They recognised the house by an old walnut tree which shaded it. Low and covered with brown tiles, there hung outside it, beneath the dormer-window of the garret, a string of onions. Faggots upright against a thorn fence surrounded a bed of lettuce, a few square feet of lavender, and sweet peas strung on sticks. Dirty water was running here and there on the grass, and all round were several indefinite rags, knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large sheet of coarse linen spread over the hedge. At the noise of the gate the nurse appeared with a baby she was suckling on one arm. With her other hand she was pulling along a poor puny little fellow, his face covered with scrofula, the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with their business, left in the country.
‘Go in,’ she said; ‘your little one is there asleep.’
The room on the ground-floor, the only one in the dwelling, had at its farther end, against the wall, a large bed without curtains, while a kneading-trough took up the side by the window, one pane of which was mended with a piece of blue paper. In the corner behind the door, shining hobnailed shoes stood in a row under the slab of the washstand, near a bottle of oil with a feather stuck in its mouth; a Mathieu Laensberg lay on the dusty mantelpiece amid gunflints, candle-ends, and bits of amadou. Finally, the last luxury in the apartment was a ‘Fame’ blowing her trumpets, a picture cut out, no doubt, from some perfumer’s prospectus and nailed to the wall with six wooden shoe-pegs.
Emma’s child was asleep in a wicker-cradle. She took it up in the wrapping that enveloped it and began singing softly as she rocked herself to and fro.
Léon walked up and down the room; it seemed strange to him to see this beautiful woman in her nankeen dress in the midst of all this poverty. Madame Bovary reddened; he turned away, thinking perhaps there had been an impertinent look in his eyes. Then she put back the little girl, who had just been sick over her collar. The nurse at once came to dry her, protesting that it wouldn’t show.
‘She gives me other doses,’ she said: ‘I am always a-washing of her. If you would have the goodness to order Camus, the grocer, to let me have a little soap, it would really be more convenient for you, as I needn’t trouble you then.’
‘Very well! very well!’ said Emma. ‘morning, Madame Rollet,’ and she went out, wiping her shoes at the door.
The good woman accompanied her to the end of the garden, talking all the time of the trouble she had getting up of nights.
‘I’m that worn out sometimes as I drop asleep on my chair. I’m sure you might at least give me just a pound of ground coffee; that’d last me a month, and I’d take it of a morning with some milk.’
After having submitted to her thanks, Madame Bovary left. She had gone a little way down the path when, at the sound of wooden shoes, she turned round. It was the nurse.
‘What is it?’
Then the peasant woman, taking her aside behind an elm tree, began talking to her of her husband, who with his trade and six francs a year that the captain – ‘Oh, come to the point!’ said Emma.
‘Well,’ the nurse went on, heaving sighs between each word, ‘I’m afraid he’ll be put out seeing me have coffee alone, you know men – ’
‘But you are to have some,’ Emma repeated; ‘I will give you some. You bother me!’
‘Oh, dear! my poor, dear lady! you see, in consequence of his wounds he has terrible cramps in the chest. He even says that cider weakens him.’
‘Do make haste, Mére Rollet!’
‘Well,’ the latter continued, making a curtsey, ‘if it weren’t asking too much,’ and she curtsied once more, ‘if you would’ – and her eyes begged – ‘a jar of brandy,’ she said at last, ‘and I’d rub your little one’s feet with it; they’re as tender as one’s tongue.’
Once rid of the nurse, Emma again took Monsieur Léon’s arm. She walked fast for some time, then more slowly, and looking straight in front of her, her eyes rested on the shoulder of the young man, whose frock-coat had a black-velvet collar. His brown hair fell over it, straight and carefully arranged. She noticed his nails which were longer than one wore them at Yonville. It was one of the clerk’s chief occupations to trim them, and for this purpose he kept a special knife in his writing-desk.
They returned to Yonville by the waterside. In the warm season the bank, wider than at other times, showed to their foot the garden wells whence a few steps led to the river. It flowed noiselessly, swift, and cold to the eye; long, thin grasses huddled together in it as the current drove them, and spread themselves upon the limpid water like streaming hair; sometimes at the top of the reeds or on the leaf of a water-lily an insect with fine legs crawled or rested. The sun pierced with a ray the small blue bubbles of the waves that, breaking, followed each other; branchless old willows mirrored their grey backs in the water; beyond, all around, the meadows seemed empty. It was the dinner hour at the farms, and the young woman and her companion heard nothing as they walked but the fall of their steps on the earth of the path, the words they spoke, and the sound of Emma’s dress rustling round her.
The walls of the gardens with pieces of bottle on their coping were hot as the glass windows of a conservatory. Wallflowers had sprung up between the bricks, and with the tip of her open sunshade Madame Bovary, as she passed, made some of their faded flowers crumble into a yellow dust, or a spray of overhanging honeysuckle and clematis caught in its fringe and dangled for a moment over the silk.
They were talking of a troupe of Spanish dancers who were expected shortly at the Rouen theatre.
‘Are you going?’ she asked.
‘If I can,’ he answered.
Had they nothing else to say to one another? Yet their eyes were full of more serious speech, and while they forced themselves to find trivial phrases, they felt the same languor stealing over them both. It was the whisper of the soul, deep, continuous, dominating that of their voices. Surprised with wonder at this strange sweetness, they did not think of speaking of the sensation or of seeking its cause. Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.
In one place the ground had been trodden down by the cattle; they had to step on large green stones put here and there in the mud. She often stopped a moment to look where to place her foot, and tottering on the stone that shook, her arms outspread, her form bent forward with a look of indecision, she would laugh, afraid of falling into the puddles of water.
When they arrived in front of her garden, Madame Bovary opened the little gate, ran up the steps and disappeared.
Léon returned to his office. His chief was away; he just glanced at the briefs, then cut himself a pen, and at last took up his hat and went out.
He went to La Pâture at the top of the Argueil hills at the beginning of the forest; he threw himself upon the ground under the pines and watched the sky through his fingers.
‘How bored I am!’ he said to himself, ‘how bored I am!’
He thought he was to be pitied for living in this village, with Homais for a friend and Monsieur Guillaumin for master. The latter, entirely absorbed by his business, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and red whiskers over a white cravat, understood nothing of mental refinements, although he affected a stiff English manner, which in the beginning had impressed the clerk.
As for the chemist’s spouse, she was the best wife in Normandy, gentle as a sheep, loving her children, her father, her mother, her cousins, weeping for others’ woes, letting everything go in her household, and detesting corsets; but so slow of movement, such a bore to listen to, so common in appearance, and of such restricted conversation, that although she was thirty, he only twenty, although they slept in adjoining rooms and he spoke to her daily, he never thought that to someone else she might be a woman, or that she possessed anything of her sex beyond the gown.
And what else was there? Binet, a few shopkeepers, two or three publicans, the curé, and, finally, Monsieur Tuvache the mayor, with his two sons, rich, crabbed, obtuse persons, who farmed their own lands and had feasts among themselves, bigoted to boot, and quite unbearable companions.
But from the general background of all these human faces Emma’s stood out isolated and yet farthest off; for between her and him he seemed to see a vague abyss.
In the beginning he had called on her several times along with the druggist. Charles had not appeared particularly anxious to see him again, and Léon did not know what to do between his fear of being indiscreet and the desire for an intimacy that seemed almost impossible.
4
When the first cold days set in Emma left her bedroom for the sitting-room, a long apartment with a low ceiling, in which there was on the mantelpiece a large bunch of coral spread out against the looking-glass. Seated in her armchair near the window, she could see the villagers pass along the pavement.
Twice a day Léon went from his office to the Lion d’Or. Emma could hear him coming from afar; she leant forward listening, and the young man glided past the curtain, always dressed in the same way, and without turning his head. But in the twilight, when, her chin resting on her left hand, she let the embroidery she had begun fall on her knees, she often shuddered at the apparition of this shadow suddenly gliding past. She would get up and order the table to be laid.
Monsieur Homais called at dinner-time. Skullcap in hand, he came in on tiptoe, in order to disturb no one, always repeating the same phrase, ‘evening, everybody.’ Then, when he had taken his seat at the table between the pair, he asked the doctor about his patients, and the latter consulted him as to the probability of their payment. Next they talked of ‘what was in the paper.’ Homais by this hour knew it almost by heart, and he repeated it from end to end, with the reflections of the penny-a-liners, and all the stories of individual catastrophes that had occurred in France or abroad. But the subject becoming exhausted, he was not slow in throwing out some remarks on the dishes before him. Sometimes even, half-rising, he delicately pointed out to madame the tenderest morsel, or turning to the servant, gave her some advice on the manipulation of stews and the hygiene of seasoning. He talked aroma, osmazome, juices, and gelatine in a bewildering manner. Moreover, Homais, with his head fuller of recipes than his shop of jars, excelled in making all kinds of preserves, vinegars, and sweet liqueurs; he knew also all the latest inventions in economic stoves, together with the art of preserving cheeses and of curing sick wines.
At eight o’clock Justin came to fetch him to shut up the shop. Then Monsieur Homais gave him a sly look, especially if Félicité was there, for he half noticed that his apprentice was fond of the doctor’s house.
‘The young dog,’ he said, ‘is beginning to have ideas, and the devil take me if I don’t believe he’s in love with your servant!’
