Yonville; The chemist's shop; At the Lion d'Or; The taciturn guest; Phlebotomy for the clergy; Monsieur Binet's views on theology; The 'Hirondelle' arrives.

YONVILLE L'ABBAYE (so called after an old Franciscan abbey of which no traces now remain) is a market town about twenty miles from Rouen between the Abbeville and Beauvais roads. It lies at the far end of a valley watered by the Rieule, a little tributary of the Andelle. Its waters turn the wheels of three mills, close to where they join the larger river, and harbour a few trout which the lads amuse themselves by trying to catch with rod and line on Sundays.

Leaving the main highway at la Boissiere, you keep along on the level till you come to where the road dips down to Les Leux, at which point the valley comes fully into view. The river which flows through it divides it into two strongly contrasted regions. On the left all is grassland and meadow, but on the right the whole of the land is under the plough. The meadows stretch along beneath some low-lying hills and link up behind with the pasture lands of Bray. Eastwards, the land, rising gently, broadens out into a wide stretch of country with patches of yellowing wheat as far as the eye can see. The stream, as it flows on between its grassy banks, runs like a white riband betwixt tilth and meadow, making the country look like a wide mantle with a green velvet cape edged with a band of silver braid.

Far away, over the distant ridge, are the oak woods of Argueil, and the steep declivities of the Cote Saint Jean, striated from top to bottom with reddish lines of varying width; and these brick-red tones, forming narrow stripes on the prevailing grey of the mountain, are due to the chalybeate springs that abound in the country round about.

Here, you are on the borders of Normandy, Picardy and the Ile de France, a sort of hybrid region where the language is devoid of accent and the landscape of character. It is here that they make the worst Neufchatel cheeses in the whole district. And farming is costly because it takes such a lot of manure to fertilize the sandy, stony soil.

Until 1835 there was, properly speaking, no road to Yonville; but about that date a connecting highway was constructed that linked up with the roads to Abbeville and Amiens, and was sometimes used by wagons going from Rouen to Flanders. Yonville l'Abbaye has stood still, despite its new outlet. Instead of improving the crops, the people have stuck to grass and hay, notwithstanding the falling market, and following the line of least resistance, the town has extended only in the direction of the river. You can see it a long way off, sprawling along by the river-bank like a neatherd who has flung himself down by the stream for a noonday nap.

At the foot of the hill, beyond the bridge, you come to a straight piece of road, bordered with young aspens, that leads to the beginning of the houses. They stand surrounded by hedges on plots of ground occupied by various outbuildings, wine-presses, cart-sheds, houses scattered about under tufted trees with ladders, poles or scythes hung on to the branches. The thatched roofs, like fur caps pulled down over the eyes, cover up about a third of the low windows, glazed with thick, bulging panes, each with a knot in the middle like the bottom of a bottle. Here and there the houses have a seedy-looking pear-tree planted against their plaster walls, crossed diagonally by two black beams, and in the doorways little swing-gates keep out the chickens that congregate on the step to peck at the brown bread-crumbs soaked in cider. Farther on the gardens grow smaller, the houses huddle closer together, the hedges disappear; here a bundle of furze swings under a window at the end of a broom-handle; it is the blacksmith's forge; after which we come to the wheelwright's, with two or three carts outside encroaching on the roadway. Then across an open space appears a white house fronted by a circular lawn adorned with a Cupid standing with his finger pressed to his lips. A pair of cast-iron vases flank the bottom of the front steps; a brass plate gleams on the front door. It is the residence of the notary, and the finest house in the district.

The church is on the other side of the way, about twenty paces further on, before you come to the market-place. The little churchyard that surrounds it, enclosed by a low wall, is so full of graves that the aged stones, sunk into the ground, make a continuous pavement with little, rectangular borders of grass between them. The church was rebuilt in the latter part of Charles the Tenth's reign. The wooden roof is beginning to perish at the top, and, here and there, shows hollow black patches on the blue surface. Over the door, where the organ ought to be, is a gallery for the men, with a winding stairway that resounds beneath their wooden clogs.

The daylight, filtering through the plain-glass windows, falls obliquely on the seats set in rows, at right angles to the walls, with, here and there, a straw mat on a nail with the words 'M. So and so's sitting' in bold letters beneath it. Farther on, where the nave begins to narrow, stands the confessional box, facing a statue of the Virgin clothed in satin with a veil adorned with silver stars on her head, her cheeks becrimsoned like an idol from the Sandwich Islands. Finally, hung above the High Altar, between four candlesticks, a copy of the 'Holy Family', presented by the Minister of the Interior, completes the vista. The choir-stalls are of plain deal.

The market, which consists of a tiled roof supported by some score or so of posts, alone occupies a good half of the square at Yonville. The Town Hall, built 'after the design of a Paris architect', is a species of Greek temple and makes an angle with the chemist's shop alongside. On the ground level are three Ionic columns, and, above them, a vaulted gallery surmounted by a tympanum showing a Gallic cock resting one claw on the Charter and grasping the scales of Justice in the other.

But what chiefly strikes the eye is the pharmacy of Monsieur Homais just opposite the 'Lion d'Or'. It is chiefly at night when his lamp is lit up and when the red and green carboys that lend splendour to his window project their long strips of coloured light far out along the ground, that, viewed athwart this radiance as though in an effulgence of Bengal lights, the shadow of the chemist himself may be discerned bending over his desk. From top to bottom, his house is plastered with placards in capitals, copper plate and block letters, advertising such things as Vichy, Seltzer, Bareges Waters, Laxatives, Raspail's Safe Cure, Gum Arabic, Darcet's Pastilles, Regnault's Ointment, Bandages, Fomentations, Medicated Chocolate, etc., etc., and the shop-sign which extends right across the front bears in gilt letters the words 'Homais, Chemist'. And at the far end of the shop, behind the big pair of scales that are screwed to the counter, the word 'Laboratory' appears over a glass door on which, half-way up, the name 'Homais' is repeated in gilt lettering on a black ground.

That's all there is worth seeing in Yonville. The one and only street, about a gunshot in length, with a shop or two on either side of it, stops short at the bend in the road. If you leave the road on your right and keep along by the Cote Saint Jean, you soon come to the cemetery.

During the cholera epidemic, a piece of the wall was demolished so as to take in three acres of the adjoining field. But all this new part is practically untenanted, the graves continuing to cluster round about the entrance in the old way. The keeper, who unites the offices of sexton and verger, thus deriving a double revenue from the deceased parishioners, takes advantage of the vacant ground to plant potatoes in it. Year by year, however, his little plot grows narrower, and when an epidemic comes along he knows not whether to rejoice at the corpses or lament the need for burying them.

'Why, you feed on the dead, Lestiboudois!' said the 'cure' one day. This gloomy remark made him ponder. For a time it gave him pause, but today, as heretofore, he goes on cultivating his potatoes there and boldly affirms that they come up of their own accord.

Since the events we are about to record, no material changes have taken place at Yonville. The tin tricolour continues to revolve on the top of the church tower; from the draper's shop the two streamers of coloured chintz flutter in the breeze; the chemist's foetuses, that look like bits of white tinder, are slowly crumbling away in their dingy spirit, and, over the front door of the inn, the ancient Golden Lion, tarnished by the rain, displays his poodle's mane to all who come and go thereby.

The night the Bovarys were due to arrive at Yonville, Widow Lefrancois, who kept the inn, was in such a fluster that the sweat fell from her in huge drops as she bustled about among her pots and pans. Tomorrow was market day; she had the joints to prepare, the fowls to draw, the soup to make and the coffee to brew. Then there were meals for the 'regulars' to be got ready, as well as for the doctor and his wife and maid. Shouts of laughter kept coming from the billiard-room; three millers in the bar parlour were clamouring for brandy; the wood was blazing, the furze crackling and, on the long table, among joints of raw mutton, stood piles of plates that rattled and shook at every stroke of the spinach chopper. From the yard came the panic-stricken clacking of the fowls as the servant girl tried to catch them to chop off their heads. A man in green leather slippers, his face slightly pitted with smallpox, a velvet cap with a gold tassel on his head, was standing warming his back by the fire. The only expression on his countenance was one of complete self-satisfaction, and he appeared to take life as easily as the goldfinch suspended above his head in its wicker cage. It was the chemist.

'Artemise!' cried the hostess, 'chop up some wood, fill the water bottles and put some brandy ready. Look alive! I wish to heaven I knew what sort of a pudding to give these people you've got coming! Oh, good gracious! there are those moving-men kicking up another hullabaloo in the billiard-room; and their cart just outside the front door! Why, the 'Hirondelle' might come along and smash right into it from behind. Call Polyte and tell him to put it into the coach-house. Would you believe it, Monsieur Homais, they've played fifteen games since morning, that they have, and got through eight jars of cider! Yes, and they'll go and cut my cloth, drat 'em!' she added, as she stood looking at them, skimmer in hand.

'No great harm if they did,' replied Monsieur Homais. 'You'd 'have' to buy a new one then.'

'A new table!' cried the widow.

'Yes, since the old one is done for, Madame Lefrancois. I've said so before and I say it again, you're penny wise and pound foolish. People, nowadays, like small pockets and heavy cues. The cannon game's clean out of fashion. Things have altered. You must move with the times. Look at Tellier, now!'

The landlady went crimson with anger.

'You can say what you like,' the chemist went on, 'his billiard-room beats yours any day, and suppose they wanted to get up a fund for the Poles or the flood victims at Lyons....'

'Anyhow, he's not the sort of tyke to worry me. I'm not afraid of 'him',' interrupted the hostess, shrugging her fat shoulders. 'No, Monsieur Homais, you can take it from me that as long as there's the 'Lion d'Or' to come to, people will come to it. It's not "here today and gone tomorrow" with us. One of these days you'll find the Cafe Francais closed down, and a nice old poster stuck up on the shutters. Get a new billiard-table,' she cried, 'when that one's so handy for folding the washing on! Why, in the shooting season I've slept as many as six on it. But that dawdler Hivert, won't he ever get here?'

'Are you waiting for him, to begin dinner, then?'

'Waiting for him? And what about Monsieur Binet, I should like to know? In he comes, on the very stroke of six; there isn't the likes of him for punctuality in the whole world. He must always have his own pet seat in the little room. He'd rather die than sit down to his dinner anywhere else. And he's that fussy! And the cider must always be just so! Not a bit like Monsieur Leon, now. Him! Why, it's gone seven, or half-past sometimes, before he gets here. He doesn't so much as look at what he eats. He's a nice young man, he is! You never get an angry word from him, you don't.'

'Well, you see, that's where the difference comes in between an educated man and a common soldier turned tax-collector.' The clock struck six. In marched Binet.

He had on a blue frock-coat which hung, without the suspicion of a crease, round about his meagre frame, and his leather cap, with its two ear-flaps tied up together on the top of his head, revealed, under its raised peak, a bald forehead compressed by long years of helmet-wearing. He wore a black cloth waistcoat, a horse-hair collar, grey trousers and, all the year round, well-polished top boots which had two parallel strips let in to make room for his enlarged toe-joints. There was not a hair out of place in the line of fair whiskers which, after the fashion of an herbaceous border, encircled his long, pale face with its beady eyes and hooked nose. Excelling in all card games, a good shot, and a neat writer, he had a lathe of his own. He had a hobby for turning out napkin rings, filling the house with them, thus ministering alike to his artistic susceptibilities and his bourgeois self-importance.

He made his way towards the little parlour. But first of all the three millers had to be got out, and all the time his place was being laid, Binet sat silent in his seat near the fire. After which he shut the door and took off his cap, as usual.

'It won't be civil speeches that will wear out 'his' tongue,' said the chemist as soon as he was alone with the landlady.

'He is never more talkative than that,' she answered. 'Last week we had a couple of "commercials" travelling in textiles; a comical pair, they were, if you like; spent the whole evening telling stories that made me cry with laughing, and there he sat like a flat fish and never spoke a word.'

'Ay,' said the chemist, 'no imagination, no sparkle, no social gifts.'

'And yet they say he has brains.'

'Brains!' answered Monsieur Homais. 'Him? Brains? Perhaps he has, of a sort,' he went on more calmly.

'Ah!' he continued, 'that a merchant in a big way of business, a legal luminary, a doctor or a chemist, should be so absorbed as to be eccentric or even gruff- that I can understand. You read of such cases in history. They, at any rate, are thinking of 'something'. Take me, for instance; how often have I not looked about all over my desk for my pen when I wanted to write a label, and found it at last behind my ear?'

Meanwhile Madame Lefrancois betook herself to the front door to see if the 'Hirondelle' was at last in sight. She gave a sudden start. A man dressed in black suddenly walked into the kitchen. In the last gleams of the fading daylight you could see that he was a ruddy-faced, athletic-looking man.

'What can I get for you, Monsieur le Cure?' asked the landlady, reaching up to the chimney-piece and taking down one of the brass candlesticks that stood rowed along it with their tallow dips. 'Will you take anything? A drop of 'Cassis?' A glass of wine?'

The priest declined very civilly. He had come for his umbrella, which he had left behind the other day at the convent at Ernemont. He begged Madame Lefrancois to have it sent along to the presbytery in the course of the evening, and then left for the church, where the Angelus bell was ringing.

When the chemist had heard the last echo of his footsteps die away, he found great fault with the 'cure's' conduct a moment ago. His refusal to take a little drop of something seemed to him a detestable piece of hypocrisy. Priests all had their little drop on the quiet, when no one was looking, and they all wanted to get their tithes back again.

The landlady stuck up for her 'cure'.

'Why, he'd break four men like you across his knee. Last year he help ed our people cart in the straw. He carried as many as six bundles at one go, he's that strong.'

'Splendid!' said the chemist. 'Go and send your daughter to confess to a stalwart customer like that. If I were the Government I'd have priests bled once a month. Yes, Madame Lefrancois, a jolly good bloodletting once a month in the interests of order and morality.'

'Oh, give over, Monsieur Homais! You are a wicked man to say such things! You've no religion.'

'Oh yes, I have,' answered the chemist, 'my religion; and a better one than theirs, with all their mumbo-jumbo. I worship God! I believe in a Supreme Being, in a Creator, or whatever you like to call him, who has put us here to be good citizens and good fathers. But that's no reason why I should go into a church and kiss silver plates, and pay out money to help fatten a pack of humbugs who live better than we do as it is. You can worship God just as well in a wood, or a field, or gazing up at the everlasting firmament like the ancients. My God is the god of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, of Beranger. I'm for the creed of Rousseau's Vicaire Savoyard, and long life to the principles of eighty-nine, say I! I've no use for a god that goes stalking about his garden with a switch in his hand, shuts up his friends in a whale's belly, makes a song about dying, and comes to life again three days after, which is not only intrinsically absurd, but completely opposed to scientific teaching, while, incidentally, it just shows that your priests have always wallowed in bestial ignorance and tried to bring the masses down to their level.'

He stopped and glanced about him as one surveying an audience, for in the ebullience of his discourse the chemist had fancied for a moment that he was haranguing the local council. But the landlady wasn't listening. She was straining her ears to catch a distant sound of wheels. The rumble of a vehicle, mingled with the tired 'clop-clop' of horses' hoofs, was now plainly audible, and at last the 'Hirondelle' pulled up at the door.

It had a yellow body mounted on two big wheels that came right up to the tilt, blocking the view of the passengers and spattering their shoulders. The little panes of the narrow window slits shook in their frames when the conveyance was closed in, and showed splashes of mud here and there on the ancient coating of dust which even a thunderstorm could not avail to wash away. It was drawn by three horses, two between the shafts, and a leader, and, going downhill, it bumped on the ground behind as it see-sawed to and fro.

Some of the inhabitants now put in an appearance. They all began to speak at once, clamouring for news, explanations and hampers. Hivert didn't know whom to attend to first. He was general factotum for the whole district. He did their shopping: brought back rolls of leather for the shoemaker, old iron for the blacksmith, a cask of herrings for his mistress, bonnets from the milliner's, false hair from the hairdresser's, and, all the way home, he distributed his parcels, heaving them over courtyard walls, standing up on his seat and shouting with all his might while the horses looked after themselves.

They had met with a mischance and had been delayed. Madame Bovary's greyhound had bolted across country. They had stood there whistling it a good quarter of an hour. Hivert, indeed, had gone back a mile and a half, and kept thinking he saw it; but at last they had been compelled to go on. Emma had burst into tears and taken on about it. She said it was Charles's fault. Monsieur Lheureux, a cloth merchant, who was with her in the conveyance, had done his best to console her by telling her of several cases in which dogs had recognized their masters after years of separation. There was a story extant, he said, of a dog that found its way back to Paris all the way from Constantinople. Another had done a hundred and fifty miles in a bee-line, and swum four rivers; and his own father once had a poodle he hadn't seen for twelve years that suddenly jumped up on his back one night, in the street, as he was going to dine in town.

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