Monsieur Léon, while studying law, had gone pretty often to the dancing-rooms, where he was even a great success amongst the grisettes, who thought he had a distinguished air. He was the best-mannered of the students; he wore his hair neither too long nor too short, didn’t spend all his quarter’s money on the first day of the month, and kept on good terms with his professors. As for excesses, he had always abstained from them, as much from cowardice as from refinement.
Often when he stayed in his room to read, or else when sitting of an evening under the lime trees of the Luxembourg, he let his Code fall to the ground, and the memory of Emma came back to him. But gradually this feeling grew weaker, and other desires gathered over it, although it still persisted through them all. For Léon did not lose all hope; there was for him, as it were, a vague promise floating in the future, like a golden fruit suspended from some fantastic tree.
Then, seeing her again after three years of absence, his passion reawakened. He must, he thought, at last make up his mind to possess her. Moreover, his timidity had worn off by contact with his gay companions, and he returned to the provinces despising everyone who had not with varnished shoes trodden the asphalt of the boulevards. By the side of a lace-gowned Parisienne, in the drawing-room of some illustrious physician, a person driving his carriage and wearing many orders, the poor clerk would no doubt have trembled like a child; but here at Rouen, on the quays, with the wife of this small doctor he felt at his ease, sure beforehand he would shine. Self-possession depends on its environment. We don’t speak on the first floor as on the fourth; and the wealthy woman seems to have, about her, to guard her virtue, all her bank-notes, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.
On leaving the Bovarys the night before, Léon had followed them through the streets at a distance; then having seen them stop at the Croix-Rouge, he turned on his heel, and spent the night meditating a plan.
So the next day about five o’clock he walked into the kitchen of the inn, with a choking sensation in his throat, pale cheeks, and that resolution of cowards that stops at nothing.
‘The gentleman isn’t in,’ answered a servant.
This seemed to him a good omen. He went upstairs.
She was not disturbed at his approach; on the contrary, she apologised for having neglected to tell him where they were staying.
‘Oh, I divined it!’ said Léon.
He pretended he had been guided towards her by chance, by instinct. She began to smile; and at once, to repair his folly, Léon told her that he had spent his morning in looking for her in all the hotels in the town one after the other.
‘So you have made up your mind to stay?’ he added.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and I am wrong. One ought not to accustom oneself to impossible pleasures when there are a thousand demands upon one.’
‘Oh, I can imagine!’
‘Ah! no; for you, you are a man!’
But men too had had their trials, and the conversation went off into certain philosophical reflections. Emma expatiated much on the misery of earthly affections, and the eternal isolation in which the heart remains entombed.
To show off, or from a naïve imitation of this melancholy which called forth his, the young man declared that he had been awfully bored during the whole course of his studies. The law irritated him, other vocations attracted him, and his mother never ceased worrying him in every one of her letters. As they talked they explained more and more fully the motives of their sadness, working themselves up in their progressive confidence. But they sometimes stopped short of the complete exposition of their thought, and then sought to invent a phrase that might express it all the same. She did not confess her passion for another; he did not say that he had forgotten her.
Perhaps he no longer remembered his suppers with girls after masked balls; and no doubt she did not recollect the rendezvous of old when she ran across the fields in the morning to her lover’s house. The noises of the town hardly reached them, and the room seemed small, as if on purpose to hem in their solitude more closely. Emma, in a dimity dressing-gown, leant her head against the back of the old armchair; the yellow wallpaper formed, as it were, a golden background behind her, and her bare head was mirrored in the glass with the white parting in the middle, and the tip of her ears peeping out from the folds of her hair.
‘But pardon me!’ she said. ‘It is wrong of me. I weary you with my eternal complaints.’
‘No, never, never!’
‘If you knew,’ she went on, raising to the ceiling her beautiful eyes, in which a tear was trembling, ‘all that I had dreamed!’
‘And I! Oh, I too have suffered! Often I went out; I went away. I dragged myself along the quays, seeking distraction amid the din of the crowd without being able to banish the heaviness that weighed upon me. In an engraver’s shop on the boulevard there is an Italian print of one of the Muses. She is draped in a tunic, and she is looking at the moon, with forget-me-nots in her flowing hair. Something drove me there continually; I stayed there hours together.’ Then in a trembling voice, ‘She resembled you a little.’
Madame Bovary turned away her head that he might not see the irrepressible smile she felt rising to her lips.
‘Often,’ he went on, ‘I wrote you letters and tore them up.’
She did not answer. He continued – ‘I sometimes fancied that some chance would bring you. I thought I recognised you at street-corners, and I ran after all the carriages through whose windows I saw a shawl fluttering, a veil like yours.’
She seemed resolved to let him go on speaking without interruption. Crossing her arms and bending down her face, she looked at the rosettes on her slippers, and at intervals made little movements inside the satin of them with her toes.
At last she sighed.
‘But the most wretched thing, is it not – is to drag out a useless existence as I do. If only our pains were of some use to someone, we might find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.’
He started off in praise of virtue, duty, and silent immolation, having himself an incredible longing for self-sacrifice that he could not satisfy.
‘I should much like,’ she said, ‘to be a nurse at a hospital.’
‘Alas! men have none of these holy missions, and I see nowhere any calling – unless perhaps that of a doctor.’
With a slight shrug of her shoulders, Emma interrupted him to speak of her illness, which had almost killed her. What a pity! She should not be suffering now! Léon at once envied the calm of the tomb, and one evening he had even made his will, asking to be buried in that beautiful rug with velvet stripes he had received from her. For this was how they would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal to which they were now adapting their past life. Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment.
But at this invention of the rug she asked, ‘But why?’
‘Why?’ He hesitated. ‘Because I loved you so!’ And congratulating himself at having surmounted the difficulty, Léon watched her face out of the corner of his eyes.
It was like the sky when a gust of wind drives the clouds across. The mass of sad thoughts that darkened them seemed to be lifted from her blue eyes; her whole face shone. He waited. At last she replied – ‘I always suspected it.’
Then they went over all the trifling events of that far-off existence, whose joys and sorrows they had just summed up in one word. They recalled the arbour with clematis, the dresses she had worn, the furniture of her room, the whole of her house.
‘And our poor cactuses, where are they?’
‘The cold killed them this winter.’
‘Ah! how I have thought of them, do you know? I often saw them again as of yore, when on the summer mornings the sun beat down upon your blinds, and I saw your two bare arms passing out amongst the flowers.’
‘Poor friend!’ she said, holding out her hand to him.
Léon swiftly pressed his lips to it. Then, when he had taken a deep breath – ‘At that time you were to me I know not what incomprehensible force that took captive my life. Once, for instance, I went to see you; but you, no doubt, do not remember it.’
