Monsieur and Madame Charles arrived in Toste at about six o’clock. The neighbors came to the windows to see their doctor’s new wife.
The old servant presented herself, curtsied to her, apologized because dinner was not ready, and urged Madame, while waiting, to become acquainted with her house.
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The brick housefront was exactly flush with the street, or rather the high road. Behind the door hung a cloak with a short cape, a bridle, a black leather cap, and, in the corner, on the floor, stood a pair of leggings still covered with dried mud. To the right was the parlor, that is, the room they used for eating and for sitting. A canary yellow wallpaper, set off at the top by swags of pale flowers, trembled perpetually over its whole extent on its poorly stretched canvas; curtains of white calico, edged with red braid, crisscrossed the length of the windows, and on the narrow mantelpiece sat resplendent a pendulum clock with a head of Hippocrates, between two silverplated candlesticks under oval globes. On the other side of the hallway was Charles’s office, a small room about six paces wide, with a table, three chairs, and an office armchair. The volumes of the Dictionary of Medical Science, whose pages were uncut but whose bindings had suffered from all the successive sales through which they had passed, by themselves almost entirely filled the six shelves of a pine bookcase. The smell of sauces cooking penetrated through the wall during consultations, just as from the kitchen one could hear the patients coughing in the consulting room and recounting in detail their entire histories. Next, opening directly onto the yard, with its stables, was a large derelict room containing an oven and now serving as woodshed, cellar, and storeroom, full of old pieces of iron, empty barrels, disused garden implements, along with a quantity of other dusty things whose function it was impossible to imagine.
The garden, longer than it was wide, ran back between two clay walls covered with espaliered apricots, to a thorn hedge that separated it from the fields. In the middle was a slate sundial, on a masonry pedestal; four flower beds filled with spindly wild roses surrounded symmetrically the more useful square of serious plantings. At the far end, under the spruce trees, a plaster curé stood reading his breviary.
Emma went up into the bedrooms. The first was not furnished at all; but the second, which was the conjugal bedroom, contained a mahogany bed in an alcove hung with red drapes. A box made of seashells adorned the chest of drawers; and on the writing desk, by the window, there stood, in a carafe, a bouquet of orange flowers, tied with white satin ribbons. It was a bridal bouquet, the other woman’s bouquet! She looked at it. Charles noticed, picked it up, and carried it off to the attic, while, sitting in an armchair (they were placing her things around her), Emma thought about her own wedding bouquet, which was packed away in a cardboard box, and wondered, dreamily, what would be done with it if by chance she were to die.
She occupied herself, during the first days, with planning changes in her house. She took the globes off the candlesticks, had new wallpaper hung, the stairwell painted, and seats made for the garden, around the sundial; she even asked how she could acquire a pool with a fountain and fish. And her husband, knowing that she liked to go for drives, found a secondhand boc, which, once it had new lamps and mudguards of padded leather, looked almost like a tilbury.
So he was happy, without a care in the world. A meal alone with her, a walk in the evening on the big road, the gesture of her hand touching the bands of her hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging from the hasp of a window, and many other things that Charles had never suspected would be a source of pleasure now formed the continuous flow of his happiness. In bed, in the morning, and side by side on the pillow, he would watch the sunlight passing through the down on her blond cheeks, half covered by the scalloped tabs of her nightcap. Seen from so close, her eyes appeared larger to him, especially when she opened her eyelids several times in succession as she awoke; black when in shadow and dark blue in broad daylight, they seemed to hold layer upon layer of colors, denser deep down and lighter and lighter toward the enameled surface. His own eyes would lose themselves in those depths, and he would see himself in miniature down to his shoulders, with the silk scarf he wore around his head and the top of his half-open nightshirt. He would get up. She would go to the window to watch him leave; and she would remain there with her elbows on the sill, between two pots of geraniums, her dressing gown loose around her. Charles, in the street, would be buckling his spurs, his foot up on the guard stone; and she would go on talking to him from above, tearing off with her teeth and blowing down to him some bit of flower or leaf, which would flutter, float, make half circles in the air like a bird, and catch, before falling, in the ill-combed mane of the old white mare, motionless at the door. Charles, on horseback, would send her a kiss; she would answer with a wave, she would close the window, he would leave. And then, on the highway stretching out before him in an endless ribbon of dust, along sunken lanes over which the trees bent like an arbor, in paths where the wheat rose as high as his knees, with the sun on his shoulders and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the joys of the night, his spirit at peace, his flesh content, he would ride along ruminating on his happiness, like a man continuing to chew, after dinner, the taste of the truffles he is digesting.
Up to now, what had there been in his life that was good? Was it his time in school, where he remained shut in between those high walls, alone among schoolmates wealthier or better than he at their studies, who laughed at his accent, who made fun of his clothes, and whose mothers came to the visiting room with pastries in their muffs? Was it later, when he was studying medicine, his purse never fat enough to pay for a contra dance with some little working girl who might have become his mistress? After that, he had lived for fourteen months with the widow, whose feet, in bed, were as cold as blocks of ice. But now he possessed, for always, this pretty woman whom he so loved. The universe, for him, did not extend beyond the silky contour of her underskirt; and he would reproach himself for not loving her more, he would want to see her again; he would return home quickly, climb the stairs, his heart pounding. Emma, in her room, would be dressing; he would come in on silent feet, he would kiss her on the back, she would cry out.
He could not refrain from constantly touching her comb, her rings, her scarf; sometimes he would give her great full-lipped kisses on her cheeks, or a string of little kisses up her bare arm, from the tips of her fingers to her shoulder; and she would push him away, with a weary half smile, as one does a clinging child.
Before her marriage, she had believed that what she was experiencing was love; but since the happiness that should have resulted from that love had not come, she thought she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “intoxication,” which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.
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She had read Paul and Virginia, and she had dreamed of the little bamboo house, the Negro Domingo, the dog Faithful, but most of all of the sweet friendship of a good little brother who goes off to fetch red fruit for you from great trees taller than church steeples, or runs barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird’s nest.
When she was thirteen years old, her father himself took her to the city, to place her in the convent. They stayed at an inn in the Saint-Gervais quarter, where they were served supper on painted plates depicting the story of Mademoiselle de La Vallière. The explanatory legends, crossed here and there by knife scratches, all glorified religion, refined sentiments, and the splendors of the Court.
Far from being unhappy at the convent in her early days there, she liked the company of the good sisters, who, to amuse her, would take her to the chapel, down a long corridor from the refectory. She played very little during recreation time, understood her catechism very well, and it was always she who answered Monsieur le vicaire when he asked the hard questions. Living thus, without ever leaving the temperate atmosphere of the classrooms, and among these
white-faced women with their rosaries and copper crucifixes, she sank gently down into the mystical languor exhaled by the perfumes of the altar, the coolness of the fonts, and the glow of the candles. Instead of following the Mass, she would gaze in her book at the holy pictures with their azure edges, and she loved the sick ewe, the Sacred Heart pierced with sharp arrows, or poor Jesus falling, as he walked, under his cross. She tried, as mortification, to go a whole day without eating. She searched her mind for some vow she could fulfill.
When she went to confession, she would invent little sins in order to stay there longer, on her knees in the darkness, her hands together, her face at the grille beneath the whisperings of the priest. The metaphors of betrothed, spouse, heavenly lover, and marriage everlasting that recur in sermons stirred unexpectedly sweet sensations in the depths of her soul.
In the evenings, before prayers, a pious work was read aloud to them in the study hall. During the week, it was some digest of Biblical history or Abbé Frayssinous’s Lectures, and, on Sunday, for a change, passages from The Genius of Christianity. How she listened, the first few times, to those sonorous lamentations of romantic melancholy, reechoing through the earth and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in a room behind some shop in a commercial district, then perhaps she would have been open to those lyrical invasions of nature, which ordinarily come to us only as expressed by writers. But she knew the country too well; she knew the bleating flocks, the milking, the plows. Accustomed to the calm aspects of things, she turned, instead, toward the more tumultuous. She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins. She needed to derive from things a sort of personal gain; and she rejected as useless everything that did not contribute to the immediate gratification of her heart,—being by temperament more sentimental than artistic, in search of emotions and not landscapes.
At the convent there was a spinster who came every month, for a week, to work in the linen room. Under the protection of the archdiocese because she belonged to an old family of gentry ruined during the Revolution, she would eat in the refectory at the good sisters’ table and, after the meal, stay for a brief chat with them before going back up to her needlework. Often the boarders would slip out of study hall to go see her. She knew by heart the love songs of the century before and would sing them softly as she plied her needle. She would tell stories, give you news, do errands for you in town, and lend the older girls, secretly, one of the novels that she always had in her apron pocket, and from which the good old maid herself would devour long chapters in the intervals of her task. They were always and only about love, lovers, paramours, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, gloomy forests, troubled hearts, oaths, sobs, tears, and kisses, skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in groves, gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever is, always well dressed, and weeping like tombstone urns. And so for six months, at the age of fifteen, Emma soiled her hands with the greasy dust of those old lending libraries. With Walter Scott, later, she became enamored of things historical, dreamed of studded leather chests, guardrooms, and troubadors. She would have liked to live in some old manor, like one of those long-bodiced chatelaines who, under the trefoiled ogives, would spend her days, elbow on stone sill and chin in hand, watching a white-plumed horseman come galloping from the depths of the countryside on a black horse. At that time she worshipped Mary Stuart and felt an ardent veneration for illustrious or ill-fated women. Joan of Arc, Héloïse, Agnès Sorel, La Belle Ferronnière, and Clémence Isaure, for her, stood out like comets against the shadowy immensity of history, in which there still appeared here and there, but less visible in the darkness and without any relation among them, Saint Louis and his oak, Bayard dying, certain of Louis XI’s ferocities, a little of Saint Bartholomew, the Béarnais’s plume, and always the memory of the painted plates on which Louis XIV was extolled.
In music class, in the ballads she sang, the only subjects were little angels with wings of gold, madonnas, lagoons, gondoliers—peaceable compositions that allowed her to glimpse, through the silliness of the style and the indiscretions of the notes, the enticing phantasmagoria of real feelings. Some of her schoolmates would bring to the convent the keepsake albums they had received as New Year’s gifts. They had to hide them, it was quite a business; they would read them in the dormitory. Delicately handling their beautiful satin bindings, Emma would stare, dazzled, at the names of the unknown authors who had signed, most often counts and viscounts, under their compositions.
She would shiver, her breath lifting the tissue paper off the engravings; it would rise up half folded and fall back gently against the page. There was a young man in a short cloak behind a balcony railing, clasping in his arms a young girl in a white dress wearing a mesh bag at her belt; or anonymous portraits of English ladies with blond curls who gazed out at you with their wide light-colored eyes from under their round straw hats. Some were shown lying back in carriages, gliding through parks, where a greyhound would bound ahead of a team driven at a trot by two little postilions in white knee breeches. Others, dreaming on sofas beside an unsealed letter, would gaze at the moon through a half-open window half draped in a black curtain. Innocents with a tear on their cheek would kiss the beak of a turtledove through the bars of a Gothic birdcage or, smiling, their head nearly touching their shoulder, would pick the leaves off a daisy with tapering fingers that curved up at the tips like Turkish slippers. And you were there, too, you sultans with long pipes, swooning under arbors, in the arms of dancing girls, you Giaours, Turkish sabers, fezzes, and you especially, wan landscapes of dithyrambic countries, which often show us both palm trees and pines, tigers to the right, a lion to the left, Tartar minarets on the horizon, in the foreground Roman ruins, then crouching camels;—the whole framed in a very tidy virgin forest, with a great perpendicular ray of sunshine quivering on the water, where, standing out as white scratches against the steely gray background, widely spaced swans are swimming.
And the shade of the Argand lamp, attached to the wall above Emma’s head, shone on all these pictures of the world, which passed before her one after another, in the silence of the dormitory, to the distant sound of some late hackney cab still rolling along the boulevards.
When her mother died, she wept a great deal in the first few days. She had a memorial picture made for herself with the dead woman’s hair, and in a letter she sent to Les Bertaux, full of sorrowful reflections on life, she asked to be buried in the same grave, later. The good man thought she was ill and came to see her. Emma was inwardly satisfied to feel that she had, at her first attempt, reached that rare ideal of pallid lives, which mediocre hearts will never attain. And so she allowed herself to slip into Lamartinean meanderings, listened to harps on lakes, to the song of every dying swan, to the falling of every leaf, to pure virgins rising to heaven, and to the voice of the Eternal speaking in the valleys. She became bored with this, did not want to admit it, continued out of habit, then out of vanity, and was at last surprised to find that she was at peace, and that there was no more sadness in her heart than there were wrinkles on her forehead.
The good nuns, who had been so confident of her vocation, perceived with great surprise that Mademoiselle Rouault seemed to be slipping out of their control. They had, indeed, lavished upon her so many masses, retreats, novenas, and sermons, so thoroughly preached the respect owed to the saints and martyrs, and given so much good advice concerning the modesty of the body and the salvation of her soul, that she did what horses do when pulled by the reins: she stopped short and the bit slipped from her teeth. That spirit of hers, practical in the midst of its enthusiasms, loving the church for its flowers, music for the words of its songs, and literature for its power to stir the passions, rebelled before the mysteries of faith, just as she grew ever more irritated by its discipline, which was antipathetic to her nature. When her father withdrew h
er from school, no one was sorry to see her go. The Mother Superior even thought she had become, lately, rather irreverent toward the community.
Back at home, Emma at first enjoyed ordering the servants about, then grew sick of the country and missed her convent. By the time Charles came to Les Bertaux for the first time, she considered herself to be thoroughly disillusioned, with nothing more to learn, nothing more to feel.
But her impatience for change, or perhaps the nervous excitation caused by the presence of this man, had been enough to make her believe she at last possessed the marvelous passion that until then had remained like a great rosy-feathered bird hovering in the splendor of a poetical sky;—and now she could not convince herself that the calm life she was living was the happiness of which she had dreamed.
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She sometimes imagined that these were, nevertheless, the most beautiful days of her life—the honeymoon, as it was called. To savor its sweetness, she would doubtless have had to go off to one of those lands with melodious names where the days following a wedding have a softer indolence! In a post chaise, under curtains of blue silk, you climb the steep roads at a walk, listening to the postilion’s song as it echoes through the mountains, mingling with the bells of the goats and the muffled sound of a waterfall. As the sun goes down, you stand together on the shore of some bay, inhaling the fragrance of the lemon trees; then, at night, alone on the terrace of a villa, your fingers intertwined, you gaze at the stars and make plans. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must produce happiness, like a plant that was peculiar to that soil and grew poorly in any other spot. If only she could have leaned her elbows on the balcony of a Swiss chalet or locked away her sadness in a cottage in Scotland, with a husband dressed in a long-skirted black velvet coat, soft boots, a pointed hat, and ruffles at his wrist!