Rodolphe calls on Emma; The coming of romance; Riding companions; Lovers by the pool; Charles's purchase; 'I have a lover'; Emma at the chateau.

SIX weeks went by, and Rodolphe did not come again.

At last, one evening, he reappeared.

'Don't let us rush matters,' he had said to himself, 'it would be mistake.'

By the end of the week he had gone off shooting. And after that was over he thought he had left it too long, but then he argued it out thus:

'If she loved me from the first day, impatience to see me must have made her love me all the more. Therefore let us go ahead.' And when he saw her turn pale as he entered, he knew he had not miscalculated.

She was alone and it was getting dark. The little muslin curtains on the windows deepened the gathering twilight, and the gilt case of the barometer, smitten by a ray of the setting sun, lit up a blaze of fire in the mirror, between the pieces of coral.

Rodolphe remained standing, and Emma barely so much as answered his first conventional greeting.

'I've been busy,' he said, 'I haven't been well.'

'Nothing serious?' she asked quickly.

'Oh, well, no,' said Rodolphe, seating himself on a stool beside her. 'I didn't think I ought to come.'

'Why?'

'Can't you guess?'

He looked at her again, but with such a passionate expression in his eyes that she dropped her gaze with a blush.

'Emma!' he began again.

'Sir!' she exclaimed, drawing back a little.

'Ah! you see perfectly well now that I was right not to come back,' he said dolefully, 'since that name, the name which I'm always thinking about and which slipped out unawares, you forbid me to use! Madame Bovary! Well, everybody calls you that. Yet it is not your name, but another's!'

Again he repeated, 'Another's'.

He buried his face in his hands.

'Yes, I am for ever thinking of you; thinking and thinking till I'm nearly mad. Ah, there, forgive me! I'll go away- far away- so that you will never hear of me again. And yet today, somehow, it seemed that something, I don't know what, was compelling me to come to you. It's no good fighting against Fate or trying to resist the smile of the angels. Who can help being swept off his feet by all that is beautiful, charming, adorable?'

It was the first time in her life Emma had heard such words, and her pride, like tired limbs resting in a warm bath, glowed and expanded at such rapturous language.

'But,' he continued, 'though I did not come, though I could not see you, I at least came and gazed upon all the things about you. At night, every night, I got up and came right up to your house here. I looked at the roof of it, all silver in the moonlight; I saw the trees in the garden swaying to and fro before your bedroom window, and a little lamp whose beams came stealing through the window-pane, glowing in the shadows. Ah! little did you dream that a poor wretch was standing there, so near and yet so far-'

She turned towards him with a sob.

'Oh, how kind you are!' she said.

'No,' he said, 'I love you, that's all. You know I do, don't you? Tell me you know it- just one word, one little word!' And insensibly Rodolphe let himself slip from the stool on to the floor. But there was a noise of someone stumping about in the kitchen, and he noticed that the door was not closed.

'It would be so kind of you,' he said, getting up, 'if you would pander to a whim of mine. I should so much like to see over your house. To know all about it, all its ins and outs.'

Madame Bovary seeing no objection, they were just getting up to go when Charles came in.

'Good morning, 'Doctor',' said Rodolphe.

Charles, flattered at this unexpected greeting, became particularly gushing, and Rodolphe took advantage of the flow of eloquence to recover himself a little.

'Madame,' he said, 'was talking to me about her health.'

'Oh,' interrupted Charles, 'it's no end of an anxiety to me. She's been getting these attacks of breathlessness again.'

Rodolphe asked whether a little horse-exercise wouldn't be a good thing.

'Why, capital, of course, the very thing.... There now, that's an idea; you should act on it, darling.'

When she replied that she hadn't got a horse, Monsieur Rodolphe offered her a mount. She refused, and he did not insist. Then, in order to account for his visit, he gave out that his carter, the hero of the blood-letting incident, still complained of giddiness.

'I'll call round,' said Bovary.

'Oh, no, no; I'll send him here. We'll come along together; it would be less trouble for you.'

'Excellent! Thanks very much.'

'Why didn't you accept Monsieur Boulanger's offer? It was exceedingly good of him,' said Charles when they were alone.

She pretended to be a little vexed, invented all kinds of excuses, and wound up by saying that it would perhaps look rather odd.

'Well, who cares a damn about that?' said Charles, performing a little pirouette on his toes. 'Health, that's the main thing. It was silly of you.'

'And how do you expect me to go riding when I haven't got a habit?'

'Must get you one,' he replied.

The habit decided her.

When the costume was ready, Charles wrote Monsieur Boulanger saying his wife could go any time, and that it was exceedingly kind of him, and so on and so forth.

Next day Rodolphe appeared at Charles's door with a couple of riding-horses. One had pink rosettes on its ears and a doeskin side-saddle. Rodolphe had put on a pair of buckskin riding-boots, telling himself that she had certainly never seen anything like them before. As a matter of fact Emma was charmed with the way he was turned out when she saw him on the landing in his velvet shooting-coat and white corduroy breeches. She was ready and waiting.

Justin slipped out of the chemist's to steal a look at her, and the apothecary himself sallied forth in his wake. He proceeded to give Monsieur Boulanger a little sound advice. 'Accidents so soon happen. Be careful now. I expect your horses are pretty fresh, aren't they?' She heard a noise overhead; it was Felicite drumming on the window to keep little Berthe amused. The child blew her a kiss, and her mother gave an answering wave with her riding-whip.

'Off you go! Have a good time!' cried Monsieur Homais. 'But do take care, whatever you do. Go steady!' And he waved his newspaper as he watched them depart.

As soon as he felt the turf beneath him, Emma's horse broke into a hand-gallop, and Rodolphe cantered along beside her. Every now and then they exchanged a word or two. She rode with her head a little forward, her hand well up and her right arm stretched out, and she abandoned herself to the rhythm of the movement which rocked her in the saddle.

At the foot of the hill, Rodolphe loosened the rein; they started off together with a single bound; then, suddenly, at the top, the horses stopped and her great blue veil fell about her.

It was early in October, and a mist hung over the land. Far off, on the horizon, shreds of vapour lingered among the folds of the hills, or, breaking asunder, floated upwards and onwards and finally melted into air. Sometimes a beam of sunlight would shine through a rift in the clouds and light up the distant roofs of Yonville, with the gardens beside the water, the courtyards, the walls and the steeple. Emma screwed up her eyes to see her house, and never had this poor village in which she dwelt seemed so diminutive. From the high ground on which they had now arrived the whole valley seemed one vast pale lake mistily melting into the air. Here and there clumps of trees jutted up like dark rocks and the tall lines of poplars, uprising above the mist, swayed like wind-swept reeds on a sandy shore.

Beside them, on the turf, between the pines, a mellow light suffused the humid air. On the earth, all ruddy-brown like snuff, the footfalls made no sound, and the horses as they walked sent the fallen fir-cones rolling along with their hoofs.

Thus Rodolphe and Emma rode along the fringe of the wood. She turned away her head every now and again to avoid his eyes, and then she saw nothing but the serried trunks of the pine-trees, whose endless succession gave her a feeling of dizziness in the head. The horses were panting, the leather of the saddles creaked.

Just as they turned into the wood, the sun came out.

'The gods are with us!' said Rodolphe.

'You think so?' she answered.

'Come! Put on the pace a little,' was his reply.

He clacked his tongue, and the horses began to trot. Tall ferns that fringed the way caught in Emma's stirrup, and Rodolphe, leaning down from his saddle, pulled them out as he rode along.

And sometimes, to keep away the branches, he rode close up to her, and Emma felt his knee rubbing against her leg. The sky was blue now, and not a leaf stirred. There were great stretches of purple heather in full bloom, and patches of violets here and there amid the masses of leaves, which were dun-coloured, russet or golden according to the various kinds of trees. Often some live thing would stir softly, and you would hear a fluttering of wings in the undergrowth, or the soft croaking of the rooks flying about among the oak-trees.

They dismounted, and Rodolphe tied the horses to a tree. She walked on ahead on the moss between the cart-tracks, but the skirts of her habit kept getting in her way although she was holding it up by the hem. Rodolphe walked behind, and as his gaze rested on the little bit of white stocking that showed between her black habit and her black boot, he felt as if he were looking at a little piece of her naked self.

She stopped.

'I'm tired,' she said.

'Come along,' he answered; 'only a little farther, don't give in yet.'

She went on another hundred yards and then stopped again. Through her veil, which fell obliquely from her hard felt hat on to her hips, her face seemed bathed in a shadowy bluish light, as though she were floating under azure waves.

'Where are we going, then?'

He made no answer. Her breath was coming in little short gasps.

Rodolphe was casting his eyes about him and biting his moustache.

They came to a more open place, where a clearing had been made. They sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, and Rodolphe fell to talking to her about his love. He did not begin by scaring her with compliments. He was calm, serious, melancholy.

Emma listened with bowed head, stirring the little chips of wood on the ground with the toe of her boot.

But when he said, 'Are not our destinies now one?' she said, 'Oh no! You know perfectly well that cannot be.'

And she rose to depart. He seized her by the wrist. She stopped. Then, gazing at him with loving, misty eyes, she said quickly,

'No more of this.... Where are the horses? Come, let us go!

He made a gesture of anger and mortification.

'Where are the horses?' she repeated. 'Where are the horses?'

Then, smiling a strange smile, with a fixed stare and clenched teeth, he opened his arms and came towards her. She shrank back, trembling all over.

'Oh, you frighten me! You hurt me! Let us go.'

'Well, then, if it must be,' he said, with a changed expression. And immediately his manner became respectful, caressing, timid. She gave him her arm and they turned to go back.

'What was it, then?' he said. 'Why were you like that? I could not understand. You misjudged me, no doubt. Why, in my thoughts, you are like a Madonna on a pedestal; lofty, immovable, unstained. But I must have you, to live. I need your eyes, your voice, your very thoughts. Be my friend, my sister, my angel!'

And he stretched out his arm and put it round her waist. She made a feeble effort to disengage herself. He continued to hold her thus as they walked along.

They heard the two horses cropping the leaves.

'Oh, stay!' said Rodolphe. 'Do not let us go! Stay!'

And he drew her away, beside a little pool, whose surface was all green with duckweed. Faded water-lilies floated motionless among the reeds. At the sound of their steps in the grass, frogs leapt away to hide themselves.

'It is wrong of me! Wrong, wrong!' she cried. 'It is madness of me to listen to you.'

'Why? Emma! Emma!'

'Oh, Rodolphe!' she moaned, drooping her head upon his shoulder.

Her cloth habit clung to the velvet of his coat. With a deep sigh she flung back her white, quivering neck, and swooningly, in tears, with a shudder that shook her whole frame, hiding her face in her hands, she surrendered.

The shades of evening had begun to fall; the level beams of the sun, shining through the branches, dazzled her eyes. Here and there about her, amid the leaves or on the ground, shone little patches of tremulous light, as if birds of paradise had passed overhead and dropped some feathers in their flight. Everywhere was silence; a sweetness seemed to exhale from the trees. She could feel her heart as it began to beat anew, she could feel the blood suffusing her whole body like a stream of milk. And then, far, far away, beyond the wood on the hills across the valley, she heard a cry, vague and prolonged, a voice that lingered on the air, and she listened to it in silence, mingling like music with the last vibrations of her throbbing nerves. Rodolphe was standing with a cigar between his teeth. One of the bridles had broken, and he was repairing it with his penknife.

They returned to Yonville by the way they had come. They saw the tracks of their horses in the soil, side by side, and there were the same bushes and the same stones in the grass. Nothing about them had changed, and yet for her something had happened, something more tremendous than if the mountains had been shifted from their base. Rodolphe leant down, every now and then, and took her hand and kissed it. She was charming, on horseback! Straight as a die, with her slim, graceful figure, her knee up on her horse's mane, the colour of her cheeks a little heightened by the fresh air and the red gold of the evening sky.

As she rode into Yonville her horse began to curvet a little on the cobbles. People came to the window to look at her.

At dinner that evening, her husband thought she looked well. But she seemed as if she didn't hear what he said, when he asked her about her ride; and she leant with her elbow beside her plate, between the two lighted candles.

'Emma!' said he.

'What?'

'Well, I spent the afternoon at Monsieur Alexandre's. He's got a mare that's seen a bit of service, but still has plenty of go in her; a little broken at the knees, that's all. He'd let her go for twenty-five or thirty pounds, I'm sure.'

Then he added,

'Thinking you'd like it, I made a bid for her, I bought her. Did I do right? Tell me, then.'

She nodded her head in sign.

'Are you going out tonight?' she asked, a quarter of an hour later.

'Yes. Why?'

'Oh, nothing, dear, nothing.'

And as soon as she had got rid of Charles she went and shut herself up in her room.

At first she felt dazed. She saw the trees, the roads, the ditches, Rodolphe; and she felt his arms round her still, while the leaves rustled and the wind whistled in the reeds.

But when she looked at herself in the glass she was amazed at her own countenance. Never had her eyes looked so big, so dark, so unfathomably deep. Some subtle transfiguring influence had come over her and made her another woman.

She kept saying to herself over and over again, 'I have a lover, a lover,' revelling in the thought of it as if a second puberty had come to her. At last she was going to taste those joys of love, that transport of bliss, which she had thought for ever denied her. She was entering into some enchanted region where all would be passion, ecstasy and feverish delight; an azure immensity of boundless space lay round about her, and the glittering peaks of enchanted love rose up before her inward vision. Her ordinary, everyday life seemed to have receded afar, to be somewhere in the shadows between these radiant heights.

Then she bethought her of the heroines of the books that she had read, all those lovely erring women who sang in her heart with voices, as of sisters, that laid a spell upon her. She looked, and lo, she saw herself amid this visionary throng, and deemed that at last the dreams of her girlhood days had come to pass, as she beheld herself in that passionate guise she had so longingly prefigured. But more than this, she was conscious of a feeling of satisfaction, as one tasting the sweets of revenge. Had she not suffered enough? But now the hour of triumph had sounded, and love, so long repressed, leapt forth at last like a bubbling fount of bliss. She drank deep of its sweetness, and no remorse, no misgiving, no foreboding ever clouded the radiance of her joy.

The next day went by in an atmosphere new and sweet. They made vows one to the other. She told Rodolphe all her troubles, and he cut her short with kisses. And gazing at him through half-shut eyelids, she besought him to call her again by her name, and to tell her again and again that he loved her. They were in the wood as on the previous day, in a clog-maker's hut. The walls were of thatch and the roof came down so low they were obliged to stoop. They were sitting, leaning against one another on a heap of dry leaves.

From that day onward they wrote to each other regularly every night. Emma took her letter to the end of the garden near the river and put it in a cleft in the wall. Rodolphe would come and take it and put another in its place, and always she complained that his letters were too short.

One morning Charles was called out to a case before it was light, and she was seized with a sudden longing to see Rodolphe there and then. She could hurry away to la Huchette, have an hour there, and be back again in Yonville before anyone was awake. The very idea made her pant with desire, and soon she was half-way across the field, tripping swiftly along, never casting a look behind her.

Day was beginning to break. A long way off Emma could see her lover's house, with its two weather-vanes standing out black against the pale sky of dawn.

On the other side of the farm-yard was a big building that must be the chateau. She went in as if the walls at her approach had swung aside of their own accord to admit her. A large staircase led up to a corridor. Emma turned the handle of the door, and there, at the far end of the room, lay a man, sleeping. It was Rodolphe. She gave a cry.

'What, you here! you here!' he kept saying. 'How did you manage it? Ah, your dress is all damp!'

'I love you!' she answered, flinging her arms round his neck.

This first adventure went off without mishap, and now, every time Charles was called out early, Emma got up, threw on some clothes, and stole furtively down the stone steps that led to the water's edge. But when the wooden gangway for the cattle was not there, she had to make her way along by the walls that fringed the river. The edge was slippery, and sometimes she had to put out her hand and clutch the tufts of faded gilliflowers to prevent herself from falling. Then she would strike across fresh-ploughed fields, sinking in, floundering, and getting her thin boots plastered with mud. The scarf tied over her hair fluttered in the wind that swept across the fields; she was scared of bullocks, and started to run. She arrived all out of breath, with roses in her cheeks, her whole body fragrant with the fresh odour of sap, of verdure and the open air. Rodolphe at this early hour would be still asleep. It was like a spring morning coming into his room.

Through the yellow curtains that draped the windows a soft old-gold light came stealing. Emma blinked her eyes as she felt her way across the room, while little drops of dew that besprent her hair seemed like an aureole of topaz around her countenance. Rodolphe, laughing, would draw her towards him and pull her down on to his breast.

And afterwards she would go and look about the room, opening this drawer and that. She would use his comb and look at herself in his shaving-glass. Sometimes there would be a pipe lying on the table by the bed among some lemons and pieces of sugar close to a water-bottle. And, picking up the pipe, she would put the mouthpiece between her lips and pretend to be smoking.

It took them a good quarter of an hour to say good-bye. Emma would burst out crying; she would have liked to stay with Rodolphe always and never leave him any more. Something stronger than she impelled her towards him; but one day, when she came in unexpectedly, a look of annoyance passed over his face.

'What is the matter?' she said. 'Don't you feel well? Tell me!'

At last he declared, looking very serious about it, that these repeated visits of hers were becoming rather too much of a good thing, and that she would be getting herself talked about.

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