Félicité now wore Madame Bovary’s gowns; not all, for he had kept some of them, and he went up to look at them in her dressing-room, locking himself in there; she was about her height, and often Charles, seeing her from behind, was seized with an illusion, and cried out – ‘Oh, stay, stay!’
But at Whitsuntide she bolted from Yonville, carried off by Theodore, and stealing all that was left of the wardrobe.
It was about this time that the widow Dupuis had the honour to inform him of the marriage ‘of Monsieur Léon Dupuis her son, notary at Yvetot, to Mademoiselle Léocadié Leboeuf of Bondeville.’ Charles, among the other congratulations he sent him, wrote this sentence – ‘How glad my poor wife would have been!’
One day when, wandering aimlessly about the house, he had gone up to the attic, he felt a pellet of fine paper under his slipper. He opened it and read: ‘Courage, Emma, courage. I would not bring misery into your life’. It was Rodolphe’s letter, fallen to the ground between the boxes, where it had remained, and that the wind from the dormer-window had just blown towards the door. And Charles stood, motionless and staring, in the very same place where, long ago, Emma, in despair, and paler even than he, had thought of dying. At last he discovered a small R at the bottom of the second page. What did this mean? He remembered Rodolphe’s attentions, his sudden disappearance, his constrained air when they had met two or three times since. But the respectful tone of the letter deceived him.
‘Perhaps they loved each other platonically,’ he said to himself.
Besides, Charles was not one to go to the bottom of things; he shrank from proofs, and his vague jealousy was lost in the immensity of his woe.
Everyone, he thought, must have adored her; all men assuredly must have coveted her. She seemed but the more beautiful to him for this; he was seized with a lasting, furious desire for her, that inflamed his despair, and that was boundless, because it was now unrealisable.
To please her, as if she were still living, he adopted her predilections, her ideas; he bought patent leather boots and took to wearing white cravats. He put cosmetics on his moustache, and, like her, signed notes of hand. She corrupted him from beyond the grave.
He was obliged to sell his silver piece by piece; next he sold the drawing-room furniture. All the rooms were stripped; but the bedroom, her own room, remained as before. After his dinner Charles went up there. He pushed the round table in front of the fire, and drew up her armchair. He sat down opposite it. A candle burnt in one of the gilt candlesticks. Berthe by his side was painting prints.
He suffered, poor man, at seeing her so badly dressed, with unlaced boots, and the armholes of her pinafore torn down to the hips; for the charwoman took no care of her. But she was so sweet, so pretty, and her little head bent forward so gracefully, letting the dear fair hair fall over her rosy cheeks, that an infinite joy came upon him, a happiness mingled with bitterness, like those ill-made wines that taste of resin. He mended her toys, made her puppets from cardboard, or sewed up half-torn dolls. Then, if his eyes fell upon the work-box, a ribbon lying about or even a pin left in a crack of the table, he began to dream, and looked so sad that she became as sad as he.
No one now came to see them, for Justin had run away to Rouen, where he was a grocer’s assistant, and the druggist’s children saw less and less of the child, Monsieur Homais not caring, seeing the difference of their social position, to continue the intimacy.
The blind man, whom he had not been able to cure with the pomade, had gone back to the hill of Bois-Guillaume, where he told the travellers of the vain attempt of the druggist, to such an extent that Homais, when he went to town, hid behind the curtains of the ‘Hirondelle’ to avoid meeting him. He detested him, and wishing in the interests of his own reputation to get rid of him at all costs, he directed against him a secret battery, that betrayed the depth of his intellect and the baseness of his vanity. Thus, for six consecutive months, one could read in the Fanal de Rouen paragraphs such as these – ‘All who bend their steps towards the fertile plains of Picardy have, no doubt, remarked, by the Bois-Guillaume hill, a wretch suffering from a horrible facial wound. He importunes, persecutes one, and levies a regular tax on all travellers. Are we still living in the monstrous times of the Middle Ages, when vagabonds were permitted to display in our public places leprosy and scrofulas they had brought back from the Crusades?’
Or –
‘In spite of the laws against vagabondage, the approaches to our great towns continue to be infected by bands of beggars. Some are seen going about alone, and these are not, perhaps, the least dangerous. What are our ediles about?’
Then Homais invented anecdotes – ‘Yesterday by the Bois-Guillaume hill, a skittish horse – ’ And then followed the story of an accident caused by the presence of the blind man.
He contrived things so well that the fellow was locked up. But he was released. He began again, and Homais began again. It was a struggle. Homais won, for his foe was condemned to lifelong confinement in an asylum.
This success emboldened him, and henceforth there was no longer a dog run over, a barn burnt down, a woman beaten in the parish, of which he did not immediately inform the public, guided always by love of progress and hatred of priests. He drew comparisons between the elementary and clerical schools, to the detriment of the latter; called to mind the massacre of St Bartholomew àpropos of a grant of one hundred francs to the church, and denounced abuses, aired new views. That was his phrase. Homais was digging and delving; he was becoming dangerous.
However, he was stifling in the narrow limits of journalism, and soon he was hankering after a book – a work! Whereupon he composed General Statistics of the Canton of Yonville, followed by Climatological Remarks. The statistics drove him to philosophy. He busied himself with great questions: the social problem, moralisation of the poorer classes, pisciculture, india-rubber, railways, etc. He even began to blush at being a bourgeois. He affected the artistic style. He smoked. He bought two chic Pompadour statuettes to adorn his drawing-room.
He by no means gave up his shop. On the contrary, he kept well abreast of new discoveries. He followed the great movement of chocolates; he was the first to introduce ‘cocoa’ and ‘revalenta’ into the Seine-Inférieure. He was enthusiastic about the hydroelectric Pulvermacher chains; he wore one himself, and when at night he took off his flannel vest, Madame Homais stood quite dazzled before the golden spiral beneath which he was hidden, and felt her ardour redouble for this man more bandaged than a Scythian, and splendid as one of the Magi.
He had fine ideas about Emma’s tomb. First he proposed a broken column with some drapery, next a pyramid, then a Temple of Vesta, a sort of rotunda, or else a ‘ruined pile.’ And in all his plans Homais always stuck to the weeping willow, which he regarded as the indispensable emblem of grief.
Charles and he made a journey to Rouen together to look at some tombs at a funeral furnisher’s, accompanied by an artist, one Vaufrylard, a friend of Bridoux’s, who made puns all the time. At last, after having examined some hundred designs, having ordered an estimate and made another journey to Rouen, Charles decided in favour of a mausoleum, which on the two principal sides was to have a ‘spirit bearing an extinguished torch.’
As to the inscription, Homais could thing of nothing so fine as ‘Sta viator’, and he got no further; he racked his brain, he constantly repeated ‘Sta viator’. At last he hit upon ‘Amabilem conjugem calcas’, which was adopted.
A strange thing was that Bovary, while continually thinking of Emma, was forgetting her. He grew desperate as he felt this image fading from his memory despite all efforts to hold it. Yet every night he dreamt of her; it was always the same dream. He drew near her, but when he was about to clasp her she fell into decay in his arms.
For a week he was seen going to church in the evening, Monsieur Bournisien even paid him two or three visits, then gave him up. Moreover, the old fellow was growing intolerant, fanatic, said Homais. He thundered against the spirit of the age, and never failed, every other week, in his sermon, to recount the death agony of Voltaire, who died devouring his excrements, as everyone knows.
In spite of the economy with which Bovary lived, he was far from being able to pay off his old debts. Lheureux refused to renew any more bills. A distraint became imminent. Then he appealed to his mother, who consented to let him take a mortgage on her property, but with a great many recriminations against Emma; and in return for her sacrifice she asked for a shawl that had escaped the depredations of Félicité. Charles refused to give it her; they quarrelled.
She made the first overtures of reconciliation by offering to have the little girl, who could help her in the house, to live with her. Charles consented to this, but when the time for parting came, all his courage failed him. Then there was a final, complete rupture.
As his affections vanished, he clung more closely to the love of his child. She made him anxious, however, for she coughed sometimes, and had red spots on her cheeks.
Opposite his house, flourishing and merry, was the family of the chemist, with whom everything was prospering. Napoléon helped him in the laboratory, Athalie embroidered him a skullcap, Irma cut out rounds of paper to cover the preserves, and Franklin recited Pythagoras’ table in a breath. He was the happiest of fathers, the most fortunate of men.
Not so! A secret ambition devoured him. Homais hankered after the cross of the Legion of Honour. He had plenty of claims to it.
‘First, having at the time of the cholera distinguished myself by a boundless devotion; second, by having published, at my expense, various works of public utility, such as’ (and he recalled his pamphlet entitled, Cider, its manufacture and effects, besides observations on the lanigerous plant-louse, sent to the Academy; his volume of statistics, and even his pharmaceutical thesis); ‘not to mention that I am a member of several learned societies’ (he was a member of exactly one).
‘In short!’ he cried, with a flourish, ‘if it were only for distinguishing myself at fires!’
Then Homais inclined towards the Government. He secretly did the prefect great service during the elections. He sold himself – in a word, prostituted himself. He even addressed a petition to the sovereign in which he implored him to ‘do him justice,’ he called him ‘our good king,’ and compared him to Henri IV.
And every morning the druggist rushed for the paper to see if his nomination were in it. It was never there. At last, unable to bear it any longer, he had a grass plot in his garden designed to represent the Star of the Cross of Honour with two little strips of grass running from the top to imitate the ribbon. He walked round it with folded arms, meditating on the folly of the government and the ingratitude of men.
From respect, or from a sort of sensuality that made him carry on his investigations slowly, Charles had not yet opened the secret drawer of a rosewood desk which Emma had generally used. One day, however, he sat down before it, turned the key, and pressed the spring. All Léon’s letters were there. This time there could be no doubt. He devoured them to the very last, ransacked every corner, all the furniture, all the drawers, behind the walls, sobbing, crying aloud, distraught, mad. He found a box and broke it open with a kick. Rodolphe’s portrait flew full in his face in the midst of the overturned love-letters.
People wondered at his despondency. He never went out, saw no one, refused even to visit his patients. Then they began to say that ‘he shut himself up to drink.’
Sometimes, however, some curious person climbed on to the garden hedge, and saw with amazement this wild, long-bearded, shabbily clothed man, weeping aloud as he walked to and fro.
On summer evenings he took his little girl with him and led her to the cemetery. They came back at nightfall, when the only light left in the Place was that in Binet’s window.
The voluptuousness of his grief was, however, incomplete, for he had no one near him to share it, and he paid visits to Madame Lefrançois to be able to speak of her. But the landlady only listened with half an ear, having troubles like himself. For Lheureux had at last established the ‘Favorites du Commerce’, and Hivert, who enjoyed a great reputation for doing errands, insisted on a rise of wages and was threatening to go over ‘to the opposition shop.’
One day when he had gone to the market at Argueil to sell his horse – his last resource – he met Rodolphe.
They both turned pale at sight of each other. Rodolphe, who had only sent his card, first stammered some apologies, then grew bolder, and even pushed his assurance (it was in the month of August and very hot) to the point of inviting him to have a bottle of beer at the public-house.
