Then there was silence. They looked one at the other and their thoughts, confounded in the same agony, clung close together like two throbbing breasts.
‘I should like to kiss Berthe,’ said Léon.
Emma went down a few steps and called Félicité.
He threw one long look around him that took in the walls, the decorations, the fireplace, as if to penetrate everything, carry away everything. But she returned, and the servant brought Berthe, who was swinging a windmill roof downwards at the end of a string. Léon kissed her several times on the neck.
‘Goodbye, poor child! goodbye, dear little one! goodbye!’ And he gave her back to her mother.
‘Take her away,’ she said.
They remained alone – Madame Bovary, her back turned, her face pressed against a windowpane; Léon held his cap in his hand, striking it lightly against his thigh.
‘It is going to rain,’ said Emma.
‘I have a cloak,’ he answered.
‘Ah!’
She turned around, her chin lowered, her forehead bent forward. The light fell on it as on a piece of marble, to the curve of the eyebrows, without one’s being able to guess what Emma was seeing on the horizon or what she was thinking within herself.
‘Well, goodbye,’ he sighed.
She raised her head with a quick movement.
‘Yes goodbye – go!’
They advanced towards each other; he held out his hand; she hesitated.
‘In the English fashion, then,’ she said, giving her own hand wholly to him, and forcing a laugh.
Léon felt it between his fingers, and the very essence of all his being seemed to pass down into that moist palm. Then he opened his hand; their eyes met again, and he disappeared.
When he reached the marketplace, he stooped and hid behind a pillar to look for the last time at this white house with the four green blinds. He thought he saw a shadow behind the window in the room; but the curtain, sliding along the pole as though no one were touching it, slowly opened its long oblique folds, that spread out with a single movement, and thus hung straight and motionless as a plaster wall. Léon set off running.
From afar he saw his employer’s gig in the road, and by it a man in a coarse apron holding the horse. Homais and Monsieur Guillaumin were talking. They were waiting for him.
‘Embrace me,’ said the druggist with tears in his eyes. ‘Here is your coat, my good friend. Mind the cold; take care of yourself; look after yourself.’
‘Come, Léon, jump in,’ said the notary.
Homais bent over the splash-board, and in a voice broken by sobs uttered these three sad words – ‘A pleasant journey!’
‘Good-night,’ said Monsieur Guillaumin. ‘Give him his head.’ They set out, and Homais went back.
Madame Bovary had opened her window overlooking the garden and watched the clouds. They gathered around the sunset on the side of Rouen, and then swiftly rolled back their black columns, behind which the great rays of the sun looked out like the golden arrows of a suspended trophy, while the rest of the empty heavens was white as porcelain. But a gust of wind bowed the poplars, and suddenly the rain fell; it pattered against the green leaves. Then the sun reappeared, the hens clucked, sparrows shook their wings in the damp thickets, and the pools of water on the gravel as they flowed away carried off the pink flowers of an acacia.
‘Ah! how far off he must be already!’ she thought.
Monsieur Homais, as usual, came at half-past six during dinner.
‘Well,’ said he, ‘so we’ve sent off our young friend!’
‘So it seems,’ replied the doctor. Then turning on his chair: ‘Any news at home?’
‘Nothing much. Only my wife was a little moved this afternoon. You know women – a nothing upsets them, especially my wife. And we should be wrong to object to that, since their nervous organisation is much more malleable than ours.’
‘Poor Léon!’ said Charles. ‘How will he live at Paris? Will he get used to it?’
Madame Bovary sighed.
‘Get along!’ said the chemist, smacking his lips. ‘The outings at restaurants, the masked balls, the champagne – all that’ll be jolly enough, I assure you.’
‘I don’t think he’ll trouble about all that,’ objected Bovary.
‘Nor do I,’ continued Monsieur Homais quickly; ‘although he’ll have to do like the rest for fear of passing for a Jesuit. And you don’t know what a life those dogs lead in the Latin quarter with actresses. Besides, students are thought a great deal of in Paris. Provided they have a few accomplishments, they are received in the best society; there are even ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who fall in love with them, which subsequently furnishes them with opportunities for making very good matches.’
‘But,’ said the doctor, ‘I fear for him that down there – ’
‘You are right,’ interrupted the chemist; ‘that is the reverse of the medal. And one is constantly obliged to keep one’s hand in one’s pocket there. For instance, suppose you are in a public garden. An individual presents himself well dressed, even wearing an order, and whom one would take for a diplomatist. He approaches you, he insinuates himself; offers you a pinch of snuff, or picks up your hat. Then you become more intimate; he takes you to a café, invites you to his country-house, introduces you, between two drinks, to all sorts of people; and three-fourths of the time it’s only to plunder your watch or lead you into some pernicious step.’
‘That is true,’ said Charles; ‘but I was thinking especially of illnesses – of typhoid fever, for example, that attacks students from the provinces.’
Emma shuddered.
‘Because of the change of regimen,’ continued the chemist, ‘and of the perturbation that results therefrom in the whole system. And then the water at Paris, don’t you know! The dishes at restaurants, all the spiced food, end by heating the blood, and are not worth, whatever people may say of them, an honest soup. For my own part, I have always preferred plain living; it is more healthy. So when I was studying pharmacy at Rouen, I boarded in a boarding-house; I dined with the professors.’
And thus he went on, expounding his opinions generally and his personal likings, until Justin came to fetch him for a mulled egg that was wanted.
‘Not a moment’s peace!’ he cried; ‘always at it! I can’t go out for a minute! Like a plough-horse, I have always to be moiling and toiling. What drudgery!’ Then, when he was at the door, ‘By the way, do you know the news?’
‘What news?’
‘That it is very likely,’ Homais went on, raising his eyebrows and assuming one of his most serious expressions, ‘that the agricultural meeting of the Seine-Inférieure will be held this year at Yonville-l’Abbaye. The rumour, at all events, is going the round. This morning the paper alluded to it. It would be of the utmost importance for our district. But we’ll talk it over later on. I can see, thank you; Justin has the lantern.’
7
The next day was a dreary one for Emma. Everything seemed to her enveloped in a black atmosphere floating confusedly over the exterior of things, and sorrow was engulfed within her soul with soft shrieks such as the winter wind makes in ruined castles. It was that reverie which we give to things that will not return, the lassitude that seizes you after everything was done; that pain, in fine, that the interruption of every wonted movement, the sudden cessation of any prolonged vibration, brings on.
As on the return from Vaubyessard, when the quadrilles were running in her head, she was full of a gloomy melancholy, of a numb despair. Léon reappeared, taller, handsomer, more charming, more vague. Though separated from her, he had not left her; he was there, and the walls of the house seemed to hold his shadow. She could not detach her eyes from the carpet where he had walked, from those empty chairs where he had sat. The river still flowed on, and slowly drove its ripples along the slippery banks. They had often walked there to the murmur of the waves over the moss-covered pebbles. How bright the sun had been! What happy afternoons they had seen alone in the shade at the end of the garden! He read aloud, bareheaded, sitting on a footstool of dry sticks; the fresh wind of the meadow set trembling the leaves of the book and the nasturtiums of the arbour. Ah! he was gone, the only harm of her life, the only possible hope of joy. Why had she not seized this happiness when it came to her? Why not have kept hold of it with both hands, with both knees, when it was about to flee from her? And she cursed herself for not having loved Léon. She thirsted for his lips. The wish took possession of her to run after him and rejoin him, throw herself into his arms and say to him, ‘It is I; I am yours.’ But Emma recoiled beforehand at the difficulties of the enterprise and her desires, increased by regret, became only the more acute.
Henceforth the memory of Léon was the centre of her boredom; it burnt there more brightly than the fire travellers have left on the snow of a Russian steppe. She sprang towards him, she pressed against him, she stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything that could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined, her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tête-à-tête – she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.
The flames, however, subsided, either because the supply had exhausted itself, or because it had been piled up too much. Little by little love was quelled by absence; regret stifled beneath habit; and this incendiary light that had empurpled her pale sky was overspread and faded by degrees. In the supineness of her conscience she even took her repugnance towards her husband for aspirations towards her lover, the burning of hate for the warmth of tenderness; but as the tempest still raged, and as passion burnt itself down to the very cinders, and no help came, no sun rose, there was night on all sides, and she was lost in the terrible cold that pierced her.
Then the evil days of Tostes began again. She now thought herself far more unhappy; for she had the experience of grief, with the certainty that it would not end.
A woman who had lain on herself such sacrifices could well allow herself certain whims. She bought a gothic prie-dieu, and in a month spent fourteen francs on lemons for polishing her nails; she wrote to Rouen for a blue cashmere gown; she chose one of Lheureux’s finest scarves, and wore it knotted around her waist over her dressing-gown; and, in this garb, with closed blinds and a book in her hand, she lay stretched on a couch.
