‘It is still too early,’ he thought, looking at the hairdresser’s cuckoo-clock, that pointed to the hour of nine. He read an old fashion journal, went out, smoked a cigar, walked up three streets, thought it was time, and went slowly towards the porch of Notre Dame.
It was a beautiful summer morning. Silver plate sparkled in the jeweller’s windows, and the light falling obliquely on the cathedral made mirrors of the corners of the grey stones; a flock of birds fluttered in the grey sky round the trefoil bell-turrets; the square, resounding with cries, was fragrant with the flowers that bordered its pavement, roses, jasmines, pinks, narcissi, and tuberoses, unevenly spaced out between moist grasses, catmint, and chickweed for the birds; the fountains gurgled in the centre, and under large umbrellas, amidst melons, piled up in heaps, flower-women, bareheaded, were twisting paper round bunches of violets.
The young man took one. It was the first time that he had bought flowers for a woman, and his breast, as he smelt them, swelled with pride, as if this homage that he meant for another had recoiled upon himself.
But he was afraid of being seen; he resolutely entered the church. The beadle, who was just then standing on the threshold in the middle of the left doorway, under the ‘Dancing Marianne’, with feather cap, and rapier dangling against his calves, came in, more majestic than a cardinal, and gleaming like a saint on a holy pyx.
He came towards Léon, and, with that smile of wheedling benignity assumed by ecclesiastics when they question children – ‘The gentleman, no doubt, does not belong to these parts? The gentleman would like to see the curiosities of the church?’
‘No!’ said the other.
And he first went round the lower aisles. Then he went out to look at the Place. Emma was not coming yet. He went up again to the choir.
The nave was reflected in the full fonts with the beginning of the arches and some portions of the glass windows. But the reflections of the paintings, broken by the marble rim, were continued farther on upon the flagstones, like a many-coloured carpet. The broad daylight from without streamed into the church in three enormous rays from the three opened portals. From time to time at the upper end a sacristan passed, making the oblique genuflexion of devout persons in a hurry. The crystal lustres hung motionless. In the choir a silver lamp was burning, and from the side chapels and dark places of the church sometimes rose sounds like sighs, with the clang of a closing grating, its echo reverberating under the lofty vault.
Léon walked with solemn steps along by the walls. Life had never seemed so good to him. She would come directly, charming, agitated, looking back at the glances that followed her, and with her flounced dress, her gold eyeglass, her thin shoes, with all sorts of elegant trifles that he had never enjoyed, and with the ineffable seduction of yielding virtue. The church like a huge boudoir spread around her; the arches bent down to gather in the shade the confession of her love; the windows shone resplendent to illumine her face, and the censers would burn that she might appear like an angel amid the fumes of the sweet-smelling odours.
But she did not come. He sat down on a chair, and his eyes fell upon a blue stained window representing boatmen carrying baskets. He looked at it long, attentively, and he counted the scales of the fishes and the buttonholes of the doublets, while his thoughts wandered off towards Emma.
The beadle, standing aloof, was inwardly angry at this individual who took the liberty of admiring the cathedral by himself. He seemed to him to be conducting himself in a monstrous fashion, to be robbing him in a sort, and almost committing sacrilege.
But a rustle of silk on the flags, the tip of a bonnet, a lined cloak – it was she! Léon rose and ran to meet her.
Emma was pale. She walked fast.
‘Read this!’ she said, holding out a paper to him. ‘Oh, no!’
And she abruptly withdrew her hand to enter the chapel of the Virgin, where, kneeling on a chair, she began to pray.
The young man was irritated at this bigot fancy; then he nevertheless experienced a certain charm in seeing her, in the middle of a rendezvous, thus lost in her devotions, like an Andalusian marchioness; then he grew bored, for she seemed never coming to an end.
Emma prayed, or rather strove to pray, hoping that some sudden resolution might descend to her from Heaven; and to draw down divine aid she filled full her eyes with the splendours of the tabernacle. She breathed in the perfumes of the full-blown flowers in the large vases, and listened to the stillness of the church, that only heightened the tumult of her heart.
She rose, and they were about to leave, when the beadle came forward, hurriedly saying – ‘Madame, no doubt, does not belong to these parts? Madame would like to see the curiosities of the church?’
‘Oh, no!’ cried the clerk.
‘Why not?’ said she. For she clung with her expiring virtue to the Virgin, the sculptures, the tombs – anything.
Then, in order to proceed ‘in due order,’ the beadle conducted them right to the entrance near the square, where, pointing out with his cane a large circle of block-stones without inscription or carving – ‘This,’ he said majestically, ‘is the circumference of the beautiful bell of Amboise. It weighed forty thousand pounds. There was not its equal in all Europe. The workman who cast it died of the joy – ’
‘Let us go on,’ said Léon.
The old fellow started off again; then, having got back to the chapel of the Virgin, he stretched forth his arm with an all-embracing gesture of demonstration, and, prouder than a country squire showing you his espaliers, went on – ‘This simple stone covers Pierre de Brézé, lord of Varenne and of Brissac, grand marshal of Poitou, and governor of Normandy, who died at the battle of Montlhéry on the 16th of July, 1465.’
Léon bit his lips, fuming.
‘And on the right, this gentleman all encased in iron, on the prancing horse, is his grandson, Louise de Brézé, lord of Breval and of Montchauvet, Count de Maulevrier, Baron de Mauny, chamberlain to the King, Knight of the Order, and also governor of Normandy; died on the 23rd of July, 1531 – a Sunday, as the inscription specifies; and below, this figure, about to descend into the tomb, portrays the same person. It is not possible, is it, to see a more perfect representation of the void?’
Madame Bovary put up her eyeglasses. Léon, motionless, looked at her, no longer even attempting to speak a single word, to make a gesture, so discouraged was he at this twofold obstinacy of gossip and indifference.
The everlasting guide went on – ‘Near him, this kneeling woman who weeps is his spouse, Diane de Poitiers, Countess de Brézé, Duchess de Valentinois, born in 1499, died in 1566, and to the left, the one with the child is the Holy Virgin. Now turn to this side; here are the tombs of the Amboise. They were both cardinals and archbishops of Rouen. That one was minister under Louis XII. He did a great deal for the cathedral. In his will he left thirty thousand gold crowns for the poor.’
And without stopping, still talking, he pushed them into a chapel full of balustrades, some put away, and disclosed a kind of block that certainly might once have been an ill-made statue.
‘Truly,’ he said with a groan, ‘it adorned the tomb of Richard Coeur de Lion, King of England and Duke of Normandy. It was the Calvinists, sir, who reduced it to this condition. They had buried it for spite in the earth, under the episcopal seat of Monsignor. See! this is the door by which Monsignor passes to his house. Let us pass on to see the gargoyle windows.’
But Léon hastily took some silver from his pocket and seized Emma’s arm. The beadle stood dumbfounded, not able to understand this untimely munificence when there were still so many things for the stranger to see. So calling him back, he cried – ‘Sir! sir! The spire! the spire!’
‘No, thank you!’ said Léon.
‘You are wrong, sir! It is four hundred and forty feet high, nine less than the great pyramid of Egypt. It is all cast; it – ’
Léon fled, for it seemed to him that his love, petrified for nearly two hours now in the church like the stones, would vanish like a vapour through that sort of truncated funnel, or oblong cage, or open chimney that rises so grotesquely from the cathedral like the extravagant attempt of some fantastic brazier.
‘But where are we going?’ she said.
Making no answer, he walked on with a rapid step; and Madame Bovary was already dipping her finger in the holy water when they heard behind them a panting breath interrupted by the regular sound of a cane. Léon turned back.
‘Sir!’
‘What is it?’
And he recognised the beadle, holding under his arms and balancing against his stomach some twenty large sewn volumes. They were works ‘which treated of the cathedral.’
‘Idiot!’ growled Léon, rushing out of the church.
A lad was playing about the close.
