The bills arrive; Leon is married; Platonic love; Monsieur Homais's articles; The druggist's ambition; Charles meets Rodolphe; Berthe's discovery.

NEXT day Charles had the little one brought home. She asked for her mummy. They told her that she had gone away, that she would bring her back some toys. Berthe spoke of her again many times; but as the days went by she ceased to think of her. The child's merry prattle went to Bovary's heart, and he had to endure the chemist's insufferable consolations.

Before long the money troubles began again, Monsieur Lheureux putting his friend Vincart once more on the war-path, and Charles involved himself in exorbitant liabilities; for he would never agree to part with anything, however trifling, that had belonged to 'her'. This enraged his mother. His wrath exceeded hers. He had changed completely. She shook the dust of the place off her feet.

Then they all tried to get their pickings. Mademoiselle Lempereur sent in an account for six months' tuition, though Emma had never had a single lesson (despite the receipted bill she had shown to Bovary)- it was an agreement they had made between them; the proprietor of the lending library claimed three years' subscription; Mere Rollet demanded payment for delivering a score of letters, and when Charles asked for an explanation she had the delicacy to reply,

'Oh, I don't know anything about it; it had to do with her business affairs.'

Every time he paid a bill, Charles thought it was the last, but fresh ones kept cropping up.

He sent out requests for the payment of outstanding bills. They showed him letters received from his wife. And then he had to make his apologies.

Felicite was now wearing Madame's dresses. Not all of them, for Charles had kept some, and he would go and shut himself up in her dressing-room and look at them. Felicite was about the same figure, and often when Charles saw her from behind, a sort of illusion would take hold of him and he would cry,

'Stay there, for God's sake! Stay where you are!'

But when Whitsuntide came she left Yonville. She decamped with Theodore and the remainder of the wardrobe.

It was about this time that Madame Veuve Dupuis 'had the honour to acquaint him with the marriage of her son, Monsieur Leon Dupuis, notary at Yvetot, to Mademoiselle Leocadie Leboeuf, of Bondeville'. Charles in the course of his congratulations wrote: 'How delighted my poor wife would have been!'

One day, when he was wandering aimlessly about the house, he happened to go upstairs into the attic, and as he was walking about, felt a little pellet of thin paper underneath his slipper. He uncrumpled it and read, 'Be brave, Emma, you must be brave! I am not going to bring disaster on your life.' It was Rodolphe's letter, which had fallen down between the boxes. There it had remained all this time, and the draught from the window had just blown it out towards the door. And now Charles was standing transfixed and staring where, long ago, more pale than he, Emma, with despair in her heart, had thought to hurl herself to death. He looked, and after a time he made out a little R at the bottom of the second page. What was the meaning of it? He remembered how attentive Rodolphe had been, his sudden disappearance, and his air of constraint on the two or three occasions he had run across him since. But the respectful tone of the letter put him off the scent.

'Perhaps there was some sort of platonic affection between them,' he thought.

Besides, Charles was not the sort of man to probe things to the bottom: he hadn't the courage to face the proofs; and his vague qualms of jealousy were swallowed up in the immensity of his sorrow.

Who, he thought to himself, could have help ed adoring her? Not a man but must have longed to possess her- that was a sure thing. And all these thoughts brought her before him, more beautiful than ever. A furious, incessant desire took hold of him, adding fuel to his despair; it knew no sort of bounds, since now it was beyond requital.

To please her, as though she were still alive, he adopted her predilections, her ideas. He bought himself patent leather boots; he took to wearing white ties; he waxed the ends of his moustache, and, like her, he set his hand to promissory notes. She was corrupting him from beyond the tomb.

He was obliged to sell the silver, piece by piece; then he got rid of the drawing-room furniture. All the rooms were robbed of their contents- all save one. 'Her' room, her bedroom, was left as it had always been. When he had had his dinner, Charles went up there. He pulled the round table in front of the fire and brought up her easy-chair. And then he would sit down facing it. A candle would be burning in one of the gilt candlesticks, and Berthe would be sitting near him, busy with her painting-book.

It pained the poor fellow to see her going about so ill clad, without any laces in her shoes, and her blouses with great slits in them from armhole to hip, for the charwoman scarcely worried about her at all. But she was so sweet and gentle, and she would put her little head on one side so winningly, so that her pretty fair hair hung down and hid her rosy cheeks, that the sight of her filled him with delight, yet that delight had its alloy of bitterness, like an ill-made wine that smells of resin. He mended her toys, cut out marionettes for her in cardboard, or stitched up the rents in the stomachs of her dolls. Then, if his eyes fell on the work-box, on a piece of ribbon lying about, or even a pin that had got into a crevice in the table, he would sit like a man in a dream, and looked so woebegone, so sad, that she grew sad like him.

No one came to see them now; for Justin had run away to Rouen, where he had found employment in a grocer's shop, and the apothecary's children gradually dropped the little Bovary girl. In view of the difference in their social status, Monsieur Homais was not anxious for the connexion to continue.

The blind man, who had derived no benefit from his ointment, had gone back to Bois-Guillaume hill, where he was in the habit of telling the travellers all about the chemist's unsuccessful experiment. It became so trying that whenever Homais had occasion to go to town he hid behind the curtains of the 'Hirondelle' to avoid encountering him. He loathed and detested him, and, in order to get rid of him at any price, in the interests of his own reputation, he attacked him with a masked battery which displayed at once the resources of his intelligence and the baseness of his vanity. For six consecutive months there appeared little paragraphs in the 'Rouen Beacon' running something like this:

'Travellers bound for the fertile regions of Picardy cannot fail to have noticed on the hillside of Bois-Guillaume a wretched specimen of humanity afflicted with a horrible facial eruption. The miserable creature plies his beggar's trade with such persistence that his importunities constitute a sort of toll or tax on all who journey that way. Are we still living in those intolerable Dark Ages when vagabonds were free to expose, without let or hindrance, to the public gaze, the leprous and scrofulous diseases brought back by them from the Crusades?'

Or, again,

'Notwithstanding the laws against vagrancy, the outskirts of our big towns continue to be infested by troops of beggars. Sometimes they wander singly, and these solitary specimens are perhaps not the least dangerous. What are our local authorities dreaming about?'

Then Homais would invent stories, such as,

'Yesterday on the hill of Bois-Guillaume, a vicious horse...' and there followed an account of an accident ascribed to the blind man's presence.

He succeeded so well that the man was shut up. However, he was let go again. He started the ball once more, and so did Homais. It was a trial of strength. Homais won, for his enemy was condemned to perpetual confinement in a pauper infirmary.

This success emboldened him, and henceforth there wasn't a dog run over, a barn fired, or a woman assaulted, but he must publish an account of it, always guided by his passion for progress and his detestation of the clergy. He drew comparisons between the lay and clerical schools, to the detriment of the latter, made references to Saint Bartholomew's Eve in connexion with a grant of one hundred francs to the Church, denounced abuses, fired off epigrams. That was his cue. Homais was laying his mines. He was becoming a power to be reckoned with.

However, he was stifled within the narrow limits of journalism. A book, a work, that was the thing for him! Therefore he compiled a volume entitled 'Statistical Records of the Yonville District, together with some Climatological Observations', and his Statistics were not unseasoned with philosophy. He concerned himself with questions of public importance: the social problem, the moral uplifting of the poorer classes, pisciculture, the cultivation of rubber, railways, etc. He became rather ashamed of his bourgeois status; he affected the artistic temperament, he took to smoking! He bought a couple of Pompadour statuettes to adorn his drawing-room withal.

He did not forsake pharmacy- not by a long way. On the contrary, he kept abreast of all the new discoveries. The great chocolate movement received his careful attention. He was the first to introduce 'cho-ca' and 'revalentia' into the district. He became an enthusiastic advocate of the Pulvermacher hydro-electric appliances. He wore one himself, and at night, when he took off his flannel waistcoat, Madame Homais was lost in admiration of the golden spiral which concealed his trunk, and conceived a yet greater ardour of devotion for this husband of hers, who stood before her swathed like a Scythian and resplendent as an Eastern Mage.

He had some fine ideas concerning Emma's tombstone. First of all he suggested a broken column with some drapery, then a pyramid, then a Temple of Vesta, a sort of rotunda... or else 'a mass of ruins'. And in all his plans Homais would cling to a weeping willow, which he looked upon as the indispensable symbol of grief.

Charles and he went off to Rouen together to look at some tombstones at a monumental mason's. An artist friend of Bridoux's went with them, an individual called Vaufrylard, who rattled off puns all the way. At length, having inspected about a hundred designs, he had estimates sent, and made a second journey to Rouen, and finally decided on a mausoleum, which was to have on its two main sides 'a genius carrying an extinguished torch'.

With regard to the inscription, Homais could think of nothing to come up to 'Sta viator', and there he stuck. He racked his brains: he went about saying 'Sta viator' over and over again. At last he thought of 'amabilem conjugem calcas!' and upon that they decided.

There was one strange thing, and that was that, though Bovary was always thinking about Emma, he began to forget her. And he was filled with despair as he felt her image fading from his memory, despite all the efforts he made to retain it. Yet every night he dreamt of her; it was always the same dream. He drew near to touch her, but just as he was clasping her to his bosom she crumbled to dust within his arms.

For a whole week he went to church of an evening. Monsieur Bournisien paid him two or three visits, and then gave him up. According to Homais that worthy person was rapidly veering towards intolerance and fanaticism. He thundered against the spirit of the age, and every fortnight, in his sermon, he never omitted to tell the well-known story of how Voltaire died devouring his own excrement.

Despite Bovary's stringent economy, he couldn't get near to wiping off his old liabilities. Lheureux refused to do any more bill-renewing. The brokers were virtually at the door. It was then that he had recourse to his mother, who agreed to let him take out a mortgage on her property, but she accompanied this favour with some very acid criticisms of Emma. And, as some return for the sacrifice she was making, she asked him for a shawl that had escaped the predatory clutches of Felicite. Charles wouldn't part with it. So there was a quarrel.

She was the first to make pacific overtures, by suggesting that she should have the child to live with her. She would be company. Charles agreed. But when the time for parting came, his courage failed him. That meant another break. This time it was final.

In proportion as his ties decreased, he centred all his love upon his child. Yet she was an anxiety to him. She coughed occasionally, and had red patches on her cheeks.

Just across the way, the chemist's family exhibited all the glories of health and high spirits, for the chemist was Fortune's darling. Napoleon assisted him in the laboratory, Athalie worked him a Turkish cap, Irma cut out discs of paper to put over the jam, and Franklin, in one breath, recited the multiplication table. He was the happiest of fathers, the luckiest of men.

Wrong! A secret ambition gnawed at his vitals. Homais coveted the Legion of Honour. He was richly entitled to it-

(1) 'For displaying, during the cholera epidemic, unlimited devotion in the alleviation of suffering.'

(2) 'Publishing, at my own expense, sundry works of public utility, such as...' (and he included his monograph entitled 'Cider, its Manufacture and Effects'; together with some Observations on Tick among Sheep, sent to the Academy; his volume of statistics, not even omitting the thesis he wrote for his pharmaceutical diploma); 'in addition to which, I am a member of several learned societies' (he belonged to one).

'Why,' he exclaimed, with a little pirouette of triumph, 'the services I've rendered at fires ought to do the trick!'

Thus Homais began to truckle to Authority. He secretly rendered the Prefect some valuable services during the elections. He sold, he prostituted, himself. He even addressed a petition to the sovereign, begging him to see justice done by him. He called him 'Our good King', and compared him to Henry IV.

And every morning the apothecary pounced on the newspaper to see if his appointment was in. But it wasn't. At last he could hold himself in no longer. He had a lawn made in his garden shaped like a cross of honour, with two little wavy ends to imitate the riband. He paced round it with folded arms, musing on the ineptitude of governments and the ingratitude of men.

Out of respect, or from a kind of sensual gratification he derived from lingering over his investigations, Charles had not yet opened the secret drawer of an ebony writing-desk which Emma had always been in the habit of using. At length, one day, he sat down in front of it, turned the key and pressed the spring. All Leon's letters were there. No room for doubt this time! He devoured them all, to the very last one, ransacked every corner, every piece of furniture, every drawer, looked behind the pictures- sobbing, howling, frenzied, mad. He discovered a box and kicked it open. Rodolphe's portrait stared him full in the face, in the midst of a wilderness of love-letters.

People were astonished to see him so low-spirited. He never went out or had anyone to see him. He even refused to go and see his patients. Then folks said he shut himself up to indulge in secret drinking.

Now and again, however, some inquisitive person would hoist himself up and look in over the garden hedge, and be struck with amazement to see a man there, a man with a neglected beard, clad in sordid clothes, with a wild look in his eye, marching up and down the garden, weeping aloud.

Of a summer evening he would take his little girl by the hand, and they would go together to the cemetery. They came back when it was quite dark, and when the only light in the Square shone from Binet's attic window.

However, he could not enjoy the voluptuousness of his sorrow to the full, because he had no one about him with whom to share it; and he used to go over and see Mere Lefrancois, so as to be able to talk of 'her'. But the landlady only listened with half an ear, for she had troubles enough of her own. Monsieur Lheureux had at last put the 'Favorites du Commerce' on the road, and Hivert, who enjoyed a great reputation as a shopping agent and general messenger, was asking for a rise and threatening to go over to 'the rival show'.

One day, when he had gone to attend the market at Argueil to sell his horse- his last remaining asset- he encountered Rodolphe.

They both turned pale. Rodolphe, who, when Emma died, had merely sent his card, stammered out a few apologies. Then he grew bolder- so bold, indeed, as to invite Charles (it was August and very hot) to have a bottle of beer with him at the inn.

Facing him, leaning on his elbow, he chewed the end of his cigar as he went on with the conversation. Charles fell into a sort of dream as he gazed at the features of the man she had loved so deeply. He seemed somehow to find a vestige of her there. It was a wonderful thing. He would have liked to be that man.

Rodolphe went on talking about farming, cattle, fertilisers and so forth, warding off the risk of any uncomfortable allusion by interpolating, where necessary, some commonplace observation. Charles was not listening, Rodolphe saw he wasn't, and watched the changes of his expression as memory after memory passed through his mind. His face grew flushed, his nostrils quivered, his lips trembled. There was, indeed, a moment when Charles, filled with sombre rage, fixed his eyes on Rodolphe, who, in a kind of panic, stopped what he was saying. But soon the old funereal weariness overspread his countenance again.

'I'm not angry with you,' he said.

Rodolphe held his peace. And Charles, with his head in his hands, repeated in a flat voice, with the resigned accent of an infinite sorrow,

'No, I'm not angry with you, now!'

Then he said a great thing, the only great thing he ever said in his life,

'It's Fate must bear the blame!'

Rodolphe, who had directed the course of this same Fate, thought him very civil for a man in his position; rather comic, indeed, and a trifle cheap.

Next day Charles went out and sat down on the seat in the garden. Gleams of sunlight came in through the trellis, the vine leaves cast the tracery of their shadows on the gravel path, the jasmine shed abroad its fragrance, the sky was blue, and bumble bees were buzzing round the lilies in full flower. Charles felt oppressed, as a young man might have felt, with the vague unrest of love that filled his stricken heart.

At seven o'clock, little Berthe, who had not seen him all the afternoon, came to fetch him in to dinner.

His head was leaning back against the wall, his eyes were shut, his mouth was open, and in his hand he held a long tress of dark hair.

'Papa, come along!' she said.

And thinking he was having a game with her, she gave him a little push. He fell to the ground. He was dead.

Thirty-six hours later, at the apothecary's request, Monsieur Canivet dashed over. He opened up the body and found nothing.

When everything had been sold, there remained twelve francs seventy-five centimes, which served to defray the cost of Mademoiselle Bovary's journey to her grandmother's. The worthy woman died the same year. Farmer Rouault being paralysed, she was taken charge of by an aunt. The aunt is poor, and sends her to earn her living in a cotton mill.

After Bovary died three doctors in succession set up at Yonville, but none of them prospered, so vigorous was the onslaught that Homais made upon them all. His practice grows like wildfire. The authorities wink at his activities, and public opinion is his shield.

He has just been awarded the Legion of Honour.

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