The bailiff arrives; The secret in the attic; Appeal to Leon; The Viscount passes; Advice for the blind; man; At the Notary's; Binet at work; Waiting for Leon; 'No one at home'; Rodolphe.

SHE behaved with great fortitude the next day, when Maitre Hareng, the bailiff, accompanied by two witnesses, came to draw up a list of the goods to be distrained.

They began with Bovary's consulting-room, and made a point of excluding the phrenological bust as being a part of his professional apparatus; but in the kitchen, they put down the crockery, the saucepans, the chairs, the candlesticks, and, in her bedroom, all the knickknacks in the cabinet. They examined her dresses, they turned out the linen, they rummaged about in the dressing-room. And her whole mode of life, with all its intimacies and secrets, was laid bare, like a corpse undergoing a post-mortem examination, to the gaze of these three men.

Maitre Hareng, with his black coat buttoned close about his spare figure, his white cravat, and tightly buckled boot straps, would say from time to time,

'Pardon me, Madame; will you allow me?'

And he frequently interjected exclamations, such as,

'Charming!'... ''Very' pretty!'

Then he would resume his notes, dipping his pen into an inkhorn which he carried in his left hand.

When they had got through the rooms, they went up into the attic.

She had a desk up there in which she kept Rodolphe's letters. That had to be opened.

'Ah, letters!' said Maitre Hareng, smiling discreetly. 'But allow me. I must make sure the box contains nothing else.'

He held up the papers a little bit on one side, as though to let the louis d'or slip out of them. Then her indignation 'did' rise- to see this big hand, with the red fingers soft as slugs, defiling those pages which had felt the beating of her heart.

At last they went! Felicite returned. She had sent her to look out for Bovary and keep him away. Quick as lightning they rushed the bum up to the attic, and he swore he would stay there.

Charles that evening seemed rather worried. She eyed him in an agony of suspense, thinking she read an accusation in every line of his face. And when her eyes rested on the chimney-piece with its Chinese screens, on the ample curtains, on the easy-chairs, on all the various things which had contributed to soften the bitterness of her life, a feeling of remorse took hold of her, or rather an immense regret which, far from annulling her passion, only teased it into greater activity. Charles sat placidly stirring the fire, his feet on the fire-dogs.

There was a moment when the bailiff's man, growing sick of his confinement, made a little noise.

'Is that someone moving about upstairs?' asked Charles.

'No,' said Emma, 'it's only a window that's been left open, rattling in the wind.'

The next day, a Sunday, she started for Rouen, to go and call on every banker she knew the name of. They were away in the country or travelling. She did not give in. Some whom she did manage to see she asked for the money, protesting that have it she must, and that she would pay it back. Some of them laughed in her face. All of them refused.

At two o'clock she tore away to Leon's. She knocked at the door, but no one came. At last Leon himself appeared.

'Who is with you?'

'What, isn't it all right?'

'Yes... but...'

And he confessed that the landlord didn't like 'women visitors'.

'I've something I must say to you,' she answered.

Then he took out his key, but she caught his arm.

'No, no. Let's go along to our own place.'

So they went to their room, in the Hotel de Boulogne.

The first thing she did was to drain a big glass of water. She was very pale.

'Leon,' she said, 'I want you to do something for me.'

Then, gripping him with her two hands and giving him a shake, she said,

'Listen, I want eight thousand francs!'

'Why, you're mad!'

'Not yet!'

And, without any further preliminaries, she plunged into the story of the distraint. She told him what an agony she was in: Charles knew nothing; her mother-in-law hated her; her own father was powerless, but he, Leon, he would hunt round and get her the money somewhere. She 'must' have it.

'How do you expect me...?'

'Oh, don't be such a coward!' she cried.

Then he said, like a ninny.

'You're making the thing worse than it is! Probably a thousand crowns or so would keep the fellow quiet.'

Well, then, all the more reason to be up and doing. Surely it was possible to find three thousand francs somewhere. Besides, Leon could go bail for her himself.

'Off you go! Do your utmost! It must be got! Rush! Oh, try! try! and I'll love you such a lot.'

He went out. At the end of an hour he was back again.

'I've tried three people,' he said, with a solemn face, 'and it's no good.'

They sat down and stared at each other from opposite sides of the chimney-piece, motionless and silent. Then Emma shrugged her shoulders and tapped impatiently on the floor. He heard her whispering under her breath,

'If I were in your place, I'd get it right enough, I know.'

'Where?'

'At your office!'

And she looked him straight in the face.

A wicked, reckless look shone in her blazing eyes, and, half-shutting her eyelids, she gave him a lascivious glance and tried to egg him on. And the young man felt himself weakening beneath the silent will-power of this woman who was prompting him to crime. A fear came over him, and to forestall any further expression of what she had in mind, he clapped his hand on his forehead and exclaimed,

'I know! Marel's coming back tonight. He won't refuse me, I hope' (Marel was a friend of his, whose father was in a big way of business), 'and I'll bring it along to you tomorrow.'

Emma did not display the enthusiasm he anticipated at the hope thus held out to her. Did she suspect the subterfuge?

'However,' he continued, turning very red, 'if I'm not there by three o'clock, don't expect me, my dearest. Well, I must be off. Forgive me, darling. Good-bye!'

He took her hand and pressed it. But he noticed that it was quite listless. Emma had not the strength to feel any more.

It struck four. She got up to go back to Yonville, obeying the urge of habit like an automaton.

It was one of those clear, keen March days, when the sun shines bright in a perfectly clear sky. Some townsfolk in their Sunday best were strolling about, looking highly pleased with themselves. She came to the Cathedral Close. Vespers were just over, and crowds of people were pouring out through the three great doorways, like a river flowing through the triple arches of a bridge, and in the centre, more stolid than a rock, stood the beadle.

The sight reminded her of that day when, tremulous with anxiety and full of hope, she entered the great building whose depths were not so deep as the love she bore in her heart; and she went on walking, weeping beneath her veil, dazed, faltering, ready to collapse.

'Look out there!' shouted a voice from a 'porte cochere' that was swinging open.

She stopped, and a black horse harnessed to a tilbury, driven by a gentleman in a coat of sable fur, pranced out into the street. Who was it? She knew him.... The carriage sped forward and disappeared.

But it was he right enough, the Vicomte! She turned away. The street was deserted. She was so depressed, so sick at heart, that she leaned against a wall to keep herself from falling.

Then she thought she must have made a mistake. Anyhow, she couldn't tell. Everything, within her and without, was abandoning her. She felt herself lost, rolling blindly through limitless abysses; and it was with something like joy that she perceived, on reaching the 'Croix Rouge', the worthy Homais, who was giving an eye to a big case of pharmaceutical stores that was being hoisted up on the 'Hirondelle'. He had got in his hand six 'cheminots' wrapped up in a silk handkerchief, for his wife.

Madame Homais had a great liking for these little, heavy, turban-shaped loaves, which people eat in Lent with salt butter. They are, maybe, a last surviving remnant of Gothic times, going back, perhaps, to the Crusades, when the sturdy Normans, seeing them on the table beneath the yellow gleam of the flickering torches, amid tankards of mead and towering joints of hog's-meat, gorged them with gusto, fancying, peradventure, they were devouring the heads of their Saracen foes. The apothecary's wife crunched them as they did, heroically, despite her dreadful teeth. And so it came about that, every time Monsieur Homais made a journey to Rouen, he never failed to bring her some back with him, always getting them at the noted shop in the rue Massacre.

'Charmed to see you!' he said, offering his hand to Emma to help her into the 'Hirondelle'.

This done, he put his 'cheminots' up on the netting rack, and sat with bare head and folded arms, in a pensive and Napoleonic attitude.

But when the blind man put in his customary appearance at the foot of the hill, he exclaimed,

'I cannot understand how it is the authorities permit people to get their living in this disgraceful manner. These unhappy creatures ought to be put away and set to do some kind of work. Upon my word, progress moves no faster than a tortoise, and we are still no better than a horde of savages.'

The blind man held out his hat, which flopped about just inside the window like a piece of the cloth covering that had come unnailed.

'That,' said the chemist, 'is a scrofulous disorder.'

And although he knew the poor devil quite well, he pretended he had never seen him before, muttered the words 'cornea, corneal opacity, sclerotic, facies', and then asked him, in a fatherly sort of way,

'Have you suffered long from this terrible affliction of yours, my good man? Instead of fuddling yourself with drink in the tavern, you would be far better advised to go in for a diet.'

He advised him to stick to good wine, good beer and good nourishing joints. The blind man went on with his song. Moreover, he seemed almost an idiot. At last Monsieur Homais opened his purse.

'Here, here's a sou; give me back a couple of liards. Don't forget what I've told you, it'll do you a power of good.'

Hivert made so bold as to give audible expression to his doubts on that matter. But the apothecary guaranteed he would cure him himself, with an antiphlogistic unguentum, prepared from a formula of his own, and he gave his address,

'Monsieur Homais, near the market, that'll be enough.'

'And now,' said Hivert, 'after all that, you might give us your "turn".'

The blind man crouched down on his hams, and with his head flung back, rolling his greenish orbs and putting out his tongue, he rubbed his stomach with both hands, while he gave forth a low wailing sound like the howl of a starving dog. Emma, sickening at the sight, threw him a five-franc piece over her shoulder. It was all she had in the world, and she thought there was something fine in thus flinging it away.

The diligence was moving on again, when suddenly Monsieur Homais thrust his head out of the window and shouted,

'Nothing farinaceous, no milk foods! Wear flannel next the skin, and expose the affected parts to the smoke of juniper berries.'

The sight of the familiar landmarks that passed one after another before her eyes gradually took Emma's mind off her present troubles. An intolerable weariness oppressed her, and she reached home dazed, discouraged and almost asleep.

'What must be, must be!' she said to herself.

And then, who knows? Something quite unexpected might happen any moment. Lheureux himself might die.

She was awakened at nine in the morning by a hubbub of voices in the Square. There was a crowd of people round by the market, all trying to read a big placard posted on one of the pillars, and she saw Justin climb up and tear it down. But just then a constable clapped him on the shoulder. Monsieur Homais came forth from the pharmacy, and Mere Lefrancois, in the midst of the crowd, looked as if she were just concluding a harangue.

'Madame! Madame!' cried Felicite rushing in, 'it's a vile shame!'

And the poor girl, completely upset, held out a yellow paper which she had just torn off the front door. Emma read at a glance that all her furniture was to be sold up.

Then they gazed at each other in silence. Servant and mistress had no secrets from one another.

'If I were you, Madame,' sighed Felicite at last, 'I should go and see Monsieur Guillaumin.'

'You would?'

That question meant, 'You know about the house from the servant. Does the master talk about me sometimes?'

'Yes, you go; you'll be doing a good thing.'

She dressed; put on her black frock and her little, close-fitting bonnet, with the jet beads, and, so as not to be seen (there were always a lot of people in the Square), she avoided going through the village, taking the path by the river.

She was quite out of breath when she reached the notary's gate. The sky was overcast and a little snow was falling.

At the sound of the bell Theodore appeared at the top of the steps in a red waistcoat. He came and let her in almost familiarly, like an old acquaintance, and showed her into the dining-room.

A big earthenware stove was blazing away beneath a cactus that filled up the rest of the recess, and in black wooden frames against paper stained to look like oak, hung Steuben's 'Esmeralda' and Schopin's 'Potiphar'. The table ready laid, a pair of silver dish warmers, the crystal door-knobs, the parquet floor and the furniture- everything shone as if it had been polished and burnished with most meticulous and English thoroughness. The windows were decorated at each corner with panes of coloured glass.

'This is the sort of dining-room,' thought Emma, 'that I ought to have.'

The notary came in, holding his dressing-gown, with its palm-leaf pattern, against his body with his left hand, while, with his right, he raised and quickly put on again his brown velvet cap, jauntily cocked over his left ear, and beyond it descended the ends of three strands of fair hair, which, starting from the back of the head, were combed carefully forward over his bald cranium.

Offering her a chair, he sat down to his breakfast, apologizing profusely for his rudeness.

'Monsieur,' I she said, 'I want to ask you...'

'Madame, I am all attention.'

She proceeded to explain her position.

Maitre Guillaumin knew all about it, for he was in secret alliance with the soft-goods merchant, to whom he always applied for money whenever he had a mortgage to arrange.

For this reason he knew, better than she did, the long story of those bills of hers. How they began with trifling sums, backed by all and sundry, renewed over and over again for longer and longer periods till at last the day came when, collecting together all the protested bills, the merchant had instructed his friend Vincart to take, in his own name, the necessary proceedings, as he had no wish to be taken for a shark by his fellow-townsmen.

She interspersed her narrative with recriminations against Lheureux, to which the notary would reply every now and then with some noncommittal observation. Eating his cutlet and drinking his tea, he lowered his chin into his pale blue cravat, pierced by two diamond pins linked together by a slender gold chain, and he smiled a strange smile, a bland and oracular smile. But noticing that her feet were wet, he said,

'Come nearer the fire. There, put them up... higher, against the porcelain.'

She said she was afraid of making it dirty.

'Oh,' said the notary, with a gallant air, 'beautiful things never spoil anything.'

Then she appealed to his sense of compassion, and, growing emotional herself, gave him a picture of her straitened home life, her struggles, her wants. Ah, he could understand that- a woman of taste like her! And without interrupting his eating, he had turned round towards her so completely that his knee rubbed against her boot, which was steaming and curling up from the heat of the stove.

But when she asked him for a thousand crowns, he pursed up his lips, and then proceeded to remark that he was sorely grieved that he had never had the management of her property, for there were scores of ways which were open to a woman to invest her money to advantage. She might, with the very minimum of risk, have put something in the peat bogs at Grumesnil or the building sites at Le Havre, with the practical certainty of making a handsome profit; and he suffered her to eat her heart out with rage at the wonderful sums she might have made.

'How was it,' he said, 'you never came to me?'

'I really don't know,' she said.

'Why on earth didn't you? You weren't afraid of me, were you? It's really I who ought to be sorry, for myself. Why, we hardly know each other. And yet I have your interests truly at heart; you don't doubt that, I hope?'

He put out his hand and took hold of hers, covered it with a voracious kiss, and then held it on his knee; and he toyed delicately with her fingers, saying all manner of nice things to her.

His colourless voice murmured on like a running stream, a sparkle shone in his eyes through the glint of his spectacles, and he put his hand up Emma's sleeve to pat her arm. She felt his panting breath upon her cheek. The man was making himself unbearable.

All of a sudden she sprang to her feet.

'Monsieur,' said she, 'I am waiting!'

'What for?' said the notary, suddenly going as white as a sheet.

'This money.'

'But...'

Then, yielding to the onrush of a desire he could not withstand,

'Very well, yes!'

He dragged himself along on his knees before her, careless of his dressing-gown.

'For God's sake, stay! I love you!'

He seized her by the waist. A flood of crimson mantled in Madame Bovary's countenance. She recoiled with a terrible expression on her face, crying,

'You are taking a despicable advantage of my distress, Monsieur. I am to be pitied, not to be sold.'

And she turned and went.

The notary stood there like a man turned to stone, his eyes fixed on his fine embroidered slippers. They were a love gift, and the sight of them at length consoled him. And he went on to reflect that a thing like that might have carried him a lot too far.

'What a wretch! What a filthy cur! What a piece of infamy!' she exclaimed to herself as she hurried, with nervous steps, beneath the aspens that fringed the roadside.

Disappointment at her failure made her the more indignant at the insult offered to her modesty. It seemed as if the fates were eager for her undoing. Taking pride at the thought, she never rated herself so high, or the world so low. She felt as if she could defy them all. She would have liked to fight men, to spit in their faces, to grind them underfoot. She continued to walk quickly, straight in front of her, pale, trembling, full of rage, scanning with weeping eyes the empty horizon and as though revelling in the hate that was choking her. When she came in sight of her house a feeling of numbness came over her. She felt as if she could not go on. Nevertheless, there was no help for it. Besides, where else 'could' she go?

Felicite was waiting for her on the doorstep.

'Well?' she asked.

'No!' said Emma.

And for the next quarter of an hour they went together through the names of all the people in Yonville who might perhaps come to the rescue. But every time Felicite mentioned a name Emma answered,

'Do you really think so? Oh, no, I'm sure they wouldn't.'

'And the Doctor'll be in in a minute or two.'

'Yes, I know that.... Leave me alone.'

She had tried everything. There was nothing more to be done. And when Charles appeared she would go to him and say,

'Go back. The carpet on which you tread is ours no more. In the house that was yours there is not a chair, not a pin, not a straw you may call your own. And it is I who have ruined you, poor soul!'

Then there would come a great sob-scene. He would weep copiously, and then, the shock once over, he would grant her his pardon.

'Yes,' she answered, grinding her teeth, 'he will forgive me- he, who, if he had as much as a million to offer me, I could never forgive for having known me.... No, never, never!'

The notion of Bovary's moral superiority exasperated her beyond endurance. Then, whether she confessed or whether she did not, he would know all about it soon- by and by, tomorrow. So she would have to wait for this horrible scene and to endure the crushing burden of his magnanimity. Something prompted her to go back to Lheureux's. But what would be the good? Should she write to her father? It was too late. And perhaps she was feeling a pang of regret that she had not yielded to Guillaumin, when suddenly she heard the sound of hoofs in the side road. Yes, it was he. He opened the gate. He was whiter than the plaster wall. Rushing out into the hall, she slipped out across the Square, and the 'maire's' wife, who was chatting with Lestiboudois outside the church, saw her go into the tax-collector's.

She ran to tell Madame Caron, and the two ladies climbed up into the attic, where, concealed by some linen that was hung up to air, they so placed themselves that they could see right into Binet's rooms.

He was up there in his garret, trying to make a copy in wood of one of those amazing pieces of carved ivory composed of crescents, spheres hollowed out, one inside the other, the whole thing as perpendicular as an obelisk, and utterly useless. He was just starting on the last bit, he was nearly at the end of his task. In the contrasted light and shadow of his workshop the pale sawdust was flying from his lathe like a plume of sparks beneath the iron-shod hoofs of a horse at the gallop. The two wheels went on spinning and humming. Binet had a smile on his face, his chin was lowered, his nostrils were dilated. He seemed, in a word, to be lost in the enjoyment of one of those utterly blissful moods that arise from the conquest of difficulties well within one's powers, and that soothe the mind with the successful accomplishment of a task uncalculated to awaken thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.

'Look! There she is!' said Madame Tuvache.

But, owing to the noise of the lathe, it was hardly possible to hear a word she said.

At last these ladies thought they caught the word 'francs', and Mere Tuvache said in a whisper,

'She's asking him to give her more time for her taxes.'

'Looks like it, said the other.

They saw her gazing all round the room, examining the napkin rings rowed along on the walls, the candlesticks, banister knobs, and so forth, while Binet stroked his beard complacently.

'She couldn't have gone to order anything from him, could she?' said Madame Tuvache.

'But he doesn't sell anything,' objected her neighbour.

The tax-collector was listening, with staring eyes, as if he couldn't understand what she meant. She went on with a tender, beseeching air. She drew nearer to him. Her bosom rose and fell. They had ceased to talk.

'Is she making up to him?' said Madame Tuvache.

Binet had gone red to the ears. She took his hands.

'Oh, that's really too bad!'

No doubt she was trying to seduce him, for the tax-collector- he was no coward either, he had fought at Bautzen and Lutzen, and been through the campaign in France, and even had his name put down for a cross of honour- suddenly recoiled as if he had seen a serpent.

'Madame!' he exclaimed, 'how could you think of such a thing?'

'Women like that ought to be thrashed,' said Madame Tuvache.

'But what's become of her?' exclaimed Madame Caron.

For she had disappeared while they were speaking. Then they saw her hurrying along the High Street. She turned to the right as if she were going to the cemetery, and they couldn't tell what to make of it.

'Madame Rollet!' she exclaimed when she got to the nurse's, undo my stays, I can't breathe.'

She dropped on to the bed and lay there sobbing. Mere Rollet put a skirt over her and stood close beside her. Then, since she made no answer, the good woman left her, took up her spinning-wheel and began to spin some hemp.

'Oh, do please stop!' said she, thinking it was Binet's lathe she heard humming.

'What's the matter with her?' the nurse wondered. 'What has she come here for?'

She had rushed off there, impelled by a sort of terror, that drove her out of her house.

Lying on her back, motionless, with fixed eyes, she only half took in the objects around her, although she stared at them with a sort of imbecile persistence. She contemplated the paper peeling off the wall, she looked fixedly at the two embers, smouldering end to end, and at a big spider that was crawling above her head along a crack in the beam. At last she collected her ideas. She began thinking of old times. One day, with Leon.... Oh, what ages ago it seemed! The sun was shining on the river and the clematis filled the air with fragrance. Then, borne along by her memories as by a seething torrent, she was soon brought to remember the day before.

'What time is it?' she inquired.

Mere Rollet got up, raised the fingers of her right hand in the direction where the sky was brightest, and came in again slowly, saying,

'Just on three o'clock.'

'Oh, thank you, thank you very much!'

For he would come. That was certain. He would have found the money. But perhaps he would go straight to the house, never thinking she might be here. So she asked the nurse to go and bring him to her.

'Make haste, make haste, do!'

'Yes, dear lady, I'm making all the haste I can.'

And now she could not understand for the life of her how it was she hadn't thought of him to begin with. Yesterday he had promised faithfully, and he wouldn't break his promise. She saw herself already at Lheureux's, unfolding the three bank-notes on his desk. But she would have to invent some tale to explain matters to Bovary. What was she going to say?

Meanwhile the nurse was a long time coming back. But as there was no clock in the cottage, Emma thought that perhaps the time seemed longer than it really was. She strolled about the garden a little, walking very slowly; she went out along the footpath, by the hedge, and came back quickly, hoping that Mere Rollet had come in another way. At last, tired of waiting, assailed by suspicions which she dismissed as soon as formed, hardly knowing whether she had been there for minutes or for years, she sat down in a corner, shut her eyes and stopped up her ears. The gate squeaked. She started to her feet. Before she could utter a word Mere Rollet said,

'There's no one at your house!'

'What?'

'No one at all! And the Doctor's weeping. He keeps calling for you. They're looking for you everywhere.'

Emma made no answer. She kept gasping for breath, staring help lessly about her, and the woman, scared at the look on her face, drew back instinctively, thinking she was mad. All at once she clapped her hand to her brow and uttered a little cry, for the thought of Rodolphe, like a vivid flash of lightning on a dark night, had passed through her mind. He was so good, so sympathetic, so generous! Moreover, if he hesitated, she knew very well she could make him do her this service merely by reminding him, with a look of her eyes, of their old love. So she betook herself to la Huchette, and it never occurred to her that she was hastening to do the very thing which an hour or so ago had driven her into a fury; she never for a moment dreamt that she was playing the prostitute.

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