It was the next month that they were to run away. She was to leave Yonville as if she was going on some business to Rouen. Rodolphe would have booked the seats, procured the passports, and even have written to Paris in order to have the whole mail-coach reserved for them as far as Marseilles, where they would buy a carriage, and go on thence without stopping to Genoa. She would take care to send her luggage to Lheureux, whence it would be taken direct to the ‘Hirondelle’, so that no one would have any suspicion. And in all this there never was any allusion to the child. Rodolphe avoided speaking of her; perhaps he no longer thought about it.

He wished to have two more weeks before him to arrange some affairs; then at the end of a week he wanted two more; then he said he was ill; next he went on a journey. The month of August passed, and, after all these delays, they decided that it was to be irrevocably fixed for the 4th September – a Monday.

At last the Saturday before arrived.

Rodolphe came in the evening earlier than usual.

‘Everything is ready?’ she asked him.

‘Yes.’

Then they walked round a garden-bed, and went to sit down near the terrace on the kerbstone of the wall.

‘You are sad,’ said Emma.

‘No; why?’

And yet he looked at her strangely in a tender fashion.

‘Is it because you are going away?’ she went on; ‘because you are leaving what is dear to you – your life? Ah! I understand. I have nothing in the world! You are all to me; so shall I be to you. I will be your people, your country; I will tend, I will love you!’

‘How sweet you are!’ he said, seizing her in his arms.

‘Really!’ she said with a voluptuous laugh. ‘Do you love me? Swear it then!’

‘Do I love you – love you? I adore you, my love.’

The moon, full and purple-coloured, was rising right out of the earth at the end of the meadow. Quickly she rose between the branches of the poplars, which hid her here and there like a black curtain pierced with holes. Then she came into view dazzling with whiteness in the empty heavens that she lit up, and now sailing along more slowly, let fall upon the river a great stain that broke into an infinity of stars; and the silver sheen seemed to writhe through the depths like a headless serpent covered with luminous scales; it also resembled some monster candelabra all along which sparkled clustering drops of diamonds. The soft night was about them; masses of shadow filled the branches. Emma, her eyes half closed, breathed in with deep sighs the fresh wind that was blowing. They did not speak, lost as they were in their surging reverie. The tenderness of old days came back to their hearts, full and silent as the flowing river, with the softness of the perfume of the syringas, casting across their memories shadows more vast and more sombre than those of the still willows that lengthened out over the grass. Often some night-animal, hedgehog or weasel, setting out on the hunt, disturbed the lovers, or sometimes they heard a ripe peach falling all alone from the espalier.

‘Ah! what a lovely night!’ said Rodolphe.

‘We shall have others,’ replied Emma; and, as if speaking to herself: ‘Yet, it will be good to travel. And yet, why should my heart be so heavy? Is it dread of the unknown? The result of a break with the past? Or rather – ? No; it is too much happiness. How weak I am, am I not? Forgive me!’

‘There is still time!’ he cried. ‘Reflect! perhaps you may repent!’

‘Never!’ she cried impetuously. And coming closer to him: ‘What ill could come to me? There is no desert, no precipice, no ocean I would not traverse with you. The longer we live together the more it will be like an embrace, every day closer, more heart to heart. There will be nothing to trouble us, no cares, no obstacle. We shall be alone, all to ourselves eternally. Oh, speak! Answer me!’

At regular intervals he answered, ‘Yes – Yes – ’ She had passed her hands through his hair, and she repeated in a childlike voice, despite the big tears which were falling, ‘Rodolphe! Rodolphe! Ah! Rodolphe! dear little Rodolphe!’

Midnight struck.

‘Midnight!’ said she, ‘Come, it is tomorrow. One day more!’

He rose to go; and, as if the movement he made had been the signal for their flight, Emma said, suddenly assuming a gay air – ‘You have the passports?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are forgetting nothing?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Certainly.’

‘It is the Hôtel de Provence, isn’t it? You will wait for me at midday?’

He nodded.

‘Till tomorrow then!’ said Emma in a last caress; and she watched him go.

He did not turn round. She ran after him, and, leaning over the water’s edge between the bulrushes – ‘Tomorrow!’ she cried.

He was already on the other side of the river and walking fast across the meadow.

After a few moments Rodolphe stopped; and when he saw her with her white gown gradually fade away in the shade like a ghost, he was seized with such a beating of the heart that he leant against a tree lest he should fall.

‘What a fool I am!’ he said with a fearful oath. ‘No matter! She was a pretty mistress!’

And immediately Emma’s beauty, and all the pleasures of their love, came back to him. For a moment he softened; then he rebelled against her.

‘For, after all,’ he exclaimed, gesticulating, ‘I can’t exile myself – I can’t have a child on my hands.’

He was saying these things to strengthen himself.

‘And besides, the worry, the expense! Oh! no, no, no! a thousand times no! It would be too stupid.’

13

On reaching home Rodolphe at once sat down at his bureau under the stag’s head that hung as a trophy on the wall. But with the pen between his fingers, he could think of nothing, so that, resting on his elbows, he began to reflect. Emma seemed to have receded into a far-off past, as if the resolution he had taken had suddenly placed a distance between them.

To get back something of her, he fetched from the cupboard at the bedside an old Rheims biscuit-box, in which he usually kept his letters from women. From it rose an odour of dry dust and withered roses. First he saw a handkerchief with pale little spots. It was a handkerchief of hers. Once when they were walking her nose had bled; he had forgotten it. Near it, chipped at all the corners, was a miniature given him by Emma: her toilette looked pretentious, and her languishing look in the worst possible taste. Then, from looking at this image and recalling the memory of its original, Emma’s features little by little grew confused in his remembrance, as if the living and the painted face, rubbing one against the other, had effaced each other. Finally, he read some of her letters; they were full of explanations relating to their journey, short, technical, and urgent, like business notes. He wanted to see the long ones again, those of old times. In order to find them at the bottom of the box, Rodolphe disturbed all the others, and mechanically began rummaging amidst this mass of papers and things, finding pell-mell bouquets, garters, a black mask, pins, and hair – hair! dark and fair, some even, catching in the hinges of the box, broke when it was opened.

Dallying thus with his souvenirs, he examined the writing and the style of the letters, as varied as their orthography. They were tender or jovial, facetious or melancholy; there were some asking for love, others asking for money. A word recalled faces to him, certain gestures, the sound of a voice; yet sometimes he could remember nothing at all.

In fact, these women, rushing at once into his thoughts, cramped each other and seemed shrunken, as reduced to a uniform level of love equalising them all. So taking handfuls of the mixed-up letters, he amused himself for some moments with letting them fall in cascades from his right into his left hand. At last, bored and weary, Rodolphe took back the box to the cupboard, saying to himself, ‘What a lot of rubbish!’ Which summed up his opinion; for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall.

‘Come,’ said he, ‘let’s begin.’

He wrote –

Courage, Emma! courage! I would not bring misery into your life.

‘After all, that’s true,’ thought Rodolphe. ‘I am acting in her interest; I am honest.’

Have you carefully weighed your resolution? Do you know to what an abyss I was dragging you, poor angel? No, you do not, do you? You were coming confident and fearless, believing in happiness in the future. Ah! unhappy that we are – insensate!

Rodolphe stopped here to think of some good excuse.