Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert [best e book reader android txt] 📗
- Author: Gustave Flaubert
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The curtain fell.
The smell of the gas mingled with that of the breaths, the waving of the fans, made the air more suffocating. Emma wanted to go out; the crowd filled the corridors, and she fell back in her armchair with palpitations that choked her. Charles, fearing that she would faint, ran to the refreshment-room to get a glass of barley-water.
He had great difficulty in getting back to his seat, for his elbows were jerked at every step because of the glass he held in his hands, and he even spilt three-fourths on the shoulders of a Rouen lady in short sleeves, who feeling the cold liquid running down to her loins, uttered cries like a peacock, as if she were being assassinated. Her husband, who was a millowner, railed at the clumsy fellow, and while she was with her handkerchief wiping up the stains from her handsome cherry-coloured taffeta gown, he angrily muttered about indemnity, costs, reimbursement. At last Charles reached his wife, saying to her, quite out of breath—
“Ma foi! I thought I should have had to stay there. There is such a crowd—SUCH a crowd!”
He added—
“Just guess whom I met up there! Monsieur Leon!”
“Leon?”
“Himself! He’s coming along to pay his respects.” And as he finished these words the ex-clerk of Yonville entered the box.
He held out his hand with the ease of a gentleman; and Madame Bovary extended hers, without doubt obeying the attraction of a stronger will. She had not felt it since that spring evening when the rain fell upon the green leaves, and they had said goodbye standing at the window. But soon recalling herself to the necessities of the situation, with an effort she shook off the torpor of her memories, and began stammering a few hurried words.
“Ah, good-day! What! you here?”
“Silence!” cried a voice from the pit, for the third act was beginning.
“So you are at Rouen?”
“Yes.”
“And since when?”
“Turn them out! turn them out!” People were looking at them. They were silent.
But from that moment she listened no more; and the chorus of the guests, the scene between Ashton and his servant, the grand duet in D major, all were for her as far off as if the instruments had grown less sonorous and the characters more remote. She remembered the games at cards at the druggist’s, and the walk to the nurse’s, the reading in the arbour, the tete-a-tete by the fireside—all that poor love, so calm and so protracted, so discreet, so tender, and that she had nevertheless forgotten. And why had he come back? What combination of circumstances had brought him back into her life? He was standing behind her, leaning with his shoulder against the wall of the box; now and again she felt herself shuddering beneath the hot breath from his nostrils falling upon her hair.
“Does this amuse you?” said he, bending over her so closely that the end of his moustache brushed her cheek. She replied carelessly—
“Oh, dear me, no, not much.”
Then he proposed that they should leave the theatre and go and take an ice somewhere.
“Oh, not yet; let us stay,” said Bovary. “Her hair’s undone; this is going to be tragic.”
But the mad scene did not at all interest Emma, and the acting of the singer seemed to her exaggerated.
“She screams too loud,” said she, turning to Charles, who was listening.
“Yes—a little,” he replied, undecided between the frankness of his pleasure and his respect for his wife’s opinion.
Then with a sigh Leon said—
“The heat is—”
“Unbearable! Yes!”
“Do you feel unwell?” asked Bovary.
“Yes, I am stifling; let us go.”
Monsieur Leon put her long lace shawl carefully about her shoulders, and all three went off to sit down in the harbour, in the open air, outside the windows of a cafe.
First they spoke of her illness, although Emma interrupted Charles from time to time, for fear, she said, of boring Monsieur Leon; and the latter told them that he had come to spend two years at Rouen in a large office, in order to get practice in his profession, which was different in Normandy and Paris. Then he inquired after Berthe, the Homais, Mere Lefrancois, and as they had, in the husband’s presence, nothing more to say to one another, the conversation soon came to an end.
People coming out of the theatre passed along the pavement, humming or shouting at the top of their voices, “O bel ange, ma Lucie!*” Then Leon, playing the dilettante, began to talk music. He had seen Tambourini, Rubini, Persiani, Grisi, and, compared with them, Lagardy, despite his grand outbursts, was nowhere.
*Oh beautiful angel, my Lucie.
“Yet,” interrupted Charles, who was slowly sipping his rum-sherbet, “they say that he is quite admirable in the last act. I regret leaving before the end, because it was beginning to amuse me.”
“Why,” said the clerk, “he will soon give another performance.”
But Charles replied that they were going back next day. “Unless,” he added, turning to his wife, “you would like to stay alone, kitten?”
And changing his tactics at this unexpected opportunity that presented itself to his hopes, the young man sang the praises of Lagardy in the last number. It was really superb, sublime. Then Charles insisted—
“You would get back on Sunday. Come, make up your mind. You are wrong if you feel that this is doing you the least good.”
The tables round them, however, were emptying; a waiter came and stood discreetly near them. Charles, who understood, took out his purse; the clerk held back his arm, and did not forget to leave two more pieces of silver that he made chink on the marble.
“I am really sorry,” said Bovary, “about the money which you are—”
The other made a careless gesture full of cordiality, and taking his hat said—
“It is settled, isn’t it? Tomorrow at six o’clock?”
Charles explained once more that he could not absent himself longer, but that nothing prevented Emma—
“But,” she stammered, with a strange smile, “I am not sure—”
“Well, you must think it over. We’ll see. Night brings counsel.” Then to Leon, who was walking along with them, “Now that you are in our part of the world, I hope you’ll come and ask us for some dinner now and then.”
The clerk declared he would not fail to do so, being obliged, moreover, to go to Yonville on some business for his office. And they parted before the Saint-Herbland Passage just as the clock in the cathedral struck half-past eleven.
Part III
Monsieur Leon, while studying law, had gone pretty often to the dancing-rooms, where he was even a great success amongst the grisettes, who thought he had a distinguished air. He was the best-mannered of the students; he wore his hair neither too long nor too short, didn’t spend all his quarter’s money on the first day of the month, and kept on good terms with his professors. As for excesses, he had always abstained from them, as much from cowardice as from refinement.
Often when he stayed in his room to read, or else when sitting of an evening under the lime-trees of the Luxembourg, he let his Code fall to the ground, and the memory of Emma came back to him. But gradually this feeling grew weaker, and other desires gathered over it, although it still persisted through them all. For Leon did not lose all hope; there was for him, as it were, a vague promise floating in the future, like a golden fruit suspended from some fantastic tree.
Then, seeing her again after three years of absence his passion reawakened. He must, he thought, at last make up his mind to possess her. Moreover, his timidity had worn off by contact with his gay companions, and he returned to the provinces despising everyone who had not with varnished shoes trodden the asphalt of the boulevards. By the side of a Parisienne in her laces, in the drawing-room of some illustrious physician, a person driving his carriage and wearing many orders, the poor clerk would no doubt have trembled like a child; but here, at Rouen, on the harbour, with the wife of this small doctor he felt at his ease, sure beforehand he would shine. Self-possession depends on its environment. We don’t speak on the first floor as on the fourth; and the wealthy woman seems to have, about her, to guard her virtue, all her banknotes, like a cuirass in the lining of her corset.
On leaving the Bovarys the night before, Leon had followed them through the streets at a distance; then having seen them stop at the “Croix-Rouge,” he turned on his heel, and spent the night meditating a plan.
So the next day about five o’clock he walked into the kitchen of the inn, with a choking sensation in his throat, pale cheeks, and that resolution of cowards that stops at nothing.
“The gentleman isn’t in,” answered a servant.
This seemed to him a good omen. He went upstairs.
She was not disturbed at his approach; on the contrary, she apologised for having neglected to tell him where they were staying.
“Oh, I divined it!” said Leon.
He pretended he had been guided towards her by chance, by, instinct. She began to smile; and at once, to repair his folly, Leon told her that he had spent his morning in looking for her in all the hotels in the town one after the other.
“So you have made up your mind to stay?” he added.
“Yes,” she said, “and I am wrong. One ought not to accustom oneself to impossible pleasures when there are a thousand demands upon one.”
“Oh, I can imagine!”
“Ah! no; for you, you are a man!”
But men too had had their trials, and the conversation went off into certain philosophical reflections. Emma expatiated much on the misery of earthly affections, and the eternal isolation in which the heart remains entombed.
To show off, or from a naive imitation of this melancholy which called forth his, the young man declared that he had been awfully bored during the whole course of his studies. The law irritated him, other vocations attracted him, and his mother never ceased worrying him in every one of her letters. As they talked they explained more and more fully the motives of their sadness, working themselves up in their progressive confidence. But they sometimes stopped short of the complete exposition of their thought, and then sought to invent a phrase that might express it all the same. She did not confess her passion for another; he did not say that he had forgotten her.
Perhaps he no longer remembered his suppers with girls after masked balls; and no doubt she did not recollect the rendezvous of old when she ran across the fields in the morning to her lover’s house. The noises of the town hardly reached them, and the room seemed small, as if on purpose to hem in their solitude more closely. Emma, in a dimity dressing-gown, leant her head against the back of the old armchair; the yellow wallpaper formed, as it were, a golden background behind her, and her bare head was mirrored in the glass with the white parting in the middle, and the tip of her ears peeping out from the folds of her hair.
“But pardon me!” she said. “It is wrong
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