And he began asking after old Tellier, the proprietor of the Café Français, whom Monsieur Bovary was then attending.
‘What’s the matter with old Tellier? He coughs so that he shakes his whole house, and I’m afraid he’ll soon want a deal covering rather than a flannel vest. He was such a rake as a young man! Those sort of people, madame, have not the least regularity; he’s burnt up with brandy. Still, it’s sad, all the same, to see an acquaintance go off.’
And while he fastened up his box he chatted about the doctor’s patients.
‘It’s the weather, no doubt,’ he said, looking frowningly at the floor, ‘that causes these illnesses. I, too, don’t feel the thing. One of these days I shall even have to consult the doctor for a pain I have in my back. Well, goodbye, Madame Bovary. At your service; your very humble servant.’ And he closed the door gently.
Emma had her dinner served in her bedroom on a tray by the fireside; she was a long time over it; everything was well with her.
‘How good I was!’ she said to herself, thinking of the scarves.
She heard some steps on the stairs. It was Léon. She got up and took from the chest of drawers the first pile of dusters to be hemmed. When he came in she seemed very busy.
The conversation languished; Madame Bovary gave it up every few minutes, whilst he himself seemed quite embarrassed. Seated on a low chair near the fire, he turned round in his fingers the ivory thimble-case. She stitched on, or from time to time turned down the hem of the cloth with her nail. She did not speak; he was silent, captivated by her silence, as he would have been by her speech.
‘Poor fellow!’ she thought.
‘How have I displeased her?’ he asked himself.
At last, however, Léon said that he should have, one of these days, to go to Rouen on some office business.
‘Your music subscription is out; am I to renew it?’
‘No,’ she replied.
‘Why?’
‘Because – ’
And pursing her lips she slowly drew a long stitch of grey thread.
This work irritated Léon. It seemed to roughen the ends of her fingers. A gallant phrase came into his head, but he did not risk it.
‘Then you are giving it up?’ he went on.
‘What?’ she asked hurriedly. ‘Music? Ah! yes! Have I not my house to look after, my husband to attend to, a thousand things, in fact, many duties that must be considered first?’
She looked at the clock. Charles was late. Then she affected anxiety. Two or three times she even repeated, ‘He is so good!’
The clerk was fond of Monsieur Bovary. But this tenderness on his behalf astonished him unpleasantly; nevertheless he took up his praises, which he said everyone was singing, especially the chemist.
‘Ah! he is a good fellow,’ continued Emma.
‘Certainly,’ replied the clerk.
And he began talking of Madame Homais, whose very untidy appearance generally made them laugh.
‘What does it matter?’ interrupted Emma. ‘A good housewife does not trouble about her appearance.’
Then she relapsed into silence.
It was the same on the following days; her talks, her manners, everything changed. She took interest in the housework, went to church regularly, and looked after her servant with more severity.
She took Berthe from nurse. When visitors called, Félicité brought her in, and Madame Bovary undressed her to show off her limbs. She declared she adored children; this was her consolation, her joy, her passion, and she accompanied her caresses with lyrical outbursts which would have reminded anyone but the Yonville people of Sachette in Notre-Dame de Paris.
When Charles came home he found his slippers put to warm near the fire. His waistcoat now never wanted lining, nor his shirt buttons, and it was quite a pleasure to see in the cupboard the nightcaps arranged in piles of the same height. She no longer grumbled as formerly at taking a turn in the garden; what he proposed was always done, although she did not understand the wishes to which she submitted without a murmur; and when Léon saw him by his fireside after dinner, his two hands on his stomach, his two feet on the fender, his cheeks red with feeding, his eyes moist with happiness, the child crawling along the carpet, and this woman with the slender waist who came behind his armchair to kiss his forehead: ‘What madness!’ he said to himself. ‘And how to reach her!’
And thus she seemed so virtuous and inaccessible to him that he lost all hope, even the faintest. But by this renunciation he placed her on an extraordinary pinnacle. To him she stood outside those fleshly attributes from which he had nothing to obtain, and in his heart she rose ever, and became farther removed from him after the magnificent manner of an apotheosis that is taking wing. It was one of those pure feelings that do not interfere with life, that are cultivated because they are rare, and whose loss would afflict more than their passion rejoices.
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.
