Madame Bovary

The château at Vaubyessard is a modern building in Italian style, with two projecting wings and three flights of steps, set at the foot of an immense green lawn where cows graze among large trees. Charles's dog-cart pulls up before the middle flight of steps. The Marquis himself comes forward and offers his arm to the doctor's wife. The vestibule is paved with marble slabs, lofty, echoing like a church. To the left, a gallery leads to the billiard room, where men with grave faces and orders on their chests stand round the table, their chins resting on high cravats. On the wainscoting, gold-framed portraits bear names in black letters — ancestors killed at Coutras, wounded at the Hougue-Saint-Vaast. The Marchioness receives Emma on an ottoman and talks to her as amicably as if she had known her a long time. At seven, dinner is served. Emma enters the dining room and feels herself wrapped in warm air — a blending of perfumes, fine linen, the fumes of viands, the odour of truffles. Silver dish covers reflect the wax candles; cut crystal throws pale rays; napkins are folded after the fashion of a bishop's mitre; lobster claws hang over the dishes; quails sit in their plumage. Madame Bovary notices that many ladies have not put their gloves in their glasses — a detail of aristocratic manners she files away. But at the upper end of the table, alone among all the women, bent over his full plate with a napkin tied round his neck like a child, an old man sits eating, letting drops of gravy drip from his mouth. His eyes are bloodshot; he wears a little queue tied with black ribbon. He is the old Duke de Laverdière, once favourite of the Count d'Artois, said to have been the lover of Queen Marie Antoinette. He has lived a life of noisy debauch — duels, bets, elopements — and squandered his entire fortune. A servant names aloud to him in his ear the dishes he points to stammering. Emma cannot stop looking at him. He had lived at court and slept in the bed of queens. Iced champagne is poured. She shivers as she feels it cold in her mouth. She has never seen pomegranates nor tasted pineapples. Even the powdered sugar seems whiter and finer than elsewhere. Emma makes her toilet with the fastidious care of an actress on her debut — hair dressed according to the hairdresser's directions, barège dress spread out on the bed. Her black eyes seem blacker than ever; a rose in her chignon trembles on its stalk with artificial dewdrops at the tip of the leaves. She wears a gown of pale saffron trimmed with three bouquets of pompon roses mixed with green. Charles, whose trouser-straps are too tight for dancing, suggests he might waltz. "You must be mad," she tells him. "They would make fun of you; keep your place. Besides, it is more becoming for a doctor." He is silent and waits while she finishes dressing. He comes to kiss her shoulder. "Let me alone! You are tumbling me." At the ball, Emma studies the men of breeding scattered among the dancers — fifteen or so, aged twenty-five to forty. Their clothes are better made, their hair more delicately pomaded, their necks moving easily in low cravats. They have the complexion of wealth: that clear complexion heightened by the pallor of porcelain, the shimmer of satin, the veneer of old furniture. In their unconcerned looks is the calm of passions daily satiated, and through all their gentleness of manner pierces that peculiar brutality — the result of half-easy mastery, force exercised and vanity amused — the management of thoroughbred horses and the society of loose women. A gentleman in a blue coat talks of Italy with a pale young woman wearing pearls. Emma listens with one ear to a conversation full of words she doesn't understand — a young man who has beaten "Miss Arabella" and "Romolus" and won two thousand louis jumping a ditch in England. With her other eye she watches a white note, folded in a triangle, thrown into a gentleman's hat by a young woman's hand as he stoops to retrieve a fallen fan. The lamps are growing dim. A servant gets up on a chair and breaks the window-panes to let in air. At the crash of glass, Emma turns and sees the faces of peasants pressed against the windows looking in. The memory of Les Bertaux rushes back — the farm, the muddy pond, her father in his blouse under the apple trees, herself skimming cream from milk-pans in the dairy. But in the refulgence of the present hour her past life, so distinct until then, fades away completely, and she almost doubts having lived it. She is just eating a maraschino ice from a silver-gilt cup, her eyes half-closed, the spoon between her teeth. At three o'clock the cotillion begins. Emma does not know how to waltz. Everyone is waltzing — Mademoiselle d'Andervilliers, the Marquis — only the guests staying in the château remain, about a dozen. One of the waltzers, familiarly called Viscount, whose low-cut waistcoat seems moulded to his chest, comes a second time to ask Madame Bovary to dance, assuring her he will guide her and that she will get through it very well. They begin slowly, then more rapidly. All around them turns — the lamps, the furniture, the wainscoting, the floor, like a disc on a pivot. The bottom of Emma's dress catches against his trousers. Their legs commingle; he looks down at her; she raises her eyes to his. A torpor seizes her; she stops. They start again, faster; the Viscount drags her along to the end of the gallery where, panting, she almost falls and for a moment rests her head upon his breast. Then, still turning but more slowly, he guides her back to her seat. She leans against the wall and covers her eyes with her hands. Charles has spent five consecutive hours standing bolt upright at the card tables, watching whist without understanding a thing, and drags himself upstairs by the balusters, his knees going up into his body, and falls asleep with a deep sigh of relief. Emma throws a shawl over her shoulders, opens the window, and leans out into the night. Some drops of rain are falling. The damp wind refreshes her eyelids. The music of the ball is still murmuring in her ears. She tries to keep herself awake to prolong the illusion of this luxurious life she would soon have to give up. Day begins to break. She looks long at the windows of the château, trying to guess which rooms belonged to those she had noticed the evening before. She would fain have known their lives, have penetrated, blended with them. But she is shivering with cold. She undresses and cowers down between the sheets against Charles, who is asleep. At luncheon next morning the repast lasts ten minutes; no liqueurs are served, which astonishes the doctor. They walk in the hothouses — strange plants bristling with hairs rise in pyramids under hanging vases, from which long green cords fall interlacing like over-filled nests of serpents. The Marquis takes Emma to see the stables: porcelain slabs bear the horses' names in black letters; the harness room shines like the flooring of a drawing room. Then the Bovarys pay their respects and set out again for Tostes. On the heights of Thibourville, some horsemen with cigars between their lips pass laughing. Emma thinks she recognizes the Viscount and turns back — she catches only the movement of heads rising and falling with the unequal cadence of a trot or gallop. A mile farther on, they stop to mend a broken trace. Charles picks up something from the ground between the horse's legs: a cigar case with a green silk border, emblazoned in the centre like the door of a carriage. Two cigars are inside. He pockets it. When they get home the dinner is not ready. Emma loses her temper. Nastasie answers rudely. "Leave the room," says Emma. "You are forgetting yourself. I give you warning." For dinner there is onion soup and a piece of veal with sorrel. Charles rubs his hands: "How good it is to be at home again!" Nastasie can be heard crying in the kitchen — she had been his first patient, his oldest acquaintance in the place. Charles tries one of the cigars in the kitchen while they wait for their room to be made ready. He smokes with lips protruding, spitting at every puff, making himself ill. "You'll make yourself ill," Emma says scornfully. He puts down the cigar and runs to swallow a glass of cold water at the pump. Emma seizes the cigar case and throws it quickly to the back of the cupboard. The next day is long. She walks about her little garden, up and down the same walks, stopping before the beds, the espalier, the plaster curate — looking with amazement at all these things she knows so well. How far off the ball seems already. Her journey to Vaubyessard had made a hole in her life, like one of those great crevices a storm will sometimes make in one night in mountains. Still she was resigned. She puts away her beautiful dress devoutly in her drawers, down to the satin shoes whose soles were yellowed with the slippery wax of the dancing floor. Her heart was like these. In its friction against wealth, something had come over it that could not be effaced. The memory of the ball then becomes an occupation for Emma. Whenever Wednesday comes round she says to herself as she wakes: "Ah! I was there a week — a fortnight — three weeks ago." And little by little the faces grow confused in her remembrance. She forgets the tune of the quadrilles; she no longer sees the liveries so distinctly; some details escape her — but the regret remains.