'Madame Bovary' Ch 2

Charles Bovary meets Emma, the daughter of one of his patients. His wife dies. Here's Chapter 2 of Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert.

Chapter 2

Night call; Monsieur Rouault's broken leg; A Norman farm; Mademoiselle Emma; Visits to les Bertaux; Heloise is jealous; Love in absence; The defaulting lawyer; The doctor is widowed. 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.

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