Madame Bovary (36 page)

The curtain came down.

The smell of gas mingled with people’s breath; the breeze from the waving fans made the atmosphere even more stifling. Emma tried to go out, but the crowd was blocking the corridors, and she fell back into her seat with palpitations that made it hard for her to breathe. Charles, afraid of seeing her faint, hurried to the refreshment bar to get her a glass of barley water.

He had great difficulty returning to his seat, for people were bumping
his elbows at every step because of the glass he was holding in his hands, and in fact he spilled three-quarters of it over the shoulders of a Rouen woman in short sleeves, who, feeling the cold liquid run down her back, began to screech like a peacock, as though she were being murdered. Her husband, the owner of a spinning mill, flew into a rage against the clumsy fellow; and while with her handkerchief she was mopping the spots on her beautiful cherry-red taffeta dress, he kept muttering in surly tones the words “compensation,” “cost,” “reimbursement.” At last Charles reached his wife, saying breathlessly:

“Heavens, I thought I’d never get back! There’s such a crowd! … Such a crowd! …”

He added:

“Now, guess who I ran into up there. Monsieur Léon!”

“Léon?”

“Himself! He’ll be coming along to pay you his respects.”

And as he finished speaking, the former clerk from Yonville entered the box.

He held out his hand with a gentlemanly informality; and Madame Bovary, without thinking, offered her own, no doubt yielding to the attraction of a stronger will. She had not felt it since that spring evening when the rain was falling on the green leaves as they said goodbye to each other, standing beside the window. But quickly recalling herself to the proprieties of the situation, with an effort she shook off the indolence of her memories and began to stammer a few hurried phrases.

“Why, good evening! … What a surprise! …”

“Quiet!” cried a voice from the parterre, for the third act was beginning.

“So you’re here in Rouen now?”

“Yes.”

“Since when?”

“Shh! Go outside! Out!”

People were turning toward them; they fell silent.

But from that moment on, she no longer listened; and the chorus of guests, the scene between Ashton and his servant, the great duet in D major—for her, it all took place at a distance, as if the instruments had become less resonant and the characters more remote; she was
remembering the card party at the pharmacist’s house, and the walk to the wet nurse’s, the reading in the arbor, the intimate conversations by the fireside, the whole course of that modest love, so tranquil and so prolonged, so discreet, so tender, which she had nevertheless forgotten. Now why had he come back? What combination of events was bringing him back into her life? He was standing behind her, leaning his shoulder against the partition wall; and from time to time, she felt herself shiver under the warm breath from his nostrils that stirred her hair.

“Are you enjoying this?” he asked, bending over so close to her that the tip of his mustache brushed her cheek.

She answered nonchalantly:

“Oh, my Lord, no! Not particularly.”

Then he suggested that they leave the theater and go somewhere for an ice.

“Oh, not yet! Let’s stay!” said Bovary. “She’s let her hair down: something tragic’s probably about to happen.”

But the mad scene was not at all interesting to Emma, and the heroine’s acting seemed to her exaggerated.

“She’s shrieking too loudly,” she said, turning to Charles, who was listening.

“Yes … perhaps … a little,” he replied, torn between his frank enjoyment and the respect he had for his wife’s opinions.

Then Léon said, sighing:

“It’s so warm. It’s quite …”

“Unbearable! Yes.”

“Are you uncomfortable?” asked Bovary.

“Yes, I’m stifling; let’s go.”

Monsieur Léon carefully laid her long lace shawl over her shoulders, and the three of them went down to the port, where they sat in the open air in front of the windows of a café.

First they talked about her illness, although Emma interrupted Charles from time to time, afraid, she said, that Monsieur Léon might be bored; and Léon told them he had come to Rouen to spend two years in a busy practice, so as to accustom himself to the business, which was different in Normandy from the sort he had handled in Paris. Then he asked after Berthe, the Homais family, Mère Lefrançois; and since, in the presence
of the husband, they had no more to say to each other, the conversation soon died.

People coming from the theater passed by on the sidewalk, humming or bawling at the top of their lungs:
O bel ange, ma Lucie!
Then Léon, to show off his passion for the arts, began to talk music. He had seen Tamburini, Rubini, Persiani, Grisi; and compared to them, Lagardy, for all his grand outbursts, was nothing.

“And yet,” interrupted Charles, who was taking little bites of his rum sorbet, “they say that in the last act he’s really wonderful; I’m sorry we left before the end, because I was beginning to enjoy it.”

“Oh, well,” the clerk went on, “he’ll be giving another performance soon enough.”

But Charles answered that they were leaving the next day.

“Unless,” he added, turning to his wife, “you’d like to stay on alone, my pet?”

And, changing tactics in the face of this unexpected opportunity to see his hopes answered, the young man began praising Lagardy in the last song. It was something superb, sublime! At that, Charles insisted:

“You’d go back on Sunday. Come now, make up your mind to do it! You’d be wrong not to, if you have the least suspicion that it would do you good.”

Meanwhile, the tables around them were emptying; a waiter came and discreetly stationed himself near them; Charles understood and drew out his purse; the clerk held him back by the arm and even remembered to leave another two silver coins, which he clinked down on the marble.

“Really,” murmured Bovary, “I don’t like you to spend your money …”

The other made a dismissive gesture full of cordiality, and, taking up his hat:

“It’s settled, then? Tomorrow, at six o’clock?”

Charles exclaimed again that he could not be away any longer; but nothing prevented Emma …

“It’s just that …,” she stammered with an odd smile, “I’m not really sure …”

“Well! We’ll see, you’ll think it over, you’ll know better in the morning …”

Then to Léon, who was walking along with them:

“Now that you’re in our neighborhood again, I hope you’ll come by, from time to time, and stay for dinner?”

The clerk declared that he certainly would, since he needed to go to Yonville anyway on a matter concerning his firm. And they parted by the passage Saint-Herbland, just as eleven-thirty was striking at the cathedral.

Monsieur Léon, while pursuing his legal studies, had quite often frequented La Chaumière, where in fact he enjoyed quite nice successes among the grisettes, who found him
distinguished.
He was the most seemly of students: he wore his hair neither too long nor too short, did not squander all of his quarter’s allowance on the first of the month, and kept on good terms with his professors. As for excesses, he had always refrained from committing them, as much from timidity as from fastidiousness.

Often, when he remained in his room reading, or sat in the evening under the lime trees of the Luxembourg, he would let his Code fall to the ground, and the memory of Emma would come back to him. But little by little, his feeling weakened, and other desires accumulated on top of it, though it still persisted through them; for Léon had not lost all hope, and for him a sort of uncertain promise hovered in the future, like a golden fruit hanging from some fantastic leafy bough.

Then, when he saw her again after an absence of three years, his passion reawakened. He must at last resolve, he thought, to attempt to possess her. What was more, his shyness had worn away from contact with wild companions, and he returned to the provinces scornful of all who had not stepped with a patent-leather foot on the asphalt of the boulevards. Before a Parisienne in lace, in the salon of some illustrious physician, a person of importance with medals and a carriage, the poor clerk, no doubt, would have trembled like a child; but here in Rouen, by the quay, with the wife of this small country practitioner, he felt at ease, certain in advance that he would dazzle her. Self-confidence depends upon surroundings: one does not speak the same way in a grand apartment as in a garret, and a rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.

Upon taking leave of Monsieur and Madame Bovary the night before, Léon had followed them, at a distance, down the street; then, having seen them stop at the Croix Rouge, he had turned back and spent the whole night devising a plan.

The next day at about five o’clock, therefore, he entered the kitchen of the inn, his throat tight, his cheeks pale, with the resolve of the timid man who will be stopped by nothing.

“Monsieur is not here,” answered a servant.

This seemed to him a good omen. He went up.

She was not disturbed that he had come; on the contrary, she apologized for having forgotten to tell him where they were staying.

“Oh! I guessed,” Léon said.

“How?”

He claimed that a kind of instinct had guided him to her, by chance. She began to smile, and immediately, in order to rectify his blunder, Léon told her he had spent his morning looking for her in every hotel in the city, one after another.

“So you decided to stay?” he added.

“Yes,” she said, “and I was wrong. One shouldn’t accustom oneself to impractical pleasures when one is surrounded by so many demands …”

“Oh! I can imagine …”

“Oh, no, you can’t! Because you’re not a woman.”

But men had their troubles, too, and the conversation began with some philosophical reflections. Emma went on at length about the wretchedness of earthly affections and the eternal isolation in which the heart remains entombed.

To show himself to good advantage, or quite naturally imitating her melancholy, which was inspiring his own, the young man declared that he had been prodigiously bored throughout his studies. Legal procedure irritated him, other vocations attracted him, and his mother, in her letters, never stopped tormenting him. For they were becoming more and more specific about the causes of their unhappiness, both, as they spoke, growing more ardent as this progressive unburdening continued. But they would sometimes stop before the complete disclosure of a thought and would then try to imagine a phrase that could express it anyway. She did not confess her passion for another man; he did not say that he had forgotten her.

Perhaps he no longer remembered those suppers following the costume balls, with girls dressed as stevedores; and she probably did not recall the meetings of earlier days, when she would run through the grass in the morning to her lover’s château. The sounds of the city barely reached them; and the room seemed small, as if designed to draw their solitude in more closely around them. Emma, in a dimity dressing gown, leaned
her chignon against the back of the old armchair; the yellow wallpaper made a sort of golden ground behind her; and her bare head was repeated in the mirror, with its white parting in the middle and the lobes of her ears showing below the bands of her hair.

“Oh, forgive me,” she said. “This is wrong of me! I’m boring you with my eternal complaints!”

“No, never! Never!”

“If only you knew,” she went on, raising her lovely, tear-filled eyes to the ceiling, “all that I had dreamed of.”

“I, too! Oh, how I suffered! Often, I would go out, I would walk, I would wander along the quays, dizzying myself with the noise of the crowd, without being able to drive away the obsession that was hounding me. In a print shop on the boulevard, there’s an Italian engraving showing one of the Muses. She’s draped in a tunic and looking at the moon, with her hair down and forget-me-nots in it. Something kept compelling me to go there; I would stay for hours at a time.”

Then, his voice trembling: