Those who had secured seats the evening before kept it waiting; some even were still in bed in their houses. Hivert called, shouted, swore; then he got down from his seat and went and knocked loudly at the doors. The wind blew through the cracked windows.
The four seats, however, filled up. The carriage rolled off; rows of apple trees followed one upon another, and the road between its two long ditches, full of yellow water, rose constantly narrowing towards the horizon.
Emma knew it from end to end; she knew that after a meadow there was a signpost, next an elm, a barn, or the hut of a lime-kiln tender. Sometimes even, in the hope of getting some surprise, she shut her eyes, but she never lost the clear perception of the distance to be traversed.
At last the brick houses began to follow one another more closely, the earth resounded beneath the wheels, the ‘Hirondelle’ glided between the gardens, where through an opening one saw statues, a periwinkle plant, clipped yews, and a swing. Then on a sudden the town appeared. Sloping down like an amphitheatre, and drowned in the fog, it widened out beyond the bridges confusedly. Then the open country spread away with a monotonous movement till it touched in the distance the vague line of the pale sky. Seen thus from above, the whole landscape looked immovable as a picture; the anchored ships were massed in one corner, the river curved round the foot of the green hills, and the isles, oblique in shape, lay on the water, like large, motionless, black fishes. The factory chimneys belched forth immense brown fumes that were blown away at the top. One heard the rumbling of the foundries, together with the clear chimes of the churches, rising up in the mist. The leafless trees on the boulevards made purplish thickets amid the houses, and the roofs, all shining with the rain, threw back irregular reflections, according to the height of the quarters in which they were. Sometimes a gust of wind drove the clouds towards the slopes of Saint Catherine, like aerial waves breaking silently against a cliff.
A giddiness seemed to her to detach itself from this mass of existence, and her heart swelled as if the hundred and twenty thousand souls that palpitated there had all at once sent into it the vapour of the passions she fancied theirs. In the presence of this vastness her love grew, and expanded tumultuously to the vague murmurings that rose towards her. She poured it forth upon the square, the walks, the streets, and the old Norman city outspread before her eyes as an enormous capital, as a Babylon into which she was entering. She leant with both hands against the window, drinking in the breeze; the three horses galloped, the stones grated in the mud, the diligence rocked, and Hivert, from afar, hailed the carts on the road, while the townspeople who had spent the night at the Guillaume woods came quietly down the hill in their little family carriages.
They stopped at the barrier; Emma undid her overshoes, put on another pair of gloves, rearranged her shawl, and some twenty paces farther she got down from the ‘Hirondelle’.
By then the town was waking up. Shop-boys in caps were cleaning up the shop-fronts, and women with baskets against their hips uttered sonorous cries at intervals at the street corners. She walked with downcast eyes, hugging the walls, and smiling with pleasure under her lowered black veil.
For fear of being observed, she did not usually take the most direct road. She plunged into dark alleys, and, all perspiring, reached the bottom of the Rue Nationale, near the fountain standing there. It is the quarter of theatres, taverns, and whores. Often a cart would pass her, bearing some shaking scenery. Waiters in aprons were sprinkling sand on the flagstones between the green shrubs. It all smelt of absinthe, cigars, and oysters.
She turned down a street; she recognised him by his curling hair that escaped from beneath his hat.
Léon walked along the pavement. She followed him to the hotel. He went up, opened the door, entered – What an embrace!
The kisses over, words gushed forth. They told each other of the week’s sorrows, the presentiments, the anxiety for the letters; but now everything was forgotten; they gazed into each other’s faces with voluptuous laughs, and tender names.
The bed was large, of mahogany, in the shape of a boat. The curtains were of red levantine, hanging from the ceiling and drooping too far down towards the bulging bolster; and nothing in the world was so lovely as her brown head and white skin standing out against this purple colour, when, with a gesture of modesty, she crossed her bare arms to hide her face in her hands.
The warm room, with its discreet carpet, its gay ornaments, and its calm light, seemed made for the intimacies of passion. The curtain-rods, ending in arrows, their brass pegs, and the great balls of the firedogs shone suddenly when the sun came in. On the mantelpiece between the candlesticks stood two of those pink shells in which the murmur of the sea sounds if they are held to the ear.
How they loved that dear room, so full of gaiety, despite its rather faded splendour! They always found the furniture in the same place, and sometimes hairpins, that she had forgotten the Thursday before, under the pedestal of the clock. They lunched by the fireside on a little round table, inlaid with rosewood. Emma carved, put bits on his plate with all sorts of winning tricks, and gave a ringing, roguish laugh when the froth of the champagne ran over from the glass to the rings on her fingers. They were so utterly lost in the possession of each other that they thought themselves in their own house, and that they would live there till death, a married pair for ever young. They said ‘our room,’ ‘our carpet,’ she even said ‘my slippers,’ a gift of Léon’s, a whim she had had. They were pink satin, bordered with swansdown. When she sat on his knees, her leg, then too short, hung in the air, and the dainty shoe, that had no back to it, was held only by the toes to her bare foot.
For the first time he enjoyed the inexpressible delicacy of feminine refinements. He had never met this grace of language, this reserve of clothing, these poses of the weary dove. He admired the exaltation of her soul and the lace on her petticoat. Besides, was she not ‘a lady’ and a married woman – a real mistress, in fine?
By the diversity of her humour, in turn mystical or mirthful, talkative, taciturn, passionate, careless, she roused in him a thousand desires, quickening instincts and memories. She was the mistress of all the novels, the heroine of all the dramas, the vague ‘she’ of all the poetry books. He found again on her shoulder the amber colouring of the ‘Odalisque Bathing’; she had the long waist of feudal châtelaines, and she resembled the ‘Pale Lady of Barcelona’. But above all she was the Angel!
Often looking at her, it seemed to him that his soul, escaping towards her, spread like a wave about the outline of her head, and fell drawn down into the whiteness of her breast. He knelt on the ground before her, and with both elbows on her knees looked at her with a smile, his face upturned.
She bent over him, and murmured as if choking with intoxication – ‘Oh, don’t move! don’t speak! look at me! Something so sweet comes from your eyes that does me such good!’
She called him ‘child’. ‘Child, do you love me?’
And in the haste of her lips seeking his mouth she did not listen for his answer.
On the clock there was a bronze cupid, smirking as he bent his arm beneath a golden garland. They had laughed at it many a time, but when they had to part everything seemed serious to them.
Motionless in front of each other, they kept repeating, ‘Till Thursday, till Thursday.’
Suddenly she seized his head between her hands, kissed him hurriedly on the forehead, crying ‘Goodbye!’ and rushed down the stairs.
She went to a hairdresser’s in the Rue de la Comédie to have her hair arranged. Night fell; the gas was lighted in the shop. She heard the bell at the theatre calling the players to the performance, and opposite she saw men with white faces and women in faded gowns going in at the stage-door.
It was hot in the room, small and too low, where the stove was hissing in the midst of wigs and pomades. The smell of the tongs, together with the greasy hands that handled her head, soon stunned her, and she dozed a little in her wrapper. Often, as he did her hair, the man offered her tickets for a masked ball.
Then she went away. She went up the streets; reached the Croix-Rouge, put on her overshoes, hidden in the morning under the seat, and sank into her place among the impatient passengers. Some got out at the foot of the hill. She remained alone in the vehicle. Every turning brought the lights of the town more and more completely into view, spreading a great luminous vapour about the dim houses. Emma knelt on the cushions, and her eyes wandered over the dazzling light. She sobbed, called on Léon, sent him tender words and kisses lost in the wind.
There was a poor vagabond wretch who wandered that hillside with his stick, right amongst the diligences. A mass of rags covered his shoulders, and an old staved-in beaver, turned out like a basin, hid his face; but when he took it off he discovered in the place of eyelids empty and bloody orbits. The flesh hung in red shreds, and there flowed from it liquids that congealed into green scale down to the nose, whose black nostrils sniffed convulsively. To speak to you he threw back his head with an idiotic laugh; then his bluish eyeballs, rolling constantly, at the temples beat against the edge of the open wound. He sang a little song as he followed the carriages –
Maids in the warmth of a summer day
Dream of love, and of love alway.
And all the rest was about birds and sunshine and green leaves.
Sometimes he suddenly appeared behind Emma, bareheaded. She drew back with a cry. Hivert made fun of him. He would advise him to get a booth at the Saint Romain fair, or else ask him, laughing, how his young woman was.
Often they had started when, with a sudden movement, his hat entered the diligence through the small window, while he clung with his other arm to the footboard, between the wheels splashing mud. His voice, feeble at first and quavering, grew sharp; it resounded in the night like the indistinct moan of a vague distress; and through the ringing of the bells, the murmur of the trees, and the rumbling of the empty vehicle, it had a far-off sound that disturbed Emma. It went to the bottom of her soul, like a whirlwind in an abyss, and carried her away into the distances of a boundless melancholy. But Hivert, noticing a weight behind, gave the blind man sharp cuts with his whip. The thong lashed his wounds, and he fell back into the mud with a yell. Then the passengers in the ‘Hirondelle’ ended by falling asleep, some with open mouths, others with lowered chins, leaning against their neighbour’s shoulder, or with their arm passed through the strap, oscillating regularly with the jolting of the carriage; and the reflection of the lantern swinging outside, on the crupper of the wheeler, penetrating into the interior through the chocolate calico curtains, threw dark blood-red shadows over the motionless people. Emma, bemused with grief, shivered in her clothes, feeling her feet grow colder and colder, feeling death in her soul.
At home Charles was waiting for her; the ‘Hirondelle’ was always late on Thursdays. Madame arrived at last, and scarcely kissed the child. Dinner was not ready. No matter! She excused the servant. This girl now seemed allowed to do just as she liked.
Often her husband, noting her pallor, asked if she were unwell.
‘No,’ said Emma.
‘But,’ he replied, ‘you seem so strange this evening.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing! nothing!’
There were even days when she had no sooner come in than she went up to her room; and Justin, happening to be there, moved about noiselessly, quicker at helping her than the best of maids. He put the matches ready, the candlestick, a book, arranged her nightgown, turned back the bedclothes.
‘Come!’ said she, ‘that will do. Now you can go.’
For he stood there, his hands hanging down and his eyes wide open, as if entangled in the countless threads of sudden reverie.
