Chương Chương 11 · Part 2 Chapter Two

. Part 2 Chapter Two

Emma got out first, then Félicité, Monsieur Lheureux, and a nurse, and

they had to wake up Charles in his corner, where he had slept soundly

since night set in.

Homais introduced himself; he offered his homages to madame and his

respects to monsieur; said he was charmed to have been able to render

them some slight service, and added with a cordial air that he had

ventured to invite himself, his wife being away.

When Madame Bovary was in the kitchen she went up to the chimney.

With the tips of her fingers she caught her dress at the knee, and

having thus pulled it up to her ankle, held out her foot in its black

boot to the fire above the revolving leg of mutton. The flame lit up the

whole of her, penetrating with a crude light the woof of her gowns, the

fine pores of her fair skin, and even her eyelids, which she blinked now

and again. A great red glow passed over her with the blowing of the wind

through the half-open door.

On the other side of the chimney a young man with fair hair watched her

silently.

As he was a good deal bored at Yonville, where he was a clerk at the

notary’s, Monsieur Guillaumin, Monsieur Léon Dupuis (it was he who

was the second habitue of the “Lion d’Or”) frequently put back his

dinner-hour in hope that some traveler might come to the inn, with whom

he could chat in the evening. On the days when his work was done early,

he had, for want of something else to do, to come punctually, and endure

from soup to cheese a _tête-à-tête_ with Binet. It was therefore with

delight that he accepted the landlady’s suggestion that he should dine

in company with the newcomers, and they passed into the large parlour

where Madame Lefrancois, for the purpose of showing off, had had the

table laid for four.

Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his skull-cap, for fear of coryza;

then, turning to his neighbour--

“Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so abominably in

our ‘Hirondelle.’”

“That is true,” replied Emma; “but moving about always amuses me. I like

change of place.”

“It is so tedious,” sighed the clerk, “to be always riveted to the same

places.”

“If you were like me,” said Charles, “constantly obliged to be in the

saddle”--

“But,” Léon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, “nothing, it

seems to me, is more pleasant--when one can,” he added.

“Moreover,” said the druggist, “the practice of medicine is not very

hard work in our part of the world, for the state of our roads allows us

the use of gigs, and generally, as the farmers are prosperous, they pay

pretty well. We have, medically speaking, besides the ordinary cases

of enteritis, bronchitis, bilious affections, etc., now and then a

few intermittent fevers at harvest-time; but on the whole, little of a

serious nature, nothing special to note, unless it be a great deal of

scrofula, due, no doubt, to the deplorable hygienic conditions of our

peasant dwellings. Ah! you will find many prejudices to combat, Monsieur

Bovary, much obstinacy of routine, with which all the efforts of your

science will daily come into collision; for people still have recourse

to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than come straight to the

doctor or the chemist. The climate, however, is not, truth to tell, bad,

and we even have a few nonagenarians in our parish. The thermometer (I

have made some observations) falls in winter to 4 degrees Centigrade

at the outside, which gives us 24 degrees Reaumur as the maximum, or

otherwise 54 degrees Fahrenheit (English scale), not more. And, as a

matter of fact, we are sheltered from the north winds by the forest of

Argueil on the one side, from the west winds by the St. Jean range on

the other; and this heat, moreover, which, on account of the aqueous

vapours given off by the river and the considerable number of cattle

in the fields, which, as you know, exhale much ammonia, that is to say,

nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen (no, nitrogen and hydrogen alone), and

which sucking up into itself the humus from the ground, mixing together

all those different emanations, unites them into a stack, so to say,

and combining with the electricity diffused through the atmosphere, when

there is any, might in the long run, as in tropical countries, engender

insalubrious miasmata--this heat, I say, finds itself perfectly tempered

on the side whence it comes, or rather whence it should come--that is to

say, the southern side--by the south-eastern winds, which, having cooled

themselves passing over the Seine, reach us sometimes all at once like

breezes from Russia.”

“At any rate, you have some walks in the neighbourhood?” continued

Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man.

“Oh, very few,” he answered. “There is a place they call La Pâture, on

the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I

go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset.”

“I think there is nothing so admirable as sunsets,” she resumed; “but

especially by the side of the sea.”

“Oh, I adore the sea!” said Monsieur Léon.

“And then, does it not seem to you,” continued Madame Bovary, “that the

mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of

which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal?”

“It is the same with mountainous landscapes,” continued Léon. “A cousin

of mine who travelled in Switzerland last year told me that one could

not picture to oneself the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the

waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. One sees pines of

incredible size across torrents, cottages suspended over precipices,

and, a thousand feet below one, whole valleys when the clouds open. Such

spectacles must stir to enthusiasm, incline to prayer, to ecstasy; and I

no longer marvel at that celebrated musician who, the better to inspire

his imagination, was in the habit of playing the piano before some

imposing site.”

“You play?” she asked.

“No, but I am very fond of music,” he replied.

“Ah! don’t you listen to him, Madame Bovary,” interrupted Homais,

bending over his plate. “That’s sheer modesty. Why, my dear fellow, the

other day in your room you were singing ‘L’Ange Gardien’ ravishingly. I

heard you from the laboratory. You gave it like an actor.”

Léon, in fact, lodged at the chemist’s where he had a small room on the

second floor, overlooking the Place. He blushed at the compliment of his

landlord, who had already turned to the doctor, and was enumerating to

him, one after the other, all the principal inhabitants of Yonville. He

was telling anecdotes, giving information; the fortune of the notary

was not known exactly, and “there was the Tuvache household,” who made a

good deal of show.

Emma continued, “And what music do you prefer?”

“Oh, German music; that which makes you dream.”

“Have you been to the opera?”

“Not yet; but I shall go next year, when I am living at Paris to finish

reading for the bar.”

“As I had the honour of putting it to your husband,” said the chemist,

“with regard to this poor Yanoda who has run away, you will find

yourself, thanks to his extravagance, in the possession of one of the

most comfortable houses of Yonville. Its greatest convenience for a

doctor is a door giving on the Walk, where one can go in and out unseen.

Moreover, it contains everything that is agreeable in a household--a

laundry, kitchen with offices, sitting-room, fruit-room, and so on. He

was a gay dog, who didn’t care what he spent. At the end of the garden,

by the side of the water, he had an arbour built just for the purpose of

drinking beer in summer; and if madame is fond of gardening she will be

able--”

“My wife doesn’t care about it,” said Charles; “although she has

been advised to take exercise, she prefers always sitting in her room

reading.”

“Like me,” replied Léon. “And indeed, what is better than to sit by

one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against

the window and the lamp is burning?”

“What, indeed?” she said, fixing her large black eyes wide open upon

him.

“One thinks of nothing,” he continued; “the hours slip by. Motionless we

traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with

the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the

adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were

yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.”

“That is true! That is true?” she said.

“Has it ever happened to you,” Léon went on, “to come across some vague

idea of one’s own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from

afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?”

“I have experienced it,” she replied.

“That is why,” he said, “I especially love the poets. I think verse more

tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears.”

“Still in the long run it is tiring,” continued Emma. “Now I, on the

contrary, adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one.

I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are

in nature.”

“In fact,” observed the clerk, “these works, not touching the heart,

miss, it seems to me, the true end of art. It is so sweet, amid all

the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble

characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness. For myself,

living here far from the world, this is my one distraction; but Yonville

affords so few resources.”

“Like Tostes, no doubt,” replied Emma; “and so I always subscribed to a

lending library.”

“If madame will do me the honour of making use of it”, said the chemist,

who had just caught the last words, “I have at her disposal a library

composed of the best authors, Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter

Scott, the ‘Echo des Feuilletons’; and in addition I receive various

periodicals, among them the ‘Fanal de Rouen’ daily, having the advantage

to be its correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchâtel,

Yonville, and vicinity.”

For two hours and a half they had been at table; for the servant

Artémis, carelessly dragging her old list slippers over the flags,

brought one plate after the other, forgot everything, and constantly

left the door of the billiard-room half open, so that it beat against

the wall with its hooks.

Unconsciously, Léon, while talking, had placed his foot on one of the

bars of the chair on which Madame Bovary was sitting. She wore a small

blue silk necktie, that kept up like a ruff a gauffered cambric collar,

and with the movements of her head the lower part of her face gently

sunk into the linen or came out from it. Thus side by side, while

Charles and the chemist chatted, they entered into one of those vague

conversations where the hazard of all that is said brings you back to

the fixed centre of a common sympathy. The Paris theatres, titles of

novels, new quadrilles, and the world they did not know; Tostes, where

she had lived, and Yonville, where they were; they examined all, talked

of everything till to the end of dinner.

When coffee was served Félicité went away to get ready the room in the

new house, and the guests soon raised the siege. Madame Lefrancois was

asleep near the cinders, while the stable-boy, lantern in hand, was

waiting to show Monsieur and Madame Bovary the way home. Bits of straw

stuck in his red hair, and he limped with his left leg. When he had

taken in his other hand the cure’s umbrella, they started.

The town was asleep; the pillars of the market threw great shadows; the

earth was all grey as on a summer’s night. But as the doctor’s house was

only some fifty paces from the inn, they had to say good-night almost

immediately, and the company dispersed.

As soon as she entered the passage, Emma felt the cold of the plaster

fall about her shoulders like damp linen. The walls were new and the

wooden stairs creaked. In their bedroom, on the first floor, a whitish

light passed through the curtainless windows.

She could catch glimpses of tree tops, and beyond, the fields,

half-drowned in the fog that lay reeking in the moonlight along

the course of the river. In the middle of the room, pell-mell, were

scattered drawers, bottles, curtain-rods, gilt poles, with mattresses

on the chairs and basins on the ground--the two men who had brought the

furniture had left everything about carelessly.

This was the fourth time that she had slept in a strange place.

The first was the day of her going to the convent; the second, of her

arrival at Tostes; the third, at Vaubyessard; and this was the fourth.

And each one had marked, as it were, the inauguration of a new phase in

her life. She did not believe that things could present themselves in

the same way in different places, and since the portion of her life

lived had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be

better.