulate her, the music master bowing with his violin case. How far away. She calls Djali, takes her between her knees, smooths the long delicate head, and says: "Come, kiss mistress; you have no troubles." She sees in the animal's melancholy face a mirror of her own and speaks to her as you speak to somebody in trouble you are trying to console. At sunset the trees become a brown colonnade against a background of gold. A fear takes hold of her. She calls Djali and hurries home, throws herself into an armchair, and does not speak for the rest of the evening. Towards the end of September something extraordinary happens: an invitation to the estate of the Marquis d'Andervilliers at Vaubyessard. The chain of cause runs through a cherry tree. Charles had cured the Marquis of an abscess, and when the steward came to pay he noticed superb cherries in the garden. Cherry trees don't thrive at Vaubyessard — the Marquis asked for slips, came personally to thank Charles, saw Emma, observed that she did not bow like a peasant, and decided he was not going beyond the bounds of condescension in inviting the young couple. On Wednesday at three o'clock they set out in the dog-cart, a great trunk strapped behind, a bonnet-box in front, Charles holding a bandbox between his knees. They arrive at nightfall, just as the lamps in the park are being lit to show the way for the carriages.