His large Spanish hat fell at a sweep of his hand, and immediately the instruments and the singers began the sextet. Edgar, flashing with fury, dominated all the others with his clearer voice; Ashton hurled homicidal provocations at him in deep notes; Lucia uttered her shrill plaint, Arthur at one side, his modulated tones in the middle register, and the bass of the minister pealed forth like an organ, while the voices of the women repeating his words took them up in chorus delightfully. They were all in a row gesticulating, and anger, vengeance, jealousy, terror, and stupefaction breathed forth at once from their half-open mouths. The outraged lover brandished his naked sword; his guipure ruffle rose with jerks to the movements of his chest, and he walked from right to left with long strides, clanking against the boards the silver-gilt spurs of his soft boots, widening out at the ankles. He, she thought, must have an inexhaustible love to lavish it upon the crowd with such effusion. All her small fault-findings faded before the poetry of the part that absorbed her; and, drawn towards this man by the illusion of the character, she tried to imagine to herself his life – that life resonant, extraordinary, splendid, and that might have been hers if fate had willed it. They would have known one another, loved one another. With him, through all the kingdoms of Europe, she would have travelled from capital to capital, sharing his fatigues and his pride, picking up the flowers thrown to him, herself embroidering his costumes. Then each evening, at the back of the box, behind the golden trellis-work, she would have drunk in eagerly the expansions of this soul that would have sung for her alone; from the stage, even as he acted, he would have looked at her. But the mad idea seized her that he was looking at her; it was certain. She longed to run to his arms, to take refuge in his strength, as in the incarnation of love itself, and to say to him, to cry out, ‘Take me away! carry me with you! let us go! Thine, thine! all my ardour and all my dreams!’
The curtain fell.
The smell of the gas mingled with one’s breath; the waving of fans made the air more suffocating. Emma wanted to go out; the crowd filled the corridors, and she fell back in her armchair with choking palpitations. Charles, fearing that she would faint, ran to the refreshment-room to get a glass of barley-water.
He had great difficulty in getting back to his seat, for his elbows were jerked at every step because of the glass he held in his hands, and he even spilt three-fourths on the shoulders of a Rouen lady in short sleeves, who feeling the cold liquid running down to her loins, uttered cries like a peacock, as if she were being assassinated. Her husband, who was a mill-owner, railed at the clumsy fellow, and while she used her handkerchief to wipe the stains from her handsome cherry-coloured taffeta gown, he angrily muttered about indemnity, costs, reimbursement. At last Charles reached his wife, saying to her, quite out of breath – ‘My word! I thought I should have had to stay there. There is such a crowd – such a crowd!’
He added – ‘Just guess whom I met up there! Monsieur Léon!’
‘Léon?’
‘Himself! He’s coming along to pay his respects.’ And as he finished these words the ex-clerk of Yonville entered the box.
He held out his hand with the ease of a gentleman; and Madame Bovary extended hers, without doubt obeying the attraction of a stronger will. She had not felt it since that spring evening when the rain fell upon the green leaves, and they had said goodbye standing at the window. But soon recalling herself to the necessities of the situation, with an effort she shook off the torpor of her memories, and began stammering a few hurried words.
‘Ah, how do you do! What! you here?’
‘Silence!’ cried a voice from the pit, for the third act was beginning.
‘So you are at Rouen?’
‘Yes.’
‘And since when?’
‘Turn them out! turn them out!’ People were looking at them. They were silent.
But from that moment she listened no more; and the chorus of the guests, the scene between Ashton and his servant, the grand duet in D major, all were for her as far off as if the instruments had grown less sonorous and the characters more remote. She remembered the games at cards at the druggist’s, and the walk to the nurse’s, the reading in the arbour, the tête-à-tête by the fireside – all that poor love, so calm and so protracted, so discreet, so tender, and that she had nevertheless forgotten. And why had he come back? What combination of circumstances had brought him back into her life. He was standing behind her, leaning with his shoulder against the wall of the box; now and again she felt herself shuddering beneath the hot breath from his nostrils falling upon her hair.
‘Does this amuse you?’ said he, bending over her so closely that the end of his moustache brushed her cheek. She replied carelessly – ‘Oh, dear me, no, not much.’
Then he proposed that they should leave the theatre and go and take an ice somewhere.
‘Oh, not yet; let us stay,’ said Bovary. ‘Her hair’s undone; this is going to be tragic.’
But the mad scene did not at all interest Emma, and the acting of the singer seemed to her exaggerated.
‘She screams too loud,’ said she, turning to Charles, who was listening.
‘Yes – a little,’ he replied, undecided between the frankness of his pleasure and his respect for his wife’s opinion.
Then with a sigh Léon said – ‘The heat is – ’
‘Unbearable! Yes!’
‘Do you feel unwell?’ asked Bovary.
‘Yes, I am stifling; let us go.’
Monsieur Léon put her long lace shawl carefully about her shoulders, and all three went off to sit down in the harbour, in the open air, outside the windows of a café.
First they spoke of her illness, although Emma interrupted Charles from time to time, for fear, she said, of boring Monsieur Léon, and the latter told them that he had come to spend two years at Rouen in a large office, in order to get practice in his profession, which was different in Normandy and Paris. Then he enquired after Berthe, the Homais, Mère Lefrançois, and as they had nothing more to say to each other, in the husband’s presence, the conversation soon ended.
People coming out of the theatre passed along the pavement, humming or shouting at the top of their voices, ‘O bel ange, ma Lucie!’ Then Léon, playing the dilettante, began to talk music. He had seen Tamburini, Rubini, Persiani, Grisi, and, compared with them, Lagardy, despite his grand outburst, was nowhere.
‘Yes,’ interrupted Charles, who was slowly sipping his rum-sherbet, ‘they say that he is quite admirable in the last act. I regret leaving before the end, because it was beginning to amuse me.’
‘Why,’ said the clerk, ‘he will soon give another performance.’
But Charles replied that they were going back next day. ‘Unless,’ he added, turning to his wife, ‘you would like to stay alone, kitten?’
And changing his tactics at this unexpected opportunity that presented itself to his hopes, the young man sang the praises of Lagardy in the last number. It was really superb, sublime. Then Charles insisted – ‘You would get back on Sunday. Come, make up your mind. You are wrong if you feel that this is doing you the least good.’
The tables round them, however, were emptying; a waiter came and stood discreetly near them. Charles, who understood, took out his purse; the clerk held back his arm, and did not forget to leave two more silver coins which he chinked on the marble.
‘I am really sorry,’ said Bovary, ‘about the money which you are – ’
The other made a careless gesture full of cordiality, and taking his hat said – ‘It is settled, isn’t it? Tomorrow at six o’clock?’
Charles explained once more that he could not absent himself longer, but that nothing prevented Emma – ‘But,’ she stammered, with a strange smile, ‘I am not sure – ’
‘Well, you must think it over. We’ll see. Night brings counsel.’ Then to Léon, who was walking along with them, ‘Now that you are in our part of the world, I hope you’ll come and ask us for some dinner now and then.’
The clerk declared he would not fail to do so, being obliged, moreover, to go to Yonville on some business for his office. And they parted before the Saint-Herbland Passage just as the clock in the cathedral struck half-past eleven.
PART THREE
1
