Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert [best e book reader android txt] 📗
- Author: Gustave Flaubert
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Bovary was searching at the bottom of his purse for a centime, and without appearing to understand all there was of humiliation for him in the mere presence of this man, who stood there like a personified reproach to his incurable incapacity.
“Hallo! you’ve a pretty bouquet,” he said, noticing Leon’s violets on the chimney.
“Yes,” she replied indifferently; “it’s a bouquet I bought just now from a beggar.”
Charles picked up the flowers, and freshening his eyes, red with tears, against them, smelt them delicately.
She took them quickly from his hand and put them in a glass of water.
The next day Madame Bovary senior arrived. She and her son wept much. Emma, on the pretext of giving orders, disappeared. The following day they had a talk over the mourning. They went and sat down with their workboxes by the waterside under the arbour.
Charles was thinking of his father, and was surprised to feel so much affection for this man, whom till then he had thought he cared little about. Madame Bovary senior was thinking of her husband. The worst days of the past seemed enviable to her. All was forgotten beneath the instinctive regret of such a long habit, and from time to time whilst she sewed, a big tear rolled along her nose and hung suspended there a moment. Emma was thinking that it was scarcely forty-eight hours since they had been together, far from the world, all in a frenzy of joy, and not having eyes enough to gaze upon each other. She tried to recall the slightest details of that past day. But the presence of her husband and mother-in-law worried her. She would have liked to hear nothing, to see nothing, so as not to disturb the meditation on her love, that, do what she would, became lost in external sensations.
She was unpicking the lining of a dress, and the strips were scattered around her. Madame Bovary senior was plying her scissor without looking up, and Charles, in his list slippers and his old brown surtout that he used as a dressing-gown, sat with both hands in his pockets, and did not speak either; near them Berthe, in a little white pinafore, was raking sand in the walks with her spade. Suddenly she saw Monsieur Lheureux, the linendraper, come in through the gate.
He came to offer his services “under the sad circumstances.” Emma answered that she thought she could do without. The shopkeeper was not to be beaten.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but I should like to have a private talk with you.” Then in a low voice, “It’s about that affair—you know.”
Charles crimsoned to his ears. “Oh, yes! certainly.” And in his confusion, turning to his wife, “Couldn’t you, my darling?”
She seemed to understand him, for she rose; and Charles said to his mother, “It is nothing particular. No doubt, some household trifle.” He did not want her to know the story of the bill, fearing her reproaches.
As soon as they were alone, Monsieur Lheureux in sufficiently clear terms began to congratulate Emma on the inheritance, then to talk of indifferent matters, of the espaliers, of the harvest, and of his own health, which was always so-so, always having ups and downs. In fact, he had to work devilish hard, although he didn’t make enough, in spite of all people said, to find butter for his bread.
Emma let him talk on. She had bored herself so prodigiously the last two days.
“And so you’re quite well again?” he went on. “Ma foi! I saw your husband in a sad state. He’s a good fellow, though we did have a little misunderstanding.”
She asked what misunderstanding, for Charles had said nothing of the dispute about the goods supplied to her.
“Why, you know well enough,” cried Lheureux. “It was about your little fancies—the travelling trunks.”
He had drawn his hat over his eyes, and, with his hands behind his back, smiling and whistling, he looked straight at her in an unbearable manner. Did he suspect anything?
She was lost in all kinds of apprehensions. At last, however, he went on—
“We made it up, all the same, and I’ve come again to propose another arrangement.”
This was to renew the bill Bovary had signed. The doctor, of course, would do as he pleased; he was not to trouble himself, especially just now, when he would have a lot of worry. “And he would do better to give it over to someone else—to you, for example. With a power of attorney it could be easily managed, and then we (you and I) would have our little business transactions together.”
She did not understand. He was silent. Then, passing to his trade, Lheureux declared that madame must require something. He would send her a black barege, twelve yards, just enough to make a gown.
“The one you’ve on is good enough for the house, but you want another for calls. I saw that the very moment that I came in. I’ve the eye of an American!”
He did not send the stuff; he brought it. Then he came again to measure it; he came again on other pretexts, always trying to make himself agreeable, useful, “enfeoffing himself,” as Homais would have said, and always dropping some hint to Emma about the power of attorney. He never mentioned the bill; she did not think of it. Charles, at the beginning of her convalescence, had certainly said something about it to her, but so many emotions had passed through her head that she no longer remembered it. Besides, she took care not to talk of any money questions. Madame Bovary seemed surprised at this, and attributed the change in her ways to the religious sentiments she had contracted during her illness.
But as soon as she was gone, Emma greatly astounded Bovary by her practical good sense. It would be necessary to make inquiries, to look into mortgages, and see if there were any occasion for a sale by auction or a liquidation. She quoted technical terms casually, pronounced the grand words of order, the future, foresight, and constantly exaggerated the difficulties of settling his father’s affairs so much, that at last one day she showed him the rough draft of a power of attorney to manage and administer his business, arrange all loans, sign and endorse all bills, pay all sums, etc. She had profited by Lheureux’s lessons. Charles naively asked her where this paper came from.
“Monsieur Guillaumin”; and with the utmost coolness she added, “I don’t trust him overmuch. Notaries have such a bad reputation. Perhaps we ought to consult—we only know—no one.”
“Unless Leon—” replied Charles, who was reflecting. But it was difficult to explain matters by letter. Then she offered to make the journey, but he thanked her. She insisted. It was quite a contest of mutual consideration. At last she cried with affected waywardness—
“No, I will go!”
“How good you are!” he said, kissing her forehead.
The next morning she set out in the “Hirondelle” to go to Rouen to consult Monsieur Leon, and she stayed there three days.
They were three full, exquisite days—a true honeymoon. They were at the Hotel-de-Boulogne, on the harbour; and they lived there, with drawn blinds and closed doors, with flowers on the floor, and iced syrups were brought them early in the morning.
Towards evening they took a covered boat and went to dine on one of the islands. It was the time when one hears by the side of the dockyard the caulking-mallets sounding against the hull of vessels. The smoke of the tar rose up between the trees; there were large fatty drops on the water, undulating in the purple colour of the sun, like floating plaques of Florentine bronze.
They rowed down in the midst of moored boats, whose long oblique cables grazed lightly against the bottom of the boat. The din of the town gradually grew distant; the rolling of carriages, the tumult of voices, the yelping of dogs on the decks of vessels. She took off her bonnet, and they landed on their island.
They sat down in the low-ceilinged room of a tavern, at whose door hung black nets. They ate fried smelts, cream and cherries. They lay down upon the grass; they kissed behind the poplars; and they would fain, like two Robinsons, have lived for ever in this little place, which seemed to them in their beatitude the most magnificent on earth. It was not the first time that they had seen trees, a blue sky, meadows; that they had heard the water flowing and the wind blowing in the leaves; but, no doubt, they had never admired all this, as if Nature had not existed before, or had only begun to be beautiful since the gratification of their desires.
At night they returned. The boat glided along the shores of the islands. They sat at the bottom, both hidden by the shade, in silence. The square oars rang in the iron thwarts, and, in the stillness, seemed to mark time, like the beating of a metronome, while at the stern the rudder that trailed behind never ceased its gentle splash against the water.
Once the moon rose; they did not fail to make fine phrases, finding the orb melancholy and full of poetry. She even began to sing—
“One night, do you remember, we were sailing,” etc.
Her musical but weak voice died away along the waves, and the winds carried off the trills that Leon heard pass like the flapping of wings about him.
She was opposite him, leaning against the partition of the shallop, through one of whose raised blinds the moon streamed in. Her black dress, whose drapery spread out like a fan, made her seem more slender, taller. Her head was raised, her hands clasped, her eyes turned towards heaven. At times the shadow of the willows hid her completely; then she reappeared suddenly, like a vision in the moonlight.
Leon, on the floor by her side, found under his hand a ribbon of scarlet silk. The boatman looked at it, and at last said—
“Perhaps it belongs to the party I took out the other day. A lot of jolly folk, gentlemen and ladies, with cakes, champagne, cornets—everything in style! There was one especially, a tall handsome man with small moustaches, who was that funny! And they all kept saying, ‘Now tell us something, Adolphe—Dolpe,’ I think.”
She shivered.
“You are in pain?” asked Leon, coming closer to her.
“Oh, it’s nothing! No doubt, it is only the night air.”
“And who doesn’t want for women, either,” softly added the sailor, thinking he was paying the stranger a compliment.
Then, spitting on his hands, he took the oars again.
Yet they had to part. The adieux were sad. He was to send his letters to Mere Rollet, and she gave him such precise instructions about a double envelope that he admired greatly her amorous astuteness.
“So you can assure me it is all right?” she said with her last kiss.
“Yes, certainly.”
“But why,” he thought afterwards as he came back through the streets alone, “is she so very anxious to get this power of attorney?”
Leon soon put on an air of superiority before his comrades, avoided their company, and completely neglected his work.
He waited for her letters; he re-read them; he wrote to her. He called her to mind with all the strength of his desires and of his memories. Instead of lessening with absence, this longing to see her again grew, so that at last on Saturday morning he escaped from his office.
When, from the summit of the hill, he saw in the valley below the church-spire with its tin flag swinging in the
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