More E-texts

Chapter 2

One night about eleven they were aroused by the clatter of hoofs that came to a standstill outside their house. The servant pushed open the attic window and parleyed for some time with a man in the street below. He had come for the doctor and had a letter with him. Nastasie went down shivering with cold, proceeded to unlock the door and drew back the bolts one by one. The man left his horse standing, and, following close on the servant's heels, came right into the bedroom. From his grey woollen cap he extracted a letter wrapped up in a piece of cloth and delivered it carefully into the doctor's hands. Charles raised himself on his elbow to read it. Nastasie stood close up to the bed holding the light. Madame, being bashful, kept her face to the wall.

The letter, sealed with a little blue seal, begged Monsieur Bovary to come at once to a farm at les Bertaux to set a broken leg. Now from Tostes to les Bertaux is a good eighteen miles across country, by way of Longueville and Saint Victor. The night was dark. Madame Bovary was afraid some accident would befall her husband, so it was decided that the farmer's man should go on ahead and that the Doctor should follow on, three hours later, when the moon got up. They were to send a boy to meet him to show him the way to the farm and open the gates.

About four o'clock in the morning, Charles, well wrapped up in his cloak, set out for les Bertaux. He was still drowsy with the warmth of the slumbers from which he had been aroused, and the steady jog-trot of his nag lulled him off into a doze. Once, when the animal pulled up of its own accord in front of one of those holes surrounded with furze which are dug alongside the furrows, Charles woke with a start, remembered about the broken leg and tried to call to mind everything he knew about fractures. The rain had ceased; day was beginning to break and, on the boughs of the leafless apple-trees, the birds sat quite still, puffing out their little feathers against the chill morning air. The level country stretched away into the distance, far as the eye could see, and the clumps of trees round the farm-houses made, here and there, at distant intervals, a splash of dark violet on the wide grey surface, which melted away on the horizon into the wan spaces of the sky. Charles, from time to time, would open his eyes, then, his senses growing weary and sleepiness coming over him again, he would soon relapse into a kind of torpor, in which his recent sensations mingled with memories of the past, and he saw himself in a sort of double vision, at once a student and a married man, lying in his bed, as he was an hour or so ago, and somehow, at the same time, walking through the ward of a hospital as in days gone by. The warm smell of surgical dressings blended with the fragrance of the morning dew; he heard the iron rings running along the curtain rods of the beds and the breathing of his wife as she lay asleep.... As he was riding through Vassonville he noticed a boy sitting on the turf at the edge of a ditch.

'Are you the doctor?' asked the child.

And when Charles said yes, he picked up his sabots and ran barefoot on in front.

The doctor, as he rode along, gathered from his guide's discourse that Monsieur Rouault was a very well-to-do farmer. He had broken his leg the night before, coming back from a neighbour's where he had been celebrating Twelfth Night. He had lost his wife two years ago, and had no one with him now but his daughter, who help ed keep house for him.

The ruts in the road grew deeper. Les Bertaux was close at hand. The small boy, slipping through a gap in the hedge, vanished from sight, reappearing at the entrance to a paddock in time to open the gate. The horse slithered on the wet grass. Charles bent his head to clear the branches. The dogs in their kennels barked as they tugged at their chains. As he rode into the yard his horse took fright and shied.

It was a prosperous-looking farm. In the stables, over the lower half of the doors, you could see great cart-horses pulling quietly at their hay. A big, steaming manure-heap was piled up along by the wall of the buildings, and among the fowls and the turkeys strutted five or six peacocks, the pride and glory of every Caux farmyard. The sheep-fold was long and the barn was lofty, and the walls of it were as smooth as the palm of your hand. In the shed were two big carts and four ploughs, complete with whips, collars and harness, the blue cloth coverings of which were getting coated with the fine dust that fell from the granaries. The yard sloped upwards, and was planted with trees spaced at regular intervals, and the cheery clamour of a flock of geese came clanging back from the neighbourhood of the pond.

A young woman wearing a dress of blue merino adorned with a triple row of flounces came to the threshold to receive Monsieur Bovary. She showed him into the kitchen, where a big fire was blazing, round which the men's dinner was cooking in pots and pans of various dimensions. Some damp clothes were drying in the great open chimney. The shovel, the tongs and the nose of the bellows, all of colossal size, shone like burnished steel, and all along the walls hung an array of kitchen utensils in whose polished surface was reflected the flickering light of the fire and the first gleams of the sun that now came stealing through the windows.

Charles went upstairs to see the patient. He found him in bed sweating under the blankets. He had flung his cotton night-cap to the other end of the room. He was a fat little man of somewhere about fifty, fair-complexioned, blue-eyed, and bald in front. And he was wearing ear-rings. Beside him, on a chair, was a big decanter of spirits, from which he would pour himself out a tot every now and again to warm up his stomach a little. But as soon as he set eyes on the doctor, he drew a dismal face, and instead of cursing, as he had been doing for twelve hours past, fell to moaning feebly.

The fracture was a simple one, without any sort of complication. Charles could not have wished for a more straightforward job. He remembered the bedside manner of the hospital doctors, and fell to comforting his patient with all manner of facetious remarks, chirurgeonly caresses, which are like oil on a bistoury. In order to improvise some splints, someone was sent to fetch a bundle of laths from the cartshed. Charles selected one, cut it into sections and rubbed it smooth with a piece of broken glass, while the servant girl tore some linen into strips for bandages, and Mademoiselle Emma did her best to sew some wads. As she was a long time finding her needle-case, her father lost patience. She said nothing, but all the time she was sewing she kept pricking her fingers, which she forthwith put in her mouth to suck.

Charles was surprised to see how white her nails were. They were brilliant and tapering, polished like bits of Dieppe ivory and trimmed like almonds. Her hands, however, were not beautiful- perhaps a shade too red and a little hard in the fingers. She herself was too tall, and her figure lacked the soft, caressing outline. Her good point was her eyes. They were dark, but her long lashes made them seem black, and she looked at you frankly, with a sort of fearless candour.

As soon as the leg was set, the doctor was invited by Monsieur Rouault himself to 'have a bite' before he left.

Charles went down into the room below. Two places, gleaming with silver plate, had been laid on a small table at the foot of a great four-poster hung with chintz with pictures of Turks on it. From an oaken press, opposite the window, came a smell of iris and damp sheets. On the floor, in the corner, stood a few sacks of corn. They represented the overflow from the barn hard by, which was reached up three stone steps. By way of ornament there hung from a nail in the middle of the wall, the green paint of which was coming off in scales, a head of Minerva in black crayon. It was in a gilt frame, and inscribed at the bottom, in Gothic characters, 'To my dear Papa'.

They began by talking about the patient, and, from that, went on to the weather and the severe cold, and the wolves that roamed the country by night. Mademoiselle Rouault did not care much for the country, especially now she had almost all the responsibility of the farm on her shoulders. The room was chilly, and she shivered all the time she was eating. This helped to display her full lips, which she had a trick of biting whenever there was a lull in the conversation.

Her neck was encircled by a white, turned-down collar. Her hair, which was so smooth that the two dark strands seemed to be all of a piece, was parted in the middle by a thin line that dipped slightly with the curve of her skull and, almost hiding her ears, was gathered together behind in a copious chignon. Her hair was waved about the temples, a thing which our country doctor had never seen in his life before. She had plenty of colour in her cheeks, and wore a pair of tortoiseshell eye-glasses, man-fashion, on a cord attached to a button of her bodice.

When Charles, who had been upstairs to say good-bye to the farmer, came back into the parlour before leaving he found her standing by the window looking out into the garden at the beansticks that had been blown down by the wind. She turned round.

'Are you looking for anything?' she asked.

'Thanks, I'm trying to find my riding-whip,' he replied. And he began to grope about on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs. It had slipped down between the sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle Emma caught sight of it, and began to reach down over the sacks. Charles gallantly hastened to her assistance, and as he too extended his arm in the same direction, he felt the young woman's back, as she bent down, rubbing against his chest. She got up, red all over, and, looking at him over her shoulder, handed him his whip.

Instead of returning to les Bertaux three days later, as he said he would, he came back the very next day, and thereafter he put in an appearance regularly twice a week, over and above the extra visits he made every now and again as if by accident.

Meanwhile the case went on satisfactorily; the patient's progress was quite normal, and when, after forty-six days, Monsieur Rouault started to try and get about without assistance, Monsieur Bovary began to be regarded as a highly capable practitioner. Pere Rouault said the very best doctors in Yvetot or Rouen itself could not have treated him better.

As for Charles, he did not ask himself how it was he liked going to les Bertaux. If he had thought about it he would have, no doubt, put it down to its being a serious case, or to the fees he expected to get. But was that really the reason that made these visits to the farm so pleasant an interlude in the dull monotony of his daily life? On those days he would get up betimes, start off at the gallop and ride hard all the way, dismounting to wipe his boots on the grass and to put on his black gloves before going into the house. He liked to find himself riding into the yard, he liked the pressure of the gate against his shoulder as he pushed it open, the cock crowing on the wall, the farm lads as they came forward to meet him. He liked the barn, and the stables, and Pere Rouault, who patted the palm of his hand and said he had saved his life; he liked the sound of Mademoiselle Emma's little clogs on the clean stone floor of the kitchen. Her high heels made her seem a little taller as she walked in front of him, and the wooden soles made a little sharp tapping sound as they clicked against the leather of her boots.

When he took his departure, she always came with him to the top of the steps, and if his horse had not been brought round, she would wait there with him. There was no talking to be done, however, because they had already said good-bye. And as she stood there, out in the open, the wind would flurry the little ringlets at the back of her neck, or set the strings of her apron dancing and twisting like streamers about her hips. Once it happened to be thawing- the trees were all running with water and the melting snow was dripping from the roofs. She was on the doorstep, and she ran back for a parasol and put it up. The parasol was a silk one, iridescent as a pigeon's breast, and the sun shining through it cast little coloured flecks of dancing light on the whiteness of her skin. She smiled beneath it at the gentle warmth, and you could hear the sound of the drops as they fell, one by one, on the taut surface of the silk.

When Charles first began his visits to les Bertaux, Madame Bovary junior never omitted to inquire for the patient, and she even went the length of opening Monsieur Rouault's account on a nice clean page in her double-entry ledger. But when she discovered that he had a daughter, she made further investigations, and learned that Mademoiselle Rouault had been to school at an Ursuline convent, that she had been well 'finished' as the saying goes, and that in consequence she had learnt dancing, geography, drawing, embroidery and the piano. This was unendurable.

'So that is why he always looks so pleased when he is going to see her. That is why he puts on his best waistcoat and risks spoiling it in the rain. Horrid woman!'

And she took an instinctive dislike to her. At first she relieved her feelings by delivering herself of little veiled allusions. Charles did not take them in. Then she indulged in more pointed remarks, which he ignored for fear of a scene. At last she told him to his face what she thought of him, and he didn't know what to reply. What did he want to keep on going to les Bertaux for? Monsieur Rouault was all right again now, and besides that, he hadn't paid his bill. Ah, she knew all about it! There was someone else there, someone who was a good talker, someone who was accomplished and clever. That's what he was so fond of. He liked young, town-bred ladies! And then she would start off again:

'Old Rouault's daughter town-bred! Go along with you! Why, the grandfather was a shepherd, and a cousin of theirs nearly found himself in court for a piece of sharp practice in some dispute or other. She's a nice one to put on airs and to go flaunting it in a silk dress at church on Sunday, as though she fancied herself a countess. Why, if it hadn't been that he did pretty well on his colza crop last year, the poor man would have been hard put to it to keep his head above water.'

Charles yielded from very weariness, and gave up his visits to les Bertaux. Heloise, after much weeping and a great outburst of affection, had made him take his Bible oath not to go there any more. And so he knuckled under. Nevertheless, his eagerness to go made him ashamed of the servility of his conduct, and, with a sort of childish hypocrisy, he persuaded himself that because he was forbidden to see her, it was lawful for him to love her. And then, the widow was lean and long in the tooth. All the year round she wore a little black shawl with the point between her shoulder-blades. Her lank, hard figure was encased in sheath-like dresses that, being always too short for her, showed off her feet and the ribands of her broad shoes criss-crossed over her grey worsted stockings.

Every now and again Charles's mother would come to stay, but after a few days the daughter-in-law seemed to sharpen her on her own file, and then they would be at him like a couple of razors, scarifying him with all manner of criticism and fault-finding. He oughtn't to eat so much. What did he want to go and offer wine for to every chance comer? What stupid obstinacy not to wear woollen underclothes!

It came to pass that one fine day in the early spring a notary of Ingouville who had charge of the widow Dubuc's investments sailed away and took with him all his clients' money. Heloise, it is true, still had a share in a ship valued at six thousand francs and her house in the Rue Saint-Francois; nevertheless, of all that fortune of hers she had made such a song about, nothing save a few bits of furniture and some odds and ends of wearing apparel had made its appearance in the household. The thing had to be looked into thoroughly. The house in Dieppe was mortgaged up to the hilt; what she had had with the notary God only knew, and her share in the vessel was not more than two hundred pounds. So she had lied, the good lady! Monsieur Bovary, senior, flew into such a rage that he took up a chair and smashed it on the stone floor, and told his wife she had been the ruin of her son, yoking him to a jade like that, whose harness wasn't worth as much as her skin. They came to Tostes and insisted on having things out. There was a scene. Heloise in tears threw herself into her husband's arms and implored him to defend her against his parents. Charles tried to stand up for her. The old people were indignant and left the house.

But the blow had struck home. A week later, as she was hanging out the washing in the yard, she was seized with an attack of bloodspitting, and the next day, while Charles had his back to her, drawing the window curtain, she exclaimed, 'Ah! mon Dieu!' heaved a sigh and went off unconscious.

She was dead! What an astounding thing!

When all was over at the cemetery Charles returned to the house. There was no one downstairs. He went up into the bedroom and saw her dress hanging up at the foot of the bed. Then, leaning against the secretaire, he remained there till it was dark, lost in sorrowful meditation. After all, she had loved him.