the precentor's footstool, opening the missal; and others on tiptoe were
just about to venture into the confessional. But the priest suddenly
distributed a shower of cuffs among them. Seizing them by the collars of
their coats, he lifted them from the ground, and deposited them on their
knees on the stones of the choir, firmly, as if he meant planting them
there.

"Yes," said he, when he returned to Emma, unfolding his large cotton
handkerchief, one corner of which he put between his teeth, "farmers are
much to be pitied."

"Others, too," she replied.

"Assuredly. Town-laborers, for example."

"It is not they--"

"Pardon! I've there known poor mothers of families, virtuous women, I
assure you, real saints, who wanted even bread."

"But those," replied Emma, and the corners of her mouth twitched as she
spoke, "those, Monsieur le Curé, who have bread and have no--"

"Fire in the winter," said the priest.

"Oh, what does that matter?"

"What! What does it matter? It seems to me that when one has firing and
food--for, after all--"

"My God! my God!" she sighed.

"Do you feel unwell?" he asked, approaching her anxiously. "It is
indigestion, no doubt? You must get home, Madame Bovary; drink a little
tea, that will strengthen you, or else a glass of fresh water with a
little moist sugar."

"Why?" And she looked like one awaking from a dream.

"Well, you see, you were putting your hand to your forehead. I thought
you felt faint." Then, bethinking himself, "But you were asking me
something? What was it? I really don't remember."

"I? Nothing! nothing!" repeated Emma.

And the glance she cast round her slowly fell upon the old man in the
cassock. They looked at one another face to face without speaking.

"Then, Madame Bovary," he said at last, "excuse me, but duty first, you
know; I must look after my good-for-nothings. The first communion will
soon be upon us, and I fear we shall be behind after all. So after
Ascension Day I keep them _recta_ an extra hour every Wednesday. Poor
children! One cannot lead them too soon into the path of the Lord, as,
moreover, he has himself recommended us to do by the mouth of His Divine
Son. Good health to you, madame; my respects to your husband."

And he went into the church making a genuflexion as soon as he reached
the door.

Emma saw him disappear between the double row of forms, walking with
heavy tread, his head a little bent over his shoulder, and with his two
hands half-open behind him.

Then she turned on her heel with one movement, like a statue on a pivot,
and went homewards. But the loud voice of the priest, the clear voices
of the boys still reached her ears, and went on behind her.

"Are you a Christian?"

"Yes, I am a Christian?"

"What is a Christian?"

"He who, being baptized--baptized--baptized--"

She went up the steps of the staircase holding on to the banisters, and
when she was in her room threw herself into an armchair.

The whitish light of the window-panes fell with soft undulations. The
furniture in its place seemed to have become more immobile, and to lose
itself in the shadow as in an ocean of darkness. The fire was out, the
clock went on ticking, and Emma vaguely marvelled at this calm of all
things while within herself was such tumult. But little Berthe was there,
between the window and the work-table, tottering on her knitted shoes,
and trying to come to her mother to catch hold of the ends of her
apron-strings.

"Leave me alone," said the latter, putting her from her with her hand.

The little girl soon came up closer against her knees, and leaning on
them with her arms, she looked up with her large blue eyes, while a
small thread of pure saliva dribbled from her lips on to the silk apron.

"Leave me alone," repeated the young woman quite irritably.

Her face frightened the child, who began to scream.

"Will you leave me alone?" she said, pushing her with her elbow.

Berthe fell at the foot of the drawers against the brass handle, cutting
against it her cheek, which began to bleed. Madame Bovary sprang to lift
her up, broke the bell-rope, called for the servant with all her might,
and she was just going to curse herself when Charles appeared. It was
the dinner-hour; he had come home.

"Look, dear!" said Emma, in a calm voice, "the little one fell down
while she was playing, and has hurt herself."

Charles reassured her; the case was not a serious one, and he went for
some sticking plaster.

Madame Bovary did not go downstairs to the dining-room; she wished to
remain alone to look after the child. Then, watching her sleep, the
little anxiety she felt gradually wore off, and she seemed very stupid
to herself, and very good to have been so worried just now at so little.
Berthe, in fact, no longer sobbed. Her breathing now imperceptibly
raised the cotton covering. Big tears lay in the corner of the
half-closed eyelids, through whose lashes one could see two pale sunken
pupils; the plaster stuck on her cheek drew the skin obliquely.

"It is very strange," thought Emma, "how ugly this child is!"

When at eleven o'clock Charles came back from the chemist's shop,
whither he had gone after dinner to return the remainder of the
sticking-plaster, he found his wife standing by the cradle.

"I assure you it's nothing," he said, kissing her on the forehead.
"Don't worry, my poor darling; you will make yourself ill."

He had stayed a long time at the chemist's. Although he had not seemed
much moved, Homais, nevertheless, had exerted himself to buoy him up, to
"keep up his spirits." Then they had talked of the various dangers that
threaten childhood, of the carelessness of servants. Madame Homais knew
something of it, having still upon her chest the marks left by a basin
full of soup that a cook had formerly dropped on her pinafore, and her
good parents took no end of trouble for her. The knives were not
sharpened, nor the floors waxed; there were iron gratings to the windows
and strong bars across the fireplace; the little Homaises, in spite of
their spirit, could not stir without some one watching them; at the
slightest cold their father stuffed them with pectorals; and until they
were turned four they all, without pity, had to wear wadded
head-protectors. This, it is true, was a fancy of Madame Homais's; her
husband was inwardly afflicted at it. Fearing the possible consequences
of such compression to the intellectual organs, he even went so far as
to say to her, "Do you want to make Caribs or Botocudos of them?"

Charles, however, had several times tried to interrupt the conversation.
"I should like to speak to you," he had whispered in the clerk's ear,
who went upstairs in front of him.

"Can he suspect anything?" Léon asked himself. His heart beat, and he
racked his brain with surmises.

At last, Charles, having shut the door, asked him to see himself what
would be the price at Rouen of a fine daguerreotype. It was a
sentimental surprise he intended for his wife, a delicate attention--his
portrait in a frock-coat. But he wanted first to know how much it would
be. The inquiries would not put Monsieur Léon out, since he went to town
almost every week.

Why? Monsieur Homais suspected some "young man's affair" at the bottom
of it, an intrigue. But he was mistaken. Léon was after no love-making.
He was sadder than ever, as Madame Lefrançois saw from the amount of
food he left on his plate. To find out more about it she questioned the
tax-collector. Binet answered roughly that he wasn't paid by the
police.

All the same, his companion seemed very strange to him, for Léon often
threw himself back in his chair, and stretching out his arms, complained
vaguely of life.

"It's because you don't take enough recreation," said the collector.

"What recreation?"

"If I were you I'd have a lathe."

"But I don't know how to turn," answered the clerk.

"Ah! that's true," said the other, rubbing his chin with an air of
mingled contempt and satisfaction.

Léon was weary of loving without any result; moreover, he was beginning
to feel that depression caused by the repetition of the same kind of
life, when no interest inspires and no hope sustains it. He was so bored
with Yonville and the Yonvillers, that the sight of certain persons, of
certain houses, irritated him beyond endurance; and the chemist, good
fellow though he was, was becoming absolutely unbearable to him. Yet the
prospect of a new condition of life frightened as much as it seduced
him.

This apprehension soon changed into impatience, and then Paris from afar
sounded its fanfare of masked balls with the laugh of grisettes. As he
was to finish reading there, why not set out at once? What prevented
him? And he began making home preparations; he arranged his occupations
beforehand. He furnished in his head an apartment. He would lead an
artist's life there! He would take lessons on the guitar! He would have
a dressing-gown, a Basque cap, blue velvet slippers! He even already
was admiring two crossed foils over his chimney-piece, with a
death's-head on the guitar above them.

The difficulty was the consent of his mother; nothing, however, seemed
more reasonable. Even his employer advised him to go to some other
chambers where he could advance more rapidly. Taking a middle course,
then, Léon looked for some place as second clerk at Rouen; found none,
and at last wrote his mother a long letter full of details, in which he
set forth the reasons for going to live at Paris immediately. She
consented.

He did not hurry. Every day for a month Hivert carried boxes, valises,
parcels for him from Yonville to Rouen and from Rouen to Yonville; and
when Léon had packed up his wardrobe, had his three armchairs
restuffed, bought a stock of cravats, in a word, had made more
preparations than for a voyage round the world, he put it off from week
to week, until he received a second letter from his mother urging him to
leave, since he wanted to pass his examination before the vacation.

When the moment for the farewells had come, Madame Homais wept, Justin
sobbed; Homais, as a man of nerve, concealed his emotion; he wished to
carry his friend's overcoat himself as far as the gate of the notary,
who was taking Léon to Rouen in his carriage. The latter had just time
to bid farewell to Monsieur Bovary.

When he reached the head of the stairs he stopped, he was so out of
breath. On his coming in, Madame Bovary rose hurriedly.

"It is I again!" said Léon.

"I was sure of it!"

She bit her lips, and a rush of blood flowing under her skin made her
red from the roots of her hair to the top of her collar. She remained
standing, leaning with her shoulder against the wainscot.

"The doctor is not here?" he went on.

"He is out." She repeated, "He is out."

Then there was silence. They looked one at the other, and their
thoughts, confounded in the same agony, clung close together like two
throbbing breasts.

"I should like to kiss Berthe," said Léon.

Emma went down a few steps and called Félicité.

He threw one long look around him that took in the walls, the brackets,
the fireplace, as if to penetrate everything, carry away everything. But
she returned, and the servant brought Berthe, who was swinging a
windmill roof downward at the end of a string. Léon kissed her several
times on the neck.

"Good-bye, poor child! good-bye, dear little one! good-bye!"

And he gave her back to her mother.

"Take her away," she said.

They remained alone--Madame Bovary, her back turned, her face pressed
against a window-pane; Léon held his cap in his hand, knocking it softly
against his thigh.

"It is going to rain," said Emma.

"I have a cloak," he answered.

"Ah!"

She turned round, her chin lowered, her forehead bent forward. The light
fell on it as on a piece of marble to the curve of the eyebrows, without
one's being able to guess what Emma was seeing in the horizon or what
she was thinking within herself.

"Well, good-bye," he sighed.

She raised her head with a quick movement.

"Yes, good-bye--go!"

They advanced toward each other; he held out his hand; she hesitated.

"In the English fashion, then," she said, giving her own hand wholly to
him, and forcing a laugh.

Léon felt it between his fingers, and the very essence of all his being
seemed to pass down into that moist palm. Then he opened his hand; their
eyes met again, and he disappeared.

When he reached the market-place, he stopped and hid behind a pillar to
look for the last time at this white house with the four green blinds.
He thought he saw a shadow behind the window in the room; but the
curtain, sliding along the pole as though no one were touching it,
slowly opened its long oblique folds, that spread out with a single
movement, and thus hung straight and motionless as a plaster wall. Léon
set off running.

From afar he saw his employer's gig in the road, and by it a man in a
coarse apron holding the horse. Homais and Monsieur Guillaumin were
talking. They were waiting for him.

"Embrace me," said the chemist with tears in his eyes. "Here is your
coat, my good friend. Mind the cold; take care of yourself; look after
yourself."

"Come, Léon, jump in," said the notary.

Homais bent over the splash-board, and in a voice broken by sobs,
uttered these three sad words:

"A pleasant journey!"

"Good-night," said Monsieur Guillaumin. "Give him his head."

They set out, and Homais went back.

Madame Bovary had opened her window overlooking the garden and watched
the clouds. They were gathering round the sunset on the side of Rouen,
and swiftly rolled back their black columns, behind which the great rays
of the sun looked out like the golden arrows of a suspended trophy,
while the rest of the empty heavens was white as porcelain. But a gust
of wind bowed the poplars, and suddenly the rain fell; it pattered
against the green leaves. Then the sun reappeared, the hens clucked,
sparrows shook their wings in the damp thickets, and the pools of water
on the gravel as they flowed away carried off the pink flowers of an
acacia.

"Ah! how far off he must be already!" she thought.

Monsieur Homais, as usual, came at half-past six during dinner.

"Well," said he, "so we've sent off our young friend!"

"So it seems," replied the doctor. Then turning on his chair: "Any news
at home?"

"Nothing much. Only my wife was a little moved this afternoon. You know
women--a nothing upsets them, especially my wife. And we should be wrong
to object to that, since their nervous organization is much more
malleable than ours."

"Poor Léon!" said Charles. "How will he live at Paris? Will he get used
to it?"

Madame Bovary sighed.

"Get along!" said the chemist, smacking his lips. "The outings at
restaurants, the masked balls, the champagne--all that'll be jolly
enough, I assure you."

"I don't think he'll go wrong," objected Bovary.

"Nor do I," said Monsieur Homais quickly; "although he'll have to do
like the rest for fear of passing for a Jesuit. And you don't know what
a life those dogs lead in the Latin Quarter with actresses. Besides,
students are thought a great deal of at Paris. Provided they have a few
accomplishments, they are received in the best society; there are even
ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who fall in love with them, which
subsequently furnishes them opportunities for making very good matches."

"But," said the doctor, "I fear for him that down there--"

"You are right," interrupted the chemist; "that is the reverse of the
medal. And one is constantly obliged to keep one's hand in one's pocket
there. Thus, we will suppose you are in a public garden. An individual
presents himself, well dressed, even wearing an order, whom any one
would take for a diplomatist. He approaches you, he insinuates himself;
offers you a pinch of snuff, or picks up your hat. Then you become more
intimate; he takes you to a café, invites you to his country-house,
introduces you, between two drinks, to all sorts of people; and three
fourths of the time it's only to plunder your watch or lead you into
some pernicious step."

"That is true," said Charles; "but I was thinking especially of
illnesses--of typhoid fever, for example, that attacks students from the
provinces."

Emma shuddered.

"Because of the change of regimen," continued the chemist, "and of the
perturbation that results therefrom in the whole system. And then the
water at Paris, don't you know! The dishes at restaurants, all the
spiced food, end by heating the blood, and are not worth, whatever
people may say of them, a good soup. For my own part, I have always
preferred plain living; it is more healthful. So when I was studying
pharmacy at Rouen, I boarded in a boardinghouse; I dined with the
professors."

And thus he went on, expounding his opinions generally and his personal
likings, until Justin came to fetch him for a mulled egg that was
wanted.

"Not a moment's peace!" he cried; "always at it! I can't go out for a
minute! Like a plough-horse, I have always to be moiling and toiling.
What drudgery!" Then, when he was at the door, "By the way, do you know
the news?"

"What news?"

"That it is very likely," Homais went on, raising his eyebrows and
assuming one of his most serious expressions, "that the agricultural
meeting of the Seine-Inférieure will be held this year at
Yonville-l'Abbaye. The rumor, at all events, is going the round. This
morning the paper alluded to it. It would be of the utmost importance
for our district. But we'll talk it over later on. I can see, thank you;
Justin has the lantern."

VII.

A WOMAN'S WHIMS.

The next day was a dreary one for Emma. Every thing seemed to her
enveloped in a black atmosphere floating confusedly over the exterior of
things, and sorrow was engulphed within her soul with soft shrieks such
as the winter wind makes in ruined castles. It was that reverie which we
give to things that will not return, the lassitude that seizes you after
everything done; that pain, in fine, that the interruption of every
wonted movement, the sudden cessation of any prolonged vibration, brings
on.

As on the return from Vaubyessard, when the quadrilles were running in
her head, she was full of a gloomy melancholy, of a numb despair. Léon
reappeared, taller, handsomer, more charming, more vague. Though
separated from her, he had not left her; he was there, and the walls of
the house seemed to hold his shadow. She could not detach her eyes from
the carpet where he had walked, from those empty chairs where he had
sat. The river still flowed on, and slowly drove its ripples along the
slippery banks. They had often walked there to the murmur of the waves,
over the moss-covered pebbles. How bright the sun had been! What happy
afternoons they had seen alone in the shade at the end of the garden! He
read aloud, bareheaded, sitting on a footstool of dry sticks; the fresh
wind of the meadow set trembling the leaves of the book and the
nasturtiums of the arbor. Ah! he was gone, the only charm of her life,
the only possible hope of joy. Why had she not seized this happiness
when it came to her? Why not have kept hold of it with both hands, with
both knees, when it was about to flee from her? And she cursed herself
for not having loved Léon. She thirsted for his lips. The wish took
possession of her to run after and rejoin him, throw herself into his
arms and say to him, "It is I; I am yours." But Emma recoiled beforehand
at the difficulties of the enterprise, and her desires, increased by
regret, became only the more acute.

Henceforth the memory of Léon was the centre of her boredom; it burnt
there more brightly than the fire travelers leave on the snow of a
Russian steppe. She sprang towards him, she pressed against him, she
stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything that
could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most
immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined,
her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness
that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost
hopes, the domestic tête-à-tête,--she gathered it all up, took
everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.

The flames, however, subsided, either because the supply had exhausted
itself, or because it had been piled up too much. Love, little by
little, was quelled by absence; regret stifled beneath habit; and this
incendiary light that had empurpled her pale sky was overspread and
faded by degrees. In the supineness of her conscience she even took her
repugnance towards her husband for aspirations towards her lover, the
burning of hate for the warmth of tenderness; but as the tempest still
raged, and as passion burnt itself down to the very cinders, and no help
came, no sun rose, there was night on all sides, and she was lost in the
terrible cold that pierced her.

Then the evil days of Tostes began again. She thought herself now far
more unhappy; for she had the experience of grief, with the certainty
that it would not end.

A woman who had laid on herself such sacrifices could well allow herself
certain whims. She bought a gothic prie-Dieu, and in a month spent
fourteen francs on lemons for polishing her nails; she wrote to Rouen
for a blue cashmere gown; she chose one of Lheureux's finest scarves,
and wore it knotted round her waist over her dressing-gown; and, with
closed blinds and a book in her hand, she lay stretched out on a couch
in this garb.

She often changed her coiffure; she did her hair _à la Chinoise_, in
flowing curls, in plaited coils; she parted it on one side and rolled it
under like a man's.

She wished to learn Italian; she bought dictionaries, a grammar, and a
supply of white paper. She tried serious reading, history, and
philosophy. Sometimes in the night Charles woke up with a start,
thinking he was being called to a patient. "I'm coming," he stammered;
and it was the noise of a match Emma had struck to relight the lamp. But
her reading fared like her pieces of embroidery, all of which, only
just begun, filled her cupboard; she took it up, left it, passed on to
other books.

She had attacks in which she could easily have been driven to commit any
folly. She maintained one day, in opposition to her husband, that she
could drink off a large glass of brandy, and, as Charles was stupid
enough to dare her to, she swallowed the brandy to the last drop.

In spite of her vaporish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called
them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the
corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of
old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed. She was pale all
over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils,
her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three gray hairs on
her temples, she talked much of her old age.

She often fainted. One day she even spat blood, and, as Charles fussed
round her showing his anxiety--

"Bah!" she answered, "what does it matter?"

Charles fled to his study and wept there, both his elbows on the table,
sitting in an armchair at his bureau under the phrenological head.

Then he wrote to his mother to beg her to come, and they had many long
consultations together on the subject of Emma.

What should they decide? What was to be done since she rejected all
medical treatment?

"Do you know what your wife wants?" replied Madame Bovary, senior. "She
wants to be forced to occupy herself with some manual work. If she were
obliged, like so many others, to earn her living, she wouldn't have
these vapors, that come to her from a lot of ideas she stuffs into her
head, and from the idleness in which she lives."

"Yet she is always busy," said Charles.

"Ah! always busy at what? Reading novels, bad books, works against
religion, in which they mock at priests in speeches taken from Voltaire.
But all that leads you far astray, my poor child. Any one who has no
religion always ends by turning out badly."

So they decided to stop Emma from reading novels. The enterprise did not
seem easy. The good lady undertook it. She was, when she passed through
Rouen, to go herself to the lending-library and represent that Emma had
discontinued her subscription. Would they not have a right to apply to
the police if the librarian persisted all the same in his poisonous
trade?

The farewells of mother and daughter-in-law were cold. During the three
weeks that they had been together they had not exchanged half-a-dozen
words apart from the inquiries and phrases when they met at table and in
the evening before going to bed.

Madame Bovary left on a Wednesday, the market-day at Yonville.

The Place since morning had been blocked by a row of carts, which, on
end and their shafts in the air, spread all along the line of houses
from the church to the inn. On the other side there were canvas booths,
where cotton checks, blankets, and woollen stockings were sold, together
with harness for horses, and packets of blue ribbon, whose ends
fluttered in the wind. The coarse hardware was spread out on the ground
between pyramids of eggs and hampers of cheeses, from which sticky
straw stuck out. Near the corn-machines clucking hens passed their necks
through the bars of flat cages. The people, crowding in the same place
and unwilling to move thence, sometimes threatened to smash the
shop-front of the chemist. On Wednesdays his shop was never empty, and
the people pushed in less to buy drugs than for consultations, so great
was Homais's reputation in the neighboring villages. His robust aplomb
had fascinated the rustics. They considered him a greater doctor than
all the doctors.

Emma was leaning out at the window; she was often there. The window in
the provinces replaces the theatre and the promenade, and she amused
herself with watching the crowd of boors, when she saw a gentleman in a
green velvet coat. He had on yellow gloves, although he wore heavy
gaiters; he was coming towards the doctor's house, followed by a peasant
walking with bent head and quite a thoughtful air.

"Can I see the doctor?" he asked Justin, who was talking on the
doorsteps with Félicité, and, taking him for a servant of the house:
"Tell him that Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger of La Huchette is here."

It was not from territorial vanity that the new arrival added "of La
Huchette" to his name, but to make himself the better known. La
Huchette, in fact, was an estate near Yonville, where he had just bought
the château and two farms that he cultivated himself, without, however,
troubling very much about them. He lived as a bachelor, and was supposed
to have at least fifteen thousand francs a year.

Charles came into the room. Monsieur Boulanger introduced his man, who
wanted to be bled because he felt "a tingling all over."

"That'll purge me," he urged as an objection to all reasoning.

So Bovary ordered a bandage and a basin, and asked Justin to hold it.
Then addressing the countryman, already pale--

"Don't be afraid, my lad."

"No, no, sir," said the other; "get on."

And with an air of bravado he held out his great arm. At the prick of
the lancet the blood spurted out, splashing against the looking-glass.

"Hold the basin nearer," exclaimed Charles.

"Lor!" said the peasant, "one would swear it was a little fountain
flowing. How red my blood is! That's a good sign isn't it?"

"Sometimes," answered the doctor, "one feels nothing at first, and then
syncope sets in, and more especially with people of strong constitution
like this man."

At these words the rustic let go the lancet-case he was twisting between
his fingers. A shudder of his shoulders made the chair-back creak. His
hat fell off.

"I thought as much," said Bovary, pressing his finger on the vein.

The basin was beginning to tremble in Justin's hands; his knees shook,
he turned pale.

"Emma! Emma!" called Charles.

With one bound she came down the staircase.

"Some vinegar," he cried. "O dear! two at once!"

And in his emotion he could hardly put on the compress.

"It is nothing," said Monsieur Boulanger quietly, taking Justin in his
arms. He seated him on the table with his back resting against the wall.

Madame Bovary began taking off his cravat. The strings of his shirt had
got into a knot, and she was for some minutes moving her light fingers
about the young fellow's neck. Then she poured some vinegar on her
cambric handkerchief; she moistened his temples with little dabs, and
then blew upon them softly. The ploughman revived, but Justin's syncope
still lasted, and his eyeballs disappeared in their pale sclerotic like
blue flowers in milk.

"We must hide this from him," said Charles.

Madame Bovary took the basin to put it under the table. With the
movement she made in bending down, her skirt (it was a summer frock with
four flounces, yellow, long in the waist and wide in the skirt) spread
out around her on the flags of the room; and as Emma, stooping,
staggered a little as she stretched out her arms, the stuff here and
there gave with the inflections of her bust. Then she went to fetch a
bottle of water, and she was melting some pieces of sugar when the
chemist arrived. The servant had been to fetch him in the tumult. Seeing
his pupil with his eyes open he drew a long breath; then going round him
he looked at him from head to foot.

"Fool!" he said, "really a little fool! A fool in four letters! A
phlebotomy's a big affair, isn't it! And a fellow who isn't afraid of
anything; a kind of squirrel, just as he is who climbs to vertiginous
heights to shake down nuts. Oh, yes! you just talk to me, boast about
yourself! Here's a fine fitness for practising pharmacy later on; for
under serious circumstances you may be called before the tribunals in
order to enlighten the minds of the magistrates, and you would have to
keep your head then, to reason, show yourself a man, or else pass for an
imbecile."

Justin did not answer. The chemist went on--

"Who asked you to come? You are always pestering the doctor and madame.
On Wednesday, moreover, your presence is indispensable to me. There are
now twenty people in the shop. I left everything because of the interest
I take in you. Come, get along! Sharp! Wait for me, and keep an eye on
the jars."

When Justin, who was rearranging his dress, had gone, they talked for a
little while about fainting-fits. Madame Bovary said she had never
fainted.

"That is extraordinary for a lady," said Monsieur Boulanger; "but some
people are very susceptible. Thus, in a duel, I have seen a second lose
consciousness at the mere sound of the loading of pistols."

"For my part," said the chemist, "the sight of other people's blood
doesn't affect me at all, but the mere thought of my own flowing would
make me faint, if I reflected upon it too much."

Monsieur Boulanger, however, dismissed his servant, advising him to calm
himself, since his fancy was over.

"It procured me the advantage of making your acquaintance," he added,
and he looked at Emma as he said this. Then he put three francs on the
corner of the table, bowed negligently, and went out.

He was soon on the other side of the river (this was his way back to La
Huchette), and Emma saw him in the meadow, walking under the poplars,
slackening his pace now and then as one who reflects.

"She is very pretty," he said to himself; "she is very pretty, this
doctor's wife. Fine teeth, black eyes, a dainty foot, a figure like a
Parisienne's. Where the devil does she come from? Wherever did this fat
fellow pick her up?"

Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger was thirty-four; he was of brutal
temperament and intelligent perspicacity, having, moreover, had much to
do with women, and knowing them well. This one had seemed pretty to him;
so he was thinking about her and her husband.

"I think he is very stupid. She is tired of him, no doubt. He has dirty
nails, and hasn't shaved for three days. While he is trotting after his
patients, she sits there botching socks. And she gets bored! She would
like to live in town and dance polkas every evening. Poor little woman!
She is gaping after love like a carp after water on a kitchen-table.
With three words of gallantry she'd adore one, I'm sure of it. She'd be
tender, charming! Yes; but how get rid of her afterwards?"

Then the difficulties of love-making seen in the distance made him by
contrast think of his mistress. She was an actress at Rouen, whom he
kept; and when he had pondered over this image, with which, even in
remembrance, he was satiated--

"Ah! Madame Bovary," he thought, "is much prettier, especially fresher.
Virginie is decidedly beginning to grow fat. She is so finikin with her
pleasures; and, besides, she has a mania for prawns."

The fields were empty, and around him Rodolphe heard only the regular
beating of the grass striking against his boots, with the cry of the
grasshopper hidden at a distance among the oats. He again saw Emma in
her room, dressed as he had seen her, and he undressed her.

"Oh, I will have her," he cried, striking a blow with his stick at a
clod in front of him. And he at once began to consider the political
part of the enterprise. He asked himself--

"Where shall we meet? By what means? We shall always be having the brat
on our hands, and the servant, the neighbors, the husband, all sorts of
worries. Pshaw! one would lose too much time over it."

Then he resumed, "She really has eyes that pierce one's heart like a
gimlet. And that pale complexion; I adore pale women!"

When he reached the top of the Argueil hills he had made up his mind.
"It's only finding the opportunities. Well, I will call in now and then.
I'll send them venison, poultry; I'll have myself bled, if need be. We
shall become friends; I'll invite them to my place. By Jove!" added he,
"there's the agricultural show coming on. She'll be there. I shall see
her. We'll begin boldly, for that's the surest way."

VIII.

A VILLAGE FESTIVAL.

At last it came, the famous agricultural show. On the morning of the
solemnity all the inhabitants at their doors were chatting over the
preparations. The pediment of the townhall had been hung with garlands
of ivy; a tent had been erected in a meadow for the banquet; and in the
middle of the Place, in front of the church, a kind of bombarde was to
announce the arrival of the prefect and the names of the successful
farmers who had obtained prizes. The National Guard of Buchy (there was
none at Yonville) had come to join the corps of firemen, of whom Binet
was captain. On that day he wore a collar even higher than usual; and,
tightly buttoned in his tunic, his figure was so stiff and motionless
that the whole vital portion of his person seemed to have descended into
his legs; which rose in a cadence of set steps with a single movement.
As there was some rivalry between the tax-collector and the colonel,
both, to show off their talents, drilled their men separately. One saw
the red epaulettes and the black breastplates pass and repass
alternately; there was no end to it, and it continually began again.
There had never been such a display of pomp. Several citizens had
washed down their houses the evening before; tricolored flags hung from
half-open windows; all the public-houses were full; and in the lovely
weather the starched caps, the golden crosses, and the colored
neckerchiefs seemed whiter than snow, shone in the sun, and relieved
with their motley colors the somber monotony of the frock-coats and blue
smocks. The neighboring farmers' wives, when they got off their horses,
pulled out a long pin that fastened round them their skirts, turned up
for fear of mud; the husbands, on the contrary, in order to save their
hats, kept their handkerchiefs round them, holding one corner between
their teeth.

The crowd came into the main street from both ends of the village.
People poured in from the lanes, the alleys, the houses; and from time
to time one heard knockers banging against doors closing behind women
with their gloves, who were going out to see the fête. What was most
admired were two long lamp-stands covered with lanterns, that flanked a
platform on which the authorities were to sit. Besides this there were
against the four columns of the townhall four kinds of poles, each
bearing a small standard of greenish cloth, embellished with
inscriptions in gold letters. On one was written, "To Commerce;" on the
other, "To Agriculture;" on the third, "To Industry;" and on the fourth,
"To the Fine Arts."

But the jubilation that brightened all faces seemed to darken that of
Madame Lefrançois, the innkeeper. Standing on her kitchen-steps she
muttered to herself, "What rubbish! what rubbish! With their canvas
booth! Do they think the prefect will be glad to dine down there under a
tent like a gipsy? They call all this fussing doing good to the place!
Then it wasn't worth while sending to Neufchâtel for the keeper of a
cookshop! And for whom? For cowherds! tatterdemalions!"

The chemist was passing. He had on a frock-coat, nankeen trousers,
beaver shoes, and, for a wonder, a hat with a low crown.

"Your servant! Excuse me, I am in a hurry." And as the fat widow asked
where he was going--

"It seems odd to you, doesn't it, to see me, who am always more cooped
up in my laboratory than the man's rat in his cheese, taking a holiday?"

"What cheese?" asked the landlady.

"Oh, nothing! nothing!" Homais continued. "I merely wished to convey to
you, Madame Lefrançois, that I usually live at home like a recluse.
To-day, however, considering the circumstances, it is necessary--"

"Oh, you're going down there!" she said contemptuously.

"Yes, I am going," replied the chemist, astonished. "Am I not a member
of the consulting commission?"

Mère Lefrançois looked at him for a few moments, and ended by saying
with a smile:

"That's another pair of shoes! But what does agriculture matter to you?
Do you understand anything about it?"

"Certainly I understand it, since I am a druggist,--that is to say, a
chemist. And the object of chemistry, Madame Lefrançois, being the
knowledge of the reciprocal and molecular action of all natural bodies,
it follows that agriculture is comprised within its domain. And, in
fact, the composition of the manure, the fermentation of liquids, the
analyses of gases, and the influence of miasmata, what, I ask you, is
all this, if it isn't chemistry, pure and simple?"

The landlady did not answer. Homais went on:

"Do you think that to be an agriculturist it is necessary to have tilled
the earth or fattened fowls oneself? It is necessary rather to know the
composition of the substances in question--the geological strata, the
atmospheric actions, the quality of the soil, the minerals, the waters,
the density of the different bodies, their capillarity, and what not.
And one must be master of all the principles of hygiene in order to
direct, criticise the construction of buildings, the feeding of animals,
the diet of the domestics. And, moreover, Madame Lefrançois, one must
know botany, be able to distinguish between plants, you understand,
which are the wholesome and those that are deleterious, which are
unproductive and which nutritive, if it is well to pull them up here and
re-sow them there, to propagate some, destroy others; in brief, one must
keep pace with science by means of pamphlets and public papers, be
always on the alert to find out improvements."

The landlady never took her eyes off the "Café Français," and the
chemist went on:

"Would to God our agriculturists were chemists, or that at least they
would pay more attention to the counsels of science. Thus, lately I
myself wrote a considerable tract, a memoir of more than seventy-two
pages, entitled, 'Cider, its Manufacture and its Effects, together with
some New Reflections on this Subject,' that I sent to the Agricultural
Society of Rouen, and which even procured me the honor of being received
among its members--Section, Agriculture; Class, Pomological. Well, if
my work had been given to the public--" But the druggist stopped, Madame
Lefrançois seemed so preoccupied.

"Just look at them!" she said. "It's past comprehension! Such a cookshop
as that!" And with a shrug of the shoulders that stretched out over her
breast the stitches of her knitted bodice, she pointed with both hands
at her rival's inn, whence songs were heard issuing. "Well, it won't
last long," she added; "it'll be over before a week."

Homais drew back with stupefaction. She came down three steps and
whispered in his ear:

"What! you didn't know it? There'll be an execution in next week. It's
Lheureux who is selling him up; he has killed him with bills."

"What a terrible catastrophe!" cried the chemist, who always found
expressions in harmony with all imaginable circumstances.

Then the landlady began telling him this story, that she had heard from
Théodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's servant, and although she detested
Telher, she blamed Lheureux. He was "a wheedler, a sneak."

"There!" she said. "Look at him! he is in the market; he is bowing to
Madame Bovary, who's got on a green bonnet. Why, she's taking Monsieur
Boulanger's arm."

"Madame Bovary!" exclaimed Homais. "I must go at once and pay her my
respects. Perhaps she'd be very glad to have a seat in the enclosure
under the peristyle." And, without heeding Madame Lefrançois, who was
calling him back to tell him more about it, the druggist walked off
rapidly with a smile on his lips, with straight knees, bowing
exuberantly right and left, and taking up much room with the large
tails of his frock-coat that fluttered behind him in the wind.

Rodolphe, having caught sight of him from afar, hurried on, but Madame
Bovary lost her breath; so he walked more slowly, and, smiling at her,
said in a rough tone:

"It's only to get away from that fat fellow, you know, the druggist."
She pressed his elbow.

"What's the meaning of that?" he asked himself. And he looked at her out
of the corner of his eyes.

Her profile was so calm that one could guess nothing from it. It stood
out in the light from the oval of her bonnet, with pale ribbons on it
like the leaves of reeds. Her eyes with their long curved lashes looked
straight before her, and though wide open, they seemed slightly puckered
by the cheekbones, because of the blood pulsing gently under the
delicate skin. A pink line ran along the partition between her nostrils.
Her head leaned towards her shoulder, and the pearly tips of her white
teeth were seen between her lips.

"Is she making fun of me?" thought Rodolphe.

Emma's gesture, however, had only been meant for a warning; for Monsieur
Lheureux was accompanying them, and spoke now and again as if to enter
into the conversation.

"What a superb day! Everybody is out! The wind is east!"

And neither Madame Bovary nor Rodolphe answered him, while at the
slightest movement made by them he drew near, saying, "I beg your
pardon!" and raised his hat.

When they reached the farrier's house, instead of following the road up
to the fence, Rodolphe suddenly turned down a path, drawing with him
Madame Bovary. He called out:

"Good evening, Monsieur Lheureux! See you again presently."

"How you got rid of him!" she said, laughing.

"Why," he went on, "allow oneself to be intruded upon by others? And as
to-day I have the happiness of being with you----"

Emma blushed. He did not finish his sentence. Then he talked of the fine
weather and of the pleasure of walking on the grass. A few daisies had
sprung up again.

"Here are some pretty Easter daisies," he said, "and enough of them to
furnish oracles to all the amorous maids in the place." He added, "Shall
I pick some? What do you think?"

"Are you in love?" she asked, coughing a little.

"H'm, h'm! who knows?" answered Rodolphe.

The meadow began to fill, and the housewives, hustled one with their
great umbrellas, their baskets, and their babies. One had often to get
out of the way of a long file of country folk, servant-maids with blue
stockings, flat shoes, and silver rings, who smelled of milk when one
passed close to them. They walked along holding one another by the hand,
and thus they spread over the whole field from the row of open trees to
the banquet tent. But this was the examination time, and the farmers one
after the other entered a kind of enclosure formed by a long cord
supported on sticks.

The beasts were there, their noses toward the cord, and making a
confused line with their unequal rumps. Drowsy pigs were burrowing in
the earth with their snouts, calves were bleating, lambs baaing; the
cows, on knees folded in, were stretching their bellies on the grass,
slowly chewing the cud, and blinking their heavy eyelids at the gnats
that buzzed round them. Ploughmen with bare arms were holding by the
halter prancing stallions that neighed with dilated nostrils, looking
toward the mares. These stood quietly, stretching out their heads and
flowing manes, while their foals rested in their shadow, or now and then
came and sucked them. And above the long undulation of these crowded
animals one saw some white mane rising in the wind like a wave, or some
sharp horns sticking out, and the heads of men running about. Apart,
outside the enclosure, a hundred paces off, was a large black bull,
muzzled, with an iron ring in its nostrils, who moved no more than if he
had been in bronze. A child in rags was holding him by a rope.

Between the two lines the committee-men were walking with heavy steps,
examining each animal, then consulting one another in a low voice. One
who seemed of more importance now and then took notes in a book as he
walked along. This was the president of the jury, Monsieur Derozerays de
la Panville. As soon as he recognized Rodolphe he came forward quickly,
and smiling amiably, said:

"What! Monsieur Boulanger, you are deserting us?"

Rodolphe protested that he was just coming. But when the president had
disappeared:

"_Ma foi!_" said he, "I shall not go. Your company is better than his."

And while poking fun at the show, Rodolphe, to move about more easily,
showed the gendarme his blue card, and even stopped now and then in
front of some fine beast which Madame Bovary did not at all admire. He
noticed this and began jeering at the Yonville ladies and their dresses;
then he apologized for the negligence of his own. He had that
incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think
they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations
of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for
social conventions, that seduces or exasperates them. Thus his cambric
shirt with plaited cuffs was blown out by the wind in the opening of his
waistcoat of gray ticking, and his broad-striped trousers disclosed at
the ankle nankeen boots with patent leather gaiters. These were so
polished that they reflected the grass. He trampled on horses' dung with
them, one hand in the pocket of his jacket and his straw hat on one
side.

"Besides," added he, "when one lives in the country----"

"It's waste of time," said Emma.

"That is true," replied Rodolphe. "To think that not one of these people
is capable of understanding even the cut of a coat!"

Then they talked about provincial mediocrity, of the lives it crushed,
the illusions lost there.

"And I too," said Rodolphe, "am drifting into depression."

"You!" she said in astonishment; "I thought you very light-hearted."

"Ah! yes. I seem so, because in the midst of the world I know how to
wear the mask of a scoffer upon my face; and yet, how many a time at the
sight of a cemetery by moonlight have I not asked myself whether it were
not better to join those sleeping there!"

"Oh! and your friends?" she said. "You do not think of them."

"My friends! What friends? Have I any? Who cares for me?" And he
accompanied the last words with a kind of whistling of the lips.

But they were obliged to separate from each other because of a great
pile of chairs that a man was carrying behind them. He was so overladen
with them that one could only see the tips of his wooden shoes and the
ends of his two outstretched arms. It was Lestiboudois, the gravedigger,
who was carrying the church chairs about among the people. Alive to all
that concerned his interests, he had hit upon this means of turning the
show to account; and his idea was succeeding, for he no longer knew
which way to turn. In fact, the villagers, who were hot, quarreled for
these seats, whose straw smelled of incense, and they lent against the
thick backs, stained with the wax of candles, with a certain veneration.

Madame Bovary again took Rodolphe's arm; he went on as if speaking to
himself:

"Yes, I have missed so many things. Always alone! Ah! if I had some aim
in life, if I had met some love, if I had found some one! Oh, how I
would have spent all the energy of which I am capable, surmounted
everything, overcome everything!"

"Yet it seems to me," said Emma, "that you are not to be pitied."

"Ah! you think so?" said Rodolphe.

"For, after all," she went on, "you are free----" she hesitated,
"rich----"

"Do not mock me," he replied.

And she protested that she was not mocking him, when the report of a
cannon resounded. Immediately all began hustling one another pell-mell
toward the village.

It was a false alarm. The prefect seemed not to be coming, and the
members of the jury felt much embarrassed, not knowing if they ought to
begin the meeting or still wait.

At last at the end of the Place a large hired landau appeared, drawn by
two thin horses, whom a coachman in a white hat was whipping lustily.
Binet had only just time to shout, "Present arms!" and the colonel to
imitate him. All ran toward the enclosure; every one pushed forward. A
few even forgot their collars; but the equipage of the prefect seemed to
anticipate the crowd, and the two yoked jades, trapesing in their
harness, came up at a little trot in front of the peristyle of the town
hall at the very moment when the National Guard and firemen deployed,
beating drums and marking time.

"Present!" shouted Binet.

"Halt!" shouted the colonel. "Left about, march."

And after presenting arms, during which the clang of the band, letting
loose, rang out like a brass kettle rolling downstairs, all the guns
were lowered. Then were seen stepping down from the carriage a gentleman
in a short coat with silver braiding, with bald brow, and wearing a tuft
of hair at the back of his head, of a sallow complexion and the most
benign appearance. His eyes, very large and covered by heavy lids, were
half-closed to look at the crowd, while at the same time he raised his
sharp nose, and forced a smile upon his sunken mouth. He recognized the
mayor by his scarf, and explained to him that the prefect was not able
to come. He himself was a councilor at the prefecture; then he added a
few apologies. Monsieur Tuvache answered them with compliments; the
other confessed himself nervous; and they remained thus, face to face,
their foreheads almost touching, with the members of the jury all round,
the municipal council, the notable personages, the National Guard and
the crowd. The councilor pressing his little cocked hat to his breast
repeated his bows, while Tuvache, bent like a bow, also smiled,
stammered, tried to say something, protested his devotion to the
monarchy and the honor that was being done to Yonville.

Hippolyte, the groom from the inn, took the head of the horses from the
coachman, and, limping along with his club-foot, led them to the door of
the "Lion d'Or," where a number of peasants collected to look at the
carriage. The drum beat, the howitzer thundered, and the gentlemen one
by one mounted the platform, where they sat down in red utrecht velvet
armchairs that had been lent by Madame Tuvache.

All these people looked alike. Their fair flabby faces, somewhat tanned
by the sun, were the color of sweet cider, and their puffy whiskers
emerged from stiff collars, kept up by white cravats with broad bows.
All the waistcoats were of velvet, double-breasted; all the watches had,
at the end of a long ribbon, an oval cornelian seal; every one rested
his two hands on his thighs, carefully stretching the stride of his
trousers, whose unsponged glossy cloth shone more brilliantly than the
leather of his heavy boots.

The ladies of the company stood at the back under the vestibule between
the pillars, while the common herd was opposite, standing up or sitting
on chairs. As a matter of fact, Lestiboudois had brought thither all
those that he had moved from the field, and he even kept running back
every minute to fetch others from the church. He caused such confusion
with this piece of business that one had great difficulty in getting to
the small steps of the platform.

"I think," said Monsieur Lheureux to the chemist, who was passing to his
place, "that they ought to have put up two Venetian masts with something
rather severe and rich for ornaments; it would have been a very pretty
effect."

"To be sure," replied Homais; "but what can you expect? The mayor took
everything on his own shoulders. He hasn't much taste. Poor Tuvache! and
he is even completely destitute of what is called the genius of art."

Rodolphe, meanwhile, with Madame Bovary, had gone up to the first floor
of the townhall, to the "council-room," and as it was empty, he declared
that they could enjoy the sight there more comfortably. He fetched three
stools from the round table under the bust of the monarch, and having
carried them to one of the windows, they sat down by each other.

There was commotion on the platform, long whisperings, much parleying.
At last the councilor got up. They knew now that his name was Lieuvain,
and in the crowd the name was passed from one to the other. After he had
collated a few pages, and bent over them to see better, he began:

"Gentlemen! May I be permitted first of all (before addressing you on
the object of our meeting to-day, and this sentiment, will, I am sure,
be shared by you all), may I be permitted, I say, to pay a tribute to
the higher administration, to the government, to the monarch, gentlemen,
our sovereign, to that beloved king, to whom no branch of public or
private prosperity is a matter of indifference, and who directs with a
hand at once so firm and wise the chariot of the state amid the
incessant perils of a stormy sea, knowing, moreover, how to make peace
respected as well as war, industry, commerce, agriculture, and the fine
arts."

"I ought," said Rodolphe, "to get back a little further."

"Why?" said Emma.

But at this moment the voice of the councilor rose to an extraordinary
pitch. He declaimed:

"This is no longer the time, gentlemen, when civil discord ensanguined
our public places, when the landlord, the business-man, the working-man
himself, falling asleep at night, lying down to peaceful sleep, trembled
lest he should be awakened suddenly by the noise of incendiary tocsins,
when the most subversive doctrines audaciously sapped foundations."

"Well, some one down there might see me," Rodolphe resumed, "then I
should have to invent excuses for a fortnight; and with my bad
reputation----"

"Oh, you are slandering yourself," said Emma.

"No! It is dreadful, I assure you."

"But, gentlemen," continued the councilor, "if, banishing from my memory
the remembrance of these sad pictures, I carry my eyes back to the
actual situation of our dear country, what do I see there? Everywhere
commerce and the arts are flourishing; everywhere new means of
communication, like so many new arteries in the body of the state,
establish within it new relations. Our great industrial centers have
recovered all their activity; religion, more consolidated, smiles in all
hearts; our ports are full, confidence is born again, and France
breathes once more!"

"Besides," added Rodolphe, "perhaps from the world's point of view they
are right."

"How so?" she asked.

"What!" said he. "Do you not know that there are souls constantly
tormented? They need by turns to dream and to act, the purest passions
and the most turbulent joys, and thus they fling themselves into all
sorts of fantasies, of follies."

Then she looked at him as one looks at a traveler who has voyaged over
strange lands, and went on:

"We have not even this distraction, we poor women!"

"A sad distraction, for happiness isn't found in it."

"But is it ever found?" she asked.

"Yes; one day it comes," he answered.

"And this is what you have understood," said the councilor. "You
farmers, agricultural laborers! you pacific pioneers of a work that
belongs wholly to civilization! you men of progress and morality, you
have understood, I say, that political storms are even more redoubtable
than atmospheric disturbances!"

"It comes one day," repeated Rodolphe, "one day suddenly, and when one
is despairing of it. Then the horizon expands; it is as if a voice
cried, 'It is here!' You feel the need of confiding the whole of your
life, of giving everything, sacrificing everything to this being. There
is no need for explanations; they understand one another. They have seen
each other in dreams!" He looked at her. "In fine, here it is, this
treasure so sought after, here before you. It glitters, it flashes; yet
one still doubts, one does not believe it; one remains dazzled, as if
one went out from darkness into light!"

And as he ended Rodolphe suited the action to the word. He passed his
hand over his face, like a man seized with giddiness. Then he let it
fall on Emma's. She took hers away.

"And who would be surprised at it, gentlemen? He only who was so blind,
so plunged (I do not fear to say it), so plunged in the prejudices of
another age as still to misunderstand the spirit of agricultural
populations. Where, indeed, is to be found more patriotism than in the
country, greater devotion to the public welfare, more intelligence, in a
word? And, gentlemen, I do not mean that superficial intelligence, vain
ornament of idle minds, but rather that profound and balanced
intelligence that applies itself above all else to useful objects, thus
contributing to the good of all, to the common amelioration and to the
support of the state, born of respect for law and the practice of
duty----"

"Ah! again!" said Rodolphe. "Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They
are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with
foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty,
duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the
beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the
ignominy that it imposes upon us."

"Yet--yet----" objected Madame Bovary.

"No, no! Why cry out against the passions? Are they not the one
beautiful thing on the earth, the source of heroism, of enthusiasm, of
poetry, music, the arts, of everything, in a word?"

"But one must," said Emma, "to some extent bow to the opinion of the
world and accept its moral code."

"Ah! but there are two," he replied. "The small, the conventional, that
of men, that which constantly changes, that brays out so loudly, that
makes such a commotion here below, of the earth earthy, like the mass of
imbeciles you see down there. But the other, the eternal, that is about
us and above, like the landscape that surrounds us, and the blue heavens
that give us light."

Monsieur Lieuvain had just wiped his mouth with a pocket-handkerchief.
He continued:

"And what should I do here, gentlemen, pointing out to you the uses of
agriculture? Who supplies our wants? Who provides our means of
subsistence? Is it not the agriculturist? The agriculturist, gentlemen,
who, sowing with laborious hand the fertile furrows of the country,
brings forth the corn, which, being ground, is made into a powder by
means of ingenious machinery, comes out thence under the name of flour,
and from there, transported to our cities, is soon delivered at the
baker's, who makes it into food for poor and rich alike. Again, is it
not the agriculturist who fattens, for our clothes, his abundant flocks
in the pastures? For how should we clothe ourselves, how nourish
ourselves, without the agriculturist? And, gentlemen, is it even
necessary to go so far for examples? Who has not frequently reflected
on all the momentous things that we get out of that modest animal, the
ornament of poultry-yards, that provides us at once with a soft pillow
for our bed, with succulent flesh for our tables, and eggs? But I should
never end if I were to enumerate one after the other all the different
products which the earth, well cultivated, like a generous mother,
lavishes upon her children. Here it is the vine, elsewhere the
apple-tree for cider, there colza, farther on cheeses and flax.
Gentlemen, let us not forget flax, which has made such great strides of
late years, and to which I will more particularly call your attention."

He had no need to call it, for all the mouths of the multitude were wide
open, as if to drink in his words. Tuvache by his side listened to him
with starting eyes. Monsieur Derozerays from time to time softly closed
his eyelids, and farther on the chemist, with his son Napoléon between
his knees, put his hand behind his ear in order not to lose a syllable.
The chins of the other members of the jury went slowly up and down in
their waistcoats in sign of approval. The firemen at the foot of the
platform rested on their bayonets; and Binet, motionless, stood with
out-turned elbows, the point of his sabre in the air. Perhaps he could
hear, but certainly he could see nothing, because of the visor of his
helmet, that fell down on his nose. His lieutenant, the youngest son of
Monsieur Tuvache, had a bigger one, for his was enormous, and shook on
his head, and from it an end of his cotton scarf peeped out. He smiled
beneath it with a perfectly infantine sweetness, and his pale little
face, whence drops were running, wore an expression of enjoyment and
sleepiness.

The square as far as the houses was crowded with people. One saw folk
leaning on their elbows at all the windows, others standing at doors,
and Justin, in front of the chemist's shop, seemed quite transfixed by
the sight of what he was looking at. In spite of the silence Monsieur
Lieuvain's voice was lost in the air. It reached you in fragments of
phrases, and interrupted here and there by the creaking of chairs in the
crowd; then you suddenly heard the long bellowing of an ox, or else the
bleating of the lambs, who answered one another at street corners. In
fact, the cowherds and shepherds had driven their beasts thus far, and
these lowed from time to time, while with their tongues they tore down
some scrap of foliage that hung above their mouths.

Rodolphe had drawn nearer to Emma, and said to her in a low voice,
speaking rapidly:

"Does not this conspiracy of the world revolt you? Is there a single
sentiment it does not condemn? The noblest instincts, the purest
sympathies are persecuted, slandered; and if at length two poor souls do
meet, all is so organized that they cannot blend together. Yet they will
make the attempt; they will flutter their wings; they will call upon
each other. Oh! no matter. Sooner or later, in six months, ten years,
they will come together, will love; for fate has decreed it, and they
are born one for the other."

His arms were folded across his knees, and thus lifting his face toward
Emma, close by her, he looked fixedly at her. She noticed in his eyes
small golden lines radiating from black pupils; she even smelled the
perfume of the pomade that made his hair glossy. Then a faintness came
over her; she recalled the Viscount who had waltzed with her at
Vaubyessard, and his beard exhaled like this hair an odor of vanilla
and citron, and mechanically she half-closed her eyes the better to
breathe it in. But in making this movement, as she leaned back in her
chair, she saw in the distance, right on the line of the horizon, the
old diligence the "Hirondelle," that was slowly descending the hill of
Leux, dragging after it a long trail of dust. It was in this yellow
carriage that Léon had so often come back to her, and by this route down
there that he had gone for ever. She fancied she saw him opposite at his
window; then all grew confused; clouds gathered; it seemed to her that
she was again turning in the waltz under the light of the lusters on the
arm of the Viscount, and that Léon was not far away, that he was coming;
and yet all the time she was conscious of the scent of Rodolphe's head
by her side. This sweetness of sensation pierced through her old
desires, and these, like grains of sand under a gust of wind, eddied to
and fro in the subtle breath of the perfume which suffused her soul. She
opened wide her nostrils several times to drink in the freshness of the
ivy round the capitals. She took off her gloves, she wiped her hands,
then fanned her face with her handkerchief, while athwart the throbbing
of her temples she heard the murmur of the crowd and the voice of the
councilor intoning his phrases. He said:

"Continue, persevere; listen neither to the suggestions of routine, nor
to the over-hasty councils of a rash empiricism. Apply yourselves, above
all, to the amelioration of the soil, to good manures, to the
development of the equine, bovine, ovine, and porcine races. Let these
shows be to you pacific arenas, where the victor in leaving it will hold
forth a hand to the vanquished, and will fraternize with him in the
hope of better success. And you, aged servants, humble domestics, whose
hard labor no Government up to this day has taken into consideration,
come hither to receive the reward of your silent virtues, and be assured
that the state henceforward has its eye upon you; that it encourages
you, protects you; that it will accede to your just demands, and
alleviate as much as in it lies the burden of your painful sacrifices."

Monsieur Lieuvain then sat down; Monsieur Derozerays got up, beginning
another speech. His was not perhaps so florid as that of the councilor,
but it recommended itself by a more direct style, that is to say, by
more special knowledge and more elevated considerations. Thus the praise
of the Government took up less space in it; religion and agriculture
more. He showed in it the relations of these two, and how they had
always contributed to civilization. Rodolphe with Madame Bovary was
talking dreams, presentiments, magnetism. Going back to the cradle of
society, the orator painted those fierce times when men lived on acorns
in the heart of woods. Then they had left off the skins of beasts, had
put on cloth, tilled the soil, planted the vine. Was this a good, and in
this discovery was there not more of injury than of gain? Monsieur
Derozerays set himself this problem. From magnetism little by little
Rodolphe had come to affinities, and while the president was citing
Cincinnatus and his plough, Diocletian planting his cabbages, and the
emperors of China inaugurating the year by the sowing of seed, the young
man was explaining to the young woman that these irresistible
attractions find their cause in some previous state of existence.

"Thus we," he said, "why did we come to know one another? What chance
willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that
flow but to unite, our special bents of mind had driven us toward each
other."

And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it.

"For good farming generally!" cried the president.

"Just now, for example, when I went to your house."

"To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix."

"Did I know I should accompany you?"

"Seventy francs."

"A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you--I remained."

"Manures!"

"And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!"

"To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!"

"For I have never in the society of any other person found so complete a
charm."

"To Monsieur Bain of Givry-Saint-Martin."

"And I shall carry away with me the remembrance of you."

"For a merino ram!"

"But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow."

"To Monsieur Belot of Nôtre-Dame."

"Oh, no! I shall be something in your thought, in your life, shall I
not?"

"Porcine race; prizes--equal, to Messrs. Lehérissé and Cullembourg,
sixty francs!"

Rodolphe was pressing her hand, and he felt it all warm and quivering
like a captive dove that tries to fly away; but, whether she was trying
to take it away or whether she was answering his pressure, she made a
movement with her fingers. He exclaimed--

"Oh, I thank you! You do not repulse me! You are good! You understand
that I am yours! Let me look at you; let me contemplate you!"

A gust of wind that blew in at the window ruffled the cloth on the
table, and in the square below all the great caps of the peasant women
were uplifted by it like the wings of white butterflies fluttering.

"Use of oil-cakes," continued the president. He was hurrying on:
"Flemish manure--flax-growing--drainage--long leases--domestic service."

Rodolphe was no longer speaking. They looked at one another. A supreme
desire made their dry lips tremble, and softly, without an effort, their
fingers intertwined.

"Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux, of Sassetot-la-Guerrière, for
fifty-four years of service at the same farm, a silver medal--value,
twenty-five francs!"

"Where is Catherine Leroux?" repeated the councilor.

She did not present herself, and one could hear voices whispering:

"Go up!"

"Don't be afraid!"

"Oh, how stupid she is!"

"Well, is she there?" cried Tuvache.

"Yes; here she is."

"Then let her come up!"

Then there came forward on the platform a little old woman with timid
bearing, who seemed to shrink within her poor clothes. On her feet she
wore heavy wooden clogs, and from her hips hung a large blue apron. Her
pale face framed in a borderless cap was more wrinkled than a withered
russet apple, and from the sleeves of her red jacket hung down two large
hands with knotty joints. The dust of barns, the potash of washings, and
the grease of wools had so incrusted, roughened, hardened these, that
they seemed dirty, although they had been rinsed in clear water; and by
dint of long service they remained half open, as if to bear humble
witness for themselves of so much suffering endured. Something of
monastic rigidity dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion
weakened that pale look. In her constant living with animals she had
caught their dumbness and their calm. It was the first time that she
found herself in the midst of so large a company, and inwardly scared by
the flags, the drums, the gentlemen in frock-coats, and the order of the
councilor, she stood motionless, not knowing whether to advance or run
away, nor why the crowd was pushing her and the jury were smiling at
her. Thus stood before these radiant bourgeois this half-century of
servitude.

"Approach, venerable Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux!" said the
councilor, who had taken the list of prize-winners from the president;
and, looking at the piece of paper and the old woman by turns, he
repeated in a fatherly tone:

"Approach! approach!"

"Are you deaf?" said Tuvache, fidgeting in his armchair; and he began
shouting in her ear, "Fifty-four years of service. A silver medal!
Twenty-five francs! For you!"

Then, when she had her medal, she looked at it, and a smile of beatitude
spread over her face; and as she walked away they could hear her
muttering:

"I'll give it to our curé up home, to say some masses for me!"

"What fanaticism!" exclaimed the chemist, leaning across to the notary.

The meeting was over, the crowd dispersed, and now that the speeches had
been read, each one fell back into his place again, and everything into
the old grooves; the masters bullied the servants, and these struck the
animals, indolent victors, going back to the stalls, a green crown on
their horns.

The National Guards, however, had gone up to the first floor of the
townhall with buns spitted on their bayonets, and the drummer of the
battalion carried a basket with bottles. Madame Bovary took Rodolphe's
arm; he saw her home; they separated at her door; then he walked about
alone in the meadow while he waited for the time of the banquet.

The feast was long, noisy, ill served; the guests were so crowded that
they could hardly move their elbows; and the narrow planks used for
forms almost broke down under their weight. They ate hugely. Each one
stuffed himself on his own account. Sweat stood on every brow, and a
whitish steam, like the vapor of a stream on an autumn morning, floated
above the table between the hanging lamps. Rodolphe, leaning against the
calico of the tent, was thinking so earnestly of Emma that he heard
nothing. Behind him on the grass the servants were piling up the dirty
plates; his neighbors were talking; he did not answer them; they filled
his glass, and there was silence in his thoughts in spite of the growing
noise. He was dreaming of what she had said, of the line of her lips;
her face, as in a magic mirror, shone on the plates of the shakos, the
folds of her gown fell along the walls, and days of love unrolled to
all infinity before him in the vistas of the future.

He saw her again in the evening during the fireworks, but she was with
her husband. Madame Homais, and the druggist, who was worrying about the
danger of stray rockets, and every moment he left the company to go and
give some advice to Binet.

The pyrotechnic pieces sent to Monsieur Tuvache had, through an excess
of caution, been shut up in his cellar, and so the damp powder would not
light, and the principal set piece, that was to represent a dragon
biting his tail, failed completely. Now and then a meager Roman-candle
went off; then the gaping crowd sent up a shout that mingled with the
cry of the women, whose waists were being squeezed in the darkness. Emma
silently nestled gently against Charles's shoulder; then, raising her
chin, she watched the luminous rays of the rockets against the dark sky.
Rodolphe gazed at her in the light of the burning lanterns.

They went out one by one. The stars shone out. A few drops of rain began
to fall. She knotted her fichu round her bare head.

At this moment the councilor's carriage came out from the inn. His
coachman, who was drunk, suddenly dozed off, and one could see from the
distance, above the hood, between the two lanterns, the mass of his
body, that swayed from right to left with the giving of the traces.

"Truly," said the chemist, "one ought to proceed most rigorously against
drunkenness! I should like to see written up weekly at the door of the
townhall on a board _ad hoc_ the names of all those who during the week
got intoxicated on alcohol. Besides, with regard to statistics, one
would thus have, as it were, public records that one could refer to in
case of need. But excuse me!"

And he once more ran off to the captain. The latter was going back to
see his lathe again.

"Perhaps you would not do ill," Homais said to him, "to send one of your
men, or to go yourself----"

"Leave me alone!" answered the tax-collector. "It's all right!"

"Do not be uneasy," said the chemist, when he returned to his friends.
"Monsieur Binet has assured me that all precautions have been taken. No
sparks have fallen; the pumps are full. Let us go to rest."

"_Ma foi!_ I want it," said Madame Homais, yawning at large. "But never
mind; we've had a beautiful day for our fête."

Rodolphe repeated in a low voice, and with a tender look, "Oh, yes! very
beautiful."

And having bowed to one another, they separated.

Two days later, in the "Fanal de Rouen," there was a long article on the
show. Homais had composed it with _verve_ the very next morning.

"Why these festoons, these flowers, these garlands? Whither hurries this
crowd like the waves of a furious sea under the torrents of a tropical
sun pouring its heat upon our heads?"

Then he spoke of the condition of the peasants. Certainly the Government
was doing much, but not enough. "Courage!" he cried to it; "a thousand
reforms are indispensable; let us accomplish them!" Then touching on the
entry of the councilor, he did not forget "the martial air of our
militia," nor "our most merry village maidens," nor the "bald-headed
old men like patriarchs who were there, and of whom some, the remnants
of our immortal phalanxes, still felt their hearts beat at the manly
sound of the drums." He cited himself among the first of the members of
the jury, and he even called attention in a note to the fact that
Monsieur Homais, chemist, had sent a memoir on cider to the agricultural
society. When he came to the distribution of the prizes, he painted the
joy of the prize-winners in dithyrambic strophes. "The father embraced
the son, the brother the brother, the husband his consort. More than one
showed his humble medal with pride; and no doubt when he got home to his
good housewife, he hung it up weeping on the modest walls of his cot.

"About six o'clock a banquet prepared in the meadow of Monsieur Leigeard
brought together the principal personages of the fête. The greatest
cordiality reigned here. Divers toasts were proposed. Monsieur Lieuvain,
the King; Monsieur Tuvache, the Prefect; Monsieur Derozerays,
Agriculture; Monsieur Homais, Industry and the Fine Arts, those twin
sisters; Monsieur Leplichey, Progress. In the evening some brilliant
fireworks on a sudden illumined the air. One would have called it a
veritable kaleidoscope, a real operatic scene; and for a moment our
little locality might have thought itself transported into the midst of
a dream of the 'Thousand and One Nights.'

"Let us state that no untoward event disturbed this family meeting." And
he added: "Only the absence of the clergy was remarked. No doubt the
priests understand progress in another fashion. Just as you please,
messieurs the followers of Loyola!"

IX.

A WOODLAND IDYLL.

Six weeks passed. Rodolphe did not come again. At last one evening he
appeared.

The day after the show he had said to himself:

"We mustn't go back too soon; that would be a mistake."

And at the end of a week he had gone off hunting. After the hunting he
had thought he was too late, and then he reasoned thus:

"If from the first day she loved me, she must, from impatience to see me
again, love me more. Let's go on with it!"

And he knew that his calculation had been right when, on entering the
room, he saw Emma turn pale. She was alone. The day was drawing in. The
small muslin curtain along the windows deepened the twilight, and the
gilding of the barometer, on which the rays of the sun fell, shone in
the looking-glass between the meshes of the coral.

Rodolphe remained standing, and Emma hardly answered his first
conventional phrases.

"I," he said, "have been busy. I have been ill."

"Seriously?" she cried.

"Well," said Rodolphe, sitting down at her side on a footstool, "no; it
was because I did not want to come back."

"Why?"

"Can you not guess?"

He looked at her again, but so hard that she lowered her head, blushing.
He went on:

"Emma!"

"Sir," she said, drawing back a little.

"Ah! you see," replied he in a melancholy voice, "that I was right not
to come back; for this name, this name that fills my whole soul, and
that escaped me, you forbid me to use! Madame Bovary! why all the world
calls you thus! Besides it is not your name; it is the name of another!"
he repeated, "of another!" And he hid his face in his hands. "Yes, I
think of you constantly. The memory of you drives me to despair. Ah!
forgive me! I will leave you! Farewell! I will go far away, so far that
you will never hear of me again; and yet--to-day--I know not what force
impelled me toward you. For one does not struggle against Heaven; one
cannot resist the smile of angels; one is carried away by that which is
beautiful, charming, adorable."

It was the first time that Emma had heard such words spoken to herself,
and her pride, like one who reposes bathed in warmth, expanded softly
and fully at this glowing language.

"But if I did not come," he continued, "if I could not see you, at least
I have gazed long on all that surrounds you. At night--every night--I
arose; I came hither; I watched your house, its roof glimmering in the
moonlight, the trees in the garden before your window, and the little
lamp, a gleam shining through the window-panes in the darkness. Ah! you
never knew that there, so near you, so far from you, was a poor wretch!"

She turned toward him with a sob.

"Oh, you are good!" she said.

"No, I love you, that is all! You do not doubt that! Tell me--one
word--only one word!"

And Rodolphe imperceptibly glided from the footstool to the floor; but a
sound of wooden shoes was heard in the kitchen, and, he noticed the door
of the room was not closed.

"How kind it would be of you," he went on, rising, "if you would humor a
whim of mine." It was to go over her house; he wanted to know it; and
Madame Bovary seeing no objection to this, they both rose, when Charles
came in.

"Good morning, doctor," Rodolphe said to him.

The doctor, flattered at this unexpected title, launched out into
obsequious phrases. Of this the other took advantage to pull himself
together a little.

"Madame was speaking to me," he then said, "about her health."

Charles interrupted him; he had indeed a thousand anxieties; his wife's
palpitations of the heart were beginning again. Then Rodolphe asked if
riding would not be good.

"Certainly! excellent! just the thing! There's an idea! You ought to
follow it up."

And as she objected that she had no horse, Monsieur Rodolphe offered
one. She refused his offer; he did not insist. Then to explain his visit
he said that his ploughman, the man of the blood-letting, still suffered
from giddiness.

"I'll call round," said Bovary.

"No, no! I'll send him to you; we'll come; that will be more convenient
for you."

"Ah! very good! I thank you."

And as soon as they were alone, "Why don't you accept Monsieur
Boulanger's kind offer?"

She assumed a sulky air, invented a thousand excuses, and finally
declared that perhaps it would look odd.

"Well, what the deuce do I care for that?" said Charles, making a
pirouette. "Health before everything! You are wrong."

"And how do you think I can ride when I haven't got a habit?"

"You must order one," he answered.

The riding-habit decided her.

When the habit was ready, Charles wrote to Monsieur Boulanger that his
wife was at his command, and that they counted on his good-nature.

The next day at noon Rodolphe appeared at Charles's door with two
saddle-horses. One had pink rosettes at his ears and a deerskin
side-saddle.

Rodolphe had put on high soft boots, saying to himself that no doubt she
had never seen anything like them. In fact, Emma was charmed with his
appearance as he stood on the landing in his great velvet coat and white
corduroy breeches. She was ready; she was waiting for him.

Justin escaped from the chemist's to see her start, and the chemist also
came out. He was giving Monsieur Boulanger a little good advice.

"An accident happens so easily. Be careful! Your horses perhaps are
mettlesome."

She heard a noise above her; it was Félicité drumming on the
window-panes to amuse little Berthe. The child blew her a kiss; her
mother answered with a wave of her whip.

"A pleasant ride!" cried Monsieur Homais. "Prudence! above all,
prudence!" And he flourished his newspaper as he saw them disappear.

As soon as he felt the ground, Emma's horse set off at a gallop.
Rodolphe galloped by her side. Now and then they exchanged a word. Her
figure slightly bent, her hand well up, and her right arm stretched out,
she gave herself up to the cadence of the movement that rocked her in
her saddle. At the bottom of the hill Rodolphe gave his horse its head;
they started together at a bound, then at the top suddenly the horses
stopped, and her large blue veil fell about her.

It was early in October. There was fog over the land. Hazy clouds
hovered on the horizon between the outlines of the hills; others, rent
asunder, floated up and disappeared. Sometimes through a rift in the
clouds, beneath a ray of sunshine, gleamed from afar the roofs of
Yonville, with the gardens at the water's edge, the yards, the walls,
and the church steeple. Emma half closed her eyes to pick out her house,
and never had this poor village where she lived appeared so small. From
the height on which they were, the whole valley seemed an immense pale
lake sending off its vapor into the air. Clumps of trees here and there
stood out like black rocks, and the tall lines of the poplars that rose
above the mist were like a beach stirred by the wind.

Beside them, on the turf between the pines, a brown light shimmered in
the warm atmosphere. The earth, ruddy like the powder of tobacco,
deadened the noise of their steps, and with the edge of their shoes the
horses as they walked kicked the fallen fir cones in front of them.

Rodolphe and Emma thus went along the skirt of the wood. She turned away
from time to time to avoid his look, and then she saw only the pine
trunks in lines, whose monotonous succession made her a little giddy.
The horses were panting; the leather of the saddles creaked.

Just as they were entering the forest the sun shone out.

"God protects us!" said Rodolphe.

"Do you think so?" she said.

"Forward! forward!" he continued.

He "tchk'd" with his tongue. The two beasts set off at a trot. Long
ferns by the roadside caught in Emma's stirrup. Rodolphe leant forward
and removed them as they rode along. At other times to turn aside the
branches, he passed close to her, and Emma felt his knee brushing
against her leg. The sky was now blue, the leaves no longer stirred.
There were spaces full of heather in flower, and plots of violets
alternated with the confused patches of the trees that were gray, fawn,
or golden colored, according to the nature of their leaves. Often in the
thicket was heard the fluttering of wings, or else the hoarse, soft cry
of the ravens flying off amid the oaks.

They dismounted. Rodolphe fastened up the horses. She walked on in front
on the moss between the paths. But her long habit got in her way,
although she held it up by the skirt; and Rodolphe, walking behind her,
saw between the black cloth and the black shoe the fineness of her white
stocking, that seemed to him as if it were a part of her nakedness.

She stopped. "I am tired," she said.

"Come, try again," he went on. "Courage!"

Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped, and through her
veil, that fell sideways from her man's hat over her hips, her face
appeared in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure
waves.

"But where are we going?"

He did not answer. She was breathing irregularly. Rodolphe looked round
him biting his mustache. They came to a larger space where the coppice
had been cut. They sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, and Rodolphe
began speaking to her of his love. He did not begin by frightening her
with compliments. He was calm, serious, melancholy.

Emma listened to him with bowed head, and stirred the bits of wood on
the ground with the tip of her foot.

But at the words, "Are not our destinies now one?----"

"Oh, no!" she replied. "You know that well. It is impossible!"

She rose to go. He seized her by the wrist. She stopped. Then, having
gazed at him for a few moments with an amorous and humid look, she said
hurriedly:

"Ah! do not speak of it again! Where are the horses? Let us go back."

He made a gesture of anger and annoyance. She repeated:

"Where are the horses? Where are the horses?"

Then smiling a strange smile, his pupils fixed, his teeth set, he
advanced with outstretched arms. She recoiled trembling. She stammered:

"Oh, you frighten me! You hurt me! Let us go!"

"If it must be," he went on, his face changing; and he again became
respectful, caressing, timid. She gave him her arm. They went back. He
said:

"What was the matter with you? Why? I do not understand. You were
mistaken, no doubt. In my soul you are as a Madonna on a pedestal, in a
place lofty, secure, immaculate. But I want you for my life. I must have
your eyes, your voice, your thought! Be my friend, my sister, my angel!"

And he put out his arm around her waist. She feebly tried to disengage
herself. He supported her thus as they walked along.

But they heard the two horses browsing on the leaves.

"Oh! one moment!" said Rodolphe. "Do not let us go! Stay!"

He drew her farther on to a small pool where duckweeds made a greenness
on the water. Faded waterlilies lay motionless between the reeds. At the
noise of their steps in the grass, frogs jumped away to hide themselves.

"I am wrong! I am wrong!" she said. "I am mad to listen to you!"

"Why? Emma! Emma!"

"Oh, Rodolphe!" said the young woman slowly, leaning on his shoulder.

The cloth of her habit caught against the velvet of his coat. She threw
back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and faltering, in tears, with
a long shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself up to him.

The shades of night were falling; the horizontal sun passing between the
branches dazzled the eyes. Here and there around her, in the leaves or
on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as if humming-birds flying
about had scattered their feathers. Silence was everywhere; something
sweet seemed to come forth from the trees; she felt her heart, whose
beating had begun again, and the blood coursing through her flesh like a
stream of milk. Then far away, beyond the wood, on the other hills, she
heard a vague prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in silence she
heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing
nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his lips, was mending with his
penknife one of the two broken bridles.

They returned to Yonville by the same road. On the mud they saw again
the traces of their horses side by side, the same thickets, the same
stones in the grass; nothing around them seemed changed; and yet for her
something had happened more stupendous than if the mountains had moved
in their places. Rodolphe now and again bent forward and took her hand
to kiss it.

She was charming on horseback--upright, with her slender waist, her knee
bent on the mane of her horse, her face something flushed by the fresh
air in the red of the evening.

On entering Yonville she made her horse prance in the road. People
looked at her from the windows.

At dinner her husband thought she looked well, but she pretended not to
hear him when he inquired about her ride, and she remained sitting there
with her elbow at the side of her plate between the two lighted candles.

"'Emma!" he said.

"What?"

"Well, I spent the afternoon at Monsieur Alexandre's. He has an old cob,
still very fine, only a little broken-kneed, that could be bought, I am
very sure, for a hundred crowns." He added, "And thinking it might
please you, I have bespoken it--bought it. Have I done right? Do tell
me!"

She nodded her head in assent; then a quarter of an hour later--

"Are you going out to-night?" she asked.

"Yes. Why?"

"Oh, nothing, nothing, my dear!"

And as soon as she had got rid of Charles she went and shut herself up
in her room.

At first she felt stunned; she saw the trees, the paths, the ditches,
Rodolphe, and she again felt the pressure of his arm, while the leaves
rustled and the reeds whistled.

But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never
had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something
subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, "I have a lover!
a lover!" delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her.
So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness
of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all
would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed her,
the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary
existence appeared remote, far below in the shade, through the
interspaces of these heights.

Then she recalled the heroines of the books that she had read, and the
lyric legion of these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with
the voice of sisters that charmed her. She became herself, as it were,
an actual part of these imaginings, and realized the love-dream of her
youth as she saw herself in this type of amorous women whom she had so
envied. Besides, Emma felt a satisfaction of revenge. Had she not
suffered enough? But now she triumphed, and the love so long pent up
burst forth in full joyous bubblings. She tasted it without remorse,
without anxiety, without trouble.

The day following passed with a new sweetness. They made vows to one
another. She told him of her sorrows. Rodolphe interrupted her with
kisses; and she, looking at him through half-closed eyes, asked him to
call her again by her name--to say that he loved her. They were in the
forest, as yesterday, in the shed of some wooden-shoe maker. The walls
were of straw, and the roof so low they had to stoop. They were seated
side by side on a bed of dry leaves.

From that day forth they wrote to one another regularly every evening.
Emma placed her letter at the end of the garden, by the river, in a
fissure of the wall. Rodolphe came to fetch it, and put another there,
that she always found fault with as too short.

One morning, when Charles had gone out before daybreak, she was seized
with the fancy to see Rodolphe at once. She would go quickly to La
Huchette, stay there an hour, and be back again at Yonville while every
one was still asleep. This idea made her pant with desire, and she soon
found herself in the middle of the field, walking with rapid steps,
without looking behind her.

Day was just breaking. Emma from afar recognized her lover's house. Its
two dove-tailed weathercocks stood out black against the pale dawn.

Beyond the farmyard there was a detached building that she thought must
be the château. She entered it as if the doors at her approach had
opened wide of their own accord. A large straight staircase led up to
the corridor, Emma raised the latch of a door, and suddenly at the end
of the room she saw a man sleeping. It was Rodolphe. She uttered a cry.

"You here? You here?" he repeated, "How did you manage to come? Ah! your
dress is damp."

"I love you," she answered, passing her arms round his neck.

This first piece of daring successful, now every time Charles went out
early Emma dressed quickly and slipped on tiptoe down the steps that led
to the waterside.

But when the plank for the cows was taken up, she had to go by the walls
alongside of the river; the bank was slippery; in order not to fall she
caught hold of the tufts of faded wallflowers. Then she went across
ploughed fields, in which she sank, stumbling, and clogging her thin
shoes. Her scarf, knotted round her head, fluttered to the wind in the
meadows. She was afraid of the oxen; she began to run; she arrived out
of breath, with rosy cheeks, and breathing out from her whole person a
fresh perfume of sap, of verdure, of the open air. At this hour Rodolphe
still slept. It was like a spring morning coming into his room.

The yellow curtains along the windows let a heavy, whitish light enter
softly. Emma felt about, opening and closing her eyes, while the drops
of dew hanging from her hair formed, as it were, a topaz aureole around
her face. Rodolphe, laughing, drew her to him and pressed her to his
breast.

Then she examined the apartment, opened the drawers of the tables,
combed her hair with his comb, and looked at herself in his
shaving-glass. Often she even put between her teeth the big pipe that
lay on the table by the bed, amongst lemons and pieces of sugar near a
bottle of water.

It took them a good quarter of an hour to say good-bye. Then Emma wept.
She would have wished never to leave Rodolphe. Something stronger than
herself forced her to him; so much so, that one day, seeing her come
unexpectedly, he frowned as one put out.

"What is the matter with you?" she said. "Are you ill? Tell me!"

At last he declared with a serious air that her visits were becoming
imprudent--that she was compromising herself.

X.

LOVERS' VOWS.

Gradually Rodolphe's fears took possession of her. At first, love had
intoxicated her, and she had thought of nothing beyond. But now that he
was indispensable to her life, she feared to lose anything of this, or
even that it should be disturbed. When she came back from his house, she
looked all about her, anxiously watching every form that passed in the
horizon, and every village window from which she could be seen. She
listened for steps, cries, the noise of the ploughs, and she stopped
short, white, and trembling more than the aspen leaves swaying overhead.

One morning as she was thus returning, she suddenly thought she saw the
long barrel of a carbine that seemed to be aimed at her. It stuck out
sideways from the end of a small tub half-buried in the grass on the
edge of a ditch. Emma, half-fainting with terror, nevertheless walked
on, and a man stepped out of the tub like a Jack-in-the-box. He had
gaiters buckled up to the knees, his cap pulled down over his eyes,
trembling lips, and a red nose. It was Captain Binet lying in ambush for
wild ducks.

"You ought to have called out long ago!" he exclaimed. "When one sees a
gun, one should always give warning."

The tax-collector was thus trying to hide the fright he had had, for a
prefectorial order having prohibited duck-hunting except in boats,
Monsieur Binet, despite his respect for the laws, was infringing them,
and so he every moment expected to see the rural guard turn up. But this
anxiety whetted his pleasure, and, all alone in his tub, he
congratulated himself on his luck and on his cleverness.

At sight of Emma he seemed relieved from a great weight, and at once
entered upon a conversation.

"It isn't warm; it's nipping."

Emma answered nothing. He went on--

"And you're out so early?"

"Yes," she said stammering; "I am just coming from the nurse where my
child is."

"Ah! very good! very good! For myself, I am here, just as you see me,
since break of day; but the weather is so muggy, that unless one had the
bird at the mouth of the gun----"

"Good evening, Monsieur Binet," she interrupted him, turning on her
heel.

"Your servant, madame," he replied drily; and he went back into his tub.

Emma regretted having left the tax-collector so abruptly. No doubt he
would form unfavorable conjectures. The story about the nurse was the
worst possible excuse, every one at Yonville knowing that the little
Bovary had been at home with her parents for a year. Besides, no one was
living in this direction; this path led only to La Huchette. Binet,
then, would guess whence she came, and he would not keep silence; he
would talk, that was certain. She remained until evening racking her
brain with every conceivable lying project, and had constantly before
her eyes that imbecile with the game-bag.

Charles after dinner, seeing her gloomy, proposed, by way of
distraction, to take her to the chemist's, and the first person she
caught sight of in the shop was the tax-collector again. He was standing
in front of the counter, lighted by the gleams of the red bottle, and
was saying:

"Please give me half an ounce of vitriol."

"Justin," cried the druggist, "bring us the sulphuric acid." Then to
Emma, who was going up to Madame Homais' room, "No, stay here; it isn't
worth while going up; she is just coming down. Warm yourself at the
stove in the meantime. Excuse me. Good-day, doctor" (for the chemist
much enjoyed pronouncing the word "doctor," as if addressing another by
it reflected on himself some of the grandeur that he found in it). "Now,
take care not to upset the mortars! You'd better fetch some chairs from
the little room; you know very well that the armchairs are not to be
taken out of the drawing-room."

And to put his armchair back in its place he was darting away from the
counter, when Binet asked him for half an ounce of sugar acid.

"Sugar acid!" said the chemist contemptuously, "don't know it; I'm
ignorant of it! But perhaps you want oxalic acid. It is oxalic acid,
isn't it?"

Binet explained that he wanted a corrosive to make himself some
copper-water with which to remove rust from his hunting things.

Emma shuddered. The chemist began, saying:

"Indeed the weather is not propitious on account of the damp."

"Nevertheless," replied the tax-collector, with a sly look, "there are
people who like it."

She was stifling.

"And give me----"

"Will he never go?" thought she.

"Half an ounce of resin and turpentine, four ounces of yellow wax, and
three half ounces of animal charcoal, if you please, to clean the
varnished leather of my togs."

The chemist was beginning to cut the wax when Madame Homais appeared,
Irma in her arms, Napoléon by her side, and Athalie following. She sat
down on the velvet seat by the window, and the lad squatted down on a
footstool, while his eldest sister hovered round the jujube box near her
papa. The latter was filling funnels and corking phials, sticking on
labels, making up parcels. Around him all were silent; only from time to
time were heard the weights jingling in the balance, and a few low words
from the chemist giving directions to his pupil.

"And how's the little woman?" suddenly asked Madame Homais.

"Silence!" exclaimed her husband, who was writing down some figures in
his waste-book.

"Why didn't you bring her?" she went on in a low voice.

"Hush! hush!" said Emma, pointing with her finger to the chemist.

But Binet, quite absorbed in looking over his bill, had probably heard
nothing. At last he went out. Then Emma, relieved, uttered a deep sigh.

"How hard you are breathing!" said Madame Homais.

"Well, you see, it's rather warm," she replied.

The next day the lovers discussed how to arrange their rendezvous. Emma
wanted to bribe her servant with a present, but it would be better to
find some safe house at Yonville. Rodolphe promised to look for one.

All through the winter, three or four times a week, in the dead of night
he came to the garden. Emma had on purpose taken away the key of the
gate, which Charles thought lost.

To call her, Rodolphe threw a sprinkle of sand at the shutters. She
jumped up with a start; but sometimes he had to wait, for Charles had a
mania for chatting by the fireside, and he would not stop. She was wild
with impatience; if her eyes could have done it, she would have hurled
him out at the window. At last she would begin to undress, then take up
a book, and go on reading very quietly as if the book amused her. But
Charles, who was in bed, called to her to come too.

"Come, now, Emma," he said, "it is time."

"Yes, I am coming," she answered.

Then, as the candles dazzled him, he turned to the wall and fell asleep.
She escaped, smiling, palpitating, undressed.

Rodolphe had a large cloak; he wrapped her in it, and putting his arm
around her waist, he drew her without a word to the end of the garden.

It was in the arbor, on the same seat of old sticks where formerly Léon
had looked at her so amorously on the summer evenings. She never thought
of him now.

The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they
heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling of
the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the
darkness and sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up and
swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them. The
cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips
seemed to them deeper; their eyes, that they could hardly see, larger;
and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on their
souls sonorous, crystalline, and reverberating in multiplied vibrations.

When the night was rainy, they took refuge in the consulting-room
between the car-shed and the stable. She lighted one of the kitchen
candles that she had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe settled down
there as if at home. The sight of the library, of the bureau, of the
whole apartment, in fine, excited his merriment, and he could not
refrain from making jokes about Charles, which rather embarrassed Emma.
She would have liked to see him more serious, and even on occasions more
dramatic; as, for example, when she thought she heard a noise of
approaching steps in the alley.

"Some one is coming!" she said.

He blew out the light.

"Have you your pistols?"

"Why?"

"Why, to defend yourself," replied Emma.

"From your husband? Oh, poor devil!" And Rodolphe finished his sentence
with a gesture that said, "I could crush him with a flip of my finger."

She was wonder-stricken at his bravery, although she felt in it a sort
of indecency and a naïve coarseness that scandalized her.

Rodolphe reflected a good deal on the affair of the pistols. If she had
spoken seriously, it was very ridiculous, he thought, even odious; for
he had no reason to hate the good Charles, not being what is called
devoured by jealousy; and on this subject Emma had treated him to a
lecture, which he did not think in the best taste.

Besides, she was growing very sentimental. She had insisted on
exchanging miniatures; they had cut handfuls of hair, and now she was
asking for a ring--a real wedding-ring, in sign of an eternal union. She
often spoke to him of the evening chimes, of the voices of nature. Then
she talked to him of her mother--hers! and of his mother--his! Rodolphe
had lost his twenty years ago. Emma none the less consoled him with
caressing words as one would soothe a forsaken child, and she sometimes
even said to him, gazing at the moon:

"I am sure that above there together they approve of our love."

But she was so pretty! He had possessed so few women of such
ingenuousness. This love without debauchery was a new experience for
him, and, drawing him out of his lazy habits, caressed at once his pride
and his sensuality. Emma's enthusiasm, which his bourgeois good sense
disdained, seemed to him in his heart of hearts charming, since it was
lavished on him. Then, sure of being loved, he no longer kept up
appearances, and insensibly his ways changed.

He had no longer, as formerly, words so gentle that they made her cry,
nor passionate caresses that made her mad; so that their great love,
which engrossed her life, seemed to lessen beneath her like the water
of a stream absorbed into its channel, and she could see the bed of it.
She would not believe it; she redoubled in tenderness, and Rodolphe
concealed his indifference less and less.

She did not know whether she regretted yielding to him, or whether she
did not wish, on the contrary, to enjoy him the more. The humiliation of
feeling herself weak was turning to rancour, tempered by their
voluptuous pleasures. It was not affection; it was like a continual
seduction. He subjugated her; she almost feared him.

Appearances, nevertheless, were calmer than ever, Rodolphe having
succeeded in carrying out the adultery after his own fancy; and at the
end of six months, when the spring-time came, they were to one another
like a married couple, tranquilly keeping up a domestic flame.

It was the time of year when old Rouault sent his turkey in remembrance
of the setting of his leg. The present always arrived with a letter.
Emma cut the string that tied it to the basket, and read the following
lines:--

    "MY DEAR CHILDREN,--I hope this will find you in good health, and
    that it will be as good as the others, for it seems to me a little
    more tender, if I may venture to say so, and heavier. But next time,
    for a change, I'll give you a turkey-cock, unless you have a
    preference for some dabs; and send me back the hamper, if you
    please, with the two old ones. I have had an accident with my
    cart-sheds, whose covering flew off one windy night among the trees.
    The harvest has not been over-good either. Finally, I don't know
    when I shall come to see you. It is so difficult now to leave the
    house since I am alone, my poor Emma."

Here there was a break in the lines, as if the old fellow had dropped
his pen to dream a little while.

    "For myself, I am very well, except for a cold I caught the other
    day at the fair at Yvetot, where I had gone to hire a shepherd,
    having turned away mine because he was too dainty. How we are to be
    pitied with such a lot of thieves! Besides, he was also rude. I
    heard from a pedlar, who, traveling through your part of the country
    this winter, had a tooth drawn, that Bovary was as usual working
    hard. That doesn't surprise me; and he showed me his tooth; we had
    some coffee together. I asked him if he had seen you, and he said
    not, but that he had seen two horses in the stables, from which I
    conclude that business is looking up. So much the better, my dear
    children, and may God send you every imaginable happiness! It
    grieves me not yet to have seen my dear little grand-daughter,
    Berthe Bovary. I have planted an Orleans plum-tree for her in the
    garden under your room, and I won't have it touched unless it is to
    have jam made for her by-and-bye, that I will keep in the cupboard
    for when she comes.

    "Good-bye my dear children. I kiss you, my girl, you too, my
    son-in-law, and the little one on both cheeks. I am, with best
    compliments, your loving father,

    "THÉODORE ROUAULT."

She held the coarse paper in her fingers for some minutes. The mistakes
in spelling interwove with one another, but Emma followed the kindly
thought that chattered through it all like a hen half hidden in a hedge
of thorns. The writing had been dried with ashes from the hearth, for a
little grey powder slipped from the letter on to her dress, and she
almost thought she saw her father bending over the hearth to take up the
tongs. How long since she had been with him, sitting on the footstool in
the chimney-corner, where she used to burn the end of a bit of wood in
the great flame of the sea-sedges! She remembered the summer evenings
all full of sunshine. The colts neighed when any one passed by, and
galloped, galloped. Under her window there was a beehive, and sometimes
the bees wheeling round in the light struck against her window like
rebounding balls of gold. What happiness she had had at that time, what
freedom, what hope! What an abundance of illusions! Nothing was left of
them now. She had got rid of them all in her soul's life, in all her
successive conditions of life,--maidenhood, her marriage, and her
love;--thus constantly losing them all her life through, like a
traveller who leaves something of his wealth at every inn along his
road.

But what, then, made her so unhappy? What was the extraordinary
catastrophe that had transformed her? And she raised her head, looking
round as if to seek the cause of that which made her suffer.

An April ray was dancing on the china of the _étagère_; the fire burned;
beneath her slippers she felt the softness of the carpet; the day was
bright, the air warm, and she heard her child shouting with laughter.

In fact, the little girl was just then rolling on the lawn in the midst
of the grass that was being turned. She was lying flat on her stomach
at the top of a rick. The servant was holding her by her skirt.
Lestiboudois was raking by her side, and every time he came near she
leant forward, beating the air with both her arms.

"Bring her to me," said her mother, rushing to embrace her. "How I love
you, my poor child! How I love you!"

Then, noticing that the tips of her ears were rather dirty, she rang at
once for warm water, and washed her, changed her linen, her stockings,
her shoes, asked a thousand questions about her health, as if on the
return from a long journey, and finally, kissing her again and crying a
little, she gave her back to the servant, who stood quite
thunder-stricken at this excess of tenderness.

That evening Rodolphe found her more serious than usual.

"That will pass over," he concluded; "it's a whim."

And he missed three rendezvous running. When he did come, she showed
herself cold and almost contemptuous.

"Ah! you're losing your time, my lady!"

And he pretended not to notice her melancholy sighs, nor the
handkerchief she took out.

Then Emma repented. She even asked herself why she detested Charles; if
it had not been better to have been able to love him? But he gave her no
opportunities for such a revival of sentiment, so that she was much
embarrassed by her desire for sacrifice, when the chemist came just in
time to provide her with an opportunity.

XI.

AN EXPERIMENT AND A FAILURE.

He had recently read a eulogy on a new method for curing club-foot, and
as he was a partisan of progress, he conceived the patriotic idea that
Yonville, in order to keep to the fore, ought to have some operations
for strephopody or club-foot.

"For," said he to Emma, "what risk is there? See" (and he enumerated on
his fingers the advantages of the attempt), "success, almost certain
relief and beautifying the patient, celebrity acquired by the operator.
Why, for example, should not your husband relieve poor Hippolyte of the
'Lion d'Or'? Note that he would not fail to tell about his cure to all
the travellers, and then" (Homais lowered his voice and looked round
him), "who is to prevent me from sending a short paragraph on the
subject to the paper? Eh! goodness me! an article gets about; it is
talked of; it ends by making a snowball! And who knows? who knows?"

In fact, Bovary might succeed. Nothing proved to Emma that he was not
clever; and what a satisfaction for her to have urged him to a step by
which his reputation and fortune would be increased! She only wished to
lean on something more solid than love.

Charles, urged by the chemist and by her, allowed himself to be
persuaded. He sent to Rouen for Dr. Duval's volume, and every evening,
holding his head between both hands, plunged into the reading of it.

While he was studying equinus, varus, and valgus, that is to say,
_katastrephopody_, _endostrephopody_, and _exostrephopody_ (or better,
the various turnings of the foot downwards, inwards, and outwards, with
the _hypostrephopody_ and _anastrephopody_), otherwise torsion downwards
and upwards, Monsieur Homais, with all sorts of arguments, was exhorting
the lad at the inn to submit to the operation.

"You will scarcely feel, probably, a slight pain; it is a simple prick,
like a little blood-letting, less than the extraction of certain corns."

Hippolyte, reflecting, rolled his stupid eyes.

"However," continued the chemist, "it doesn't concern me. It's for your
sake, for pure humanity! I should like to see you, my friend, rid of
your hideous deformity, together with that waddling of the lumbar
regions which, whatever you say, must considerably interfere with you in
the exercise of your calling."

Then Homais represented to him how much jollier and brisker he would
feel afterwards, and even gave him to understand that he would be more
likely to please the women; and the stable-boy began to smile heavily.
Then he attacked him through his vanity:--

"Aren't you a man? Hang it! what would you have done if you had had to
go into the army, to go and fight beneath the standard? Ah! Hippolyte!"

And Homais retired, declaring that he could not understand this
obstinacy, this blindness in refusing the benefactions of science.

The poor fellow gave way, for it was like a conspiracy. Binet, who never
interfered with other people's business, Madame Lefrançois, Artémise,
the neighbors, even the mayor, Monsieur Tuvache--every one persuaded
him, lectured him, shamed him; but what finally decided him was that it
would cost him nothing. Bovary even undertook to provide the machine for
the operation. This generosity was an idea of Emma's, and Charles
consented to it, thinking in his heart of hearts that his wife was an
angel.

So, by the advice of the chemist, and after three fresh starts, he had a
kind of box made by the carpenter, with the aid of the locksmith, that
weighed about eight pounds, in which iron, wood, sheet-iron, leather,
screws, and nuts had not been spared.

But to know which of Hippolyte's tendons to cut, it was necessary first
of all to find out what kind of club-foot he had.

He had a foot forming almost a straight line with the leg, which,
however, did not prevent it from being turned in, so that it was an
equinus together with something of a varus, or else a slight varus with
a strong tendency to equinus. But with this equinus, wide in foot like a
horse's hoof, with rugose skin, dry tendons, and large toes, on which
the black nails looked as if made of iron, the club-foot ran about like
a deer from morn till night. He was constantly to be seen on the Place,
jumping around the carts, thrusting his limping foot forward. He seemed
even stronger on that leg than the other. By dint of hard service it had
acquired, as it were, moral qualities of patience and of energy; and
when he was doing some heavy work, he stood on it in preference to its
fellow.

Now, as it was an equinus, it was necessary to cut the tendo Achillis,
and, if need were, the anterior tibial muscle could be seen to
afterwards for getting rid of the varus; for the doctor did not dare to
risk both operations at once; he was even trembling already for fear of
injuring some important region that he did not know.

Neither Ambrose Paré, applying for the first time since Celsus, after an
interval of fifteen centuries, a ligature to an artery, nor Dupuytren,
about to open an abscess in the brain, nor Gensoul when he first took
away the superior maxilla, had hearts that trembled, hands that shook,
minds so strained as had the doctor when he approached Hippolyte, his
tenotome between his fingers. And, as at hospitals, near by on a table
lay a heap of lint, with waxed thread, many bandages--a pyramid of
bandages--every bandage to be found at the chemist's. It was Monsieur
Homais who since morning had been organising all these preparations, as
much to dazzle the multitude as to keep up his illusions. Charles
pierced the skin; a dry crackling was heard. The tendon was cut, the
operation over. Hippolyte could not get over his surprise, but bent over
Bovary's hands to cover them with kisses.

"Come, be calm," said the chemist; "later you will show your gratitude
to your benefactor."

And he went down to tell the result to five or six inquirers who were
waiting in the yard, and who fancied that Hippolyte would reappear
walking properly. Then Charles, having buckled his patient into the
machine, went home, where Emma, all anxiety, awaited him at the door.
She threw herself on his neck: they sat down to table; he ate much, and
at dessert he even wished to take a cup of coffee, a luxury he permitted
himself only on Sundays when there was company.

The evening was charming, full of prattle, of dreams together. They
talked about their future fortune, of the improvements to be made in
their house; he saw people's estimation of him growing, his comforts
increasing, his wife always loving him; and she was happy to refresh
herself with a new sentiment, healthier, better, to feel at last some
tenderness for this poor fellow who adored her. The thought of Rodolphe
for one moment passed through her mind, but her eyes turned again to
Charles; she even noticed with surprise that he had not bad teeth.

They were in bed when Monsieur Homais, in spite of the servant, suddenly
entered the room, holding in his hand a sheet of paper just written. It
was the paragraph he intended for the "Fanal de Rouen." He brought it
them to read.

"Read it yourself," said Bovary.

He read:

"'Despite the prejudices that still cover a part of the face of Europe
like a net, the light nevertheless begins to penetrate our country
places. Thus on Tuesday our little town of Yonville found itself the
scene of a surgical operation which is at the same time an act of
loftiest philanthropy. Monsieur Bovary, one of our most distinguished
practitioners----"

"Oh, that is too much! too much!" said Charles, choking with emotion.

"No, no! not at all! What next!"

"'----Performed an operation on a club-footed man.' I have not used the
scientific term, because you know in a newspaper every one would not
perhaps understand. The masses must----"

"No doubt," said Bovary; "go on!"

"I proceed," said the chemist. "'Monsieur Bovary, one of our most
distinguished practitioners, performed an operation on a club-footed man
called Hippolyte Tautain, stable-man for the last twenty-five years at
the hotel of the "Lion d'Or," kept by Widow Lefrançois, at the Place
d'Armes. The novelty of the attempt, and the interest incident to the
subject, had attracted such a concourse of persons that there was a
veritable obstruction on the threshold of the establishment. The
operation, moreover, was performed as if by magic, and barely a few
drops of blood appeared on the skin, as if to show that the rebellious
tendon had at last given way beneath the efforts of art. The patient,
strangely enough--we affirm it as an eye-witness--complained of no pain.
His condition up to the present time leaves nothing to be desired.
Everything tends to show that his convalescence will be brief; and who
knows whether, at our next village festivity, we shall not see our good
Hippolyte figuring in the bacchic dance in the midst of a chorus of
joyous boon-companions, and thus proving to all eyes by his verve and
his capers his complete cure? Honor, then, to the generous savants!
Honor to those indefatigable spirits who consecrate their vigils to the
amelioration or to the alleviation of their kind! Honor, thrice honor!
Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame
walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science
now accomplishes for all men. We shall keep our readers informed as to
the successive phases of this remarkable cure.'"

                *     *     *

This did not prevent Mère Lefrançois from coming five days after,
scared, and crying out--

"Help! he is dying! I am going crazy!"

Charles rushed to the "Lion d'Or," and the chemist, who caught sight of
him passing along the Place hatless, abandoned his shop. He appeared
himself breathless, red, anxious, and asking every one who was going up
the stairs--

"Why, what's the matter with our interesting strephopode?"

The strephopode was writhing in hideous convulsions, so that the machine
in which his leg was enclosed was knocked against the wall enough to
break it.

With many precautions, in order not to disturb the position of the limb,
the box was removed, and an awful sight presented itself. The outlines
of the foot disappeared in such a swelling that the entire skin seemed
about to burst, and it was covered with ecchymosis, caused by the famous
machine. Hippolyte had already complained of suffering from it. No
attention had been paid to him; they had to acknowledge that he had not
been altogether wrong, and he was freed for a few hours. But hardly had
the oedema gone down to some extent, than the two savants thought fit
to put back the limb in the apparatus, strapping it tighter to hasten
matters. At last, three days after, Hippolyte being unable to endure it
any longer, they once more removed the machine, and were much surprised
at the result they saw. The livid tumefaction spread over the leg, with
blisters here and there, whence oozed a black liquid. Matters were
taking a serious turn. Hippolyte began to worry himself, and Mère
Lefrançois had him installed in the little room near the kitchen, so
that he might at least have some distraction.

But the tax-collector, who dined there every day, complained bitterly of
such companionship. Then Hippolyte was removed to the billiard-room. He
lay there moaning under his heavy coverings, pale, with long beard,
sunken eyes, and from time to time turning his perspiring head on the
dirty pillow, where the flies alighted. Madame Bovary went to see him.
She brought him linen for his poultices; she comforted and encouraged
him. Besides, he did not want for company, especially on market-days,
when the peasants were knocking about the billiard-balls round him,
fenced with the cues, smoked, drank, sang, and brawled.

"How are you?" they said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Ah! you're not
up to much, it seems, but it's your own fault. You should do this! do
that!" And then they told him stories of people who had all been cured
by other remedies than his. Then by way of consolation they added:--

"You give way too much! Get up! You coddle yourself like a king! All the
same, old chap, you don't smell nice!"

Gangrene, in fact, was spreading more and more. Bovary himself turned
sick at it. He came every hour, every moment. Hippolyte looked at him
with eyes full of terror, sobbing--

"When shall I get well? Oh, save me! How unfortunate I am! how
unfortunate I am!"

And the doctor left, always recommending him to diet himself.

"Don't listen to him, my lad," said Mère Lefrançois. "Haven't they
tortured you enough already? You'll grow still weaker. Here! swallow
this."

And she gave him some good beef-tea, a slice of mutton, a piece of
bacon, and sometimes small glasses of brandy, that he had not the
strength to put to his lips.

Abbé Bournisien, hearing that he was growing worse, asked to see him. He
began by pitying his sufferings, declaring at the same time that he
ought to rejoice at them since it was the will of the Lord, and take
advantage of the occasion to reconcile himself to Heaven.

"For," said the ecclesiastic in a paternal tone, "you rather neglected
your duties; you were rarely seen at divine worship. How many years is
it since you approached the holy table? I understand that your work,
that the whirl of the world may have kept you from care for your
salvation. But now is the time to reflect. Yet don't despair. I have
known great sinners, who, about to appear before God (you are not yet at
this point, I know), had implored His mercy, and who certainly died in
the best frame of mind. Let us hope that, like them, you will set us a
good example. Thus, as a precaution, what is to prevent you from saying
morning and evening a 'Hail Mary, full of grace,' and 'Our Father which
art in heaven'? Yes, do that, for my sake, to oblige me. That won't cost
you anything. Will you promise me?"

The poor devil promised. The curé came back day after day. He chatted
with the landlady, and even told anecdotes interspersed with jokes and
puns that Hippolyte did not understand. Then, as soon as he could, he
fell back upon matters of religion, putting on an appropriate expression
of face.

His zeal seemed successful, for the club-foot soon manifested a desire
to go on a pilgrimage to Bon-Secours if he were cured; to which Monsieur
Bournisien replied that he saw no objection; two precautions were better
than one; it was no risk.

The chemist was indignant at what he called the manoeuvres of the
priest; they were prejudicial, he said, to Hippolyte's convalescence,
and he kept repeating to Madame Lefrançois, "Leave him alone! leave him
alone! You perturb his morals with your mysticism."

But the good woman would no longer listen to him; he was the cause of it
all. From a spirit of contradiction she hung up near the bedside of the
patient a basin filled with holy-water and a branch of box.

Religion, however, seemed no more able to succour him than surgery, and
the invincible gangrene still spread from the extremities towards the
stomach. It was all very well to vary the potions and change the
poultices; the muscles each day rotted more and more; and at last
Charles replied by an affirmative nod of the head when Mère Lefrançois
asked him if she could not, as a forlorn hope, send for Monsieur Canivet
of Neufchâtel, who was a celebrity.

A doctor of medicine, fifty years of age, enjoying a good position and
self-possessed, Charles's colleague did not refrain from laughing