Bab Bab 7 · Part 1 Chapter Seven

. Part 1 Chapter Seven

She thought, sometimes, that, after all, this was the happiest time

of her life--the honeymoon, as people called it. To taste the full

sweetness of it, it would have been necessary doubtless to fly to those

lands with sonorous names where the days after marriage are full of

laziness most suave. In post chaises behind blue silken curtains to ride

slowly up steep road, listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed

by the mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled sound of

a waterfall; at sunset on the shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume

of lemon trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces above, hand in

hand to look at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her

that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar

to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean

over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch

cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails,

and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills? Perhaps she would have liked

to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable

uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed

her--the opportunity, the courage.

If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed it, if his look had but

once met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden plenty would have

gone out from her heart, as the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by

a hand. But as the intimacy of their life became deeper, the greater

became the gulf that separated her from him.

Charles’s conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and

everyone’s ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without

exciting emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity,

he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors

from Paris. He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day

he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come

across in a novel.

A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold

activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements

of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing,

wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm,

this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him.

Sometimes she would draw; and it was great amusement to Charles to stand

there bolt upright and watch her bend over her cardboard, with eyes

half-closed the better to see her work, or rolling, between her fingers,

little bread-pellets. As to the piano, the more quickly her fingers

glided over it the more he wondered. She struck the notes with aplomb,

and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken

up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the

other end of the village when the window was open, and often the

bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad bare-headed and in list

slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.

Emma, on the other hand, knew how to look after her house. She sent the

patients’ accounts in well-phrased letters that had no suggestion of

a bill. When they had a neighbour to dinner on Sundays, she managed to

have some tasty dish--piled up pyramids of greengages on vine leaves,

served up preserves turned out into plates--and even spoke of buying

finger-glasses for dessert. From all this much consideration was

extended to Bovary.

Charles finished by rising in his own esteem for possessing such a wife.

He showed with pride in the sitting room two small pencil sketches by

her that he had had framed in very large frames, and hung up against the

wallpaper by long green cords. People returning from mass saw him at his

door in his wool-work slippers.

He came home late--at ten o’clock, at midnight sometimes. Then he asked

for something to eat, and as the servant had gone to bed, Emma waited

on him. He took off his coat to dine more at his ease. He told her, one

after the other, the people he had met, the villages where he had been,

the prescriptions he had written, and, well pleased with himself, he

finished the remainder of the boiled beef and onions, picked pieces off

the cheese, munched an apple, emptied his water-bottle, and then went to

bed, and lay on his back and snored.

As he had been for a time accustomed to wear nightcaps, his handkerchief

would not keep down over his ears, so that his hair in the morning was

all tumbled pell-mell about his face and whitened with the feathers of

the pillow, whose strings came untied during the night. He always wore

thick boots that had two long creases over the instep running obliquely

towards the ankle, while the rest of the upper continued in a straight

line as if stretched on a wooden foot. He said that “was quite good

enough for the country.”

His mother approved of his economy, for she came to see him as formerly

when there had been some violent row at her place; and yet Madame Bovary

senior seemed prejudiced against her daughter-in-law. She thought “her

ways too fine for their position”; the wood, the sugar, and the candles

disappeared as “at a grand establishment,” and the amount of firing in

the kitchen would have been enough for twenty-five courses. She put her

linen in order for her in the presses, and taught her to keep an eye on

the butcher when he brought the meat. Emma put up with these lessons.

Madame Bovary was lavish of them; and the words “daughter” and “mother”

were exchanged all day long, accompanied by little quiverings of the

lips, each one uttering gentle words in a voice trembling with anger.

In Madame Dubuc’s time the old woman felt that she was still the

favorite; but now the love of Charles for Emma seemed to her a desertion

from her tenderness, an encroachment upon what was hers, and she watched

her son’s happiness in sad silence, as a ruined man looks through

the windows at people dining in his old house. She recalled to him as

remembrances her troubles and her sacrifices, and, comparing these with

Emma’s negligence, came to the conclusion that it was not reasonable to

adore her so exclusively.

Charles knew not what to answer: he respected his mother, and he loved

his wife infinitely; he considered the judgment of the one infallible,

and yet he thought the conduct of the other irreproachable. When Madam

Bovary had gone, he tried timidly and in the same terms to hazard one or

two of the more anodyne observations he had heard from his mamma. Emma

proved to him with a word that he was mistaken, and sent him off to his

patients.

And yet, in accord with theories she believed right, she wanted to make

herself in love with him. By moonlight in the garden she recited all

the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him many

melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after as before, and

Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved.

When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without

getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did

not experience as of believing anything that did not present itself

in conventional forms, she persuaded herself without difficulty that

Charles’s passion was nothing very exorbitant. His outbursts became

regular; he embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one habit among

other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony

of dinner.

A gamekeeper, cured by the doctor of inflammation of the lungs, had

given madame a little Italian greyhound; she took her out walking, for

she went out sometimes in order to be alone for a moment, and not to see

before her eyes the eternal garden and the dusty road. She went as far

as the beeches of Banneville, near the deserted pavilion which forms an

angle of the wall on the side of the country. Amidst the vegetation of

the ditch there are long reeds with leaves that cut you.

She began by looking round her to see if nothing had changed since last

she had been there. She found again in the same places the foxgloves and

wallflowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and

the patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always

closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts,

aimless at first, wandered at random, like her greyhound, who ran round

and round in the fields, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing

the shrew-mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge of a cornfield.

Then gradually her ideas took definite shape, and, sitting on the grass

that she dug up with little prods of her sunshade, Emma repeated to

herself, “Good heavens! Why did I marry?”

She asked herself if by some other chance combination it would have not

been possible to meet another man; and she tried to imagine what would

have been these unrealised events, this different life, this unknown

husband. All, surely, could not be like this one. He might have been

handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive, such as, no doubt, her old

companions of the convent had married. What were they doing now? In

town, with the noise of the streets, the buzz of the theatres and the

lights of the ballroom, they were living lives where the heart expands,

the senses bourgeon out. But she--her life was cold as a garret whose

dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was

weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.

She recalled the prize days, when she mounted the platform to receive

her little crowns, with her hair in long plaits. In her white frock and

open prunella shoes she had a pretty way, and when she went back to her

seat, the gentlemen bent over her to congratulate her; the courtyard was

full of carriages; farewells were called to her through their windows;

the music master with his violin case bowed in passing by. How far all

of this! How far away! She called Djali, took her between her knees, and

smoothed the long delicate head, saying, “Come, kiss mistress; you have

no troubles.”

Then noting the melancholy face of the graceful animal, who yawned

slowly, she softened, and comparing her to herself, spoke to her aloud

as to somebody in trouble whom one is consoling.

Occasionally there came gusts of winds, breezes from the sea rolling in

one sweep over the whole plateau of the Caux country, which brought

even to these fields a salt freshness. The rushes, close to the ground,

whistled; the branches trembled in a swift rustling, while their

summits, ceaselessly swaying, kept up a deep murmur. Emma drew her shawl

round her shoulders and rose.

In the avenue a green light dimmed by the leaves lit up the short moss

that crackled softly beneath her feet. The sun was setting; the sky

showed red between the branches, and the trunks of the trees, uniform,

and planted in a straight line, seemed a brown colonnade standing out

against a background of gold. A fear took hold of her; she called Djali,

and hurriedly returned to Tostes by the high road, threw herself into an

armchair, and for the rest of the evening did not speak.

But towards the end of September something extraordinary fell upon her

life; she was invited by the Marquis d’Andervilliers to Vaubyessard.

Secretary of State under the Restoration, the Marquis, anxious to

re-enter political life, set about preparing for his candidature to

the Chamber of Deputies long beforehand. In the winter he distributed a

great deal of wood, and in the Conseil General always enthusiastically

demanded new roads for his arrondissement. During the dog-days he had

suffered from an abscess, which Charles had cured as if by miracle by

giving a timely little touch with the lancet. The steward sent to Tostes

to pay for the operation reported in the evening that he had seen some

superb cherries in the doctor’s little garden. Now cherry trees did not

thrive at Vaubyessard; the Marquis asked Bovary for some slips; made it

his business to thank his personally; saw Emma; thought she had a pretty

figure, and that she did not bow like a peasant; so that he did not

think he was going beyond the bounds of condescension, nor, on the other

hand, making a mistake, in inviting the young couple.

On Wednesday at three o’clock, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, seated in

their dog-cart, set out for Vaubyessard, with a great trunk strapped

on behind and a bonnet-box in front of the apron. Besides these Charles

held a bandbox between his knees.

They arrived at nightfall, just as the lamps in the park were being lit

to show the way for the carriages.