Etext of Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert 



Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert 
1857




PART 1

CHAPTER ONE

We were in the study-hall when the headmaster entered,
followed by a new boy not yet in school uniform and by the
handy man carrying a large desk.  Their arrival disturbed the
slumbers of some of us, but we all stood up in our places as
though rising from our work.

The headmaster motioned us to be seated, then, turning
to the teacher:

"Monsieur Roger," he said in an undertone, "here's a
pupil I'd like you to keep your eye on.  I'm putting him in
the last year of the lower school.  If he does good work and
behaves himself we'll move him up to where he ought to be at
his age."

The newcomer, who was hanging back in the corner so
that the door half hid him from view, was a country lad of
about fifteen, taller than any of us.  He had his hair cut
in bangs like a cantor in a village church, and he had a
gentle, timid look.  He wasn't broad in the shoulders, but
his green jacket with its black buttons seemed tight under
the arms; and through the vents of his cuffs we could see red
wrists that were clearly unaccustomed to being covered.  His
yellowish breeches were hiked up by his suspenders, and from
them emerged a pair of blue-stockinged legs.  He wore heavy
shoes, hobnailed and badly shined.

We began to recite our lessons.  He listened avidly, as 
though to a sermon, he didn't dare even cross his legs or
lean on his elbows, and at two o'clock, when the bell rang
for the next class, the teacher had to tell him to line up
with the rest of us.

We always flung our caps on the floor when entering a 
classroom, to free our hands.  We hurled them under the seats
from the doorway itself, in such a way that they struck the
wall and raised a cloud of dust.  That was "how it was done."

But whether he had failed to notice this ritual or had
not dared join in observance of it, his cap was still in his
lap when we'd finished reciting our prayer.  It was a head-
gear of composite order, containing elements of an ordinary
hat, a hussar's busby, a lancer's cap, a sealskin cap, and a
nightcap; one of those wretched things whose mute hideousness
suggests unplumbed depths, like an idiot's face.  Ovoid and
stiffened with whalebone, it began with three convex strips,
then followed alternating lozenges of velvet and rabbit's fur,
separated by a red band.  Then came a kind of bag, terminating
in a cardboard-lined polygon intricately decorated with braid.
From this hung a long, excessively thin cord ending in a kind
of tassel of gold netting.  The cap was new, its peak was
shiny.

"Stand up," said the teacher.

He rose.  His cap dropped to the floor.  Everyone began
to laugh.

He bent over for it.  A boy beside him sent it down again
with his elbow.  Once again he picked it up.

"How about getting rid of your helmet?" suggested the
teacher, who was something of a wit.

Another loud laugh from the students confused the poor
fellow.  He didn't know whether to keep the cap in his hand,
drop it on the floor, or put it on his head.  He sat down
again and placed it in his lap.

"Stand up," repeated the professor, "and tell me your
name."

The new boy mumbled a name that was unintelligible.

"Say it again!"

The same jumble of syllables came out, drowned in the
jeers of the class.

"Louder!" cried the teacher.  "Louder!"

With desperate resolve the new boy opened a mouth that
seemed enormous, and as though calling someone he cried at
the top of his lungs the word "Charbovari!"

This touched off a roar that rose crescendo, punctuated
with shrill screams.  There was a shrieking, a banging of
desks as everyone yelled, "Charbovari!  Charbovari!"  Then
the din broke up into isolated cries that slowly diminished,
occasionally starting up again along a line of desks where a
stifled laugh would burst out here and there like a half-
spent firecracker.

But a shower of penalties gradually restored order, and
the teacher, finally grasping the name Charles Bovary after
it had been several times spelled out and repeated and he
had read it aloud himself, at once commanded the poor devil
to sit in the dunce's seat, at the foot of the platform.  He
began to move toward it, then hesitated.

"What are you looking for?" the teacher demanded.

"My c--" the new boy said timidly, casting an uneasy
glance around him.

"Everybody will stay and write five hundred lines!"

Like Neptune's "Quos ego," those words, furiously
uttered, cut short the threat of a new storm.  "Quiet!" the
indignant teacher continued, mopping his forehead with a
handkerchief he took from his toque.  "As for you," he said
to the new boy, "you'll copy out for me twenty times all the
tenses of ridiculus sum."

Then, more gently,  "You'll find your cap.  No one has
stolen it."

All was calm again.  Heads bent over copybooks, and for
the next two hours the new boy's conduct was exemplary, even
though an occasional spitball, sent from the nib of a pen,
struck him wetly in the face.  He wiped himself each time
with his hand, and otherwise sat there motionless, his eyes
lowered.

That evening, in study period, he took his sleeveguards
from his desk, arranged his meager equipment, and carefully
ruled his paper.  We saw him working conscientiously, looking
up every word in the dictionary, taking great pains.  It was
doubtless thanks to this display of effort that he was not
demoted to a lower form.  For while he had a fair knowledge
of grammatical rules, his translations lacked elegance.  He
had begun his Latin with this village priest.  His thrifty
parents had sent him away to school as late as possible.

His father, Monsieur Charles-Denis-Bartholome Bovary, 
had been an army surgeon's aide, forced to leave the service
about 1812 as a result of involvement in a conscription 
scandal.  He had then turned his personal charms to advantage,
picking up a dowry of 60,000 francs brought to him by a knit-
goods dealer's daughter who had fallen in love with his
appearance.  He was a handsome man, much given to bragging and
clanking his spurs.  His side whiskers merged with his
mustache, his fingers were always loaded with rings, his
clothes were flashy.  He had the look of a bully and the easy
cajoling ways of a traveling salesman.  Once married, he
lived off his wife's money for two or three years.  He ate
well, rose late, smoked big porcelain pipes, stayed out every
night to see a show, spent much of his time in cafes.  His
father-in-law died and left very little.   This made him
indignant, and he "went into textiles" and lost some money.
Then he retired to the country, with the intention of "making
things pay."  But he knew as little about crops as he did
about calico, and since he rode his horses instead of working
them in the fields, drank his cider bottled instead of
selling it by the barrel, ate his best poultry, and greased
his hunting boots with the fat from his pigs, he soon realized
that the had better give up all idea of profit-making.

So for two hundred francs a year he rented, in a village
on the border of Normandy and Picardy, a dwelling that was
half farm, half gentleman's residence, and there, surly,
eaten by discontent, cursing heaven, envying everyone, he
shut himself up at the age of forty-five, disgusted with
mankind, he said, and resolved to live in peace.

His wife had been mad about him at the beginning.  In
her love she had tendered him a thousand servilities that
had alienated him all the more.  Once sprightly, all outgoing
and affectionate, with age she had grown touchy, nagging and 
nervous, like stale wine turning to vinegar.  At first she
had suffered uncomplainingly, watching him chase after every
trollop in the village and having him come back to her at 
night from any one of twenty disgusting places surfeited and
stinking of drink.  Then her pride rebelled.  She withdrew 
into her shell, and swallowing her rage she bore up stoically
until her death.  She was always busy, always doing things.  
She was constantly running to lawyers, to the judge, remember-
ing when notes fell due and obtaining renewals.  And at home
she was forever ironing, sewing, washing, keeping an eye on
the hired men, figuring their wages.  Monsieur, meanwhile,
never lifted a finger.  He sat smoking in the chimney corner
and spitting into the ashes, continually falling into a grumpy
doze and waking to utter uncomplimentary remarks.

When she had a child it had to be placed out with a wet
nurse.  And then later, when the little boy was back with
its parents, he was pampered like a prince.  His mother
stuffed him with jams and jellies.  His father let him run
barefoot, and fancied himself a disciple of Rousseau to the
point of saying he'd be quite willing to have the boy go
naked like a young animal.  To counter his wife's maternal
tendencies he tried to form his son according to a certain
virile ideal of childhood and to harden his constitution by
subjecting him to strict discipline, Spartan-style.  He sent
him to bed without a fire, taught him to take great swigs of
rum and to ridicule religious processions.  But the child
was pacific by nature, and such training had little effect.
His mother kept him tied to her apron-strings.  She made him
paper cutouts, told him stories, and conversed with him in
endless bitter-sweet monologues full of coaxing chatter.  In
the isolation of her life she transferred to her baby all
her own poor frustrated ambitions.  She dreamed of glamorous
careers,  She saw him tall, handsome, witty, successful, a
bridge builder or a judge.  She taught him to read, and even,
on an old piano she had, to sing two or three sentimental
little songs.  But from Monsieur Bovary, who cared little
for culture, all this brought merely the comment that it was
"useless."  Could they ever afford to give him an education,
to buy him a practice or a business?  Besides, "with enough
nerve a man could always get ahead in the world."  Madame
Bovary pursed her lips, and the boy ran wild in the village.

He followed the hired men and chased crows, pelting
them with clods of earth until they flew off.  He ate the
wild blackberries that grew along the ditches, looked after
the turkeys with a long stick, pitched hay, roamed the woods,
played hopscotch in the shelter of the church porch when it
rained, and on important feast-days begged the sexton to let
him toll the bells so that he could hang with his full weight
from the heavy rope and feel it sweep him off his feet as it 
swung in its arc.

He throve like an oak.  His hands grew strong and his
complexion ruddy.

When he was twelve, his mother had her way.   He began
his studies.  The priest was asked to tutor him.  But the
lessons were so short and irregular that they served little
purpose.  They took place at odd hurried moments.  In the
sacristy between a baptism and a funeral.  Or else the
priest would send for him after the Angelus, when his parish
business was over for the day.  They would go up to his
bedroom and begin, midges and moths fluttering around the
candle.  There in the warmth the child would fall asleep,
and the old man, too, would soon be dozing and snoring, his
hands folded over his stomach and his mouth open.  Other
times, as Monsieur le cure was returning from a sick-bed
with the holy oils, he would catch sight of Charles
scampering in the fields, and would call him over and
lecture him for a few minutes, taking advantage of the
occasion to make him conjugate a verb right there, under a
tree.  Rain would interrupt them, or some passer-by whom
they knew.  However, he was always satisfied with him, and
even said that "the young fellow had a good memory."  

Things weren't allowed to stop there.  Madame was
persistent.  Shamed into consent; or, rather, his resistance
worn down, Monsieur gave in without further struggle.  They
waited a year, until the boy had made his First Communion,
then six months more, and finally Charles was sent to the
lycee in Rouen.  His father delivered him himself, toward 
the end of October, during the fortnight of the Saint-Romain
fair. 

It would be very difficult today for any of us to say
what he was like.  There was nothing striking about him.  He
played during recess, worked in study-hall, paid attention
in class, slept soundly in the dormitory, ate heartily in
the refectory.  His local guardian was a wholesale hardware
dealer in the rue Ganterie, who called for him one Sunday a
month after early closing, sent him for a walk along the
riverfront to look at the boats, then brought him back to
school by seven, in time for supper.  Every Thursday night
Charles wrote a long letter to his mother, using red ink and
three seals.  Then he looked over his history notes, or
leafed through an old volume of Anacharsis that lay around
the study-hall.  When his class went for outings he talked
with the school servant who accompanied them, a countryman
like himself.

By working hard he managed to stay about in the middle
of the class.  Once he even got an honorable mention in
natural history.  But before he finished upper school his
parents took him out of the lycee entirely and sent him to
study medicine, confident that he could get his baccalaureate
degree anyway by making up the intervening years on his own.

His mother chose a room for him, four flights up over-
looking the stream called the Eau-de-Robec, in the house of
a dyer she knew.  She arranged for his board, got him a table
and two chairs, and sent home for an old cherry bed.  And to
keep her darling warm she bought him a small cast-iron stove
and a load of wood.  Then after a week she went back to her
village, urging him a thousand times over to behave himself
now that he was on his own.

The curriculum that he read on the bulletin board
staggered him.  Courses in anatomy, pathology, pharmacy,
chemistry, botany, clinical practice, therapeutics, to say
nothing of hygiene and materia medica.   Names of unfamiliar
etymology that were like so many doors leading to solemn
shadowy sanctuaries.

He understood absolutely nothing of any of it.  He
listened in vain.   He could not grasp it.  Even so, he
worked.  He filled his notebooks, attended every lecture,
never missed hospital rounds.  In the performance of his daily
task he was like a mill-horse that treads blindfolded in a
circle, utterly ignorant of what he is grinding.

To save him money, his mother sent him a roast of veal
each week by the stagecoach, and off this he lunched when he
came in from the hospital, warming his feet by beating them
against the wall.  Then he had to hurry off to lectures, to
the amphitheatre, to another hospital, crossing the entire
city again when he returned.  At night, after eating the
meager dinner his landlord provided, he climbed back up to
his room, back to work.  Steam rose from his damp clothes as
he sat beside the red-hot stove.

On fine summer evenings, at the hour when the warm
streets are empty and servant girls play at shuttlecock in
front of the houses, he would open his window and lean out.
The stream, which makes this part of Rouen a kind of squalid
little Venice, flowed just below, stained yellow, purple or
blue between its bridges and railings.  Workmen from the dye
plants, crouching on the bank, washed their arms in the
water.  Above him, on poles projecting from attics, skeins 
of cotton were drying in the open.  And beyond the roof-tops
stretched the sky, vast and pure, with the red sun setting.
How good it must be in the country!  How cool in the beech 
grove!  And he opened his nostrils wide, longing for a whiff
of the fresh and fragrant air, but none was ever wafted to
where he was.

He grew thinner and taller, and his face took on a kind
of plaintive expression that almost made it interesting.

The fecklessness that was part of his nature soon led 
him to break all his good resolutions.  One day he skipped
rounds, the next, a lecture.  Idleness, he found, was to his
taste, and gradually he stayed away entirely.

He began to go to cafes.  Soon he was crazy about
dominoes.  To spend his evenings shut up in a dirty public
room, clinking black-dotted pieces of sheep's bone on a
marble table, seemed to him a marvelous assertion of his
freedom that raised him in his own esteem.  It was like an
initiation into the world, admission to a realm of forbidden
delights, and every time he entered the cafe the feel of the
doorknob in his hand gave him a pleasure that was almost 
sensual.  Now many things pent up within him burst their 
bonds.  He learned verses by heart and sang them at student 
gatherings, developed an enthusiasm for Beranger, learned to
make punch, and knew, at long last, the joys of love.

Thanks to that kind of preparation he failed completely
the examination that would have entitled him to practice
medicine as an offcier de sante.  And his parents were waiting
for him at home that very night at celebrate his success!

He set out on foot.  At the outskirts of the village he
stopped, sent someone for his mother, and told her all.
She forgave him, laying his downfall to the unfairness of
the examiners, and steadied him by promising to make all
explanations.  (It was five years before Monsieur Bovary
learned the truth.  By that time it was an old story and he
could accept it, especially since he couldn't conceive of
his own offspring as being stupid.)

Charles set to work again and crammed ceaselessly,
memorizing everything on which he could possibly be
questioned.  He passed with a fairly good grade.  What a
wonderful day for his mother!  Everyone was asked to dinner.

Where should he practice?  At Tostes.  In that town
there was only one elderly doctor, whose death Madame
Bovary had long been waiting for, and the old man hadn't yet
breathed his last when Charles moved in across the road as 
his successor.

But it wasn't enough to have raised her son, sent him
into medicine, and discovered Tostes for him to practice in.
He had to have a wife.  She found him one, a huissier's 
widow in Dieppe, forty-five years old, with twelve hundred
francs a year.

Ugly though she was, and thin as a lath, with a face as
spotted as a meadow in springtime, Madame Dubuc unquestionably
had plenty of suitors to choose from.  To gain her ends Madame
Bovary had to get rid of all the rivals, and her outwitting of
one of them, a butcher whose candidacy was favored by the
local clergy, was nothing short of masterly.

Charles had envisaged marriage as the beginning of a 
better time, thinking that he would have greater freedom and
be able to do as he liked with himself and his money.  But 
it was his wife who ruled.  In front of company he had to say
certain things and not others, he had to eat fish on Friday,
dress the way she wanted, obey her when she ordered him to
dun nonpaying patients.  She opened his mail, watched his 
every move, and listened through the thinness of the wall
when there were women in his office.

She had to have her cup of chocolate every morning.
There was no end to the attentions she required.  She
complained incessantly of her nerves, of pains in her chest,
of depressions and faintnesses.  The sound of anyone moving
about near her made her ill.  When people left her she couldn't
bear her loneliness.  When they came to see her it was, of
course, "to watch her die."  When Charles came home in the
evening she would bring her long thin arms out from under
her bedclothes, twine them around his neck, draw him down
beside her on the edge of the bed, and launch into the tale
of her woes.  He was forgetting her, he was in love with
someone else!  How right people had been, to warn her that
he'd make her unhappy!  And she always ended by asking him
to give her a new tonic and a little more love.

PART 1

CHAPTER TWO

One night about eleven o'clock they were awakened by a
noise; a horse had stopped just at their door.  The maid
opened the attic window and parleyed for some time with a man
who stood in the street below.  He had been sent to fetch the
doctor, he had a letter.  Nastasie came downstairs, shivering,
turned the key in the lock and pushed back the bolts one by
one.  The man left his horse, followed the maid, and entered
the bedroom at her heels.  Out of his gray-tasseled woolen
cap he drew a letter wrapped in a piece of cloth, and with a
careful gesture handed it to Charles, who raised himself on
his pillow to read it.  Nastasie stood close to the bed,
holding the light.  Madame had modestly turned her back and
lay facing the wall.

This letter, sealed with a small blue wax seal, begged
Monsieur Bovary to come immediately to a farm called Les
Bertaux, to set a broken leg.  Now, from Tostes to Les Bertaux
is at least fifteen miles, going by way of Longueville And

Saint-Victor.  It was a pitch-black night.  Madame Bovary was
fearful lest her husband meet with an accident.  So it was
decided that the stable hand who had brought the letter should
start out ahead, and that Charles should follow three hours
later, by that time there would be a moon.  A boy would be
sent out to meet him, to show him the way to the farm and open
the field gates.

About four o'clock in the morning Charles set out for Les
Bertaux, wrapped in a heavy coat.  He was still drowsy from
his warm sleep, and the peaceful trot of his mare lulled him
like the rocking of a cradle.  Whenever she stopped of her own
accord in front of one of those spike-edged holes that farmers
dig along the roadside to protect their crops, he would wake
up with a start, quickly remember the broken leg, and try to
recall all the fractures he had ever seen.  The rain had
stopped, day was breaking, and on the leafless branches of the
apple trees birds were perched motionless, ruffling up their
little feathers in the cold morning wind.  The countryside
stretched flat as far as eye could see, and the tufts of trees
clustered around the farmhouses were widely spaced dark purple
stains on the vast gray surface that merged at the horizon
into the dull tone of the sky.  From time to time Charles
would open his eyes, and then, his senses dimmed by a return
of sleep, he would fall again into a drowsiness in which
recent sensations became confused with older memories to give
him double visions of himself, as husband and as student,
lying in bed as he had been only an hour or so before, and
walking through a surgical ward as in the past.  In his mind
the hot smell of poultices mingled with the fresh smell of
the dew, he heard at once the rattle of the curtain rings on
hospital beds, and the sound of his wife's breathing as she
lay asleep.  At Vassonville he saw a little boy sitting in
the grass beside a ditch.

"Are you the doctor?" the child asked.

And when Charles answered, he took his wooden shoes in 
his hands and began to run in front of him.

As they continued on their way, the officier de sante
gathered from what his guide told him that Monsieur Rouault
must be a very well-to-do farmer indeed.  He had broken his
leg the previous evening, on his way back from celebrating
Twelfth Night at the home of a neighbor.  His wife had been
dead for two years.  He had with him only his "demoiselle,"
his daughter, who kept house for him.

Now the road was more deeply rutted, they were approaching
Les Bertaux.  The boy slipped through an opening in a hedge,
disappeared, then reappeared ahead, opening a farmyard gate
from within.  The horse was slipping on the wet grass, Charles
had to bend low to escape over-hanging branches.  Kenneled
watchdogs were barking, pulling at their chains.  As he passed
through the gate of Les Bertaux, his horse took fright and
shied wildly.

It was a porsperous-looking farm.  Through the open upper-
halves of the stable doors great plough-horses could be seen
placidly feeding from new racks.  Next to the out-buildings
stood a big manure pile, and in among the chickens and turkeys
pecking at its steaming surface were five or six peacocks,
favorite show pieces of cauchois farmyards.  The sheepfold was
long, the barn lofty, its walls as smooth as your hand.  In
the shed were two large carts and four ploughs complete with
whips, horse collars and full trappings, the blue wool pads
gray under the fine dust that sifted down from the lofts.  The
farmyard sloped upwards, planted with symmetrically spaced
trees, and from near the pond came the merry sound of a flock
of geese.

A young woman wearing a blue merino dress with three
flounces came to the door of the house to greet Monsieur
Bovary, and she ushered him into the kitchen, where a big open
fire was blazing.  Around its edges the farm hands' breakfast
was bubbling in small pots of assorted sizes.  Damp clothes
were drying inside the vast chimney-opening.  The fire shovel,
the tongs, and the nose of the bellows, all of colossal
proportions, shone like polished steel, and along the walls
hung a lavish array of kitchen utensils, glimmering in the
bright light of the fire and in the first rays of the sun that
were now beginning to come in through the windowpanes.

Charles went upstairs to see the patient.  He found him
in bed, sweating under blankets, his nightcap lying where he
had flung it.  He was a stocky little man of fifty, fair-
skinned, blue-eyed, bald in front and wearing earrings.  On a
chair beside him was a big decanter of brandy, he had been
pouring himself drinks to keep up his courage.  But as soon
as he saw the doctor he dropped his bluster, and instead of
cursing as he had been doing for the past twelve hours he
began to groan weakly.

The fracture was a simple one, without complications of
any kind.  Charles couldn't have wished for anything easier.
Then he recalled his teachers' bedside manner in accident 
cases, and proceeded to cheer up his patient with all kinds
of facetious remarks, a truly surgical attention, like the
oiling of a scalpel.  For splints, they sent someone to bring
a bundle of laths from the carriage shed.  Charles selected
one, cut it into lengths and smoothed it down with a piece of
broken window glass, while the maidservant tore sheets for
bandages and Mademoiselle Emma tried to sew some pads.  She
was a long time finding her workbox, and her father showed 
his impatience.  She made no reply, but as she sewed she kept
pricking her fingers and raising them to her mouth to suck.

Charles was surprised by the whiteness of her fingernails.
They were almond-shaped, tapering, as polished and shining as
Dieppe ivories.  Her hands, however, were not pretty, not pale
enough, perhaps, a little rough at the knuckles, and they were
too long, without softness of line.  The finest thing about
her was her eyes.  They were brown, but seemed black under the
long eyelashes, and she had an open gaze that met yours with
fearless candor.

When the binding was done, the doctor was invited by 
Monsieur Rouault himself to "have something" before he left.

Charles went down to the parlor on the ground floor.  At
the foot of a great canopied bed, it calico hangings printed
with a design of people in Turkish dress, there stood a little
table on which places had been laid for two, a silver mug
beside each plate.  From a tall oaken cupboard facing the
window came an odor of orris root and damp sheets.  In corners
stood rows of grain sacks, the overflow from the granary,
which was just adjoining, approached by three stone steps.
The room's only decoration, hanging from a nail in the center
of the flaking green-painted wall, was a black pencil drawing
of a head of Minerva framed in gold and inscribed at the
bottom in Gothic letters "To my dear Papa."

They spoke about the patient first, and then about the
weather, about the bitter cold, about the wolves that roamed
the fields at night, Mademoiselle Rouault didn't enjoy country
life, especially now, with almost the full responsibility of
the farm on her shoulders.  The room was chilly, and she
shivered as she ate.  Charles noticed that her lips were full,
and that she had the habit of biting them in moments of
silence.

Her neck rose out of the low fold of a white collar.  The
two black sweeps of her hair, pulled down from a fine center
part that followed the curve of her skull, were so sleek that
each seemed to be one piece.  Covering all but the very tips
of her ears, it was gathered at the back into a large chignon,
and toward the temples it waved a bit, a detail that the
country doctor now observed for the first time in his life.
Her skin was rosy over her cheekbones.  A pair of shell-rimmed
eyeglasses, like a man's, was tucked between two buttons of
her bodice.

When Charles came back downstairs after going up to take
leave of Monsieur Rouault, he found her standing with her
forehead pressed against the windowpane, looking out at the
garden, where the beanpoles had been thrown down by the wind.
She turned around.

"Are you looking for something?' she asked.

"For my riding crop," he said.

And he began to rummage on the bed, behind doors, under
chairs.  It had fallen on the floor between the grainbags and
the wall.  Mademoiselle Emma caught sight of it and reached
for it, bending down across the sacks.  Charles hurried over
politely, and as he, too, stretched out his arm he felt his
body in slight contact with the girl's back, bent there
beneath him.  She stood up, blushing crimson, and glanced at
him over her shoulder as she handed him his crop.

Instead of returning to Les Bertaux three days later, as
he had promised, he went back the very next day, then twice a
week regularly, not to mention unscheduled calls he made from
time to time, as though by chance.

Everything went well; the bone knit according to the
rules, and after forty-six days, when Monsieur Rouault was seen
trying to get around his farmyard by himself, everyone began to
think of Monsieur Bovary as a man of great competence.  Monsieur
Rouault said he wouldn't have been better mended by the biggest
doctors of Yvetot or even Rouen.

As for Charles, he didn't ask himself why he enjoyed going
to Les Bertaux.  Had he thought of it, he would doubtless have
attributed his zeal to the seriousness of the case, or perhaps
to the fee he hoped to earn.  Still, was that really why his
visits to the farm formed so charming a contrast to the drabness
of the rest of his life?  On such days he would rise early, set
off at a gallop, urge his horse, and when he was almost there he
would dismount to dust his shoes on the grass, and put on his
black gloves.  He enjoyed the moment of arrival, the feel of the
gate as it yielded against his shoulder.   He enjoyed the rooster
crowing on the wall, the farm boys coming to greet him.  He
enjoyed the barn and the stables.  He enjoyed Monsieur Rouault,
who would clap him in the palm of the hand and call him his
"savior."   He enjoyed hearing Mademoiselle Emma's little sabots
on the newly washed flagstones of the kitchen floor.  With their
high heels they made her a little taller, and when she walked in
them ahead of him their wooden soles kept coming up with a quick,
sharp, tapping sound against the leather of her shoes. 

She always accompanied him to the foot of the steps outside
the door.  If his horse hadn't been brought around she would wait
there with him.  At such moments they had already said good-bye,
and stood there silent.  The breeze eddied around her, swirling
the stray wisps of hair at her neck, or sending her apron strings
flying like streamers around her waist.  Once she was standing
there on a day of thaw, when the bark of the trees in the farm-
yard was oozing sap and the snow was melting on the roofs.  She
went inside for her parasol, and opened it.  The parasol was a
rosy iridescent silk, and the sun pouring through it painted the
white skin of her face with flickering patches of light.  Beneath
it she smiled at the springlike warmth, and drops of water could
be heard falling one by one on the taut moire.

During the first period of Charles' visits to Les Bertaux,
Madame Bovary never failed to ask about the patient's progress,
and in her double-entry ledger she had given Monsieur Rouault
a fine new page to himself.  But when she heard that he had a
daughter she began to make inquiries, and she learned that
Mademoiselle Rouault had had her schooling in a convent, with
the Ursuline nuns, had received, as the saying went, a "fine
education," in the course of which she had been taught dancing,
geography, drawing, needlework and a little piano.  Think of
that!  

"So that's why he brightens up when he goes there!  That's
why he wears his new waistcoat, even in the rain!  Ah!  So she's
at the bottom of it!"

Instinctively she hated her.  At first she relieved her
feelings by making insinuations.  Charles didn't get them.  Then
she let fall parenthetical remarks which he left unanswered out
of fear of a storm, and finally she was driven to point-blank
reproaches which he didn't know how to answer.  Why was it that
he kept going back to Les Bertaux, now that Monsieur Rouault was
completely mended and hadn't even paid his bill?  Ah!  Because
there was a certain person there.  Somebody who knew how to talk.
Somebody who did embroidery.  Somebody clever.  That's what he
enjoyed, he had to have city girls!  And she went on:

"Rouault's daughter, a city girl!  Don't make me laugh!
The grandfather was a shepherd, and there's a cousin who
barely escaped sentence for assault and battery.  Scarcely
good reasons for giving herself airs, for wearing silk dresses
to church like a countess!  Besides, her father, poor fellow,
if it hadn't been for last year's colza crop he'd have been
hard put to it to pay his debts."

For the sake of peace, Charles stopped going to Les
Bertaux.  Heloise had made him swear, his hand on his prayer
book, that he would never go back there again.  She had
accomplished it after much sobbing and kissing, in the midst
of a great amorous explosion.  He yielded, but the strength
of his desire kept protesting against the servility of his
behavior, and with a naive sort of hypocrisy he told himself
that this very prohibition against seeing her implicitly
allowed him to love her.  And then the widow he was married to
was skinny, she was long in the tooth, all year round she wore
a little black shawl with a corner hanging down between her
shoulder blades, her rigid form was always sheathed in dresses
that were like scabbards.  They were always too short, they
showed her ankles, her big shoes, and her shoelaces criss-
crossing their way up her gray stockings.

Charles' mother came to see them from time to time, but
after a few days she invariably took on her daughter-in-law's
sharpness against her son, and like a pair of knives they kept
scarifying him with their comments and criticisms.  He oughtn't
to eat so much!  Why always offer a drink to everyone who
called?  So pigheaded not to wear flannel underwear!

Early in the spring it happened that a notary in Ingou-
ville, custodian of the Widow Dubuc's capital, sailed away one
fine day, taking with him all his clients' money.  To be sure,
Heloise still owned her house in the rue Saint-Francois in
Dieppe, as well as a six thousand franc interest in a certain
ship, nevertheless, of the great fortune she'd always talked
so much about, nothing except a few bits of furniture and some
clothes had ever been seen in the household.  Now, inevitably,
everything came under investigation.  The house in Dieppe, it
turned out, was mortgaged up to it eaves, what she had placed
with the notary, God only knew, and her share in the boat
didn't amount to more than three thousand.  So she'd been
lying, lying all along, the dear, good lady!  In his rage the
older Monsieur Bovary dashed a chair to pieces on the floor
and accused his wife of ruining their son's life by yoking
him to such an ancient nag, whose harness was worth even less
than her carcass.  They came to Tostes.  The four of them had
it out.  There were scenes.  The weeping Heloise threw herself
into her husband's arms and appealed to him to defend her
against his parents.  Charles began to take her part.  The
others flew into a rage and left.

But, "the fatal blow had been struck."  A week later she
was hanging out washing in her yard when suddenly she began to
spit blood, and the next day, while Charles was looking the
other way, drawing the window curtain, she gave a cry, then a
sigh, and fainted.  She was dead!  Who would have believed it?

When everything was over at the cemetery, Charles returned
to the house.  There was no one downstairs, and he went up to
the bedroom.  One of her dresses was still hanging in the alcove.
He stayed there until dark, leaning against the writing desk,
his mind full of sad thoughts.  Poor thing!  She had loved him,
after all.

PART 1

CHAPTER THREE

One morning Monsieur Rouault came to pay Charles for
setting his leg, seventy-five francs in two-francs pieces,
with a turkey thrown in for good measure.  He had heard of
his bereavement, and offered him what consolation he could.

"I know what it is," he said, patting him on the shoulder.
"I've been through just what you're going through.  When I
lost my wife I went out into the fields to be by myself.  I
lay down under a tree and cried.  I talked to God, told him
all kinds of crazy things.  I wished I were dead, like the
maggoty moles I saw hanging on the branches.  And when I
thought of how other men were holding their wives in their
arms at that very moment, I began to pound my stick on the
ground.  I was almost out of my mind.  I couldn't eat.  The
very thought of going to a cafe made me sick, you'd never
believe it.  Well, you know, what with one day gradually 
nosing out another, and spring coming on top of winter and
then fall after the summer, it passed bit by bit, drop by
drop.  It just went away, it disappeared.  I mean it grew
less and less.  There's always part of it you never get rid
of entirely.  You always feel something here."  And he put
his hand on his chest.  "But it happens to us all, and you
mustn't let yourself go, you mustn't want to die just because
other people are dead.  You must brace up, Monsieur Bovary.
Things will get better.  Come and see us.  My daughter talks
about you every once in a while.  She says you've probably

forgotten her.  Spring will soon be here.  You and I'll go
out after a rabbit, it will take your mind off things."

Charles took his advice.  He went back to Les Bertaux.
He found it unchanged since yesterday, since five months
before, that is.  The pear trees were already in flower, and
the sight of Monsieur Rouault coming and going normally 
around the place made everything livelier.

The farmer seemed to think that the doctor's grief-
stricken condition called for a special show of consideration,
and he urged him to keep his hat on, addressed him in a low
voice as though he were ill, and even pretended to be angry
that no one had thought to cook him something special and
light, like custard or stewed pears.  He told him funny
stories.  Charles found himself laughing, but then the thought
of his wife returned to sober him.  By the end of the meal he
had forgotten her again.

He thought of her less and less as he grew used to living
alone.  The novelty and pleasure of being independent soon
made solitude more bearable.  Now he could change his meal
hours at will, come and go without explanation, stretch out
across the bed if he was particularly tired.  So he pampered
and coddled himself and accepted all the comforting everyone
offered.  Besides, his wife's death had helped him quite a bit
professionally.  For a month or so everyone had kept saying,
"Poor young man!  What a tragedy!"  His reputation grew, more
and more patients came.  Now he went to Les Bertaux whenever
he pleased.  He was aware of a feeling of hope, nothing very
specific, a vague happiness.  He thought himself better-
looking when he stood at the mirror to brush his whiskers.

One day he arrived about three o'clock.  Everyone was
in the fields.  He went into the kitchen, and at first didn't
see Emma.  The shutters were closed.  The sun, streaming in
between the slats, patterned the floor with long thin stripes
that broke off at the corners of the furniture and quivered
on the ceiling.  On the table, flies were climbing up the
sides of glasses that had recently been used, and buzzing as
they struggled to keep from drowning in the cider at the
bottom.  The light coming down the chimney turned the soot 
on the fireback to velvet and gave a bluish cast to the cold
ashes.  Between the window and the hearth Emma sat sewing.
Her shoulders were bare, beaded with little drops of sweat.

Country-style, she offered him something to drink.  He
refused, she insisted, and finally suggested with a laugh
that he take a liqueur with her.  She brought a bottle of 
curacao from the cupboard, reached to a high shelf for two
liqueur glasses, filled one to the brim and poured a few
drops in the other.  She touched her glass to his and raised
it to her mouth.  Because it was almost empty she had to
bend backwards to be able to drink, and with her head tilted
back, her neck and lips outstretched, she began to laugh at
tasting nothing.  And then the tip of her tongue came out
from between her small teeth and began daintily to lick the
bottom of the glass.

She sat down again and resumed her work.  She was darn-
ing a white cotton stocking.  She sewed with her head bowed,
and she did not speak, nor did Charles.  A draft was coming
in under the door and blowing a little dust across the stone
floor.  He watched it drift, and was aware of a pulsating 
sound inside his head.  That, and the clucking of a laying
hen outside in the yard.  From time to time Emma cooled her 
cheeks with the palms of her hands, and then cooled her hands
against the iron knobs of the tall andirons.  

She complained that the heat had been giving her dizzy
spells, and asked whether sea bathing would help.  Then she
began to talk about her convent school and Charles about his
lycee.  Words came to them both.  They went upstairs to her
room.  She showed him her old music exercise books, and the
little volumes and the oak-leaf wreaths, the latter now lying
abandoned in the bottom of a cupboard, that she had won as
prizes.  Then she spoke of her mother, and the cemetery, and 
took him out to the garden to see the bed where she picked
flowers the first Friday of every month to put on her grave.
But their gardener had no understanding of such things, farm
help was so trying!  She would love, if only for the winter, 
to live in the city, though she had to say that it was really
in summer, with the days so long, that the country was most
boring of all.  Depending on what she talked about, her voice
was clear, or shrill, or would grow suddenly languorous and
trail off almost into a murmur, as though she were speaking
to herself.  One moment she would be gay and wide-eyed.  The
next, she would half shut her eyelids and seem to be drowned
in boredom, her thoughts miles away.

That evening, on his homeward ride, Charles went over 
one by one the things she had said, trying to remember her
exact words and sense their implications, in an effort to 
picture what her life had been like before their meeting.
But in his thoughts he could never see her any differently
from the way she had been when he had seen her the first time,
or as she had been just now when he left her.  Then he won-
dered what could become of her, whether she would marry, and
whom.  Alas!  Monsieur Rouault was very rich, and she . . . so
beautiful!  But Emma's face appeared constantly before his
eyes, and in his ears there was a monotonous throbbing, like
the humming of a top.  "But why don't you get married!  Why
don't you get married!"  That night he didn't sleep, his throat
was tight, he was thirsty.  He got up to drink from his water
jug and opened the window.  The sky was covered with stars, a 
hot wind was blowing, dogs were barking in the distance.  He
stared out in the direction of Les Bertaux.

After all, he thought, nothing would be lost by trying,
and he resolved to ask his question when the occasion presented
itself.  But each time it did, the fear of not finding the 
proper words paralyzed his lips.

Actually, Rouault wouldn't have been a bit displeased to
have someone take his daughter off his hands.  She was of no
use to him on the farm.  He didn't really hold it against her,
being of the opinion that she was too clever to have anything 
to do with farming, that accursed occupation that had never
made a man a millionaire.  Far from having grown rich at it,
the poor fellow was losing money every year.  He more than
held his own in the market place, where he relished all the
tricks of the trade, but no one was less suited than he to
the actual growing of crops and the managing of a farm.  He
never lifted a finger if he could help it, and never spared
any expense in matters of daily living.  He insisted on good
food, a good fire, and a good bed.  He liked his cider hard,
his leg of mutton rare, his coffee well laced with brandy.  He
took his meals in the kitchen, alone, facing the fire, at a
little table that was brought in to him already set, like on
the stage.

So when he noticed that Charles tended to be flushed in
his daughter's presence, meaning that one of these days he
would ask for her hand, he pondered every aspect of the
question well in advance.  Charles was a bit namby-pamby, not
his dream of a son-in-law.  But he was said to be reliable, 
thrifty, very well educated, and he probably wouldn't haggle
too much over the dowry.  Moreover, Rouault was soon going to
have to sell twenty-two of his acres.  He owed considerable
to the mason and considerable to the harness-maker and the
cider press needed a new shaft.  "If he asks me for her," he
said to himself, "I won't refuse."

Toward the beginning of October, Charles spent three days
at Les Bertaux.  The last day had slipped by like the others,
with the big step put off from one minute to the next.  Rouault
was escorting him on the first lap of his homeward journey.  
They were walking along a sunken road.  They were just about to
part, the moment had come.  Charles gave himself to the corner
of the hedge, and finally, when they had passed it.  "Monsieur
Rouault," he murmured, "there's something I'd like to say to
you."

They stopped.  Charles fell silent.

"Well, tell me what's on your mind!  I know it already
anyway!" Rouault said with a gentle laugh.

"Monsieur Rouault . . . Monsieur Rouault . . ."  Charles
stammered.

"Personally, I wouldn't like anything better,: continued
the farmer.  "I imagine the child agrees with me, but we'd 
better ask her.  I'll leave you here now, and go back to the
house.  If it's `Yes', now listen to what I'm saying, you
won't have to come in, there are too many people around, and
besides she'd be too upset.  But to take you off the anxious
seat I'll slam a shutter against the wall.  You can look back
and see, if you lean over the hedge."

And he went off.

Charles tied his horse to a tree.  He hastily stationed
himself on the path and waited.  Half an hour went by.  Then
he counted nineteen minutes by his watch.  Suddenly there was
a noise against the wall.  The shutter had swung back, the 
catch was still quivering.

The next morning he was at the farm by nine.  Emma
blushed when he entered, laughing a little in an attempt to
be casual.  Rouault embraced his future son-in-law.  They
postponed all talk of financial arrangements.  There was
plenty of time, since the wedding couldn't decently take 
place before the end of Charles' mourning, that is, toward
the spring of the next year.

It was a winter of waiting.  Mademoiselle Rouault busied
herself with her trousseau.  Part of it was ordered in Rouen,
and she made her slips and nightcaps herself, copying fashion
drawings that she borrowed.  Whenever Charles visited the farm
they spoke about preparations for the wedding, discussing
which room the dinner should be served in, wondering how many
courses to have and what the entrees should be.

Emma herself would have liked to be married at midnight,
by torchlight.  But Rouault wouldn't listen to the idea.  So
there was the usual kind of wedding, with forty-three guests,
and everybody was sixteen hours at table, and the festivities
began all over again the next day and even carried over a 
little into the days following.

PART 1

CHAPTER FOUR

The invited guests arrived early in a variety of
vehicles.  One-horse shays, two-wheeled charabancs, old gigs
without tops, vans with leather curtains.  And the young men
from the nearest villages came in farm-carts, standing one
behind the other along the sides and grasping the rails to
keep from being thrown, for the horses trotted briskly and
the roads were rough.  They came from as far as twenty-five
miles away, from Goderville, from Normanville, from Cany.
All the relations of both families had been asked, old
quarrels had been patched up, letters sent to acquaintances
long lost sight of.

From time to time the crack of a whip would be heard
behind the hedge, then after a moment the gate would open and
a cart would roll in.  It would come at a gallop as far as
the doorstep, then stop with a lurch, and out would pour its
passengers, rubbing their knees and stretching their arms.
The ladies wore country-style headdresses and city-style
gowns, with gold watch chains, tippets (the ends crossed and
tucked into their belts), or small colored fichus attached
at the back with pins and leaving the neck bare.  The boys,
attired exactly like their papas, looked ill at ease in their
new clothes (and indeed many of them were wearing leather
shoes that day for the first time in their lives).  And next
to them would be some speechless, gangling girl of fourteen
or sixteen, probably their cousin or their older sister,
flushed and awkward in her white First Communion dress let
down for the occasion, her hair sticky with scented pomade,
terribly worried lest she dirty her gloves.  Since there
weren't enough stable hands to unharness all the carriages,
the men rolled up their sleeves and went to it themselves.
According to their social status, they wore tail coats, frock
coats, long jackets or short jackets.  The tail coats were
worthy garments, each of them a prized family possession
taken out of the closet only on great occasions.  The frock
coats had great flaring skirts that billowed in the wind,
cylindrical collars, and pockets as capacious as bags.  The
long jackets were double-breasted, of coarse wool, and
usually worn with a cap of some kind, its peak trimmed with
brass.  And the short jackets were very short indeed, with
two back buttons set close together like a pair of eyes, and
stiff tails that looked as though a carpenter had hacked them
with his axe out of a single block of wood.  A few guests
(these, of course, would sit at the foot of the table) wore
dress smocks, that is, smocks with turned-down collars, fine
pleating at the back, and stitched belts low on the hips.

And the shirts!  They bulged like breastplates.  Every
man was freshly shorn.  Ears stood out from heads, faces were
of a holiday smoothness.  Some of the guests from farthest
away, who had got up before dawn and had to shave in the
dark, had slanting gashes under their noses, or patches of
skin the size of a three-franc piece peeled from their jaws.
During the journey their wounds had been inflamed by the
wind, and as a result red blotches adorned many a big beaming
white face.

Since the mayor's office was scarcely more than a mile
from the farm, the wedding party went there on foot and came
back the same way after the church ceremony.  The procession
was compact at first, like a bright sash festooning the
countryside as it followed the narrow path winding between
the green grain fields.  But soon it lengthened out and broke
up into different groups, which lingered to gossip along the
way.  The fiddler went first, the scroll of his violin gay
with ribbons.  Then came the bridal pair, then their families,
then their friends in no particular order.  And last of all 
the children, having a good time pulling the bell-shaped
flowers from the oat stalks or playing among themselves out
of sight of their elders.  Emma's gown was too long, and 
trailed a little.  From time to time she stopped to pull it
up, and at such moments she would carefully pick off the
coarse grasses and thistle spikes with her gloved fingers,
as Charles waited empty-handed beside her.  Rouault, in a
new silk hat, the cuffs of his black tail coat coming down
over his hands as far as his fingertips, had given his arm
to the older Madame Bovary.  The older Monsieur Bovary, who
looked on all these people with contempt, and had come
wearing simply a single-breasted overcoat of military cut,
was acting the barroom gallant with a young peasant girl.
She bobbed and blushed, tongue-tied and confused.  The other
members of the wedding party discussed matter of business,
or played tricks behind each other's backs, their spirits
already soaring in anticipation of the fun.  If they
listened, they could hear the steady scraping of the fiddle
in the fields.  When the fiddler realized that he had left
everyone far behind, he stopped for breath, carefully rubbed
his bow with rosin to make his strings squeak all the better,
and then set off again on his course, raising and lowering
the neck of his violin to keep time.  The sound of the
instrument frightened away all the birds for a long distance
ahead.

The table was set up in the carriage shed.  On it were
four roasts of beef, six fricassees of chicken, a veal
casserole, three legs of mutton, and in the center a charming
little suckling pig flanked by four andouilles a l'oseille,
pork sausages flavored with sorrel.  At the corners stood 
decanters of brandy.  The sweet cider foamed up around its
corks, and before anyone was seated, every glass had been
filled to the brim with wine.  Great dishes of yellow
custard, their smooth surfaces decorated with the newlyweds'
initials in candy-dot arabesques, were set trembling whenever
the table was given the slightest knock.  The pies and cakes
had been ordered from a caterer in Yvetot.  Since he was just
starting up in the district, he had gone to considerable
pains, and when dessert time came he himself brought to the
table a wedding cake that drew exclamations from all.  Its
base was a square of blue cardboard representing a temple
with porticos and colonnades and adorned on all sides with
stucco statuettes standing in niches spangled with gold-paper
stars.  The second tier was a mediaeval castle in gateau de
Savoie, surrounded by miniature fortifications of angelica,
almonds, raisins, and orange sections.  And finally, on the
topmost layer, which was a green meadow, with rocks, jelly
lakes, and boats of hazelnut shells.  A little Cupid was
swinging in a chocolate swing.  The tips of the two uprights,
the highest points of the whole, were two real rosebuds.

The banquet went on till nightfall.  Those who grew
tired of sitting took a stroll in the yard or played a kind
of shuffleboard in the barn, then they returned to table.  A
few, toward the end, fell asleep and snored.  But everything
came to life again with the coffee.  There were songs,
displays of strength.  The men lifted weights, played the 
game of passing their heads under their arms while holding
one thumb on the table, tried to raise carts to their
shoulders.  Dirty jokes were in order, the ladies were kissed.
In the evening, when it came time to go, the horses, stuffed
with oats to the bursting point, could scarcely be forced
between the shafts.  They kicked and reared, broke their
harness, brought curses or laughs from their masters.  And
all night long, under the light of the moon on the country
roads, runaway carts were bouncing along ditches at a gallop,
leaping over gravel piles and crashing into banks, with women
leaning out trying desperately to seize the reins.

Those who stayed at Les Bertaux spent the night drinking
in the kitchen.  The children fell asleep on the floor.

The bride had begged her father that she be spared the 
usual pranks.  However, a fishmonger cousin (who had actually
brought a pair of soles as a wedding present) was just
beginning to spurt water from his mouth through the keyhole
when Rouault came along and stopped him, explaining that the
importance of his son-in-law's position didn't permit such
unseemliness.  The cousin complied very grudgingly.  In his
heart he accused Rouault of being a snob, and he joined a
group of four or five other guests, who had happened several
times in succession to be given inferior cuts of meat at 
table and so considered that they, too, had been badly
treated.  The whole group sat there whispering derogatory
things about their host, and in veiled language expressed
hopes for his downfall.

The older Madame Bovary hadn't opened her mouth all day.
No one had consulted her about her daughter-in-law's bridal
dress, or the arrangements for the party.  She went up to bed
early.  Her husband didn't accompany her.  Instead, he sent
to Saint-Victor for cigars and sat up till dawn smoking and
drinking kirsch and hot water.  This variety of grog was new
to his fellow guests, and made him feel that their respect
for him rose all the higher.

Charles was far from being a wag.  He had been dull
throughout the festivities, responding but feebly to the 
witticisms, puns, doubles-entendres, teasings and dubious
jokes that everyone had felt obliged to toss at him from the
moment they had sat down to the soup.

The next day, however, he seemed a different man.  It
was he who gave the impression of having lost his virginity
overnight.  The bride made not the slightest sign that could
be taken to betray anything at all.  Even the shrewdest were
nonplused, and stared at her with the most intense curiosity
whenever she came near.  But Charles hid nothing.  He
addressed her as "ma femme," using the intimate "tu," kept
asking everyone where she was and looking for her everywhere,
and often took her out into the yard, where he could be
glimpsed through the trees with his arm around her waist,
leaning over her as they walked, his head rumpling the yoke
of her bodice.

Two days after the wedding the bridal pair left, because
of his patients Charles could stay away no longer.  Rouault
had them driven to Tostes in his cart, going with them him-
self as far as Vassonville.  There he kissed his daughter a
last time, got out, and retraced his way.  When he had walked
about a hundred yards he stopped.  The sight of the cart
disappearing in the distance, its wheels spinning in the dust,
made him utter a deep sigh.  He remembered his own wedding,
his own earlier days, his wife's first pregnancy.  He, too,
had been very happy, the day he had taken her from her
father's house to his own.  She had ridden pillion behind him
as their horse trotted over the snow, for it had been close 
to Christmas and the fields were white.  She had clutched him
with one arm, her basket hooked over the other.  The wind was
whipping the long lace streamers of her coiffure cauchoise so
that at times they blew across his mouth, and by turning his
head he could see her rosy little face close behind his 
shoulder, smiling silently at him under the gold buckle of 
her bonnet.  From time to time she would warm her fingers by
sliding them inside his coat.  How long ago it all was!  Their
boy would be thirty if he were alive today!  Then he looked
back again, and there was nothing to be seen on the road.  He
felt dismal, like a stripped and empty house, and as tender
memories and black thoughts mingled in his brain, dulled by
the vapors of the feast, he considered for a moment turning
his steps toward the church.  But he was afraid that the sight
of it might make him even sadder, so he went straight home.

Monsieur and Madame Charles reached Tostes about six
o'clock.  The neighbors came to their windows to see their
doctor's new wife.

The elderly maidservant appeared, greeted them, apolo-
gized for not having dinner ready, and suggested that Madame,
in the meantime, might like to make a tour of inspection of
her house.

PART 1

CHAPTER FIVE

The brick house-front was exactly flush with the street,
or rather the road.  Behind the door hung a coat with a short
cape, a bridle, and a black leather cap.  And on the floor in
a corner lay a pair of gaiters still caked with mud.  To the
right was the parlor, which served as both dining and sitting
room.  A canary-yellow wallpaper, set off at the top by a 
border of pale flowers, rippled everywhere on its loose
canvas lining.  White calico curtains edged with red braid
hung crosswise down the length of the windows.  And on the
narrow mantelpiece a clock ornamented with a head of Hippo-
crates stood proudly between two silver-plated candlesticks
under oval glass domes.  Across the hall was Charles' small
consulting room, about eighteen feet wide, with a table,
three straight chairs and an office armchair.  There was a
fir bookcase with six shelves, occupied almost exclusively
by a set of the Dictionary of the Medical Sciences, its pages
uncut but its binding battered by a long succession of
owners.  Cooking smells seeped through the wall during office
hours, and the patient's coughs and confidences were quite
audible in the kitchen.  In the rear, opening directly into
the yard, which contained the stables, was a big ramshackle
room with an oven, now serving as woodshed, wine bin and
store room.  It was filled with old junk, empty barrels,
broken tools, and a quantity of other objects, all dusty and
nondescript.

The long narrow garden ran back between two clay walls
covered with espaliered apricot trees to the thorn hedge
that marked it off from the fields.  In the middle was a
slate sundial on a stone pedestal.  Four beds of scrawny
rose bushes were arranged symmetrically around a square 
plot given over to vegetables.  At the far end, under some
spruces, a plaster priest stood reading his breviary.

Emma went up to the bedrooms.  The first was empty.  In
the second, the conjugal chamber, a mahogany bed stood in an
alcove hung with red draperies.  A box made of seashells
adorned the chest of drawers, and on the desk near the window,
standing in a decanter and tied with white satin ribbon, was 
a bouquet of orange blossoms.  A bride's bouquet.  The other
bride's bouquet!  She stared at it.  Charles noticed, picked
it up, and took it to the attic.  And as her boxes and bags
were brought up and placed around her, she sat in an armchair
and thought of her own bridal bouquet, which was packed in 
one of those very boxes, wondering what would be done with it
if she were to die.

She spent the first few days planning changes in the 
house.  She took the domes off the candlesticks, had the 
parlor repapered, the stairs painted, and seats made to go
around the sundial in the garden.  She even made inquiries
as to the best way of installing a fountain and a fish pond.
And her husband, knowing that she liked to go for drives,
bought a secondhand two-wheeled buggy.  With new lamps and
quilted leather mudguards it looked almost like a tilbury.

He was happy now, without a care in the world.  A meal
alone with her, a stroll along the highway in the evening, 
the way she touched her hand to her hair, the sight of her 
straw hat hanging from a window hasp, and many other things
in which it had never occurred to him to look for pleasure.
Such now formed the steady current of his happiness.  In bed
in the morning, his head beside hers on the pillow, he would
watch the sunlight on the downy gold of her cheeks, half
covered by the scalloped tabs of her nightcap.  Seen from so
close, her eyes appeared larger than life, especially when
she opened and shut her eyelids several times on awakening.
Black when looked at in shadow, dark blue in bright light,
they seemed to contain layer upon layer of color, thicker
and cloudier beneath, lighter and more transparent toward
the lustrous surface.  As his own eyes plunged into those
depths, he saw himself reflected there in miniature down to
his shoulders, his foulard on his head, his nightshirt open. 
After he had dressed she would go to the window and watch
him leave for his rounds.  She would lean out between two
pots of geraniums, her elbows on the sill, her dressing gown
loose around her.  In the street, Charles would strap on his
spurs at the mounting-block, and she would continue to talk
to him from above, blowing down to him some bit of flower or
leaf she bitten off in her teeth.  It would flutter down
hesitantly, weaving semicircles in the air like a bird, and
before reaching the ground it would catch in the tangled
mane of the old white mare standing motionless at the door.
From the saddle Charles would send her a kiss.  She would
respond with a wave, then she would close the window, and
he was off.  And on the endless dusty ribbon of the highway,
on sunken roads vaulted over by branches, on paths between
stands of grain that rose to his knees, the sun on his 
shoulders and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart
full of the night's bliss, his spirit at peace and his flesh
content, he would ride on his way ruminating his happiness,
like someone who keeps savoring, hours later, the fragrance
of the truffles he has eaten for dinner.

Up until now, had there ever been a happy time in his
life?  His years at the lycee, where he had lived shut in 
behind high walls, lonely among richer, cleverer schoolmates
who laughed at his country accent and made fun of his clothes
and whose mothers brought them cookies in their muffs on
visiting days?  Or later, when he was studying medicine and
hadn't enough in his purse to go dancing with some little 
working girl who might have become his mistress?  After that
he had lived fourteen months with the widow, whose feet in
bed had been like icicles.  But now he possessed, and for
always, this pretty wife whom he so loved.  The universe, for
him, went not beyond the silken circuit of her petticoat.
And he would reproach himself for not showing her his love,
and yearn to be back with her.  He would gallop home, rush
upstairs, his heart pounding.  Emma would be at her dressing
table.  He would creep up silently behind her and kiss her.
She would cry out in surprise.

He couldn't keep from constantly touching her comb, her
rings, everything she wore.  Sometimes he gave her great
full-lipped kisses on the cheek, or a whole series of tiny
kisses up her bare arm, from her fingertips to her shoulder.
And half amused, half annoyed, she would push him away as one
does an importunate child.

Before her marriage she had thought that she had love
within her grasp.  But since the happiness which she had
expected this love to bring her hadn't come, she supposed
she must have been mistaken.  And Emma tried to imagine just
what was meant, in life, by the words "bliss," "passion,"
and "rapture."  Words that had seemed so beautiful to her in 
books.

PART 1

CHAPTER SIX

She had read Paul and Virginia, and had dreamed of the
bamboo cabin, of the Negro Domingo and the dog Fidele.  And
especially she dreamed that she, too, had a sweet little
brother for a devoted friend, and that he climbed trees as
tall as church steeples to pluck her their crimson fruit, 
and came running barefoot over the sand to bring her a bird's
nest.

When she was thirteen, her father took her to the city
to enter her as a boarder in the convent.  They stayed at a
hotel near Saint-Gervais, where their supper plates were
decorated with scenes from the life of Mademoiselle de La
Valliere.  The explanatory captions, slashed her and there 
by knife scratches, were all in praise of piety, the sensi-
bilities of the heart, and the splendors of the court.

Far from being unhappy in the convent, at first, she
enjoyed the company of the nuns.  It was fun when they took
her to the chapel, down a long corridor from the refectory.
She rarely played during recess, and she was very quick at
catechism.  It was always Mademoiselle Rouault who answered
Monsieur le vicaire's hardest questions.  As she continued
to live uninterruptedly in the insipid atmosphere of the
classrooms, among the white-faced women with their brass
crucifixes dangling from their rosaries, she gently succumbed
to the mystical languor induced by the perfumes of the altar,
the coolness of the holy-water fonts, the gleaming of the 
candles.  Instead of following the Mass she kept her prayer
book open at the holy pictures with their sky-blue borders.
And she loved the Good Shepherd, the Scared Heart pierced
by sharp arrows, and poor Jesus stumbling and falling under
his cross.  To mortify herself she tried to go a whole day
without eating.  She looked for some vow that she might
accomplish.

When she went to confession she invented small sins in
order to linger on her knees there in the darkness, her hands
joined, her face at the grille, the priest whispering just 
above her.  The metaphors constantly used in sermons,
"betrothed," "spouse," "heavenly lover," "mystical marriage,"
excited her in a thrilling new way.

Every evening before prayers a piece of religious writing
was read aloud in study hall.  During the week it would be
some digest of Biblical history or the Abbe Frayssinous'
lectures.  On Sunday it was always a passage from the Genie
du Christianisme, offered as entertainment.  How intently she
listened, the first times, to the ringing lamentations of 

that romantic melancholy, echoed and re-echoed by all the
voices of earth and heaven!  Had her childhood been spent in
cramped quarters behind some city shop, she might have been
open to the lyric appeal of nature, which usually reaches us
only by way of literary interpretations.  But she knew too
much about country life.  She was well acquainted with lowing
herds, with dairy maids and ploughs.  From such familiar, 
peaceful aspects, she turned to the picturesque.  She loved
the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when
it grew here and there among ruins.  She had to extract a 
kind of personal advantage from things, and she rejected as
useless everything that promised no immediate gratification,
for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and
what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.


At the convent there was an old spinster who came for
a week every month to look after the linen.  As a member of
an ancient noble family ruined by the Revolution she was a 
protegee of the archdiocese, and she ate at the nuns table
in the refectory and always stayed for a chat with them
before returning upstairs to her work.  The girls often
slipped out of study-hall to pay her a visit.  She had a
repertoire of eighteenth-century love songs, and sang them in
a low voice as she sewed.  She told stories, kept the girls
abreast of the news, did errands for them in the city, and to
the older ones would surreptitiously lend one of the novels
she always carried in her apron pocket.  Novels of which the
good spinster herself was accustomed to devour long chapters
in the intervals of her task.  They were invariably about
love affairs, lovers, mistresses, harassed ladies swooning in
remote pavilions.  Couriers were killed at every relay, horses
ridden to death on every page.  There were gloomy forests,
broken hearts, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, skiffs in the
moonlight, nightingales in thickets.  The noblemen were all
brave as lions, gentle as lambs, incredibly virtuous, always
beautifully dressed, and wept copiously on every occasion.
For six months, when she was fifteen, Emma begrimed her hands
with this dust from old lending libraries.  Later, reading
Walter Scott, she became infatuated with everything historical
and dreamed about oaken chests and guardrooms and troubadours.
She would have liked to live in some old manor, like those
long-waisted chatelaines who spent their days leaning out of 
fretted Gothic casements, elbow on parapet and chin in hand,
watching a white-plumed knight come galloping out of the
distance on a black horse.  At that time she worshipped Mary
Queen of Scots, and venerated women illustrious or ill-
starred.  In her mind Joan of Arc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, La
Belle Ferroniere and Clemence Isaure stood out like comets on
the shadowy immensity of history.  And here and there (though
less clearly outlined than the others against the dim back-
ground, and quite unrelated among themselves) were visible
also St. Louis and his oak, the dying Bayard, certain atro-
cities of Louis XI, bits of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew,
the plumed crest of Henri IV, and, always, the memory of the 
hotel plates glorifying Louis XIV.

The sentimental songs she sang in music class were all
about little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagoons,
gondoliers, mawkish compositions that allowed her to glimpse,
through the silliness of the words and the indiscretions of
the music, the alluring, phantasmagoric realm of genuine 
feeling.  Some of her schoolmates brought to the convent the
keepsake albums they had received as New Year's gifts.  They
had to hide them, it was very exciting, they could be read
only at night, in the dormitory.  Careful not to harm the
lovely satin bindings, Emma stared bedazzled at the names of
the unknown authors, counts or viscounts, most of them, who
had written their signatures under their contributions.

She quivered as she blew back the tissue paper from each
engraving.  It would curl up into the air, then sink gently
down against the page.  Behind a balcony railing a young man
in a short cloak clasped in his arms a girl in a white dress,
a chatelaine bag fastened to her belt.  Or there were portraits
of unidentified aristocratic English beauties with blond curls,
staring out at you with their wide light-colored eyes from
under great straw hats.  Some were shown lolling in carriages,
gliding through parks.  Their greyhound ran ahead, and two
little grooms in white knee breeches drove the trotting horses.
Others, dreaming on sofas, an opened letter lying beside them,
gazed at the moon through a window that was half open, half
draped with a black curtain.  Coy maidens with tears on their
cheeks kissed turtledoves through the bars of Gothic bird
cages.  Or, smiling, their cheeks practically touching their
own shoulders, they pulled the petals from daisies with
pointed fingers that curved up at the ends like Eastern
slippers.  Then there were sultans with long pipes swooning
under arbors in the arms of dancing girls.  There were
Giaours, Turkish sabres, fezzes.  And invariably there were
blotchy, pale landscapes of fantastic countries.  Pines and
palms growing together, tigers on the right, a lion on the
left, tartar minarets on the horizon, Roman ruins in the
foreground, a few kneeling camels.  All of it set in a very
neat and orderly virgin forest, with a great perpendicular
sunbeam quivering in the water.  And standing out on the
water's surface, scratched in white on the steel-gray back-
ground, a few widely spaced floating swans.

The bracket lamp above Emma's head shone down on those
pictures of every corner of the world as she turned them over
one by one in the silence of the dormitory, the only sound,
coming from the distance, that of some belated cab on the
boulevards.

When her mother died, she wept profusely for several
days.  She had a memorial picture made for herself from the
dead woman's hair.  And in a letter filled with sorrowful
reflections on life that she sent to Les Bertaux, she begged
to be buried, when her time came, in the same grave.  Her
father thought she must be ill, and went to see her.  Emma
was privately pleased to feel that she had so very quickly
attained this ideal of ethereal languor, inaccessible to
mediocre spirits.  So she let herself meander along Lamar-
tinian paths, listening to the throbbing of harps on lakes,
to all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of every
leaf, to the flight of pure virgins ascending to heaven,
and to the voice of the Eternal speaking in the valleys.
Gradually these things began to bore her, but she refused to
admit it and continued as before, first out of habit, then
out of vanity.  Until one day she discovered with surprise
that the whole mood had evaporated, leaving her heart as free
of melancholy as her brow was free of wrinkles.

The good nuns, who had been taking her vocation quite
for granted, were greatly surprised to find that Mademoiselle
Rouault was apparently slipping out of their control.  And
indeed they had so deluged her with prayers, retreats, novenas
and sermons, preached so constantly the respect due the saints
and the martyrs, and given her so much good advice about
modest behavior and the saving of her soul, that she reacted
like a horse too tightly reined.  She balked, and the bit fell
from her teeth.  In her enthusiasms she had always looked for
something tangible.  She had loved the church for its flowers,
music for its romantic words, literature for its power to stir
the passions.  And she rebelled before the mysteries of faith
just as she grew ever more restive under discipline, which was
antipathetic to her nature.  When her father took her out of
school no one was sorry to see her go.  The Mother Superior,
indeed, remarked that she had lately been displaying a certain
lack of reverence toward the community.

Back at home, Emma at first enjoyed giving orders to the
servants, then grew sick of country life and longed to be 
back in the convent.  By the time Charles first appeared at
Les Bertaux she thought that she was cured of illusions, that
she had nothing more to learn, and no great emotions to look
forward to.

But in her eagerness for a change, or perhaps overstimu-
lated by this man's presence, she easily persuaded herself
that love, that marvelous thing which had hitherto been like
a great rosy-plumaged bird soaring in the splendors of poetic
skies, was at last within her grasp.  And now she could not
bring herself to believe that the uneventful life she was
leading was the happiness of which she had dreamed.

PART 1

CHAPTER SEVEN

She reflected occasionally that these were, nevertheless,
the most beautiful days of her life, the honeymoon days, as
people called them.  To be sure, their sweetness would be best
enjoyed far off, in one of those lands with exciting names
where the first weeks of marriage can be savored so much more
deliciously and languidly!  The postchaise with its blue silk
curtains would have climbed slowly up the mountain roads, and
the postilion's song would have re-echoed among the cliffs,
mingling with the tinkling of goat bells and the dull roar of
waterfalls.  They would have breathed the fragrance of lemon
trees at sunset by the shore of some bay.  And at night, alone
on the terrace of a villa, their fingers intertwined, they
would have gazed at the stars and planned their lives.  It
seemed to her that certain portions of the earth must produce
happiness, as though it were a plant native only to those
soils and doomed to languish elsewhere.  Why couldn't she be
leaning over the balcony of some Swiss chalet?  Or nursing
her melancholy in a cottage in Scotland, with a husband clad
in a long black velvet coat and wearing soft leather shoes, a
high-crowned hat and fancy cuffs!

She might have been glad to confide all these things to
someone.  But how speak about so elusive a malaise, one that
keeps changing its shape like the clouds and its direction
like the winds?  She could find no words, and hence neither
occasion nor courage came to hand.

Still, if Charles had made the slightest effort, if he
had had the slightest inkling, if his glance had a single
time divined her thought, it seemed to her that her heart
would have been relieved of its fullness as quickly and 
easily as a tree drops its ripe fruit at the touch of a
hand.  But even as they were brought closer together by the 
details of daily life, she was separated from him by a
growing sense of inward detachment.

Charles' conversation was flat as a sidewalk, a place 
of passage for the ideas of every man.  They wore drab every
day clothes, and they inspired neither laughter nor dreams.
When he had lived in Rouen, he said, he had never had any
interest in going to the theatre to see the Parisian company
that was acting there.  He couldn't tell her the meaning of
a riding term she had come upon in a novel.

Wasn't it a man's role, though, to know everything?
Shouldn't he be expert at all kinds of things, able to initi-
ate you into the intensities of passion, the refinements of
life, all the mysteries?  This man could teach you nothing. 
He knew nothing, he wished for nothing.  He took it for
granted that she was content, and she resented his settled
calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself
brought him.

She drew occasionally, and Charles enjoyed nothing more
than standing beside her watching her bent over her sketch-
book, half shutting his eyes the better to see her work, or
rolling her bread-crumb erasers between his thumb and finger.
As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew the more he
marveled.  She played with dash, swooping up and down the 
keyboard without a break.  The strings of the old instrument
jangled as she pounded, and when the window was open it
could be heard to the end of the village.  The huissier's
clerk often stopped to listen as he passed on the road,
bareheaded, shuffling along in slippers, holding in his hand
the notice he was about to post.

Moreover, Emma knew how to run her house.  She let
Charles' patients know how much they owed him, writing them
nicely phrased letters that didn't sound like bills.  When
a neighbor came to Sunday dinner she always managed to think
up some attractive dish.  She would arrange greengages in a
pyramid on a bed of vine leaves.  She served her jellies not
in their jars but neatly turned out on a plate, she spoke of
buying finger bowls for dessert.  All this redounded greatly
to Bovary's credit.

He came to esteem himself the higher for having such a
wife.  He had two of her pencil sketches framed in wide
frames, and hung them proudly in the parlor, at the end of
long green cords.  Citizens returning from Mass saw him
standing on his doorsteps, wearing a splendid pair of carpet
slippers.

He came home from his rounds late, ten o'clock, some-
times midnight.  He was hungry at that hour, and since the
servant had gone to bed it was Emma who served him.  He would
take off his coat to be more comfortable at table, tell her
every person he had seen, every village he had been to, every
prescription he had written.  And he would complacently eat
what was left of the stew, pare his cheese, munch an apple,
pour himself the last drop of wine.  Then he would go up to
bed, fall asleep the minute he was stretched on his back, and
begin to snore.

He had so long been used to wearing cotton nightcaps 
that he couldn't get his foulard to stay on his head, and in
the morning his hair was all over his face and white with
down.  The strings of his pillowcase often came undone 
during the night.  He always wore heavy boots, with deep
creases slanting from instep to ankle and the rest of the
uppers so stiff that they seemed to be made of wood.  He 
said that they were "plenty good enough for the country."

His mother approved his thriftiness.  As in the past, 
she came to visit him whenever there was a particularly 
violent crisis in her own home.  And yet she seemed to be
prejudiced against her new daughter-in-law.  She considered
her "too grand in her tastes for the kind of people they 
were."  The younger Bovarys ran through wood, sugar and
candles at the rate of some great establishment.  And the
amount of charcoal they used would have done the cooking for
twenty-five.  She rearranged Emma's linen in the closets and
taught her to check on the butcher when he delivered the 
meat.  Emma listened to these lectures.  Madame Bovary did
not stint herself.  And all day there would be a tremulous-
lipped exchange of "ma fille" and "ma mere," each of the 
ladies uttering the sugary words in a voice that quivered 
with rage.

In Madame Dubuc's day the older woman had known herself
to be the favorite.  But now Charles' love for Emma seemed
to her a desertion, an invasion of her own right.  And she
looked on sadly at Charles' happiness, like a ruined man
staring through a window at revelers in a house that was
once his own.  Using the device of "Do you remember?" she
reminded him of everything she had suffered and sacrificed

for his sake, and contrasting all this with Emma's careless
ways she pointed out how wrong he was to adore his wife to
the exclusion of herself.

Charles didn't know what to answer.  He respected his
mother, and his love for his wife was boundless.  He con-
sidered the former's opinions infallible, and yet Emma seemed
to him perfect.  After the older Madame Bovary's departure
he made a fainthearted attempt to repeat one of two of the
milder things he had heard her say, using her own phraseology.
But with a word or two Emma convinced him he was wrong, and
sent him back to his patients.

Throughout all this, following formulas she believed
efficacious, she kept trying to experience love.  Under the
moonlight in the garden she would recite to Charles all the
amorous verses she knew by heart, and sing him soulful
sighing songs.  But it all left her as unruffled as before,
and Charles, too, seemed as little lovesick, as little 
stirred, as ever.

Having thus failed to produce the slightest spark of
love in herself, and since she was incapable of understanding
what she didn't experience, or of recognizing anything that
wasn't expressed in conventional terms, she reached the
conclusion that Charles' desire for her was nothing very
extraordinary.  His transports had become regularized.  He
embraced her only at certain times.  This had now become a
habit like any other.  Like a dessert that could be counted
on to end a monotonous meal.

A gamekeeper whom Monsieur had cured of pneumonia made
Madame a present of a little Italian greyhound bitch, and 
she took her with her whenever she went for a stroll.  She
did this every now and then, for the sake of a moment's 
solitude, a momentary relief from the everlasting sight of 
the back garden and the dusty road.

She would walk to the avenue of beeches at Banneville,
near the abandoned pavilion at the corner of the wall along
the fields.  Rushes grow in the ditch there, tall and sharp-
edged among the grass.

Once arrived she would look around her, to see whether
anything had changed since the last time she had come.  The
foxgloves and the wallflowers were where they had been.
Clumps of nettles were still growing around the stones.
Patches of lichen still clung along the three windows, whose
perennially closed shutters were rotting away from their 
rusty iron bars.  Her thoughts would be vague at first,
straying like her dog, who would be running in circles,
barking at yellow butterflies, chasing field mice, nibbling
poppies at the edge of a wheat field.  Then her ideas would
gradually focus, and sitting on the grass, jabbing it with
little pokes of her parasol, Emma would ask herself again
and again, "Why . . . why . . . did I ever marry?"

She wondered whether some different set of circumstances
might not have resulted in her meeting some different man,
and she tried to picture those imaginary circumstances.  The
life they would have brought her, the unknown other husband.
However she imagined him, he wasn't a bit like Charles.  He
might have been handsome, witty, distinguished, magnetic, the
kind of man her convent schoolmates had doubtless married.
What kind of lives were they leading now?  Cities and the
busy streets, buzzing theatres, brilliant balls.  Such
surroundings afforded them unlimited opportunities for deep
emotions and exciting sensations.  But her life was as cold
as an attic facing north.  And boredom, like a silent spider,
was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her
heart.  She remembered Prize Days, when she had gone up onto
the stage to receive her little wreaths.  She had been so
charming, with her braids, her white dress, her prunella-
cloth slippers.  Gentlemen had leaned over, when she was back
in her seat, and paid her compliments.  The courtyard had
been full of carriages.  Guests called good-bye to her as
they rolled away.  The music teacher with his violin case
bowed to her as he passed.  How far away it all was! How far!

She would call Djali, take her between her knees, stroke
her long delicate head.  "Kiss your mistress," she would say,
"you happy, carefree thing."  The slender Djali would yawn
slowly, as a dog does, and the melancholy look in her eyes
would touch Emma, and she would liken her to herself, talking
to her aloud as though comforting someone in distress.

Sometimes squalls blew up, winds that suddenly swept in
from the sea over the plateau of the pays de Caux and filled
the countryside with fresh, salt-smelling air.  The whistling
wind would flatten the reeds and rustle the trembling beech
leaves, while the tops of the trees swayed and murmured. Emma
would pull her shawl close about her shoulders and get up.

Under the double row of trees a green light filtered
down through the leaves onto the velvety moss that crunched
softly beneath her feet.  The sun was setting.  The sky 
showed red between the branches, and the identical trunks of
the straight line of trees were like a row of brown columns
against a golden backdrop.  A terror would seize her, she
would call Djali and walk quickly back to Tostes along the
highway.  There she would sink into a armchair, and sit
silent all evening.

Then, late in September, something exceptional happened.
She was invited to La Vaubyessard, home of the marquis
d`Andervilliers.

The marquis had been a member of the cabinet under the
Restoration, and now, hoping to re-enter political life, he 
was paving the way for his candidature to the Chamber of
Deputies.  He made generous distributions of firewood among
the poor in the winter, and in sessions of the departmental
council he was always eloquent in demanding better roads for
his district.  During the hot weather he had had a mouth
abscess, which Charles had relieved, miraculously it seemed,
by a timely nick of the scalpel.  His steward, sent to
Tostes to pay the bill for the operation, reported that
evening that he had seen some superb cherries in the
doctor's little garden.  The cherry trees at La Vaubyessard
weren't doing well.  Monsieur le marquis asked Charles for
a few grafts, made a point of going to thank him personally,
saw Emma, and noticed that she had a pretty figure and
didn't curtsy like a peasant.  So at the chateau it was
decided that the doctor and his young wife could be invited
without any transgression of the limits of condescension,
and at the same time could be counted on to behave with
decorum among their betters.

One Wednesday at three in the afternoon, therefore,
Monsieur and Madame Bovary set out in their buggy for La
Vaubyessard, a large trunk tied on behind and a hatbox in
front.  Charles had another box between his legs.

They arrived at nightfall, just as lanterns were being 
lit in the grounds to illuminate the driveway.

PART 1

CHAPTER EIGHT

The chateau, a modern building in the Italian style,
with two projecting wings and three entrances along the
front, stretched across the far end of a vast expanse of turf
where cows grazed in the open spaces between groups of tall
trees.  Tufts of shrubbery, rhododendrons, syringas and
snowballs, made a variegated border along the curving line of
the graveled drive.  A stream flowed under a bridge.  Through
the evening haze the thatched farm buildings could be seen
scattered over a meadow shut in by two gently rising wooded
ridges.  And at the rear, in among thick plantings of trees,
were the two parallel lines of the coach houses and the
stables, remains of the original, ancient chateau that had
been torn down.

Charles' buggy drew up before the middle door.
Servants appeared, then the marquis, who gave the doctor's
wife his arm and led her into the entrance hall.

This had a marble floor and a high ceiling, footsteps
and voices echoed as in a church.  From the far side rose a
straight staircase, and to the left a gallery giving on the
garden led to the billiard room, the sound of clicking ivory
balls could be heard ahead.  As she passed through on her way
to the drawing room Emma noticed the men around the table.
Dignified looking, with cravats reaching up to their chins
and decorations on their chests, they smiled silently as they
made their shots.  On the dark wall paneling hung great
gilded frames, inscribed at the base with names in black
letters.  "Jean-Antoine d`Andervilliers d`Yverbonville, comte
de la Vaubyessard and baron de la Fresnaye, killed at the 
battle of Coutras, October 20, 1587."  Or, "Jean-Antoine-
Henry-Guy d`Andervilliers de la Vaubyessard, admiral of the 
fleet and knight of the order of St. Michael, wounded in the
battle of La Hogue, May 29, 1692, died at La Vaubyessard
January 23, 1693."  The rest were barely visible, for the
lamplight was directed down on the green felt of the tables,
and much of the room was in shadow.  This darkened the row of
pictures.  Only the crackle of their varnish caught an
occasional broken gleam, and here and there some detail of
painting lighter than the rest stood out from one of the dim,
gold-framed rectangles.  A pale forehead, two staring eyes,
powdered wigs cascading onto red-coated shoulders, a garter
buckle high up on a fleshy calf.

The marquis opened the drawing room door, and one of the
ladies rose.  It was the marquise, and she came over to Emma,
greeted her, drew her down beside her on a settee and talked
to her as easily as though they were old acquaintances.  She
was a woman of forty or so, with fine shoulders, a hooked nose
and a drawling voice.  On her auburn hair she was wearing a
simple bit of lace, the points falling down behind.  Close 
beside her sat a blonde young woman in a high-backed chair, 
and around the fireplace gentlemen with flowers in their
buttonholes were chatting with the ladies.

Dinner was served at seven.  The men, more numerous than
the ladies, were put at a table in the entrance hall.  The
ladies sat down in the dining room, with the marquis and the
marquise. 

Here the air was warm and fragrant.  The scent of
flowers and fine linen mingled with the odor of cooked meats
and truffles.  Candle flames cast long gleams on rounded
silver dish-covers, the clouded facets of the cut glass shone
palely.  There was a row of bouquets all down the table, and
on the wide-bordered plates the napkins stood like bishops'
mitres, each with an oval-shaped roll between its folds.  Red
lobster claws protruded from platters, oversized fruit was
piled up on moss in openwork baskets.  Quail were served in
their plumage.  Steam rose from open dishes.  And the
platters of carved meat were brought round by the maitre
d'hotel himself, grave as a judge in silk stockings, knee
breeches, white neckcloth and jabot.  He reached them down
between the guests, and with a flick of his spoon transferred
to each plate the piece desired.  Atop the high copper-banded
porcelain stove the statue of a woman swathed to the chin in
drapery stared down motionless at the company.

Madame Bovary was surprised to notice that several of 
the ladies had failed to put their gloves in their wine
glasses.

At the head of the table, alone among ladies, was an
old man.  His napkin was tied around his neck like a child's,
and he sat hunched over his heaped plate, gravy dribbling
from his mouth.  The underlids of his eyes hung down and

showed red inside, and he wore his hair in a little pigtail
wound with black ribbon.  This was the marquis' father-in-
law, the old duc de Laverdiere, favorite of the duc d`Artois
in the days of the marquis de Conflans' hunting parties at Le
Vaudreuil.  He was said to have been Marie-Antoinette's lover
between Monsieur de Coigny and Monsieur de Lauzun.  He had
led a wild, dissipated life, filled with duels, wagers and
abductions.  He had gone through his money and been the
terror of his family.  Now, muttering unintelligibly, he
pointed his finger at one dish after another, and a servant
standing behind his chair shouted their names in his ear.
Emma's eyes kept coming back to this pendulous-lipped old
man as though he were someone extraordinary, someone august.
He had lived at court!  He had slept with a queen!

Iced champagne was served, and the feel of the cold
wine in her mouth gave Emma a shiver that ran over her from
head to toe.  She had never see pomegranates or eaten pine-
apple.  Even the powdered sugar seemed to her whiter and 
finer than elsewhere.

Then the ladies went up to their rooms to dress for the 
ball.

Emma devoted herself to her toilette with the meticu-
lous care of an actress the night of her debut.  She did her
hair as the hairdresser advised, and slipped into her gauzy
barege gown, which had been laid out for her on the bed.

Charles trousers were too tight at the waist.  And then,
"The shoe straps will interfere with my dancing," he said.

"You?  Dance?" Emma cried.

"Of course!"

"But you're crazy!  Everybody would laugh.  You mustn't.
It's not suitable for a doctor, anyway," she added.

Charles said no more.  He walked up and down waiting for
Emma to be ready.

He saw her from behind in a mirror, between two sconces.
Her dark eyes seemed darker than ever.  Her hair, drawn down
smoothly on both sides and slightly fluffed out over the ears,
shone with a blue luster.  In her chignon a rose quivered on 
its flexible stem, with artificial dewdrops at the leaf-tips.
Her gown was pale saffron, trimmed with three bunches of
pompon roses and green sprays.

Charles came up to kiss her on the shoulder.  "Don't!"
she cried.  "You're rumpling me."

The strains of a violin floated up the stairs, a horn
joined in.  As Emma went down she had to restrain herself 
from running.

The quadrilles had begun.  More and more guests were 
arriving.  There was something of a crush.  Emma stayed near
the door on a settee.

When the music stopped, the dance floor was left to the
men, who stood there talking in groups, and to the liveried
servants, who crossed it with their heavy trays.  Along the
line of seated women there was a flutter of painted fans.
Smiles were half hidden behind bouquets.  Gold-stoppered
scent bottles twisted and turned in white-gloved hands, the
tight silk binding the wrists and showing the form of the
nails.  There was a froth of lace around decolletages, a
flashing of diamonds at throats, bracelets dangling medals
and coins tinkled on bare arms.  Hair was sleek and shining
in front, twisted and knotted behind, and every coiffure had
its wreath or bunch or sprig, of forget-me-nots, jasmine,
pomegranate blossoms, wheat-sprays, cornflowers.  The dow-
agers, sitting calm and formidable, wore red head dresses like
turbans.

Emma's heart pounded a bit as her partner led her out by
the fingertips and she waited in line for the starting signal
on the violin.  But her nervousness soon wore off, and swaying
and nodding in time with the orchestra, she glided forward.
She responded with a smile to the violinist's flourishes as
he continued to play solo when the other instruments stopped.
At such moments the chink of gold pieces came clearly from
the gaming tables in the next room.  Then everything was in
full swing again, the cornet blared, once again feet tramped
in rhythm, skirts ballooned and brushed together, hands joined
and separated, eyes lowered one moment looked intently into
yours the next.

Scattered among the dancers or talking in doorways were
a number of men, a dozen or so, aged from twenty-five to
forty, who were clearly distinguishable from the rest by a
certain look of overbreeding common to them all despite
differences of age, dress, or feature.

Their coats were better cut, and seemed to be of finer
cloth.  Their hair, brought forward in ringlets over the 
temples, seemed to glisten with more expensive pomades.  
Their complexion bespoke wealth.  They had the pale, very 
white skin that goes so well with the diaphanous tints of 
porcelain, the luster of satin, the patina of old wood, and 
is kept flawless by simple, exquisite fare.  These men moved
their heads unconstrainedly above low cravats.  Their long
side whiskers drooped onto turned-down collars.  They wiped
their lips with handkerchiefs that were deliciously scented
and monogrammed with huge initials.  Those who were beginning
to age preserved a youthful look, while the faces of the young
had a touch of ripeness.  There was an air of indifference
about them, a calm produced by the gratification of every
passion.  And though their manners were suave, one could sense
beneath them that special brutality which comes from the habit
of breaking down half-hearted resistances that keep one fit
and tickle one's vanity, the handling of blooded horses, the
pursuit of loose women.

A few steps from Emma a blue-coated gentleman was deep
in Italy with a pale young woman in pearls.  They were
gushing about the massiveness of the piers in St. Peter's,
about Tivoli, Vesuvius, Castellamare and the Cascine, the
roses in Genoa, the Colosseum by moonlight.  And the conver-
sation heard with her other ear was full of words she didn't
understand.  It was coming from a circle that had formed
around a very young man who only the week before had "beaten
Miss Arabella and Romulus" and seemed to have won two thou-
sand louis d'or by jumping a certain ditch in England.  One
of the speakers was complaining that his racers were putting
on weight, another that misprints had made the name of his
horse unrecognizable in the newspapers.

The air in the ballroom had grown heavy.  The lamps were
beginning to dim.  A number of men had disappeared in the 
direction of the billiard room.  A servant climbed on a chair
and broke two panes in a window.  At the sound of the smash
Madame Bovary turned her head and saw peasants peering in 
from the garden, their faces pressed against the glass.  She
thought of Les Bertaux.  She saw the farm, the muddy pond, 
her father in a smock under the apple trees, and she saw 
herself as she had been there, skimming cream with her finger
from the milk jars in the dairy.  But amid the splendors of
this night her past life, hitherto so vividly present, was
vanishing utterly.  Indeed she was beginning almost to doubt
that she had lived it.  She was here, and around the brilliant
ball was a shadow that veiled all else.  She was eating a 
maraschino ice, at that precise moment, from a gilded silver
scallop-shell that she was holding in her left hand.  The
spoon was between her teeth, her eyes were half shut.

A lady near her dropped her fan just as a gentleman was
passing.  "Would you be good enough to pick up my fan,
Monsieur?" she asked him.  "It's there behind the sofa."

The gentleman bowed, and as he stretched out his arm
Emma saw the lady toss something into his hat, something 
white, folded in the shape of a triangle.  The gentleman
recovered the fan and handed it to the lady respectfully.
She thanked him with a nod and began to sniff at her bouquet.

For supper there was an array of Spanish wines and Rhine 
wines, bisque soup and cream of almond soup, Trafalgar
pudding, and platters of all kinds of cold meat in trembling
aspic.  And after it the carriages began gradually to leave.
Drawing back a corner of a muslin curtain, Emma could see
their lamps slipping away into the darkness.  The settees
emptied.  Some of the card players stayed on.  The musicians
cooled the tips of their fingers on their tongues.  Charles
was half asleep, propped up against a door.

At three in the morning the closing cotillion began.
Emma had never waltzed.  Everyone else was waltzing, including
Mademoiselle d`Andervilliers and the marquis.  By this time 
only the hosts and the house guests remained, about a dozen 
in all.  One of the waltzers, whom everyone called simply
"Vicomte," and whose very low-cut waist-coat seemed to be
molded on his torso, came up to Madame Bovary and for the
second time asked her to be his partner.  He would lead her,
he urged, she'd do very well.

They started out slowly, then quickened their step. 
They whirled, or, rather everything, lamps, furniture, walls,
floor, whirled around them, like a disc on a spindle. As they
passed close to a door the hem of Emma's gown caught on her
partner's trousers, and for a moment their legs were all but
intertwined.  He looked down at her, she up at him.  A para-
lyzing numbness came over her, and she stopped.  Then they
resumed, and spinning more quickly the vicomte swept her off
until they were alone at the very end of the gallery.  There,
out of breath, she almost fell, and for an instant leaned her
head against a wall, and put her hand over her eyes.

When she opened them, a lady was sitting on a low stool
in the middle of the salon, three waltzers on their knees
before her.  The lady chose the vicomte, and the violin
struck up again.

Everyone watched them as they went round and round.  She
held her body rigid, her head inclined.  He maintained the
same posture as before, very erect, elbow curved, chin forward.
This time he had a partner worthy of him!  They danced on and
on, long after all the others had dropped out exhausted.

Hosts and guests chatted a few minutes longer, and then,
bidding each other good night, or rather good morning, they
all went up to bed.

Charles dragged himself up the stairs by the handrail.
His legs, he said, were "ready to drop off."  He had spent
five solid hours on his feet by the card tables watching 
people play whist, unable to make head or tail of it.  So he
gave a great sigh of relief when he pulled his shoes off at
last.

Emma slipped a shawl over her shoulders, opened the 
window and leaned out.

The night was very dark.  A few drops of rain were
falling.  She breathed the moist wind, so cooling to her 
eyelids.  The music was still throbbing in her ears, and she
forced herself to stay awake in order to prolong the illusion
of this luxurious life she would so soon have to be leaving.

The sky began to lighten.  Her glance lingered on the
windows of the various rooms as she tried to imagine which 
of them were occupied by the people she had seen the night
before.  She longed to know all about their lives, to pene-
trate into them, to be part of them.

But she was shivering with cold.  She undressed and 
crept into bed beside the sleeping Charles.

Everyone came downstairs for breakfast.  The meal
lasted ten minutes.  To the doctor's surprise no liqueurs
were served.  Mademoiselle d'Andervilliers gathered up the
remains of the brioches in a basket to feed the swans in the
lake, and everyone went for a stroll in the greenhouse, where
strange hairy plants were displayed on pyramidal stands, and
hanging jars that looked like nests crawling with snakes
dripped long, dangling, intertwined green tendrils.  From the
orangery at the end of the greenhouse a roofed passage led to
the outbuildings.  To please the young woman the marquis took
her to see the stables.  Above the basket-shaped racks were
porcelain name plates with the horses' names in black letters.
Each horse moved restlessly in his stall at the approach of
the visitors and the coaxing, clicking sounds they made with
their tongues.  The boards of the harness-room floor shone
like the parquet floor of a drawing room.  The carriage
harness hung in the middle, on two revolving posts, and the
bits, whips, stirrups and curbs were on a line of hooks along
the wall.

Charles, meanwhile, had gone to ask a groom to harness
his buggy.  It was brought round to the front door, and when
all the bundles were stowed away, the Bovarys said their
thank-yous to the marquis and the marquise and set out for
home.

Emma sat silent, watching the turning wheels.  Charles
drove perched on the edge of the seat, arms wide apart, and
the little horse went along at an ambling trot between the
overwide shafts.  The slack reins slapped against his rump
and grew wet with lather, and the case tied on behind thumped
heavily and regularly against the body of the buggy.

They were climbing one of the rises near Thibourville
when just ahead of them, coming from the opposite direction,
there appeared a group of riders, who passed by laughing and
smoking cigars.  Emma thought she recognized the vicomte.
She turned and stared, but all she saw was the bobbing heads
of trotting or galloping riders silhouetted against the sky.

Half a mile farther along they had to stop.  The
breeching broke, and Charles mended it with a rope.  As he 
was checking his harness he saw something on the ground
between the horse's feet, and he picked up a cigar case
trimmed with green silk and bearing a crest in the center
lake a carriage door.

"A couple of cigars in it, too," he said.  "I'll smoke
them after dinner."

"You've taken up smoking?" Emma demanded.

"Once in a while, when I get the chance."

He put his find in his pocket and gave the pony a flick
of the whip.

When they reached home dinner was far from ready.  Madame
lost her temper.  Nastasie talked back.

"It's too much!" Emma cried.  "I've had enough of your
insolence!"  And she gave her notice on the spot.

For dinner there was onion soup and veal with sorrel.
Charles, sitting opposite Emma, rubbed his hands with satis-
faction.  "How good to be home!"

They could hear Nastasie weeping.  Charles had an affec-
tion for the poor thing.  She had kept him company on many an
idle evening during his widowerhood.  She had been his first
patient, his first acquaintance in the village.

"Are you really letting her go?" he finally asked.

"Yes, what's to stop me?"

Then they warmed themselves in the kitchen while their
room was made ready.  Charles proceeded to smoke.  He curled
and pursed his lips around the cigar, spat every other
minute, shrank back from every puff.

"You're going to make yourself sick," she said scorn-
fully.

He put down his cigar and rushed to the pump for a drink
of cold water.  Emma snatched the cigar case and quickly
flung it to the back of the closet.

The next day was endless.  She walked in her garden, up
and down the same paths over and over again, stopping to look
at the flower beds, the fruit trees, the plaster priest,
staring with a kind of amazement at all these things from her
past life, things once so familiar.  How remote the ball
already was!  What was it that made tonight see so very far
removed from the day before yesterday?  Her visit to La
Vaubyessard had opened a breach in her life, like one of those
great crevasses that a storm can tear across the face of a 
mountain in the course of a single night.  But there was 
nothing to do about it.  She put her beautiful ball costume 
reverently away in a drawer, even to her satin slippers, whose
soles were yellow from the slippery wax of the dance floor.
Her heart was like them.  Contact with luxury had left an
indelible mark on it.

The memory of the ball would not leave her.  Every
Wednesday she told herself as she woke.  "Ah!  One week ago
. . . two weeks ago . . . three weeks age, I was there!"
Little by little the faces grew confused in her mind.  She
forgot the tune of the quadrille.  The liveries and the 
splendid rooms became blurred.  Some of the details departed,
but the yearning remained.

PART 2

CHAPTER ONE

Yonville-l'Abbaye (even the ruins of the ancient capuchin
abbey from which it derives its name are no longer there) is a
market town twenty miles from Rouen, between the highways to
Abbeville and Beauvais in the valley of the Rieule.  This is a
small tributary of the Andelle.  It turns the wheels of three
mills before joining the larger stream, and contains some
trout that boys like to fish on Sundays.

Branching off from the highway at La Boissiere, the road
to Yonville continues level until it climbs the hill at Les
Leux.  And from there it commands a view of the valley.  This
is divided by the Rieule into two contrasting bits of country-
side.  Everything to the left is grazing land, everything to
the right is ploughed field.  The pastures extend along the 
base of a chain of low hills and merge at the far end with the
meadows of Bray, while eastward the plain rises gently and 
grows steadily wider, flaunting its golden grainfields as far
as the eye can see.  The stream, flowing along the edge of the
grass, is a white line dividing the color of the meadows from
that of the ploughed earth.  The country thus resembles a 
great spread-out cloak, its green velvet collar edged with
silver braid.

On the horizon beyond Yonville loom the oaks of the
Argueil forest and the escarpments of the bluffs of Saint-
Jean, the latter streaked from top to bottom with long,
irregular lines of red.  These are marks left by rain, and
their brickish color, standing out so sharply against the
gray rock of the hill, comes from the iron content of the
many springs in the country just beyond.

This is where Normandy, Picardy and the Ile-de-France
come together, a mongrel region where the speech of the 
natives is as colorless as the landscape is lacking in char-
acter.  Here they make the worst Neufchatel cheeses in the
entire district.  And here farming calls for considerable
investment.  Great quantities of manure are needed to fer-
tilize the friable, sandy, stony soil.

Up until 1835 no road was kept open to Yonville, but
about that time the cross-cut was made that links the Amiens
and Abbeville highways and is sometimes used by carters tra-
veling from Rouen to Flanders.  Nevertheless, despite its
"new avenues for trade," Yonville-l'Abbaye has stood still.
Instead of adopting improved methods of farming, the natives
stick to their pastures, worn-out though they are.  And the
lazy town, spurning the farmland, has continued its spontan-
eous growth in the direction of the river.  The sight of it
from a distance, stretched out along the bank, brings to mind
a cowherd taking a noonday nap beside the stream.

At the foot of the hill the road crosses the Rieule on a
bridge, and then, becoming an avenue planted with young
aspens, leads in a straight line to the first outlying houses.
These are surrounded by hedges, and their yards are full of
scattered outbuildings, cider presses, carriage houses and
distilling sheds standing here and there under thick trees
with ladders and poles leaning against their trunks and
scythes hooked over their branches.  The thatched roofs hide
the top third or so of the low windows like fur caps pulled
down over eyes, and each windowpane, thick and convex, has a
bull's-eye in its center like the bottom of a bottle.  Some
of the plastered house walls with their diagonal black
timbers are the background for scraggly espaliered pear trees.
And the house doors have little swinging gates to keep out the
baby chicks, who come to the sill to peck at brown-bread
crumbs soaked in cider.  Gradually the yards become narrower,
houses are closer together, the hedges disappear, occasionally
a fern broom put out to dry is seen hanging from a window.
There is a blacksmith shop, a cart-maker's with two or three
new carts outside half blocking the roadway.  Then comes a
white house behind an iron fence, its circular lawn adorned
by a cupid holding finger to lips.  Two cast-iron urns stand
at either end of the entrance terrace.  Brass plates gleam
brightly at the door.  This is the notary's house, the finest
in town.

The church is across the street, twenty yards further on,
at the corner of the main square.  The little graveyard sur-
rounding it, enclosed by an elbow-high wall, is so full of
graves that the old tombstones, lying flat on the ground, form
a continuous pavement divided into rectangular blocks by the
grass that pushes up between.  The church was remodeled during
the last years of the reign of Charles X.  The wooden vaulting
is beginning to rot at the top.  Black cavities are appearing
here and there in the blue paint.  Above the door, in the
place usually occupied by an organ, is a gallery for the men,
reached by a spiral staircase that echoes loudly under the
tread of wooden shoes.

Daylight, coming through the windows of plain glass,
falls obliquely on the pews.  And here and there on the wall
from which they jut out at right angles is tacked a bit of 
straw matting, with the name of the pew-holder in large
letters below.  Beyond, where the nave narrows, stands the
confessional, and opposite it a statuette of the Virgin.  She
is dressed in a satin gown and a tulle veil spangled with 
silver stars, and her cheeks are daubed red like some idol
from the Sandwich Islands.  A painting by a copyist, inscribed
"Holy Family:  Presented by the Minister of the Interior,"
hangs over the main altar, and there, flanked by four candle-
sticks, it closes the vista.  The cheap fir choir stalls have
never been painted.

The market, that is, a tile roof supported by about
twenty pillars, takes up approximately half the main square 
of Yonville.  The town hall, designed, as everyone will tell
you, "by a Paris architect," is a kind of Greek temple forming
one corner of the square, next door to the pharmacy.  Its
lower story has three Ionic columns.  Above is a row of arched
windows, and the culminating pediment is filled with a figure
of the Gallic cock, one of its claws resting on the Constitu-
tion and the other holding the scales of justice.

But what catches the eye the most is across the square
from the Lion d'Or hotel.  Monsieur Homais' pharmacy!  Especi-
ally at night, when his lamp is lit, and the red and green 
glass jars decorating his window cast the glow of their two
colors far out across the roadway!  Peering through it, as
through the glare of Bengal lights, one can catch a glimpse,
at that hour, of the dim figure of the pharmacist himself, 
bent over his desk.  The entire facade of his establishment
is plastered from top to bottom with inscriptions, in running
script, in round hand, in block capitals, "Vichy, Seltzer and
Bareges Waters.  Depurative Fruit Essences.  Raspail's Remedy.
Arabian Racahout.  Darcet's Pastilles.  Regnault's Ointment.
Bandages, Baths, Laxative Chocolates, etc."  And the shop-sign
as wide as the shop itself, proclaims in gold letters, "Homais
Pharmacy."  At the rear of the shop, behind the great scales
fastened to the counter, the word "Laboratory" is inscribed 
above a glass door.  And this door itself, halfway up, bears 
once again the name "Homais," in gold letters on a black
ground.

That is as much as there is to see in Yonville.  The
street (the only street), long as a rifle-shot and lined with
a few shops, abruptly ceases to be a street at a turn of the
road.  If you leave it on the right and follow the base of the
bluffs of Saint-Jean, you soon reach the cemetery.

This was enlarged the year of the cholera.  One wall was
torn down and three adjoining acres were added.  But all this
new portion is almost uninhabited, and new graves continue as 
in the past to be dug in the crowded area near the gate.  The
caretaker, who is also gravedigger and sexton at the church
(thus profiting doubly from the parish corpses), has taken
advantage of the empty land to plant potatoes.  Nevertheless,
his little field grows smaller every year, and when there is
an epidemic he doesn't know whether to rejoice in the deaths
or lament the space taken by the new graves.

"You are feeding on the dead, Lestiboudois!"  Monsieur
le cure told him, one day.

The somber words gave him pause, and for a time he 
desisted.  But today he continues to plant his tubers, coolly
telling everyone that they come up by themselves.

Since the events which we are about to relate, absolutely
nothing has changed in Yonville.  To this day the tin tricolor
still turns atop the church tower.  The two calico streamers
outside the dry-goods shop still blow in the wind.  The spongy
foetuses in the pharmacy window continue to disintegrate in
their cloudy alcohol.  And over the main entrance of the hotel
the old golden lion, much discolored by the rains, stares down
like a curly-headed poodle on passers-by.

The evening the Bovarys were expected at Yonville, Madame
Lefrancois, the widow who owned this hotel, was so frantically
busy with her saucepans that large beads of sweat stood out on
her face.  Tomorrow was market day, and she had to get every-
thing ready in advance.  Cut the meat, clean the chickens,
make soup, roast and grind the coffee.  In addition, she had
tonight's dinner to get for her regular boarders and for the
new doctor and his wife and their maid.  Bursts of laughter
came from the billiard room.  In the small dining room three
millers were calling for brandy.  Logs were blazing, charcoal
was crackling, and on the long table in the kitchen, in among
the quarters of raw mutton, stood high piles of plates that
shook with the chopping of the spinach on the chopping-block.
From the yard came the squawking of the chickens that the 
kitchen maid was chasing with murderous intent.

Warming his back at the fire was a man in green leather
slippers, wearing a velvet skullcap with a gold tassel.  His
face, slightly pitted by smallpox, expressed nothing but self-
satisfaction, and he seemed as contented with life as the 
goldfinch in a wicker cage hanging above his head.  This was
the pharmacist.

"Artemise!" cried the mistress of the inn.  "Chop some
kindling, fill the decanters, bring some brandy, hurry up!
Lord!  If I only knew what dessert to offer these people you're
waiting for!  Listen to their moving-men starting up that
racket in the billiard room again!  They've left their van in
the driveway, too.  The Hirondelle will probably crash into
it.  Call 'Polyte and tell him to put it in the shed!  Would 
you believe it, Monsieur Homais, since this morning they've
played at least fifteen games and drunk eight pots of cider!
But they're going to ruin my table," she said, staring over
at them across the room, her skimming spoon in her hand.

"That wouldn't be much of a loss," replied Monsieur
Homais.  "You'd buy another one."

"Another billiard table!" cried the widow.

"But this one's falling apart, Madame Lefrancois!  I
tell you again, it's shortsighted of you not to invest in a
new one!  Very shortsighted!  Players today want narrow poc-
kets and heavy cues, you know.  They don't play billiards
the way they used to.  Everything's changed.  We must keep
up with the times!  Just look at Tellier . . ."

The hostess flushed with anger.

"Say what you like," the pharmacist went on, "his bil-
liard table is nicer than yours.  And if a patriotic tourna-
ment were to be got up, for Polish independence or Lyons
flood relief . . ."

"We're not afraid of fly-by-nights like Tellier," the
hostess interrupted, shrugging her heavy shoulders.  "Don't
worry, Monsieur Homais.  As long as the Lion d'Or exists
we'll keep out customers.  We're a well-established house.
But the Cafe Francais . . .  One of these mornings you'll
find it sealed up, with a nice big notice on the window
blinds.  A new billiard table!" she went on, talking as 
though to herself.  "But this one's so handy to stack the
washing on!  And in the hunting season it's slept as many
as six! . . .  But what's keeping that slowpoke Hivert?"

"You'll wait till he arrives, to give your gentlemen
their dinner?" the pharmacist asked.

"Wait?  And what about Monsieur Binet?  You'll see
him come in on the stroke of six.  He's the most punctual
man in the world.  He always has to sit at the same place
in the little room.  He'd die rather than eat his dinner
anywhere else.  And finicky!  So particular about his cider!
Not like Monsieur Leon!  Monsieur Leon sometimes doesn't
come in till seven, or even half-past, and half the time he
doesn't even know what he's eating.  What a nice young man!
So polite!  So soft-spoken!"

"Ah, Madame!  There's a great difference, you know,
between someone who's been properly brought up and a tax
collector who got his only schooling in the army."

The clock struck six.  Binet entered.

He was clad in a blue frock coat that hung straight down
all around his skinny body.  And the raised peak of his
leather cap, its earflaps pulled up and fastened at the top,
displayed a bald, squashed-looking forehead, deformed by long
pressure of a helmet.  He was wearing a coarse wool vest, a
crinoline collar, gray trousers, and, as he did in every
season, well-shined shoes that bulged in two parallel lines
over the rising of his two big toes.  Not a hair was out of
place in the blond chin whisker outlining his jaw.  It was
like the edging of a flower bed around his long, dreary face
with its small eyes and hooked nose.  He was a clever card 
player, a good hunter, and wrote a fine hand.  His hobby was
making napkin rings on his own lathe.  Jealous as an artist
and stingy as a bourgeois, he cluttered up his house with his
handiwork.

He headed for the small room, but the three millers had
to be got out before he would go in.  While his table was 
being set he stood next to the stove without saying a word,
then he closed the door and took off his cap as usual.

"He won't wear out his tongue with civilities," the
pharmacist remarked, as soon as he was alone with the hostess.

"He never talks a bit more than that," she answered.  
"Last week I had two cloth salesmen here, two of the funniest
fellows you ever listened to.  They told me stories that made
me laugh till I cried.  Would you believe it?  He sat there
like a clam, didn't open his mouth."

"No imagination," pronounced the pharmacist.  "Not a 
hint of a spark!  No manners whatever!"

"And yet they say he has something to him," objected the
hostess.

"Something to him?" cried Monsieur Homais.  "That man?
Something to him?  Still, in his own line I suppose he may
have," he conceded.

And he went on.  "Ah!  A business man with vast connec-
tions, a lawyer, a doctor, a pharmacist, I can understand it
if they get so engrossed in their affairs that they become
eccentric, even surly.  History is full of such examples.
But at least they have important affairs to be engrossed in!
Take me, for instance.  How often I've turned my desk upside
down looking for my pen to write some labels, only to find
I'd stuck it behind my ear!"

Meanwhile Madame Lefrancois had approached the door to
see whether the Hirondelle wasn't in sight, and she started
as a black-clad man that moment entered the kitchen.  In the
last faint light of dusk it was just possible to make out his
florid face and athletic figure.

"What can I offer you, Monsieur le cure?" she asked,
reaching down a brass candlestick from a row that stood all
ready and complete with candles on the mantelpiece.  "A drop
of cassis?  A glass of wine?"

The priest very politely declined.  He had come to fetch
his umbrella, he said.  He had left it at the convent in
Ernemont the other day, and had supposed the Hirondelle would
have delivered it by now.  He asked Madame Lefrancois to have
it brought to him at the rectory during the evening, and then
left for the church, where the bell was tolling the Angelus.

When the sound of his footsteps in the square had died
away, the pharmacist declared that in his opinion the priest's
behavior had been most improper.  His refusal to take a glass
of something was the most revolting kind of hypocrisy.  All
priests were secret tipplers, he said, and they were all doing
their best to bring back the days of the tithe.

The hostess said some words in the cure's defense.  "Be-
sides," she went on, "he could take on four like you.  Last 
year he helped our men get in the straw.  He carried as many
as six bundles at a time, that shows you how strong he is."

"Bravo!" cried the pharmacist.  "Go ahead!  Keep sending
your daughters to confession to strapping fellows like that!
But if I were the go