Madame Bovary (48 page)

Then she turned away, suddenly at peace, almost serene, as though she had done her duty.

When Charles, overwhelmed by the news of the seizure, returned to the house, Emma had just left. He shouted, he wept, he fainted, but she did not return. Where could she be? He sent Félicité to Homais’s, to Monsieur Tuvache’s, to Lheureux’s, to the Lion d’Or, everywhere; and in the intervals when his anguish subsided, he saw his reputation destroyed, their fortune lost, Berthe’s future blighted! What was the cause? … Not a word! He waited until six o’clock that evening. At last, unable to bear it any longer, and imagining she had gone to Rouen, he went out onto the big road, walked for half a league, met no one, waited a little longer, and came back.

She had returned.

“What happened? … Why? … Explain it to me! …”

She sat down at her desk and wrote a letter, which she sealed slowly, adding the day’s date and the hour. Then she said in a solemn tone:

“You’ll read this tomorrow; until then, I beg you, don’t ask me a single question! … No, not one!”

“But …”

“Oh, leave me alone!”

And she lay down at full length on her bed.

An acrid taste in her mouth woke her. She caught sight of Charles and closed her eyes again.

She was observing herself curiously, to see if she was in pain. But no! Nothing yet. She could hear the ticking of the clock, the sound of the fire, and Charles breathing as he stood by her bed.

“Ah! It’s a small thing, really—death!” she thought; “I’ll fall asleep, and everything will be over!”

She drank a mouthful of water and turned to the wall.

That hideous taste of ink persisted.

“I’m thirsty! … Oh, I’m so thirsty!” she said with a sigh.

“What’s the matter with you?” said Charles, who was holding out a glass to her.

“It’s nothing! … Open the window … I’m suffocating!”

And she was overcome by a wave of nausea so sudden that she scarcely had time to snatch her handkerchief from under the pillow.

“Take it away!” she said quickly. “Throw it out!”

He questioned her; she did not answer. She was keeping still, for fear that the least disturbance would make her vomit. Meanwhile, she felt an icy cold rising within her from her feet to her heart.

“Ah! Now it’s beginning!” she murmured.

“What did you say?”

She rolled her head from side to side with a gentle motion full of anguish, at the same time opening her jaws again and again, as though she were holding something very heavy on her tongue. At eight o’clock, the vomiting began again.

Charles observed that in the bottom of the basin there was a sort of white gravel clinging to the porcelain sides.

“How extraordinary! How curious!” he kept saying.

But she said loudly:

“No. You’re wrong!”

Then, delicately, almost caressingly, he passed his hand over her stomach. She gave a sharp cry. He drew back, alarmed.

Then she began to moan, weakly at first. Her shoulders were shaken by a violent shudder, and she turned paler than the sheet in which her clenched fingers were buried. Her uneven pulse was almost imperceptible now.

Beads of sweat stood out on her face, which was tinged with blue and almost rigid, as though frozen by the exhalation of some metallic vapor. Her teeth were chattering, her dilated eyes gazed vaguely around her, and to each question her only answer was to move her head back and forth; she even smiled two or three times. Gradually, her moans grew louder. A muffled howl escaped her; she claimed she was feeling better and would soon get up. But she was seized with convulsions; she cried out:

“Oh! It’s awful. My God!”

He flung himself to his knees by her bed.

“Speak to me! What did you eat? Answer, in heaven’s name!”

And he looked at her with a love in his eyes that she had never seen before.

“Well … There … over there! …” she said in a faltering voice.

He leaped to the desk, broke the seal, and read aloud: “ ‘No one should be blamed …’ ” He stopped, passed his hand over his eyes, and read it again.

“What! … Help! Oh, help!”

And he could do nothing but say that word over and over again: “Poisoned! Poisoned!” Félicité ran to Homais, who uttered it loudly in the square; Madame Lefrançois heard it at the Lion d’Or; several people got out of bed to let their neighbors know; and all night the village was awake.

Perplexed, stammering, close to collapse, Charles walked around the room. He stumbled against the furniture, tore at his hair; and the pharmacist had never imagined there could be so dreadful a spectacle.

He returned to his house to write to Monsieur Canivet and Doctor Larivière. He was flustered; he composed more than fifteen drafts. Hippolyte went off to Neufchâtel, and Justin spurred Bovary’s horse so hard that he had to leave it on the hill at Bois-Guillaume, foundered and three-quarters dead.

Charles tried to leaf through his medical dictionary; he could not see, the lines were dancing.

“Calm down!” said the apothecary. “It’s just a question of administering some powerful antidote. Which poison was it?”

Charles showed him the letter. It was arsenic.

“Well, then,” Homais went on, “an analysis must be done.”

For he knew that in cases of poisoning an analysis always had to be done; and Charles, not understanding, answered:

“Ah! Do it! Do it! Save her …”

Then, returning to her side, he sank down on the carpet, and he stayed there resting his head against the edge of her bed, sobbing.

“Don’t cry!” she said to him. “I won’t be tormenting you much longer!”

“Why? What made you do it?”

She replied:

“I had to, my dear.”

“Weren’t you happy? Is it my fault? And yet I did everything I could!”

“Yes … that’s true … You’re good. You are!”

And she ran her hand through his hair slowly. The gentleness of that sensation was more than his sadness could bear; he felt his entire being give way to despair at the thought of having to lose her, just when she was admitting more love for him than ever before; and he could think
of nothing; he knew nothing, dared nothing; the urgent need for an immediate decision was enough to overwhelm him.

She was done, she was thinking, with all the betrayals, the atrocities, and the endless cravings that had tormented her. She hated no one now; a twilight confusion was descending on her thoughts, and of all earthly sounds Emma now heard only the intermittent lamentation of that poor heart, soft and indistinct, like the last echo of a symphony moving away into the distance.

“Bring me little Berthe,” she said, raising herself on her elbow.

“You’re not worse, are you?” asked Charles.

“No! No!”

The child came in, in the arms of her nanny, wearing a long nightgown from which her bare feet emerged, her expression serious, still half dreaming. She gazed in surprise at the disordered room and blinked her eyes, dazzled by the candles burning here and there on the furniture. They probably reminded her of the morning of New Year’s Day or Mid-Lent, when, wakened early in this same way by candlelight, she would be brought into her mother’s bed to be given her presents, for she began to say:

“Where is it, Mama?”

And when no one spoke:

“But I don’t see my little shoe!”

Félicité held her over the bed, while she was still looking toward the fireplace.

“Was it nurse that took it?” she asked.

And at that word, which carried her back in memory to her adulteries and her misfortunes, Madame Bovary turned her head away, as though in revulsion at another, stronger poison that was rising into her mouth. Berthe, meanwhile, was still on the bed.

“Oh, how big your eyes are, Mama! How pale you are! You’re sweating! …”

Her mother looked at her.

“I’m frightened!” said the little girl, drawing back.

Emma took her hand to kiss it; she struggled.

“That’s enough! Take her away!” cried Charles, who was sobbing in the alcove.

Then the symptoms stopped for a moment; she seemed less agitated;
and with each meaningless word she spoke, with each slightly calmer breath that came from her chest, he gained new hope. At last, when Canivet entered, he threw himself into his arms, weeping.

“Ah! It’s you! Thank you! You’re so kind! But things are going better now. Here, look at her …”

His colleague was not at all of that opinion, and
not beating about the bush
, as he put it, he prescribed an emetic to empty the stomach completely.

She was soon vomiting blood. Her lips pressed together more tightly. Her limbs were contracted, her body was covered with brown spots, and her pulse was slipping under their fingers like a taut thread, like a harp string about to snap.

Then she began to scream horribly. She cursed the poison, swore at it, implored it to be quick, and with her stiffened arms pushed away everything that Charles, in greater agony than she, tried to make her drink. He was standing, his handkerchief at his lips, his breath rasping in his throat, weeping and choked by sobs that shook him down to his heels; Félicité was rushing here and there in the room; Homais, motionless, kept sighing heavily; and Monsieur Canivet, though still maintaining his composure, was beginning to feel troubled.

“The devil! … and yet … she has been purged, and once the cause is removed …”

“The effect should cease,” said Homais; “it’s self-evident.”

“Well, save her!” exclaimed Bovary.

And so, without listening to the pharmacist, who was venturing the hypothesis that “this might be a salutary paroxysm,” Canivet was about to administer some theriaca when they heard the crack of a whip; all the windowpanes rattled, and a berlin drawn by three horses straining against their breast straps and spattered with mud up to their ears emerged in a single bound from the corner of the marketplace. It was Doctor Larivière.

The sudden appearance of a god would not have aroused more emotion. Bovary raised his hands, Canivet stopped short, and Homais removed his fez well before the doctor came in.

He belonged to that great school of surgery inspired by Bichat, to that now-vanished generation of philosopher-practitioners who cherished their art with a fanatical love and practiced it with enthusiasm and sagacity!
The entire hospital shook when he flew into a rage, and his pupils revered him so deeply that as soon as they established themselves, they would endeavor to imitate him as closely as possible; thus, in the surrounding towns, one would recognize, on their backs, his long quilted merino overcoat and his ample black tailcoat, whose unbuttoned cuffs partly covered his fleshy hands—his very fine hands, always gloveless, as though to be more prepared to plunge into human suffering. Disdainful of medals, titles, and academies, hospitable, generous, fatherly toward the poor, and practicing virtue without believing in it, he would almost have passed for a saint had not the shrewdness of his mind made him feared like a devil. His
gaze, keener than his lancet, would descend straight into your soul, past your excuses and your reticence, and disarticulate your every lie. And so he went on from day to day, full of the easy majesty that comes from an awareness of great talent, from wealth, and from forty years of an irreproachable life of hard work.

He frowned even in the doorway, seeing Emma’s cadaverous face as she lay on her back, her mouth open. Then, while appearing to listen to Canivet, he ran his forefinger under his nostrils and said several times:

“Good, good.”

But he gave a slow shrug of his shoulders. Bovary observed it; they looked at each other; and this man, though so used to the sight of grief, could not stop a tear from falling on his ruffled shirtfront.

He wanted to take Canivet into the next room. Charles followed him.

“She’s very bad, isn’t she? What if we applied mustard plasters—I don’t know! You must think of something—you who have saved so many lives!”

Charles put his arms around him and gazed at him in fear and entreaty, nearly fainting against his chest.

“Come now, my poor fellow, be brave! There’s nothing more to be done.”

And Doctor Larivière turned away.

“You’re leaving?”

“I’ll be back.”

He went out as though to give an order to the postilion, accompanied by Sieur Canivet, who was no more anxious than he was to see Emma die in his hands.

The pharmacist joined them on the square. He was incapable, by temperament, of staying away from a famous person. And so he beseeched Monsieur Larivière to do him the signal honor of being his guest at lunch.

They quickly sent for pigeons from the Lion d’Or, whatever the butcher had in the way of cutlets, cream from Tuvache, eggs from Lestiboudois, and the apothecary himself helped with the preparations while Madame Homais, tugging at the laces of her bodice, said:

“Please forgive us, monsieur; here in this desolate spot, if we don’t have a day’s warning …”

“The stemmed glasses!!!” hissed Homais.

“If we lived in the city, at least we’d be able to fall back on stuffed pigs’ feet.”

“Be quiet! … Please sit down, Doctor!”

He felt it appropriate, after the first few bites, to provide some details about the catastrophe:

“First we had a feeling of siccity in the pharynx, then intolerable pains in the epigastrium, then superpurgation and coma.”

“How did she poison herself?”

“I don’t know, Doctor—I’m not even sure where she could have procured the arsenious oxide.”

Justin, who was just then carrying in a stack of plates, was seized with a fit of trembling.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked the pharmacist.

At that question, the young man let everything fall to the floor with a great crash.

“Imbecile!” cried Homais. “Clumsy lout! Pathetic ass!”

But, abruptly controlling himself:

“I wanted, Doctor, to attempt an analysis, and
primo
, I carefully inserted into a tube …”

“It would have been better,” said the surgeon, “to insert your fingers into her throat.”

His colleague said nothing, having just a short time before received, in private, a severe rebuke concerning his emetic, so that this worthy Canivet, so arrogant and long-winded in the case of the clubfoot, was today very modest; he smiled without pause, in an approving manner.