Chapter Twelve
They began to love one another again. Often, even in the middle
of the day, Emma suddenly wrote to him, then from the window made
a sign to Justin, who, taking his apron off, quickly ran to La
Huchette. Rodolphe would come; she had sent for him to tell him
that she was bored, that her husband was odious, her life
frightful.
"But what can I do?" he cried one day impatiently.
"Ah! if you would--"
She was sitting on the floor between his knees, her hair loose,
her look lost.
"Why, what?" said Rodolphe.
She sighed.
"We would go and live elsewhere--somewhere!"
"You are really mad!" he said laughing. "How could that be
possible?"
She returned to the subject; he pretended not to understand, and
turned the conversation.
What he did not understand was all this worry about so simple an
affair as love. She had a motive, a reason, and, as it were, a
pendant to her affection.
Her tenderness, in fact, grew each day with her repulsion to her
husband. The more she gave up herself to the one, the more she
loathed the other. Never had Charles seemed to her so
disagreeable, to have such stodgy fingers, such vulgar ways, to
be so dull as when they found themselves together after her
meeting with Rodolphe. Then, while playing the spouse and virtue,
she was burning at the thought of that head whose black hair fell
in a curl over the sunburnt brow, of that form at once so strong
and elegant, of that man, in a word, who had such experience in
his reasoning, such passion in his desires. It was for him that
she filed her nails with the care of a chaser, and that there was
never enough cold-cream for her skin, nor of patchouli for her
handkerchiefs. She loaded herself with bracelets, rings, and
necklaces. When he was coming she filled the two large blue glass
vases with roses, and prepared her room and her person like a
courtesan expecting a prince. The servant had to be constantly
washing linen, and all day Felicite did not stir from the
kitchen, where little Justin, who often kept her company, watched
her at work.
With his elbows on the long board on which she was ironing, he
greedily watched all these women's clothes spread about him, the
dimity petticoats, the fichus, the collars, and the drawers with
running strings, wide at the hips and growing narrower below.
"What is that for?" asked the young fellow, passing his hand over
the crinoline or the hooks and eyes.
"Why, haven't you ever seen anything?" Felicite answered
laughing. "As if your mistress, Madame Homais, didn't wear the
same."
"Oh, I daresay! Madame Homais!" And he added with a meditative
air, "As if she were a lady like madame!"
But Felicite grew impatient of seeing him hanging round her. She
was six years older than he, and Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's
servant, was beginning to pay court to her.
"Let me alone," she said, moving her pot of starch. "You'd better
be off and pound almonds; you are always dangling about women.
Before you meddle with such things, bad boy, wait till you've got
a beard to your chin."
"Oh, don't be cross! I'll go and clean her boots."
And he at once took down from the shelf Emma's boots, all coated
with mud, the mud of the rendezvous, that crumbled into powder
beneath his fingers, and that he watched as it gently rose in a
ray of sunlight.
"How afraid you are of spoiling them!" said the servant, who
wasn't so particular when she cleaned them herself, because as
soon as the stuff of the boots was no longer fresh madame handed
them over to her.
Emma had a number in her cupboard that she squandered one after
the other, without Charles allowing himself the slightest
observation. So also he disbursed three hundred francs for a
wooden leg that she thought proper to make a present of to
Hippolyte. Its top was covered with cork, and it had spring
joints, a complicated mechanism, covered over by black trousers
ending in a patent-leather boot. But Hippolyte, not daring to use
such a handsome leg every day, begged Madame Bovary to get him
another more convenient one. The doctor, of course, had again to
defray the expense of this purchase.
So little by little the stable-man took up his work again. One
saw him running about the village as before, and when Charles
heard from afar the sharp noise of the wooden leg, he at once
went in another direction.
It was Monsieur Lheureux, the shopkeeper, who had undertaken the
order; this provided him with an excuse for visiting Emma. He
chatted with her about the new goods from Paris, about a thousand
feminine trifles, made himself very obliging, and never asked for
his money. Emma yielded to this lazy mode of satisfying all her
caprices. Thus she wanted to have a very handsome ridding-whip
that was at an umbrella-maker's at Rouen to give to Rodolphe. The
week after Monsieur Lheureux placed it on her table.
But the next day he called on her with a bill for two hundred and
seventy francs, not counting the centimes. Emma was much
embarrassed; all the drawers of the writing-table were empty;
they owed over a fortnight's wages to Lestiboudois, two quarters
to the servant, for any quantity of other things, and Bovary was
impatiently expecting Monsieur Derozeray's account, which he was
in the habit of paying every year about Midsummer.
She succeeded at first in putting off Lheureux. At last he lost
patience; he was being sued; his capital was out, and unless he
got some in he should be forced to take back all the goods she
had received.
"Oh, very well, take them!" said Emma.
"I was only joking," he replied; "the only thing I regret is the
whip. My word! I'll ask monsieur to return it to me."
"No, no!" she said.
"Ah! I've got you!" thought Lheureux.
And, certain of his discovery, he went out repeating to himself
in an undertone, and with his usual low whistle--
"Good! we shall see! we shall see!"
She was thinking how to get out of this when the servant coming
in put on the mantelpiece a small roll of blue paper "from
Monsieur Derozeray's." Emma pounced upon and opened it. It
contained fifteen napoleons; it was the account. She heard
Charles on the stairs; threw the gold to the back of her drawer,
and took out the key.
Three days after Lheureux reappeared.
"I have an arrangement to suggest to you," he said. "If, instead
of the sum agreed on, you would take--"
"Here it is," she said placing fourteen napoleons in his hand.
The tradesman was dumfounded. Then, to conceal his
disappointment, he was profuse in apologies and proffers of
service, all of which Emma declined; then she remained a few
moments fingering in the pocket of her apron the two five-franc
pieces that he had given her in change. She promised herself she
would economise in order to pay back later on. "Pshaw!" she
thought, "he won't think about it again."
Besides the riding-whip with its silver-gilt handle, Rodolphe had
received a seal with the motto Amor nel cor* furthermore, a scarf
for a muffler, and, finally, a cigar-case exactly like the
Viscount's, that Charles had formerly picked up in the road, and
that Emma had kept. These presents, however, humiliated him; he
refused several; she insisted, and he ended by obeying, thinking
her tyrannical and overexacting.
*A loving heart.
Then she had strange ideas.
"When midnight strikes," she said, "you must think of me."
And if he confessed that he had not thought of her, there were
floods of reproaches that always ended with the eternal question--
"Do you love me?"
"Why, of course I love you," he answered.
"A great deal?"
"Certainly!"
"You haven't loved any others?"
"Did you think you'd got a virgin?" he exclaimed laughing.
Emma cried, and he tried to console her, adorning his
protestations with puns.
"Oh," she went on, "I love you! I love you so that I could not
live without you, do you see? There are times when I long to see
you again, when I am torn by all the anger of love. I ask myself,
Where is he? Perhaps he is talking to other women. They smile
upon him; he approaches. Oh no; no one else pleases you. There
are some more beautiful, but I love you best. I know how to love
best. I am your servant, your concubine! You are my king, my
idol! You are good, you are beautiful, you are clever, you are
strong!"
He had so often heard these things said that they did not strike
him as original. Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm
of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the
eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and
the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much
experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of
expression. Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such
words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers;
exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be
discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes
overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give
the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of
his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle,
on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to
move the stars.
But with that superior critical judgment that belongs to him who,
in no matter what circumstance, holds back, Rodolphe saw other
delights to be got out of this love. He thought all modesty in
the way. He treated her quite sans facon.* He made of her
something supple and corrupt. Hers was an idiotic sort of
attachment, full of admiration for him, of voluptuousness for
her, a beatitude that benumbed her; her soul sank into this
drunkenness, shrivelled up, drowned in it, like Clarence in his
butt of Malmsey.
*Off-handedly.
By the mere effect of her love Madame Bovary's manners changed.
Her looks grew bolder, her speech more free; she even committed
the impropriety of walking out with Monsieur Rodolphe, a
cigarette in her mouth, "as if to defy the people." At last,
those who still doubted doubted no longer when one day they saw
her getting out of the "Hirondelle," her waist squeezed into a
waistcoat like a man; and Madame Bovary senior, who, after a
fearful scene with her husband, had taken refuge at her son's,
was not the least scandalised of the women-folk. Many other
things displeased her. First, Charles had not attended to her
advice about the forbidding of novels; then the "ways of the
house" annoyed her; she allowed herself to make some remarks, and
there were quarrels, especially one on account of Felicite.
Madame Bovary senior, the evening before, passing along the
passage, had surprised her in company of a man--a man with a
brown collar, about forty years old, who, at the sound of her
step, had quickly escaped through the kitchen. Then Emma began to
laugh, but the good lady grew angry, declaring that unless morals
were to be laughed at one ought to look after those of one's
servants.
"Where were you brought up?" asked the daughter-in-law, with so
impertinent a look that Madame Bovary asked her if she were not
perhaps defending her own case.
"Leave the room!" said the young woman, springing up with a
bound.
"Emma! Mamma!" cried Charles, trying to reconcile them.
But both had fled in their exasperation. Emma was stamping her
feet as she repeated--
"Oh! what manners! What a peasant!"
He ran to his mother; she was beside herself. She stammered
"She is an insolent, giddy-headed thing, or perhaps worse!"
And she was for leaving at once if the other did not apologise.
So Charles went back again to his wife and implored her to give
way; he knelt to her; she ended by saying--
"Very well! I'll go to her."
And in fact she held out her hand to her mother-in-law with the
dignity of a marchioness as she said--
"Excuse me, madame."
Then, having gone up again to her room, she threw herself flat on
her bed and cried there like a child, her face buried in the
pillow.
She and Rodolphe had agreed that in the event of anything
extraordinary occurring, she should fasten a small piece of white
paper to the blind, so that if by chance he happened to be in
Yonville, he could hurry to the lane behind the house. Emma made
the signal; she had been waiting three-quarters of an hour when
she suddenly caught sight of Rodolphe at the corner of the
market. She felt tempted to open the window and call him, but he
had already disappeared. She fell back in despair.
Soon, however, it seemed to her that someone was walking on the
pavement. It was he, no doubt. She went downstairs, crossed the
yard. He was there outside. She threw herself into his arms.
"Do take care!" he said.
"Ah! if you knew!" she replied.
And she began telling him everything, hurriedly, disjointedly,
exaggerating the facts, inventing many, and so prodigal of
parentheses that he understood nothing of it.
"Come, my poor angel, courage! Be comforted! be patient!"
"But I have been patient; I have suffered for four years. A love
like ours ought to show itself in the face of heaven. They
torture me! I can bear it no longer! Save me!"
She clung to Rodolphe. Her eyes, full of tears, flashed like
flames beneath a wave; her breast heaved; he had never loved her
so much, so that he lost his head and said "What is, it? What do
you wish?"
"Take me away," she cried, "carry me off! Oh, I pray you!"
And she threw herself upon his mouth, as if to seize there the
unexpected consent if breathed forth in a kiss.
"But--" Rodolphe resumed.
"What?"
"Your little girl!"
She reflected a few moments, then replied--
"We will take her! It can't be helped!"
"What a woman!" he said to himself, watching her as she went. For
she had run into the garden. Someone was calling her.
On the following days Madame Bovary senior was much surprised at
the change in her daughter-in-law. Emma, in fact, was showing
herself more docile, and even carried her deference so far as to
ask for a recipe for pickling gherkins.
Was it the better to deceive them both? Or did she wish by a sort
of voluptuous stoicism to feel the more profoundly the bitterness
of the things she was about to leave?
But she paid no heed to them; on the contrary, she lived as lost
in the anticipated delight of her coming happiness.
It was an eternal subject for conversation with Rodolphe. She
leant on his shoulder murmuring--
"Ah! when we are in the mail-coach! Do you think about it? Can it
be? It seems to me that the moment I feel the carriage start, it
will be as if we were rising in a balloon, as if we were setting
out for the clouds. Do you know that I count the hours? And you?"
Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this period; she
had that indefinable beauty that results from joy, from
enthusiasm, from success, and that is only the harmony of
temperament with circumstances. Her desires, her sorrows, the
experience of pleasure, and her ever-young illusions, that had,
as soil and rain and winds and the sun make flowers grow,
gradually developed her, and she at length blossomed forth in all
the plenitude of her nature. Her eyelids seemed chiselled
expressly for her long amorous looks in which the pupil
disappeared, while a strong inspiration expanded her delicate
nostrils and raised the fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the
light by a little black down. One would have thought that an
artist apt in conception had arranged the curls of hair upon her
neck; they fell in a thick mass, negligently, and with the
changing chances of their adultery, that unbound them every day.
Her voice now took more mellow infections, her figure also;
something subtle and penetrating escaped even from the folds of
her gown and from the line of her foot. Charles, as when they
were first married, thought her delicious and quite irresistible.
When he came home in the middle of the night, he did not dare to
wake her. The porcelain night-light threw a round trembling gleam
upon the ceiling, and the drawn curtains of the little cot formed
as it were a white hut standing out in the shade, and by the
bedside Charles looked at them. He seemed to hear the light
breathing of his child. She would grow big now; every season
would bring rapid progress. He already saw her coming from school
as the day drew in, laughing, with ink-stains on her jacket, and
carrying her basket on her arm. Then she would have to be sent to
the boarding-school; that would cost much; how was it to be done?
Then he reflected. He thought of hiring a small farm in the
neighbourhood, that he would superintend every morning on his way
to his patients. He would save up what he brought in; he would
put it in the savings-bank. Then he would buy shares somewhere,
no matter where; besides, his practice would increase; he counted
upon that, for he wanted Berthe to be well-educated, to be
accomplished, to learn to play the piano. Ah! how pretty she
would be later on when she was fifteen, when, resembling her
mother, she would, like her, wear large straw hats in the
summer-time; from a distance they would be taken for two sisters.
He pictured her to himself working in the evening by their side
beneath the light of the lamp; she would embroider him slippers;
she would look after the house; she would fill all the home with
her charm and her gaiety. At last, they would think of her
marriage; they would find her some good young fellow with a
steady business; he would make her happy; this would last for
ever.
Emma was not asleep; she pretended to be; and while he dozed off
by her side she awakened to other dreams.
To the gallop of four horses she was carried away for a week
towards a new land, whence they would return no more. They went
on and on, their arms entwined, without a word. Often from the
top of a mountain there suddenly glimpsed some splendid city with
domes, and bridges, and ships, forests of citron trees, and
cathedrals of white marble, on whose pointed steeples were
storks' nests. They went at a walking-pace because of the great
flag-stones, and on the ground there were bouquets of flowers,
offered you by women dressed in red bodices. They heard the
chiming of bells, the neighing of mules, together with the murmur
of guitars and the noise of fountains, whose rising spray
refreshed heaps of fruit arranged like a pyramid at the foot of
pale statues that smiled beneath playing waters. And then, one
night they came to a fishing village, where brown nets were
drying in the wind along the cliffs and in front of the huts. It
was there that they would stay; they would live in a low,
flat-roofed house, shaded by a palm-tree, in the heart of a gulf,
by the sea. They would row in gondolas, swing in hammocks, and
their existence would be easy and large as their silk gowns, warm
and star-spangled as the nights they would contemplate. However,
in the immensity of this future that she conjured up, nothing
special stood forth; the days, all magnificent, resembled
each other like waves; and it swayed in the horizon, infinite,
harmonised, azure, and bathed in sunshine. But the child began to
cough in her cot or Bovary snored more loudly, and Emma did not
fall asleep till morning, when the dawn whitened the windows, and
when little Justin was already in the square taking down the
shutters of the chemist's shop.
She had sent for Monsieur Lheureux, and had said to him--
"I want a cloak--a large lined cloak with a deep collar."
"You are going on a journey?" he asked.
"No; but--never mind. I may count on you, may I not, and
quickly?"
He bowed.
"Besides, I shall want," she went on, "a trunk--not too heavy--
handy."
"Yes, yes, I understand. About three feet by a foot and a half,
as they are being made just now."
"And a travelling bag."
"Decidedly," thought Lheureux. "there's a row on here."
"And," said Madame Bovary, taking her watch from her belt, "take
this; you can pay yourself out of it."
But the tradesman cried out that she was wrong; they knew one
another; did he doubt her? What childishness!
She insisted, however, on his taking at least the chain, and
Lheureux had already put it in his pocket and was going, when she
called him back.
"You will leave everything at your place. As to the cloak"--she
seemed to be reflecting--"do not bring it either; you can give me
the maker's address, and tell him to have it ready for me."
It was the next month that they were to run away. She was to
leave Yonville as if she was going on some business to Rouen.
Rodolphe would have booked the seats, procured the passports, and
even have written to Paris in order to have the whole mail-coach
reserved for them as far as Marseilles, where they would buy a
carriage, and go on thence without stopping to Genoa. She would
take care to send her luggage to Lheureux whence it would be
taken direct to the "Hirondelle," so that no one would have any
suspicion. And in all this there never was any allusion to the
child. Rodolphe avoided speaking of her; perhaps he no longer
thought about it.
He wished to have two more weeks before him to arrange some
affairs; then at the end of a week he wanted two more; then he
said he was ill; next he went on a journey. The month of August
passed, and, after all these delays, they decided that it was to
be irrevocably fixed for the 4th September--a Monday.
At length the Saturday before arrived.
Rodolphe came in the evening earlier than usual.
"Everything is ready?" she asked him.
"Yes."
Then they walked round a garden-bed, and went to sit down near
the terrace on the kerb-stone of the wall.
"You are sad," said Emma.
"No; why?"
And yet he looked at her strangely in a tender fashion.
"It is because you are going away?" she went on; "because you are
leaving what is dear to you--your life? Ah! I understand. I have
nothing in the world! you are all to me; so shall I be to you. I
will be your people, your country; I will tend, I will love you!"
"How sweet you are!" he said, seizing her in his arms.
"Really!" she said with a voluptuous laugh. "Do you love me?
Swear it then!"
"Do I love you--love you? I adore you, my love."
The moon, full and purple-coloured, was rising right out of the
earth at the end of the meadow. She rose quickly between the
branches of the poplars, that hid her here and there like a black
curtain pierced with holes. Then she appeared dazzling with
whiteness in the empty heavens that she lit up, and now sailing
more slowly along, let fall upon the river a great stain that
broke up into an infinity of stars; and the silver sheen seemed
to writhe through the very depths like a heedless serpent covered
with luminous scales; it also resembled some monster candelabra
all along which sparkled drops of diamonds running together. The
soft night was about them; masses of shadow filled the branches.
Emma, her eyes half closed, breathed in with deep sighs the fresh
wind that was blowing. They did not speak, lost as they were in
the rush of their reverie. The tenderness of the old days came
back to their hearts, full and silent as the flowing river, with
the softness of the perfume of the syringas, and threw across
their memories shadows more immense and more sombre than those of
the still willows that lengthened out over the grass. Often some
night-animal, hedgehog or weasel, setting out on the hunt,
disturbed the lovers, or sometimes they heard a ripe peach
falling all alone from the espalier.
"Ah! what a lovely night!" said Rodolphe.
"We shall have others," replied Emma; and, as if speaking to
herself: "Yet, it will be good to travel. And yet, why should my
heart be so heavy? Is it dread of the unknown? The effect of
habits left? Or rather--? No; it is the excess of happiness. How
weak I am, am I not? Forgive me!"
"There is still time!" he cried. "Reflect! perhaps you may
repent!"
"Never!" she cried impetuously. And coming closer to him: "What
ill could come to me? There is no desert, no precipice, no ocean
I would not traverse with you. The longer we live together the
more it will be like an embrace, every day closer, more heart to
heart. There will be nothing to trouble us, no cares, no
obstacle. We shall be alone, all to ourselves eternally. Oh,
speak! Answer me!"
At regular intervals he answered, "Yes--Yes--" She had passed her
hands through his hair, and she repeated in a childlike voice,
despite the big tears which were falling, "Rodolphe! Rodolphe!
Ah! Rodolphe! dear little Rodolphe!"
Midnight struck.
"Midnight!" said she. "Come, it is to-morrow. One day more!"
He rose to go; and as if the movement he made had been the signal
for their flight, Emma said, suddenly assuming a gay air--
"You have the passports?"
"Yes."
"You are forgetting nothing?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Certainly."
"It is at the Hotel de Provence, is it not, that you will wait
for me at midday?"
He nodded.
"Till to-morrow then!" said Emma in a last caress; and she
watched him go.
He did not turn round. She ran after him, and, leaning over the
water's edge between the bulrushes
"To-morrow!" she cried.
He was already on the other side of the river and walking fast
across the meadow.
After a few moments Rodolphe stopped; and when he saw her with
her white gown gradually fade away in the shade like a ghost, he
was seized with such a beating of the heart that he leant against
a tree lest he should fall.
"What an imbecile I am!" he said with a fearful oath. "No matter!
She was a pretty mistress!"
And immediately Emma's beauty, with all the pleasures of their
love, came back to him. For a moment he softened; then he
rebelled against her.
"For, after all," he exclaimed, gesticulating, "I can't exile
myself--have a child on my hands."
He was saying these things to give himself firmness.
"And besides, the worry, the expense! Ah! no, no, no, no! a
thousand times no! That would be too stupid."
