Kabanata Kabanata 5 · Part 1 Chapter Five

. Part 1 Chapter Five

The brick front was just in a line with the street, or rather the road.

Behind the door hung a cloak with a small collar, a bridle, and a black

leather cap, and on the floor, in a corner, were a pair of leggings,

still covered with dry mud. On the right was the one apartment, that was

both dining and sitting room. A canary yellow paper, relieved at the

top by a garland of pale flowers, was puckered everywhere over the badly

stretched canvas; white calico curtains with a red border hung crossways

at the length of the window; and on the narrow mantelpiece a clock with

a head of Hippocrates shone resplendent between two plate candlesticks

under oval shades. On the other side of the passage was Charles’s

consulting room, a little room about six paces wide, with a table,

three chairs, and an office chair. Volumes of the “Dictionary of Medical

Science,” uncut, but the binding rather the worse for the successive

sales through which they had gone, occupied almost along the six shelves

of a deal bookcase.

The smell of melted butter penetrated through the walls when he saw

patients, just as in the kitchen one could hear the people coughing in

the consulting room and recounting their histories.

Then, opening on the yard, where the stable was, came a large

dilapidated room with a stove, now used as a wood-house, cellar, and

pantry, full of old rubbish, of empty casks, agricultural implements

past service, and a mass of dusty things whose use it was impossible to

guess.

The garden, longer than wide, ran between two mud walls with espaliered

apricots, to a hawthorn hedge that separated it from the field. In the

middle was a slate sundial on a brick pedestal; four flower beds with

eglantines surrounded symmetrically the more useful kitchen garden bed.

Right at the bottom, under the spruce bushes, was a cure in plaster

reading his breviary.

Emma went upstairs. The first room was not furnished, but in the second,

which was their bedroom, was a mahogany bedstead in an alcove with red

drapery. A shell box adorned the chest of drawers, and on the secretary

near the window a bouquet of orange blossoms tied with white satin

ribbons stood in a bottle. It was a bride’s bouquet; it was the other

one’s. She looked at it. Charles noticed it; he took it and carried it

up to the attic, while Emma seated in an arm-chair (they were putting

her things down around her) thought of her bridal flowers packed up in

a bandbox, and wondered, dreaming, what would be done with them if she

were to die.

During the first days she occupied herself in thinking about changes in

the house. She took the shades off the candlesticks, had new wallpaper

put up, the staircase repainted, and seats made in the garden round the

sundial; she even inquired how she could get a basin with a jet fountain

and fishes. Finally her husband, knowing that she liked to drive out,

picked up a second-hand dogcart, which, with new lamps and splashboard

in striped leather, looked almost like a tilbury.

He was happy then, and without a care in the world. A meal together,

a walk in the evening on the highroad, a gesture of her hands over her

hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging from the window-fastener, and

many another thing in which Charles had never dreamed of pleasure, now

made up the endless round of his happiness. In bed, in the morning, by

her side, on the pillow, he watched the sunlight sinking into the down

on her fair cheek, half hidden by the lappets of her night-cap. Seen

thus closely, her eyes looked to him enlarged, especially when, on

waking up, she opened and shut them rapidly many times. Black in the

shade, dark blue in broad daylight, they had, as it were, depths of

different colours, that, darker in the centre, grew paler towards the

surface of the eye. His own eyes lost themselves in these depths; he saw

himself in miniature down to the shoulders, with his handkerchief round

his head and the top of his shirt open. He rose. She came to the window

to see him off, and stayed leaning on the sill between two pots of

geranium, clad in her dressing gown hanging loosely about her. Charles,

in the street buckled his spurs, his foot on the mounting stone, while

she talked to him from above, picking with her mouth some scrap of

flower or leaf that she blew out at him. Then this, eddying, floating,

described semicircles in the air like a bird, and was caught before

it reached the ground in the ill-groomed mane of the old white mare

standing motionless at the door. Charles from horseback threw her a

kiss; she answered with a nod; she shut the window, and he set off. And

then along the highroad, spreading out its long ribbon of dust, along

the deep lanes that the trees bent over as in arbours, along paths where

the corn reached to the knees, with the sun on his back and the morning

air in his nostrils, his heart full of the joys of the past night, his

mind at rest, his flesh at ease, he went on, re-chewing his happiness,

like those who after dinner taste again the truffles which they are

digesting.

Until now what good had he had of his life? His time at school, when

he remained shut up within the high walls, alone, in the midst of

companions richer than he or cleverer at their work, who laughed at his

accent, who jeered at his clothes, and whose mothers came to the school

with cakes in their muffs? Later on, when he studied medicine, and never

had his purse full enough to treat some little work-girl who would have

become his mistress? Afterwards, he had lived fourteen months with the

widow, whose feet in bed were cold as icicles. But now he had for life

this beautiful woman whom he adored. For him the universe did not extend

beyond the circumference of her petticoat, and he reproached himself

with not loving her. He wanted to see her again; he turned back quickly,

ran up the stairs with a beating heart. Emma, in her room, was dressing;

he came up on tiptoe, kissed her back; she gave a cry.

He could not keep from constantly touching her comb, her ring, her

fichu; sometimes he gave her great sounding kisses with all his mouth on

her cheeks, or else little kisses in a row all along her bare arm

from the tip of her fingers up to her shoulder, and she put him away

half-smiling, half-vexed, as you do a child who hangs about you.

Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that

should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought,

have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in

life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so

beautiful in books.