A pile of tosh; Rodolphe says good-bye; A basket of apricots; Emma reads her letter; The carriage crosses the square; Monsieur Homais on perfumes; Emma's illness.

HE was no sooner back, than down he sat at his bureau, under the stag's head that hung as a trophy on the wall. But when he got the pen between his fingers he couldn't for the life of him think what he was going to say, and there he sat lost in meditation, resting on his elbows. Emma seemed to have receded into the dim and distant past, as if his late resolve had suddenly put a yawning gulf between them.

In order to get hold of some tangible memento of her, he went to the cupboard at the head of his bed and brought out an old biscuit box that had come from Rheims, in which he used to keep the letters he received from women. It emitted a smell of mustiness and withered roses. The first thing he noticed was a handkerchief covered with little faded stains. It belonged to her. Her nose had started bleeding when they were out walking once; he had forgotten all about it. Close to it was a miniature of herself that she had given him. It was all broken at the corners. He thought her dress looked showy and her seductive glance in the most deplorable taste. Then, as he gazed at this picture and tried to recall the original, Emma's features began to grow vague and blurred in his mind, as if the living face and the painted face, rubbing one against the other, had become mutually obliterated. And then he went on to the letters. They were full of arrangements for going away, short, practical and to the point, like business communications. He looked for the long ones, the letters she used to write him.

They were at the bottom of the box, and Rodolphe had to upset all the others. Mechanically he began to rummage about among the miscellaneous jumble, coming across all manner of things- a pair of garters, a black mask, pins, and locks of hair, some dark and some fair; some of it was entangled in the hinges of the box and broke as it opened.

And so, toying idly with his souvenirs, he fell to examining the different sorts of handwriting, the different styles of composition, as varied as the spelling. Some were affectionate, some were breezy, some were jocular, and some were sad. Some asked for love, and others for money. A word, perhaps, would bring back a face or a gesture, the sound of a voice. Sometimes, however, nothing came at all. In fact, these women, thus crowding pell-mell into his thoughts, mutually obscured one another, and dwindled away to one uniform level. Taking up a handful of letters, he amused himself for some moments by letting them fall in a cascade from his right hand into his left. Then, growing bored and sleepy, he went and put the box back in the cupboard, saying,

'What a pile of tosh!'

That summed up what he really thought, for his pleasures, like schoolboys in a playground, had trodden down his heart so hard that nothing ever grew there, and whatsoever passed through it, more heedless than children, did not, like them, so much as leave a name scored upon the wall.

'Come on,' he said, 'let's make a start.'

He wrote,

'Emma, you must be brave. I do not want to bring misery into your life....'

'And that's true enough' thought Rodolphe. 'I'm acting in her interests; I'm doing the decent thing.'

'Have you carefully weighed the consequences of your intended action? Have you realized the awful abyss to which I was dragging you, my poor angel? No, you haven't, have you? You were going on, confident and heedless, believing all would be well, trusting in the future.... Ah, what ill-fated, insensate things we are!'

Here Rodolphe paused, trying to hit on some good excuse.

'Suppose I say I've lost all my money! No, that's no good. It wouldn't really do the trick. I should only have the whole thing over again later on. You can never get women like that to listen to reason.' He thought a little; then he went on,

'I shall never forget you, you may rely on that, and I shall never cease to entertain a profound regard for you; but the day was bound to come, sooner or later (such is the fate of all things human), when our ardour would have cooled. Weariness would have come upon us, and who knows whether I might have been called upon to suffer the horrible anguish of witnessing your remorse and of sharing it myself, since I should have been its cause? The mere thought of the pain that will be yours is a torture to me, Emma. Forget all about me. Why was it fated that I should know you? Why were you so beautiful? Was I at fault? Oh, God, surely not! Fate, and fate alone, is to blame.'

'That's a phrase that always gets home,' said he.

'Ah, if you had just been an ordinary, don't-care sort of woman, of whom there are plenty in this world, I might, purely for my own amusement, have tried the experiment, since it wouldn't have had any danger for you. But that delicious exaltation, which is at once your charm and your undoing, has prevented you from understanding, adorable woman that you are, the falseness of our future position. I myself did not realize it to begin with, but lay stretched at my case, as though beneath the shade of the manchineel tree, in the shelter of that ideal of bliss, regardless of the consequences.'

'Perhaps she'll think I'm giving it up because of the money business. Ah, well, let her think it. The thing's got to be ended.'

'Society is cruel, Emma,' he went on. 'Wherever we went it would track us down. You would have had to put up with innuendoes, and all sorts of malicious gossip. People would cut you and perhaps insult you. You, insulted! Oh, God! And I, who would fain seat you on a throne; I, who am carrying away the memory of you like a talisman- for I am going to punish myself with exile for all the ill I have wrought you. I am going away. Whither? I know not. I am distraught. Adieu! Be good and kind, always. Keep in memory the unhappy man who has lost you. Teach my name to your child and bid her remember it in her prayers.'

The candles began to gutter. Rodolphe got up and shut the windows.

'I think that's about all,' he said to himself when he had sat down again. 'But no- just in case she tries again.'

'I shall be far away when you read these sad lines. I have made up my mind to go at once, so as to avoid the temptation of seeing you again. No wavering! I shall come back, and perhaps some day, later on, we shall talk together, quite dispassionately, of the days when we were lovers. Adieu.'

And there was yet another, a last, adieu, divided into two words, 'A Dieu!' He thought that in excellent taste.

'Now, how am I going to sign it?' he said to himself. '"Yours most sincerely"? No, I know. "Your Friend." That'll do.'

He read his letter over. He thought it quite good.

'Poor little woman!' he mused, feeling quite sentimental about her. 'She'll think me as hard as a rock. There ought to have been some tears on this; but I can't cry. I can't help it.' And so, pouring some water into a tumbler, Rodolphe wetted his finger and let fall a big drop that made a pale smear on the ink. Then he looked about for a seal, and came across the one with the words 'Amor nel Cor' upon it.

'That hardly fits the occasion.... Oh, well, never mind!'

That done, he smoked three pipes and went to bed.

Next day when he got up (which was two o'clock, for he had slept late) Rodolphe told one of his men to pick a basket of apricots. He placed his letter at the bottom, underneath the vine leaves, and dispatched Girard, his head ploughman, with orders to convey it carefully to Madame Bovary. This was the way he got letters to her, sending her fruit or game, according to the time of year.

'If she inquires for me,' he said, 'tell her I've gone away. Be sure and give the basket into her own hands. Off you go, and mind what you're about!'

Girard slipped on his new blouse, tied his handkerchief round the apricots, and clumping along in his great iron-bound clogs, pursued his tranquil way to Yonville. When he arrived, Madame Bovary and Felicite were unfolding a bundle of washing on the kitchen-table.

'Yur,' said the man, 'yur's somethin' for 'ee from maister.'

She felt instinctively that there was something wrong. All the time she was fumbling in her pocket for a tip for the man, she was shaking all over and looking at him anxiously. He couldn't for the life of him make out why anyone should be so disturbed at receiving such a simple present. At last he went. But Felicite was still in the room. Unable to stand it any longer, she rushed off to the dining-room, ostensibly to dispose of the apricots. She emptied the basket, tore away the leaves, saw the letter, opened it, and then, as if a fire were raging at her heels, made, in an agony of terror, for her room.

Charles was there. She just caught a glimpse of him. He said something, but she didn't hear, and went on running upstairs to the top of the house, panting, distraught, beside herself, still clutching that horrible piece of paper that rattled like a piece of sheet-iron in her hand. She got to the top and stopped outside the attic door, which was shut. Then she tried to collect herself. The letter! She must read it through, but she dare not. Where? How? They would see her.

'Ah, no,' she thought, 'I shall be all right here,' and she pushed open the door and went in. The heat from the slate roof came down on her like a ton of bricks. It gripped her temples, it nearly stifled her. She dragged herself to the shutter, pulled back the bolt and let in a flood of blinding sunlight.

Opposite, away beyond the housetops, stretched the open country, far as the eye could see. Immediately beneath her was the marketplace. Not a soul was there. The stones on the pavement were sparkling in the sun, the weather-vanes on the housetops never stirred. Across the way, from a room on a lower floor, came a sort of snoring sound with shriller variations. It was Binet, busy at his lathe.

She was leaning against the window recess, reading the letter through again, with, now and then, a little bitter laugh. She endeavoured to concentrate on it, to see what it really meant, but the more she tried, the more confused and dazed she felt. She saw him. She heard him. She flung her arms about his neck. Her heart knocked against her breast like great blows from a sledge-hammer. The beats came faster and faster with irregular intervals between. She cast her eyes all round about her, longing for the world to crumble into dust. Why not have done with it? Who was holding her back? She was free, wasn't she? She took a step forward. She leaned out and looked down at the pavement below.

'Come then,' she said, 'come!'

The beam of light that shone up directly from below was pulling the weight of her body towards the abyss. The surface of the market-place seemed to be oscillating and moving upwards all along by the walls, and the floor seemed to be slanting downwards like a vessel heeling over to the wind. She was right at the edge, almost suspended, with a vast space all around her. The blue sky came flooding towards her, the air was eddying in her hollow head. She had but to let herself go, to obey the summons. And still the whirring of the lathe went on, like someone calling her in a furious rage.

'Emma! Emma!' cried Charles.

It stopped her.

'Where are you, then? Come along!'

The thought that she had just escaped from death nearly made her swoon with terror. She shut her eyes. A touch on the sleeve made her shudder. It was Felicite.

'The Doctor's waiting for you, Madame. The soup is on the table.'

She had to go down! And sit through a meal!

She tried to eat. The food choked her.

Then she unfolded her napkin, as if to count the darns. She tried to concentrate on the task, counting the number of threads. Suddenly she thought of the letter. Had she lost it? Where had she put it? But her brain felt so tired that she couldn't even invent an excuse for getting up from the table. Then her courage gave way. She was afraid of Charles. He knew everything; for certain he did! And, curiously enough, he said just at that moment,

'It looks as if we shan't be seeing Monsieur Rodolphe again for some considerable time.'

'Who told you that?' she asked with a start.

'Who told me?' he repeated, rather taken aback at the sharpness of her tone. 'Why, Girard. I met him just now outside the Cafe Francais. He's gone on a journey, or he's on the point of going.' She choked down a sob.

'Why, what is there to be astonished at? He goes away every now and then, to break the monotony a bit. And, by Jove, I don't blame him! When a man's got plenty of money and no encumbrances! Anyhow, he has a jolly good time of it, our friend. He's a bit of a goer, they say. Monsieur Langlois has told me some...'

He broke off, because the servant was coming in.

The girl put the apricots, which were scattered all over the sideboard, back into the basket. Charles, not noticing how red his wife had gone, told the girl to bring them over, and stuck his teeth into one.

'Oh, perfect!' he said. 'Here, try one.'

He held out the basket. She put it away gently.

'Just smell! What a lovely scent!' said he, and he kept on putting the basket under her nose.

'Oh, I can't breathe!' she cried, starting to her feet. She controlled herself by an effort of will. The spasm passed. 'It's nothing!' she said. 'Nothing, nothing! Only nerves! Sit down and get on with your dinner.' She dreaded lest he should question her, make a fuss over her; dreaded that she wouldn't be left alone.

Charles did as she bade him and sat down. He spat out the stones into his hand and put them on the edge of his plate.

Suddenly a blue tilbury drove across the market-place at a brisk trot. Emma gave a shriek and fell rigid to the floor.

The fact was that Rodolphe, after thinking the whole thing over, had decided to go to Rouen, and as the only way from la Huchette to Buchy lay through Yonville, there was nothing for it but to go through the village, and Emma recognized him by the light of the carriage lamps which flashed through the twilight like a gleam of lightning.

Hearing a terrific commotion in the house, the chemist rushed over as hard as he could pelt. The table, with all the dinner-things, was upset. The meat, the gravy, the knives, the cruet were scattered over the floor. Charles was shouting for help ; Berthe, frightened out of her wits, was screaming, and Felicite, with trembling hands, was unfastening her mistress's stays, and Emma herself lay stretched out on the floor, shaken from head to foot by convulsive tremors.

'I'll run over and get some aromatic vinegar from my laboratory,' said the apothecary.

They held the flask to her nose, and she opened her eyes.

'There you are!' said Homais. 'It would bring a corpse to life again.'

'Speak! speak!' Charles kept on saying. 'Come, be yourself! It's me, your own Charles, who loves you. Don't you know me? There! there's your little one. Kiss her, then.'

The child stretched out her arms to her mother, to put them round her neck. But Emma turned away her head and gasped,

'No, no.... No one!'

She fainted away again. They carried her up to bed. She lay at full length, her mouth gaping, her eyes shut, her hands open, quite still, and as white as a waxen image. Two wet trails of tears slowly trickled from her eyes on to the pillow.

Charles was standing bolt upright in the recess. The chemist was at his side, maintaining that thoughtful silence which is the correct attitude to observe in the graver crises of life.

'You needn't worry now,' he said, taking him by the elbow. 'I think the attack is over.'

'Yes, she's a bit quieter now,' answered Charles, who was watching her sleeping. 'Poor little woman! She's gone right back again.' Homais wanted to know how it had all happened. Charles said it had come on her all of a sudden, while she was eating some apricots.

'Extraordinary!' remarked the chemist. 'But it's quite possible the apricots may have induced syncope. Some people are so terribly sensitive to certain odours. The subject would well repay study, in its pathological no less than its physiological aspect. It's a fact well known to the priests, who have always introduced aromatic scents into the ceremonies of the Church. The obvious intention is to numb the intellectual faculties while creating a condition of ecstasy, no difficult matter in the case of women, who are more sensitive in this respect than men. Cases have been cited where they have fainted at the smell of burnt hartshorn, of newly baked bread....'

'Mind you don't wake her,' whispered Bovary, under his breath.

'Nor is it only human beings who are prone to these attacks, animals also are liable thereto. For example, you are doubtless not unaware of the powerfully aphrodisiac effect produced by the 'nepeta cataria', commonly called valerian, on animals of the feline tribe. Moreover, to give an example, the authenticity of which I can guarantee, Bridoux, an old friend of mine, now in business in the Rue Malpalu, has a dog which goes off into a fit if anyone holds out a snuff-box to him. He has often demonstrated this experimentally in the presence of friends at his cottage in the Bois Guillaume. Would anyone have believed that a common sternutatory could produce such an overwhelming effect on a quadrupedal organism? It is a remarkable phenomenon, is it not?'

'Yes,' said Charles, who wasn't listening to a word.

'That throws a valuable light,' said the other, with a smile of benign complacency, 'on the innumerable vagaries of the nervous system. As for your wife, I confess to you that I have always considered her a typically neurotic subject. For that reason, my worthy friend, I am not going to recommend the administration of any of those so-called remedies which, while professing to act on the symptoms, really affect the constitution. No, my friend, no tinkering about with drugs. Diet, that's the thing! Sedatives, emollients, carminatives. Then, don't you think we might work on the imagination a little?'

'In what way? How?' said Bovary.

'Ah, there you are! That's the question. 'There's the rub', as someone said in the newspaper the other day.'

But at this point Emma woke up, shouting, 'The letter! The letter!' They thought she was delirious. And at midnight delirious she was. She had got brain fever.

For forty-three days Charles never quitted her side. He left his patients to take care of themselves. He didn't go to bed, he was for ever feeling her pulse, applying mustard plasters and cold-water compresses. He sent Justin all the way to Neufchatel for ice. The ice melted before he got home. He sent him back for more. He called in Monsieur Canivet, in consultation. He sent to Rouen for Dr. Lariviere, his old master; he was like one desperate. What scared him most was Emma's depressed condition. She didn't speak, took no notice of anything, and didn't even seem to suffer- as if her soul and body were together at rest after the tumult through which they had passed.

About half-way through October she was able to sit up in bed, propped up with pillows. Charles started crying when he saw her eating her first bit of bread and jam. She began to recover her strength, and got up for an hour or two in the afternoons, and one day, when she was feeling ever so much better, he tried to get her to walk a little in the garden, leaning on his arm. The gravel of the paths was almost hidden by dead leaves. She walked very slowly, dragging her feet along in her slippers, leaning her shoulder against Charles. And always a smile was on her face.

And thus they went, arm in arm, to the bottom of the garden, down by the terrace. Slowly she drew herself up and shaded her eyes with her hand, to see what she could see. She gazed away, far, far away, into the distance, but there was nothing on the skyline but heaps of burning grass that were smouldering on the hills.

'You'll make yourself tired, my darling,' said Bovary.

And pushing her gently to get her to go into the arbour, he said,

'There, then, sit down on this seat. You'll be all right here.'

'Oh, no! Not there, not there!' she said.

She had an attack of dizziness, and that same night she was as bad as ever again, though this time the course of her illness was more uncertain and its symptoms were more complex. Now it was her heart that troubled her. Now her chest, or her head, or her limbs. Then, she had attacks of vomiting, which Charles thought might be the early symptoms of cancer. And on the top of all this trouble, the poor fellow was worried about money.

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