Leaving the highroad at La Boissiére, one keeps straight on to the top of the Leux hill, whence the valley is seen. The river that runs through it makes of it, as it were, two regions with distinct physiognomies – all on the left is pasture land, all on the right arable. The meadow stretches under a bulge of low hills to join at the back with the pasture land of the Bray country, while on the eastern side, the plain, gently rising, broadens out, showing as far as eye can follow its blond cornfields. The water, flowing by the grass, divides with a white line the colour of the roads and of the plains, and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.
Before us, on the verge of the horizon, lie the oaks of the forest of Argueil, with the steeps of the Saint-Jean hills scarred from top to bottom with red irregular lines; they are rain-tracks, and these brick-tones standing out in narrow streaks against the grey colour of the mountain are due to the quality of iron springs that flow beyond in the neighbouring country.
Here we are on the confines of Normandy, Picardy, and the Ile-de-France, a bastard land, whose language is without accent as its landscape is without character. It is there that they make the worst Neufchâtel cheeses of all the arrondissement, and, moreover, farming is costly because so much manure is needed to enrich this friable sandy, flinty soil.
Up to 1835 there was no practicable road for getting to Yonville, but about this time a crossroad was made which joins that of Abbeville to that of Amiens, and is occasionally used by the Rouen wagoners on their way to Flanders. Yonville-l’Abbaye has remained stationary in spite of its ‘new outlet’. Instead of improving the soil, they persist in keeping up the pasture lands, however depreciated they may be in value, and the lazy borough, growing away from the plain, has naturally spread riverwards. It is seen from afar sprawling along the banks like a cowherd taking a siesta by the waterside.
At the foot of the hill beyond the bridge begins a roadway, planted with young aspens, that leads in a straight line to the first houses in the place. These, fenced in by hedges, are in the middle of courtyards full of straggling buildings, winepresses, cart-sheds, and distilleries scattered under thick trees, with ladders, poles, or scythes hung on to the branches. The thatched roofs, like fur caps drawn over eyes, reach down over about a third of the low windows, whose coarse convex glasses have knots in the middle like the bottoms of bottles. Against the plaster wall diagonally crossed by black joists, a meagre pear tree sometimes leans, and the ground-floors have at their door a small swing-gate, to keep out the chicks that come pilfering crumbs of bread steeped in cider on the threshold. But the courtyards grow narrower, the houses closer together, and the fences disappear; a bundle of ferns swings under a window from the end of a broomstick; there is a blacksmith’s forge and then a wheelwright’s, with two or three new carts outside partly blocking the way. Then across an open space appears a white house beyond a grass mound ornamented by a Cupid, finger on lips; two brass vases are at each end of a flight of steps; the gilt notary’s plaques blaze upon the door. It is the notary’s house, the finest in the place.
The church is on the other side of the street, twenty paces farther down, at the entrance of the square. The little cemetery that surrounds it, closed in by a wall breast high, is so full of graves that the old stones, level with the ground, form a continuous pavement, on which the grass of itself has marked out regular green squares. The church was rebuilt during the last years of the reign of Charles X. The wooden roof is beginning to rot from the top, and here and there has black hollows in its blue colour. Over the door, where the organ should be, is a loft for the men, with a spiral staircase that reverberates under their wooden shoes.
The daylight coming through the plain glass windows falls obliquely upon the pews ranged along the walls, which are adorned here and there with a straw mat bearing beneath it the words in large letters, ‘Mr So-and-so’s pew’. Farther on, at a spot where the building narrows, the confessional forms a pendant to a statuette of the Virgin, clothed in a satin robe, coifed with a tulle veil sprinkled with silver stars, and with red cheeks, like an idol of the Sandwich Islands; and, finally, a copy of the ‘ “Holy Family”, presented by the Minister of the Interior’, overlooking the high altar, between four candlesticks, closes in the perspective. The choir stalls, of deal wood, have been left unpainted.
The market, that is to say, a tiled roof supported by some twenty posts, occupies of itself about half the public square of Yonville. The town hall, constructed ‘from the designs of a Paris architect’, is a sort of Greek temple that forms the corner next to the chemist’s shop. On the ground-floor are three Ionic columns and on the first floor a semicircular gallery, while the dome that crowns it is occupied by a Gallic cock, resting one foot upon the Charter and holding the scales of Justice in the other.
But what chiefly attracts the eye is the chemist’s shop of Monsieur Homais, opposite the Lion d’Or inn. In the evening especially its argand lamp is lit up and the red and green jars embellishing his shop-front throw their two streams of colour far across the street; then across them, as if with Bengal lights, is seen the shadow of the chemist leaning over his desk. His house from top to bottom is placarded with inscriptions written in large hand, round hand, printed hand: ‘Vichy, Seltzer, Barège waters, blood purifiers, Raspail patent medicine, Arabian racahout, Darcet lozenges, Regnault paste, trusses, baths, hygienic chocolate’, etc. And the signboard, which takes up all the breadth of the shop, bears in gold letters, ‘Homais, Chemist’. Then at the back of the shop, behind the great scales fixed to the counter, the word ‘Laboratory’ appears on a scroll above a glass door, which about halfway up once more repeats ‘Homais’ in gold letters on a black ground.
Beyond this there is nothing to see at Yonville. The street (the only one) a gunshot in length and flanked by a few shops on either side stops short at the turn of the highroad. If it is left on the right hand and the foot of the Saint-Jean hills followed the cemetery is soon reached.
In order to enlarge this, at the time of the cholera, a piece of wall was pulled down, and three acres of land beside it purchased; but all the new portion is almost tenantless; the tombs, as heretofore, continue to crowd together towards the gate. The keeper, who is at once gravedigger and church beadle (thus making a double profit out of the parish corpses), has taken advantage of the unused plot of ground to plant potatoes there. From year to year, however, his small field grows smaller, and when there is an epidemic, he does not know whether to rejoice at the deaths or regret the burials.
‘You get your daily bread from the dead, Lestiboudois!’ the curé at last said to him one day. This grim remark made him reflect; it checked him for some time; but to this day he carries on the cultivation of his little tubers, and will even stoutly maintain that they grow naturally.
Since the events about to be narrated, nothing in fact has changed at Yonville. The tin tricolour flag still swings at the top of the church-steeple; the two chintz streamers still flutter in the wind from the linen-draper’s; the chemist’s foetuses, like lumps of white amadou, rot more and more in their turbid alcohol, and above the big door of the inn the old golden lion, faded by rain, still shows passers-by its poodle mane.
On the evening when the Bovarys were to arrive at Yonville, Widow Lefrançois, the landlady of this inn, was so very busy that she sweated generously as she stirred her saucepans. Tomorrow was market-day. The meat had to be cut beforehand, fowls drawn, soup and coffee made. Moreover, she had the boarders’ meal to see to, and that of the doctor, his wife, and their servant; the billiard-room was ringing with bursts of laughter; three millers in a small parlour were calling for brandy; the wood was blazing, the brazen pan was hissing, and on the long kitchen-table, amid the quarters of raw mutton, rose piles of plates that rattled with the shaking of the block on which spinach was being chopped. From the poultry-yard was heard the screaming of the fowls which the servant was chasing to wring their necks.
A man slightly marked with smallpox, in green leather slippers, and wearing a velvet cap with a gold tassel, was warming his back at the chimney. His face expressed nothing but self-satisfaction, and he appeared to take life as calmly as the goldfinch suspended over his head in its wicker cage: this was the chemist.
‘Artémise!’ shouted the landlady, ‘chop some wood, fill the water bottles, bring some brandy, look sharp! If only I knew what dessert to offer the guests you are expecting! Good heavens! Those furniture-movers are beginning their racket in the billiard-room again; and their van has been left before the front door! The “Hirondelle” might run into it when it draws up. Call Polyte and tell him to put it up. Only think, Monsieur Homais, that since morning they have had about fifteen games, and drunk eight jars of cider! Why, they’ll tear my cloth for me,’ she went on, looking at them from a distance, her strainer in her hand.
‘That wouldn’t be much of a loss,’ replied Monsieur Homais. ‘You would buy another.’
‘Another billiard-table!’ exclaimed the widow.
‘Since that one is coming to pieces, Madame Lefrançois. I tell you again you are doing yourself harm, much harm! And besides, players now want narrow pockets and heavy cues. Hazards aren’t played now; everything is changed! One must keep pace with the times! Just look at Tellier!’
The hostess reddened with vexation. The chemist went on – ‘You may say what you like; his table is better than yours; and if one were to think, for example, of getting up a patriotic pool for Poland or the sufferers from the Lyons floods – ’
‘It isn’t beggars like him that’ll frighten us,’ interrupted the landlady, shrugging her fat shoulders. ‘Come, come, Monsieur Homais; as long as the Lion d’Or exists people will come to it. We’ve feathered our nest; while one of these days you’ll find the Café Français closed, with a big placard on the shutters. Change my billiard-table!’ she went on, speaking to herself, ‘the table that comes in so handy for folding the washing, and which I have slept six visitors on in the shooting season! But that dawdler, Hivert, isn’t here yet!’
‘Are you waiting for him for your gentlemen’s dinner?’
‘Wait for him! And what about Monsieur Binet? As the clock strikes six you’ll see him come in, for he hasn’t his equal under the sun for punctuality. He must always have his seat in the small parlour. He’d rather die than dine anywhere else. And so squeamish he is, and so particular about the cider! Not like Monsieur Léon: he sometimes comes at seven, or even half-past, and he doesn’t so much as look at what he eats. Such a nice young man! Never speaks a rough word!’
‘Well, you see, there’s a great difference between an educated man and an old carabineer who is now a tax-collector.
Six o’clock struck. Binet came in.
He wore a blue frock-coat falling in a straight line round his thin body, and his leather cap, with its lappets knotted over the top of his head with string, showed under the turned-up peak a bald forehead, flattened by the constant wearing of a helmet. He wore a black cloth waistcoat, a hair collar, grey trousers, and, all the year round, well-blacked boots, that had two parallel swellings due to the sticking out of his big toes. Not a hair stood out from the regular line of fair whiskers, which, encircling his jaws, framed, after the fashion of a garden border, his long, wan face, whose eyes were small and the nose hooked. Clever at all games of cards, a good sportsman with the gun, and writing a fine hand, he had a lathe at home, and amused himself by turning napkin-rings, with which he cluttered up his house, with all the jealousy of an artist and the egotism of a bourgeois.
He went to the small parlour, but the three millers had to be got out first, and during the whole time necessary for laying the cloth, Binet remained silent in his place near the stove. Then he shut the door and took off his cap in his usual way.
‘It isn’t with saying civil things that he’ll wear out his tongue,’ said the chemist, as soon as he was alone with the landlady.
‘He never talks more,’ she replied. ‘Last week two travellers in the cloth line were here – such clever chaps, who told such jokes in the evening, that I fairly cried with laughing; and he stood there like a dab fish and never said a word.’
‘Yes,’ observed the chemist; ‘no imagination, no sallies, nothing that makes the society-man.’
‘Yet they say he has parts,’ objected the landlady.
‘Parts!’ replied Monsieur Homais; ‘he parts! In his own line it is possible,’ he added in a calmer tone. And he went on – ‘Ah! that a merchant, who has large connections, a jurisconsult, a doctor, a chemist, should be thus absent-minded, that they should become whimsical or even peevish, I can understand; such cases are cited in history. But at least it is because they are thinking of something. Myself, for example, how often has it happened to me to look on the bureau for my pen to write a label, and to find, after all, that I had put it behind my ear?’
Madame Lefrançois just then went to the door to see if the ‘Hirondelle’ were not coming. She started. A man dressed in black suddenly came into the kitchen. By the last gleam of the twilight one could see that his face was rubicund and his form athletic.
‘What can I do for you, Monsieur le Curé?’ asked the landlady, as she reached down from the chimney one of the copper candlesticks placed with their candles in a row. ‘Will you take something? A thimbleful of Cassis? A glass of wine?’
The priest declined very politely. He had come for his umbrella, that he had forgotten the other day at the Ernemont convent, and after asking Madame Lefrançois to have it sent to him at the presbytery in the evening, he left for the church, from which the Angelus was ringing.
When the chemist no longer heard the noise of his boots along the square, he thought the priest’s behaviour just now very unbecoming. This refusal to take any refreshment seemed to him the most odious hypocrisy; all priests tippled on the sly, and were trying to bring back the days of the tithe.
The landlady took up the defence of her curé.
‘Besides, he could double up four men like you over his knee. Last year he helped our people to bring in the straw; he carried as many as six trusses at once, he is so strong.’
‘Bravo!’ said the chemist. ‘Now just send your daughters to confess to fellows with such a temperament! I, if I were the Government, I’d have the priests bled once a month. Yes, Madame Lefrançois, every month – a good phlebotomy – in the interests of the police and morals.’
‘Be quiet, Monsieur Homais. You are an infidel; you’ve no religion.’
