Madame Bovary (10 page)

At the convent there was a spinster who came every month, for a week, to work in the linen room. Under the protection of the archdiocese because she belonged to an old family of gentry ruined during the Revolution, she would eat in the refectory at the good sisters’ table and, after the meal, stay for a brief chat with them before going back up to her needlework. Often the boarders would slip out of study hall to go see her. She knew by heart the love songs of the century before and would sing
them softly as she plied her needle. She would tell stories, give you news, do errands for you in town, and lend the older girls, secretly, one of the novels that she always had in her apron pocket, and from which the good old maid herself would devour long chapters in the intervals of her task. They were always and only about love, lovers, paramours, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden
to death on every page, gloomy forests, troubled hearts, oaths, sobs, tears, and kisses, skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in groves,
gentlemen
brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever is, always well dressed, and weeping like tombstone urns. And so for six months, at the age of fifteen, Emma soiled her hands with the greasy dust of those old lending libraries. With Walter Scott, later, she became enamored of things historical, dreamed of studded leather chests, guardrooms, and troubadors. She would have liked to live in some old manor, like one of those long-bodiced chatelaines who, under the trefoiled ogives, would spend her days, elbow on stone sill and chin in hand, watching a white-plumed horseman come galloping from the depths of the countryside on a black horse. At that time she worshipped Mary Stuart and felt an ardent veneration for illustrious or ill-fated women. Joan of Arc, Héloïse, Agnès Sorel, La Belle
Ferronnière, and Clémence Isaure, for her, stood out like comets against the shadowy immensity of history, in which there still appeared here and there, but less visible in the darkness and without any relation among them, Saint Louis and his oak, Bayard dying, certain of Louis XI’s ferocities, a little of Saint Bartholomew, the Béarnais’s plume, and always the memory of the painted plates on which Louis XIV was extolled.

In music class, in the ballads she sang, the only subjects were little angels with wings of gold, madonnas, lagoons, gondoliers—peaceable compositions that allowed her to glimpse, through the silliness of the style and the indiscretions of the notes, the enticing phantasmagoria of real feelings. Some of her schoolmates would bring to the convent the keepsake albums they had received as New Year’s gifts. They had to hide them, it was quite a business; they would read them in the dormitory. Delicately handling their beautiful satin bindings, Emma would stare, dazzled, at the names of the unknown authors who had signed, most often counts and viscounts, under their compositions.

She would shiver, her breath lifting the tissue paper off the engravings; it would rise up half folded and fall back gently against the page. There
was a young man in a short cloak behind a balcony railing, clasping in his arms a young girl in a white dress wearing a mesh bag at her belt; or anonymous portraits of English
ladies
with blond curls who gazed out at you with their wide light-colored eyes from under their round straw hats. Some were shown lying back in carriages, gliding through parks, where a greyhound would bound ahead of a team driven at a trot by two little postilions in white knee breeches. Others, dreaming on sofas beside an unsealed letter, would gaze at the moon through a half-open window half draped in a black curtain. Innocents with a tear on their cheek would kiss the beak of a turtledove through the bars of a Gothic birdcage or, smiling, their head nearly touching their shoulder, would pick
the leaves off a daisy with tapering fingers that curved up at the tips like Turkish slippers. And you were there, too, you sultans with long pipes, swooning under arbors, in the arms of dancing girls, you Giaours, Turkish sabers, fezzes, and you especially, wan landscapes of dithyrambic countries, which often show us both palm trees and pines, tigers to the right, a lion to the left, Tartar minarets on the horizon, in the foreground Roman ruins, then crouching camels;—the whole framed in a very tidy virgin forest, with a great perpendicular ray of sunshine quivering on the water, where, standing out as white scratches against the steely gray background, widely spaced swans are swimming.

And the shade of the Argand lamp, attached to the wall above Emma’s head, shone on all these pictures of the world, which passed before her one after another, in the silence of the dormitory, to the distant sound of some late hackney cab still rolling along the boulevards.

When her mother died, she wept a great deal in the first few days. She had a memorial picture made for herself with the dead woman’s hair, and in a letter she sent to Les Bertaux, full of sorrowful reflections on life, she asked to be buried in the same grave, later. The good man thought she was ill and came to see her. Emma was inwardly satisfied to feel that she had, at her first attempt, reached that rare ideal of pallid lives, which mediocre hearts will never attain. And so she allowed herself to slip into Lamartinean meanderings, listened to harps on lakes, to the song of every dying swan, to the falling of every leaf, to pure virgins rising to heaven, and to the voice of the Eternal speaking in the valleys. She became bored with this, did not want to admit it, continued out of habit, then out of vanity, and was at last surprised to find that she was at
peace, and that there was no more sadness in her heart than there were wrinkles
on her forehead.

The good nuns, who had been so confident of her vocation, perceived with great surprise that Mademoiselle Rouault seemed to be slipping out of their control. They had, indeed, lavished upon her so many masses, retreats, novenas, and sermons, so thoroughly preached the respect owed to the saints and martyrs, and given so much good advice concerning the modesty of the body and the salvation of her soul, that she did what horses do when pulled by the reins: she stopped short and the bit slipped from her teeth. That spirit of hers, practical in the midst of its enthusiasms, loving the church for its flowers, music for the words of its songs, and literature for its power to stir the passions, rebelled before the mysteries of faith, just as she grew ever more irritated by its discipline, which was antipathetic to her nature. When her father withdrew her from school, no one was sorry to see her go. The Mother Superior even thought she had become, lately, rather
irreverent toward the community.

Back at home, Emma at first enjoyed ordering the servants about, then grew sick of the country and missed her convent. By the time Charles came to Les Bertaux for the first time, she considered herself to be thoroughly disillusioned, with nothing more to learn, nothing more to feel.

But her impatience for change, or perhaps the nervous excitation caused by the presence of this man, had been enough to make her believe she at last possessed the marvelous passion that until then had remained like a great rosy-feathered bird hovering in the splendor of a poetical sky;—and now she could not convince herself that the calm life she was living was the happiness of which she had dreamed.

She sometimes imagined that these were, nevertheless, the most beautiful days of her life—the honeymoon, as it was called. To savor its sweetness, she would doubtless have had to go off to one of those lands with melodious names where the days following a wedding have a softer indolence! In a post chaise, under curtains of blue silk, you climb the steep roads at a walk, listening to the postilion’s song as it echoes through the mountains, mingling with the bells of the goats and the muffled sound of a waterfall. As the sun goes down, you stand together on the shore of some
bay, inhaling the fragrance of the lemon trees; then, at night, alone on the terrace of a villa, your fingers intertwined, you gaze at the stars and make plans. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must produce happiness, like a plant that was peculiar to that soil and grew poorly in any other spot. If only she could have leaned her elbows on
the balcony of a Swiss chalet or locked away her sadness in a cottage in Scotland, with a husband dressed in a long-skirted black velvet coat, soft boots, a pointed hat, and ruffles at his wrist!

Perhaps she would have liked to confide in someone about all these things. But how does one express an uneasiness so intangible, one that changes shape like a cloud, that changes direction like the wind? She lacked the words, the occasion, the courage.

If Charles had wished it, however, if he had suspected it, if his gaze, just once, had read her thoughts, it seemed to her that her heart would have been relieved of its fullness as quickly as the ripe fruit falls from an espaliered tree at the touch of a hand. But while the intimacy of their life grew ever closer, an inner detachment formed, which loosened her ties to him.

Charles’s conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, and everyone’s ideas walked along it in their ordinary clothes, without inspiring emotion, or laughter, or reverie. He had never been interested, he said, when he lived in Rouen, in going to the theater to see the actors from Paris. He did not know how to swim, or fence, or fire a pistol, and he was not able to explain to her, one day, a riding term she had encountered in a novel.

But shouldn’t a man know everything, excel at a host of different activities, initiate you into the intensities of passion, the refinements of life, all its mysteries? Yet this man taught her nothing, knew nothing, wished for nothing. He thought she was happy; and she resented him for that settled calm, that ponderous serenity, that very happiness which she herself brought him.

She would draw, sometimes; and Charles found it most entertaining to stand there and watch her bending over her pad, half closing her eyes to see her work better, or forming pellets of bread crumbs on her thumb. As for the piano, the faster her fingers raced, the more he marveled. She would strike the keys with assurance and run down the entire keyboard from top to bottom without stopping. When it was thus assaulted by her, the old instrument, with its buzzing strings, could be heard as far as the
edge of the village if the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, who was passing on the main road, bareheaded and in slippers, would stop to listen, holding his piece of paper in his hand.

Moreover, Emma knew how to manage her household. She would send the patients the statements for their consultations in well-phrased letters that did not sound like invoices. When, on a Sunday, they had some neighbor to dinner, she would contrive to present a stylish dish, understood how to build a pyramid of greengages on some vine leaves, would serve little pots of preserves turned out on plates, and she even talked about buying mouth-rinsing bowls for the dessert course. All of this reflected a good deal of credit on Bovary.

Charles came to respect himself more because he possessed such a wife. In the parlor, he would proudly show off two small sketches of hers, done in graphite, which he had had framed in very wide frames and hung against the wallpaper with long green cords. Coming out of Mass, one would see him standing on his doorstep wearing a fine pair of carpet slippers.

He would return home late, at ten o’clock, sometimes midnight. Then he would ask for something to eat, and since the maid had gone to bed, it was Emma who would serve him. He would take off his frock coat in order to dine more comfortably. He would tell her one by one all the people he had met, the villages where he had been, the prescriptions he had written, and, satisfied with himself, he would eat the remains of the beef hash with onions, cut the rind off his cheese, munch an apple, empty his carafe, then go off to bed, sleep on his back, and snore.

Since he had long been used to wearing a nightcap, his scarf would not stay on his ears; thus his hair, in the morning, lay tousled over his face and whitened by the down from his pillow, whose strings would come undone during the night. He always wore stout boots, which had at the instep two thick creases slanting up toward the ankles, while the rest of the upper continued in a straight line, stretched as though by a foot made out of wood. He would say
they were plenty good enough for the country.

His mother approved of this thriftiness—for she would come to see him as she had in the past, whenever there had been some particularly violent squall in her own household; and yet the elder Madame Bovary seemed prejudiced against her daughter-in-law. She felt that her
style was too lofty for their station in life;
wood, sugar, and candles
vanished as fast
as in a grand house
, and the amount of charcoal consumed in the kitchen was enough to do the cooking for twenty-five! She tidied her linen in the cupboards and taught her to watch the butcher when he brought the meat. Emma accepted these lessons; Madame Bovary lavished them; and the words “my daughter” and “my mother” were exchanged all day long, accompanied by a little quiver of the lips, each woman uttering gentle speeches in a voice trembling with rage.

In Madame Dubuc’s day, the old woman had felt that she was still the favorite; but now Charles’s love for Emma seemed to her a desertion of her own affection, an encroachment on what belonged to her; and she observed her son’s happiness in sad silence, like a ruined man gazing in through a window at people sitting around the dinner table in a house that had once been his own. In the guise of remembering times past, she would remind him of her struggles and sacrifices and, comparing them to Emma’s negligence, would conclude that it was not reasonable to adore her so exclusively.

Charles did not know what to answer; he respected his mother, and he loved his wife infinitely; he considered the judgment of the one to be infallible, and yet he found the other irreproachable. When Madame Bovary had gone, he would try to venture timidly, and in the same terms, one or two of the mildest observations he had heard his mama make; Emma, proving to him with one word that he was mistaken, would send him back to his patients.