Emma alighted first, then Félicité, Monsieur Lheureux, a wet nurse, and they had to wake Charles up in his corner, where he had fallen fast asleep the moment night fell.
Homais introduced himself; he presented his compliments to Madame, his respects to Monsieur, said how delighted he was to be able to render them whatever service, and added with a cordial air that he had dared to invite himself along, his wife happening to be away.
Madame Bovary, once in the kitchen, went up to the fireplace. With the tips of her two fingers, she caught her gown at knee height, and, having thus raised it to her ankles, she held out to the flame, above the revolving leg of mutton, one foot enclosed in a small black boot. The fire lit her up in her entirety, its raw light penetrating the weave of her dress, the smooth pores of her white skin and even her eyelids that she half-closed from time to time. An intense crimson hue swept over her, whenever a puff of wind came in through the half-open door.
From the other side of the fireplace, a young man with fair hair watched her in silence.
As he was heartily bored at Yonville, where he was clerk to the lawyer Guillaumin, Monsieur Léon Dupuis (he it was, the other regular at the Lion d’Or) would often defer the moment of his meal, hoping that some traveler would come to the inn with whom he might chat in the course of the evening. Indeed, on days when his work was done, he was more or less obliged, for want of any other occupation, to arrive punctually, and suffer Binet’s conversation from the soup to the cheese. So he accepted with delight the landlady’s proposal that he dine in the company of the new arrivals, and they passed into the big parlor, where Madame Lefrançois, out of ostentation, had had the four covers laid.
Homais asked permission to keep on his bonnet-grec, for fear of a head cold.
Then, turning to his neighbor:
“Madame, no doubt, is a little weary? One is so terribly tossed about in that Hirondelle of ours!”
“That’s true,” said Emma; “but disturbance always diverts me; I like changing places.”
“It’s such a dull affair,” sighed the clerk, “just to spend one’s life confined to the same spot!”
“If you were like me,” said Charles, “endlessly obliged to be on horseback …”
“But,” Léon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, “there’s nothing more agreeable, to my mind; when you’re able to,” he added.
“Yet,” said the apothecary, “the practice of medicine is not overly taxing in our region; for the state of our roads permits the use of the gig, and, generally speaking, one is paid reasonably, the farmers being well-off. We have, medically, aside from the normal cases of enteritis, bronchitis, bilious ailments, etc., some sporadic fevers now and again at harvest time, but, overall, few serious cases, nothing special to note, except for a decent amount of scrofula, no doubt due to the appalling conditions of hygiene in our peasant dwellings. Ah! you will come across much prejudice to battle against, Monsieur Bovary; much routine stubbornness, with which your every scientific effort will clash daily; for they still have recourse to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than going as a matter of course to the doctor or to the pharmacist. The climate, however, is not, to tell the truth, bad, and we even count several ninety-year-olds in the commune. The thermometer (I have taken the readings myself) goes down to four degrees in winter, and, in high summer, touches twenty-five, thirty degrees Centigrade at the very most, which gives us a maximum of twenty-four Réaumur, or else fifty-four Fahrenheit (English scale), no higher!—and, indeed, we are sheltered from the northerly winds by the Forest of Argueil on the one side, and by Saint-Jean’s hill from the westerly winds on the other; and this heat, meanwhile, on account of the water vapor given off by the river and the considerable presence of cattle in the fields—which emit, as you know, much ammonia, that’s to say, azotic gas, hydrogen and oxygen (no, just azotic gas and hydrogen)—and which, sucking up the humus from the earth, blending all these different emanations, reuniting them in a bundle, so to speak, and itself combining with the electricity diffused in the atmosphere, when there is any, can in the long term, as in the tropics, spawn unhealthy miasmas;—this heat, I say, is precisely tempered on the side where it comes from, or rather from where it would be coming, that’s to say the south side, by the southeasterly winds, which, themselves being cooled as they cross the Seine, sometimes reach us all of a sudden, like the winds from Russia!”
“Have you at least some walks in the vicinity?” continued Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man.
“Oh, very few,” he replied. “There’s a spot known as the Pasture, at the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, of a Sunday, I go up there with a book, and stay to watch the sunset.”
“There’s nothing I admire more than a sunset,” she resumed, “but by the seaside, especially.”
“Oh! I adore the sea,” said Monsieur Léon.
“And then, does it not seem to you,” replied Madame Bovary, “that the mind sails more freely on that limitless expanse, whose contemplation lifts the soul and imparts ideas of the infinite, of the ideal?”
“It’s the same with mountain landscapes,” Léon went on. “I’ve a cousin who traveled through Switzerland last year, and who told me that you cannot imagine the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. You see pines of an incredible size, lying across torrents, cottages hanging above precipices, and, a thousand feet below, entire valleys, when there’s a break in the clouds. Such sights must enrapture, be an inducement to prayer, to ecstasy! And I no longer feel astonished by this celebrated musician who, to better stimulate his imagination, was wont to go off and play the piano before some imposing site or other.”
“You play music?” she asked.
“No, but I like it very much,” he replied.
“Ah! don’t listen to him, Madame Bovary,” Homais interrupted, leaning over his plate, “that’s pure modesty.—What, my dear boy? Well! The other day, in your room, you were singing The Guardian Angel quite delightfully. I heard you from the laboratory; you articulated the words like an actor.”
Léon did, indeed, lodge at the pharmacist’s, where he had a little room on the second floor, overlooking the square. He blushed at this compliment from his landlord, who had already turned to the doctor and was enumerating the principal inhabitants of Yonville one after the other. He recounted anecdotes, proffered information; the notary’s wealth was not known precisely, and there was the Tuvache household which caused great to-do.
Emma took up again:
“And which music do you prefer?”
“Oh! German music, the sort that induces dreams.”
“Do you know the Italians?”
“Not yet; but I shall see them next year, when I go to live in Paris, to finish my law studies.”
“As I had the honor,” said the apothecary, “to convey to your husband with reference to this wretched Yanoda fellow who took off, you will, thanks to his imprudent actions, find yourself enjoying one of the most comfortable houses in Yonville. Its chief convenience for a doctor, is that it has a door onto the Alley Walk, which lets you go in and out without being seen. Moreover, it is furnished with all that’s pleasing in a household: washhouse, kitchen with pantry, family parlor, fruit loft and so forth. He was a jolly fellow who never thought twice about spending! He had built for himself, at the bottom of the garden, beside the water, an arbor expressly for summertime beer drinking, and if Madame likes to garden, she can …”
“My wife scarcely takes an interest in it,” said Charles; “she prefers, however much we beg her to exercise, to stop in her room the whole time, reading.”
“I’m just the same,” said Léon; “in fact, what better occupation than to lie by the fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats on the panes, the lamp burns …?”
“Isn’t it?” she said, fastening upon him her large dark wide-open eyes.
“Nothing is planned,” he continued, “the hours slip by. One roams motionless through countries that seem vividly seen and your mind, entwining with the fiction, frolics in the details or pursues the twists and turns of the adventures. It blends with the characters; so that it seems to be you whose heart races under their dress.”
“True! True!” she said.
“Has it sometimes happened to you,” Léon went on, “that you meet in a book with a vague idea you’ve had, some dim picture that returns from a long way off, and which is like the total exposure of your shrewdest perception?”
“I have felt that,” she replied.
“This is why,” he said, “I especially love the poets. I find verse more delicate than prose, it makes you cry more easily.”
“Nevertheless, it’s wearying in the long run,” Emma went on; “and these days, on the contrary, I adore stories where one thing follows another without a breath to spare, that make us feel scared. I detest those commonplace heroes and mild feelings, as exist in life.”
“In fact,” the clerk observed, “as these works do not touch the heart, they wander, it seems to me, from the real aim of Art. It is so soothing, among life’s disenchantments, to be able to turn in your imagination to noble characters, unsullied affections and pictures of happiness. As for me, living here, far from society, it’s my sole distraction; but Yonville offers so few resources!”
“Like Tostes, no doubt,” Emma went on; “I too was always subscribed to a circulating library.”
“If Madame wishes to do me the honor of using it,” said the pharmacist, who had just caught these last words, “I myself have at her disposal a library composed of the finest authors: Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter Scott, The Literary Echo, etc., and I receive, furthermore, different periodicals, among them The Rouen Beacon daily, having the benefit of being its correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchâtel, Yonville and environs.”
They had been eating for two and a half hours; because Artémise the maid, nonchalantly dragging the selvage of her old slippers on the tiles, would bring the plates one after the other, forget everything, pay attention to nothing and keep leaving half-open the billiard-room door which battered the wall with its latch bar’s tip.
Without realizing it, talking all the while, Léon had placed his foot on one of the crosspieces of the chair in which Madame Bovary was seated. She wore a little blue-silk scarf, which held a collar of fluted cambric upright like a ruff; and, depending on how she moved her head, the lower part of her face buried itself in the linen or emerged from it softly. Thus it was, close to each other, while Charles and the pharmacist chatted, that they embarked on one of those vague conversations, in which chance phrases keep bringing you back to the fixed center of a mutual understanding. Parisian shows, titles of novels, new dances, and the society world they knew nothing of, Tostes where she had lived, Yonville where they had turned out to be, they explored everything, spoke of everything until the end of dinner.
When the coffee was served, Félicité went off to prepare the bedroom in the new house, and the guests soon withdrew. Madame Lefrançois slept by the embers, while the stable lad, lantern in hand, waited to take Monsieur and Madame Bovary home. His red hair was interwoven with bits of straw, and he limped on his left leg. When he had taken Monsieur le Curé’s umbrella in his other hand, they set off on foot.
The town was asleep. The pillars of the market house cast long shadows. The ground was entirely gray, as on a summer’s night.
But, as the doctor’s house stood only fifty paces from the inn, they had to wish each other good night almost immediately, and the company dispersed.
Emma, even from the entrance hall, felt the plaster’s chill drop onto her shoulders like a damp cloth. The walls were newly done, and the wooden stairs creaked. In the bedroom, on the first floor, a whitish daylight fell through the curtainless windows. Tops of trees could be glimpsed, and the meadows further off, half-drowned in fog, smoking in the moonlight wherever the river wound.
In the middle of the rooms, piled pell-mell, there were drawers, bottles, curtain rods, gilt poles along with mattresses on chairs and basins on the parquet—the two men who had carried the furniture having left everything there, carelessly.
It was the fourth time she had slept in an unknown place. The first had been the day of her entry into the convent, the second that of her arrival at Tostes, the third at Vaubyessard, the fourth was this one; and each had acted in her life like the unveiling of a fresh phase. She refused to believe that things could repeat themselves in the same way in different places, and, as the portion already experienced had been bad, what remained to be consumed would doubtless be better.