Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paler, her face longer. With her black hair, her large eyes, her aquiline nose, her birdlike walk, and always silent now, did she not seem to be passing through life scarcely touching it, and to bear on her brow the vague impress of some divine destiny? She was so sad and so calm, at once so gentle and so reserved, that near her one felt oneself seized by an icy charm, as we shudder in churches at the perfume of the flowers mingling with the cold of the marble. The others even did not escape from this seduction. The chemist said – ‘She is a woman of great parts, who wouldn’t be out of place in a sub-prefecture.’
The housewives admired her economy, the patients her politeness, the poor her charity.
But she was eaten up with desires, with rage, with hate. That dress with the narrow folds hid a distracted heart, of whose torment those chaste lips said nothing. She was in love with Léon, and sought solitude that she might with the more ease delight in his image. The sight of his form troubled the voluptuousness of this meditation. Emma thrilled at the sound of his step; then in his presence the emotion subsided, and afterwards there remained to her only an immense astonishment that ended in sorrow.
Léon did not know that when he left her in despair she rose after he had gone to see him in the street. She concerned herself about his comings and goings; she watched his face; she invented quite a history to find an excuse for going to his room. The chemist’s wife seemed happy to her to sleep under the same roof, and her thoughts constantly centred upon this house, like the Lion d’Or pigeons, who came there to dip their red feet and white wings in its gutters. But the more Emma recognised her love, the more she crushed it down, that it might not be evident, that she might make it less. She would have liked Léon to guess it, and she imagined chances, catastrophes that should facilitate this. What restrained her was, no doubt, idleness and fear, and a sense of shame also. She thought she had repulsed him too much, that the time was past, that all was lost. Then, pride, the joy of being able to say to herself, ‘I am virtuous,’ and to look at herself in the glass taking resigned poses, consoled her a little for the sacrifice she believed she was making.
Then the lusts of the flesh, the longing for money, and the melancholy of passion all blended themselves into one suffering, and instead of turning her thoughts from it, she clave to it the more, urging herself to pain, and seeking everywhere occasion for it. She was irritated by an ill-served dish, or by a half-open door; bewailed the velvets she had not, the happiness she had missed, her too exalted dreams, her narrow home.
What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness on this point ingratitude. For whose sake, then, was she virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all felicity, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of that complex strap that buckled her in on all sides?
On him alone, then, she concentrated all the various hatreds that resulted from her boredom, and every effort to diminish only augmented it; for this useless trouble was added to the other reasons for despair, and contributed still more to the separation between them. Her own gentleness to herself made her rebel against him. Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires. She would have liked Charles to beat her, that she might have a better right to hate him, to revenge herself upon him. She was surprised sometimes at the atrocious conjectures that came into her thoughts, and she had to go on smiling, to hear repeated to her at all hours that she was happy, to pretend to be happy, to let it be believed.
Yet she had loathing of this hypocrisy. She was seized with the temptation to flee somewhere with Léon to try a new life; but at once a vague chasm full of darkness opened within her soul.
‘Besides, he no longer loves me,’ she thought. ‘What is to become of me? What help is to be hoped for, what consolation, what solace?’
She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in a low voice, with flowing tears.
‘Why don’t you tell master?’ the servant asked her when she came in during these crises.
‘It is nerves,’ said Emma. ‘Don’t speak to him about this; it would worry him.’
‘Ah! yes,’ Félicité went on, ‘you are just like La Guérine, old Guérin’s daughter, the fisherman at Pollet, whom I used to know at Dieppe before I came to you. She was so sad, so sad, that to see her standing on the threshold of her house, she seemed like a shroud spread out against the door. Her illness, it seemed, was a kind of fog that she had in her head, and the doctors could do nothing, nor the priest either. When she was taken too bad she went off quite alone to the seashore, so that the coastguard on his rounds often found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle. Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say.’
‘But with me,’ replied Emma, ‘it was after marriage that it began.’
6
One evening, while sitting at the open window, she had been watching Lestiboudois, the beadle, trimming the box-hedge, she suddenly heard the Angelus ringing.
It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are in bloom, and a warm wind blows over the flower-beds newly turned, and the gardens, like women, seem to be getting ready for the summer fêtes. Through the bars of the arbour and away beyond, the river seen in the fields, meandering through the grass in wandering curves. The evening vapours rose between the leafless poplars, touching their outlines with a violet tint, paler and more transparent than a subtle gauze caught athwart their branches. In the distance cattle moved about; neither their steps nor their lowing could be heard; and the bell, still ringing through the air, kept up its peaceful lamentation.
With this repeated tinkling the thoughts of the young woman lost themselves in old memories of her youth and schooldays. She remembered the great candlesticks that rose above the vases full of flowers on the altar, and the tabernacle with its small columns. She would have liked to be once more lost in the long line of white veils, marked off here and there by the stiff black hoods of the good sisters bending over their prie-dieu. At mass on Sundays, when she looked up, she saw the gentle face of the Virgin amid the blue smoke of the rising incense. Then she was moved; she felt herself weak and quite deserted, like the down of a bird whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she went towards the church, inclined to no matter what devotions, so that her soul was absorbed and all existence lost in it.
On the Place she met Lestiboudois on his way back, for, in order not to shorten his day’s labour, he preferred interrupting his work, then beginning it again, so that he rang the Angelus to suit his own convenience. Besides, the ringing over a little earlier warned the lads of catechism hour.
A few had already arrived and were playing marbles on the stones of the cemetery. Others, astride the wall, swung their legs, kicking with their clogs the large nettles growing between the little enclosure and the newest graves. This was the only green spot. All the rest was but stones, always covered with a fine powder, despite the vestry broom.
The children in list shoes ran about there as if it were an enclosure made for them. The shouts of their voices could be heard through the humming of the bell. This grew less and less with the swinging of the great rope that, hanging from the top of the belfry, dragged its end on the ground. Swallows flitted to and fro uttering little cries, cut the air with the edge of their wings, and swiftly returned to their yellow nests under the tiles of the coping. At the end of the church a lamp was burning, the wick of a night-light in a glass hung up. Its light from a distance looked like a white stain trembling in the oil. A long ray of the sun fell across the nave and seemed to darken the lower sides and the corners.
‘Where is the curé?’ asked Madame Bovary of one of the lads, who was amusing himself by shaking a swivel in a hole too large for it.
‘He is just coming,’ he answered.
And in fact the door of the presbytery grated; Abbé Bournisien appeared; the children, pell-mell, fled into the church.
‘These young scamps!’ murmured the priest, ‘always the same!’ Then, picking up a catechism all in rags that he had struck with his foot, ‘They respect nothing!’ But as soon as he caught sight of Madame Bovary, ‘Excuse me,’ he said; ‘I did not recognise you.’
He thrust the catechism into his pocket, and stopped short, balancing the heavy vestry key between his two fingers.
The light of the setting sun that fell full upon his face paled the lasting of his cassock, shiny at the elbows, unravelled at the hem. Grease and tobacco stains followed along his broad chest the lines of the buttons, and grew more numerous the farther they were from his neckcloth, in which the massive folds of his red chin rested; this was dotted with yellow spots, that disappeared beneath the coarse hair of greyish beard. He had just dined, and was breathing noisily.
‘How are you?’ he added.
‘Not well,’ replied Emma; ‘I am ill.’
‘Well, and so am I,’ answered the priest. ‘These first warm days weaken one most remarkably, don’t they? But, after all, we are born to suffer, as St Paul says. But what does Monsieur Bovary think of it?’
‘He!’ she said with a gesture of contempt.
‘What!’ replied the good fellow, quite astonished, ‘doesn’t he prescribe something for you?’
‘Ah!’ said Emma, ‘it is no earthly remedy I need.’
But the curé from time to time looked into the church, where the kneeling boys were shouldering one another and tumbling over like packs of cards.
‘I should like to know – ’ she went on.
‘You look out, Riboudet,’ cried the priest in an angry voice; ‘I’ll warm your ears, you imp!’ Then turning to Emma. ‘He’s Boudet the carpenter’s son; his parents are well off, and let him do just as he pleases. Yet he could learn quickly if he would, for he is very sharp. And so sometimes for a joke I call him Riboudet (like the road one takes to go to Maromme) and I even say “Mon Riboudet”. Ha! ha! “Mont Riboudet”. The other day I repeated that jest to Monsignor, and he laughed at it; he condescended to laugh at it. And how is Monsieur Bovary?’
She seemed not to hear him. And he went on – ‘Always very busy, no doubt; for he and I are certainly the busiest people in the parish. But he is a doctor of the body,’ he added with a thick laugh, ‘and I of the soul.’
She fixed her pleading eyes upon the priest. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you solace all sorrows.’
‘Ah! don’t talk to me of it, Madame Bovary. This morning I had to go to the Bas-Diauville for a cow that was ill; they thought it was under a spell. All their cows, I don’t know how it is – But pardon me! Longuemarre and Boudet! Bless me! will you leave off?’
And with a bound he ran into the church.
The boys just then were jostling round the large desk, climbing over the precentor’s footstool, opening the missal; and others on tiptoe were just about to venture into the confessional. But the priest suddenly distributed a shower of cuffs among them. Seizing them by the collars of their coats he lifted them from the ground and deposited them on their knees on the stones of the choir, firmly, as if he meant planting them there.
‘Yes,’ said he, when he returned to Emma, unfolding his large cotton handkerchief, one corner of which he put between his teeth, ‘farmers are much to be pitied.’
‘Others too,’ she replied.
‘Assuredly. Town-labourers, for example.’
‘It is not they – ’
‘Pardon! I’ve there known poor mothers of families, virtuous women, I assure you, real saints, who lacked even bread.’
‘But those,’ replied Emma, and the corners of her mouth twitched as she spoke, ‘those, Monsieur le Curé, who have bread and have no – ’
‘Fire in the winter,’ said the priest.
‘Oh, what does that matter?’
‘What! What does it matter? It seems to me that when one has firing and food – for, after all – ’
