Madame Bovary (8 page)

She sat down and took up her work again, a white cotton stocking to which she was making repairs; she sewed with her forehead lowered; she did not speak, nor did Charles. A draft of air, passing under the door, pushed a little dust over the stone floor; he watched it drift and heard only the pulse beating inside his head, and the cry of a hen, in the distance, laying an egg in the yard. Emma, from time to time, would cool her cheeks by pressing against them the palms of her hands, which she would then chill on the iron knobs of the great firedogs.

She complained of having suffered, since the beginning of the season, from dizzy spells; she asked if sea bathing would be useful; she began to talk about the convent, Charles about his school, words came to them. They went up to her room. She showed him her old music notebooks, the small books she had been given as prizes, and the wreaths made of oak leaves, left in the bottom of a cupboard. She talked to him, too, about her mother, about the cemetery, and even showed him, in the garden, the bed from which she gathered flowers, on the first Friday of each month, to put on her grave. But their gardener understood nothing; their servants were so bad! She would have liked very much, if only during the winter at least, to live in town, although the long, fine days made the country perhaps even more tiresome during the summer;—and depending on what she was saying, her voice was clear, high-pitched, or suddenly languorous, trailing off in modulations that
sank almost to a murmur, when she was talking to herself,—sometimes joyful, her eyes wide and innocent, and sometimes half closing her lids, her gaze drowned in boredom, her thoughts wandering.

That evening, as he was returning home, Charles took up again one by one the words she had used, trying to recall them, to complete their meaning, in order to re-create for himself the portion of her life that she had lived during the time when he did not yet know her. But he could never see her, in his mind, differently from the way he had seen her the first time, or the way he had just left her. Then he wondered what would become of her, whether she would marry, and whom. Alas! Père Rouault was very rich, and she! … so lovely! But Emma’s face kept returning to linger before his eyes, and something monotonous like the drone of a top kept buzzing in his ears: “But what if you were to get married! What if you
were to get married!” That night, he could not sleep, his throat was tight, he was thirsty; he got up to drink from his water jug, and he opened the window; the sky was covered with stars, a warm wind was
passing, in the distance, dogs were barking. He turned his face toward Les Bertaux.

Thinking that after all he had nothing to lose, Charles resolved to put the question when the opportunity arose; but each time it did arise, his fear of not finding the proper words sealed his lips.

Père Rouault would not have been sorry to have someone relieve him of his daughter, who was hardly any use to him in his house. Inwardly he excused her, believing she had too much spirit for farming, a vocation accursed by heaven, since one never saw a millionaire involved in it. Far from having made a fortune, the poor fellow was losing money every year: for though he excelled in the marketplace, where he took pleasure in the stratagems of the job, farming itself, with the interior management of the farm, suited him less than anyone. He never willingly took his hands out of his pockets, and spared no expense for anything to do with his life, wanting good food, a good fire, and a good bed. He liked hard cider, a rare leg of lamb,
glorias
well beaten. He took his meals in the kitchen, alone, facing the fire, at a little table they brought to him already set, as in the theater.

And so when he noticed that Charles’s cheeks turned red in the presence of his daughter, which meant that one of these days Charles would ask for her hand in marriage, he pondered the whole matter in advance. He certainly found him a little
puny
, and this wasn’t the sort of son-in-law he would have wished for; but he was said to be sober in his habits, thrifty, well educated, and he would probably not haggle too much over the dowry. Therefore, since Père Rouault was going to be forced to sell twenty-two acres of
his property
, since he owed a good deal to the mason, a good deal to the harness maker, since the shaft of the press needed to be repaired:

“If he asks me for her,” he said to himself, “I’ll give her to him.”

Around Michaelmas, Charles had come to spend three days at Les Bertaux. The last had slipped away like the ones before, receding from one quarter hour to the next quarter hour. Père Rouault was seeing him on his way; they were walking in a sunken lane, they were about to take leave of each other; this was the moment. Charles gave himself as far as the corner of the hedge, and at last, when they had passed it:

“Maître Rouault,” he murmured, “I have something I would like to say to you.”

They stopped. Charles was silent.

“Well, tell me what’s on your mind! Don’t I know all about it already?” said Père Rouault, laughing gently.

“Père Rouault … Père Rouault,” stammered Charles.

“For my part I couldn’t ask anything better,” continued the farmer. “My little girl probably feels the same, but still, we must put it to her and see. You be on your way, then; I’m going back to the house. If it’s yes, understand, you won’t have to come back, because of the other folks, and besides, it would be too much for her. But so you don’t sweat blood, I’ll push the shutter wide open against the wall: you’ll be able to see it back there, if you lean over the hedge.”

And he went off.

Charles tied his horse to a tree. He hurried to stand in the path; he waited. Half an hour passed, then he counted nineteen minutes on his watch. Suddenly there was a noise against the wall; the shutter had been folded back, the latch was still quivering.

The next day, at nine o’clock, he was at the farm. Emma blushed when he went in, while trying to laugh a little, to maintain her composure. Père Rouault embraced his future son-in-law. They put off talking about the financial arrangements; they had, after all, some time ahead of them, since the marriage could not decently take place before the end of Charles’s mourning, that is, toward the spring of the following year.

The winter was spent in expectation of this. Mademoiselle Rouault busied herself with her trousseau. Part of it was ordered in Rouen, and she made some chemises and nightcaps for herself from fashion patterns that she borrowed. During the visits that Charles paid to the farm, they would talk about the preparations for the wedding; they would wonder which room the dinner should be given in; they would muse over the number of courses that would be needed and what the entrées would be.

Emma, however, would have liked to be married at midnight, by torchlight; but Père Rouault found the idea incomprehensible. So there was a wedding celebration to which forty-three people came, during which they remained at table for sixteen hours, which started up again the next day and carried over a little into the days that followed.

The guests arrived early in carriages, one-horse jaunting-cars, two-wheeled charabancs, old gigs without tops, spring-carts with leather curtains, and the young people from the nearest villages in wagons in which they stood in lines, resting their hands on the rails to keep from falling, going at a trot and badly shaken about. Some came from ten leagues away, from Goderville, from Normanville, and from Cany. All the relatives of both families had been invited, quarrels with friends had been mended, letters had been sent to acquaintances long lost from sight.

From time to time, a whip would be heard cracking behind the hedge; soon the gate would open: it was a cariole entering. Galloping to the bottom of the front steps, it would stop short and discharge its passengers, who would emerge from all sides rubbing their knees and stretching their arms. The ladies, in bonnets, wore dresses in the fashion of the town, gold watch chains, tippets with the ends crossed under their belts, or small colored fichus attached in the back with a pin, showing the napes of their necks. The little boys, dressed the same as their papas, seemed uncomfortable in their new suits (indeed, many of them were wearing a pair of boots that day for the first time in their lives), and one would see next to them, breathing not a word in the white dress from her first communion, lengthened for the event, some tall girl of fourteen or sixteen, probably a cousin or older sister, red in the face, gaping, her hair greased with rose pomade, very much
afraid of soiling her gloves. Since there were not nearly enough stableboys to unhitch all the carriages, the gentlemen turned up their sleeves and went to it themselves. According to their different social positions, they wore tailcoats, frock coats, long jackets, cutaways—good tailcoats, embraced by a family’s highest esteem and taken from the cupboard only on solemn occasions; frock coats with great skirts that floated in the wind, cylindrical collars, pockets as ample as bags; jackets of coarse cloth, ordinarily worn with some sort of cap circled with brass at its visor; very short cutaways, with two buttons in the back set close together like a pair of eyes and panels that seemed to have been cut from a single block of wood by a carpenter’s ax. A few others still (but these, of course, would be dining at the foot of the table) were wearing dress smocks, that is, with collars folded down on
the shoulders, backs gathered in small
pleats, and waists fastened very low with a stitched belt.

And the shirts bulged from the chests like breastplates! Every man was freshly shorn, ears stuck out from heads, cheeks were close-shaven; some, indeed, who had risen before dawn, not having been able to see clearly as they shaved, had diagonal gashes under their noses or, along their jaws, patches of peeled skin as broad as three-franc ecus, which, inflamed by the cold air during the ride, marbled with pink patches all those great beaming white faces.

Since the town hall was half a league from the farm, they went there on foot and came back in the same manner, after the ceremony had been performed at the church. The procession, at first united like a single colorful scarf, undulating over the countryside, along the narrow path winding between the green wheat fields, soon lengthened out and broke up into different groups that loitered to talk. The fiddler walked in front, his violin trimmed with ribbons at its scroll; then came the married couple, the relatives, the friends in no particular order; and the children lagged behind, amusing themselves tearing the bell-shaped flowers off the oat stems or playing among themselves, out of sight. Emma’s dress, too long, trailed a little at the hem; from time to time, she would stop to lift it up, and then, delicately, with her gloved fingers, she would remove the coarse grass and small spikes of thistle, while Charles, his hands empty, waited until she had
finished. Père Rouault, a new silk hat on his head and the cuffs of his black coat covering his hands down to the nails, gave his arm to the elder Madame Bovary. As for the elder Monsieur Bovary, who, really despising all these people, had come simply in a frock coat of military cut with one row of buttons, he was delivering barroom compliments to a blond young peasant woman. She bowed her head, blushed, not knowing what to answer. The others in the wedding party talked business or played tricks behind one another’s backs, rousing their spirits in advance; and if one listened, one could always hear the scraping of the fiddler, who went on playing across the fields. When he noticed that the others were far behind him, he would stop to catch his breath, rub his bow with rosin for a long time so that the strings would squeak all the more loudly, and then begin walking again, lowering and raising the neck of his violin by turns, to mark the beat firmly for himself.
The noise of the instrument frightened away the little birds for a long distance around him.

It was in the cart shed that the table had been set up. On it there were four roasts of beef, six fricassées of chicken, stewed veal, three legs of mutton, and, in the middle, a nice roast suckling pig, flanked by four andouille sausages flavored with sorrel. At the corners stood the eau-de-vie, in carafes. Sweet cider in bottles pushed its thick foam up around the corks, and every glass had been filled to the brim, beforehand, with wine. Large plates of yellow custard that quivered at the slightest knock to the table displayed, on their smooth surfaces, the initials of the newlyweds drawn in arabesques of nonpareils. They had gone to Yvetot to find a pastry cook for the tarts and the nougats. Since he was just starting up in the area, he had done things carefully; and he himself carried in, at dessert time, a masterpiece of confection that caused people to cry out. At the base, first, there was a square of blue cardboard representing a
temple with porticoes, colonnades, and statuettes of stucco all around, in niches spangled with gold paper stars; then on the second tier was a castle keep made of sponge cake, surrounded by tiny fortifications of angelica, almonds, raisins, and orange sections; and lastly, on the topmost layer, which was a green meadow with rocks and with lakes made of jam and boats of nutshells, a little Cupid was swinging on a chocolate swing whose two poles ended in two real rosebuds, for knobs, at the top.

They ate until nightfall. When they were tired of sitting down, they would go for a walk in the farmyards or play a game of cork-penny in the barn; then they would come back to the table. A few of them, toward the end, fell asleep there and snored. But at coffee time, everything came to life again; they broke into song, they had contests of strength, they lifted weights, they played “under my thumb,” they tried to raise the carts onto their shoulders, they said off-color things, they kissed the ladies. At night, when it was time to leave, the horses, gorged to the nostrils with oats, could hardly get into the shafts; they kicked, they reared, they broke their harnesses, their masters swore or laughed; and all night long, in the moonlight, along the country roads, there were runaway carriages racing at full gallop, bounding into ditches, leaping over stretches of gravel, catching on embankments, with women leaning out the door to seize the
reins.