The Greatest Works of Gustave Flaubert. Gustave Flaubert

These presents, however, humiliated him; he refused several; she insisted, and he ended by obeying, thinking her tyrannical and overexacting.

      *A loving heart.

      Then she had strange ideas.

      “When midnight strikes,” she said, “you must think of me.”

      And if he confessed that he had not thought of her, there were floods of reproaches that always ended with the eternal question —

      “Do you love me?”

      “Why, of course I love you,” he answered.

      “A great deal?”

      “Certainly!”

      “You haven’t loved any others?”

      “Did you think you’d got a virgin?” he exclaimed laughing.

      Emma cried, and he tried to console her, adorning his protestations with puns.

      “Oh,” she went on, “I love you! I love you so that I could not live without you, do you see? There are times when I long to see you again, when I am torn by all the anger of love. I ask myself, Where is he? Perhaps he is talking to other women. They smile upon him; he approaches. Oh no; no one else pleases you. There are some more beautiful, but I love you best. I know how to love best. I am your servant, your concubine! You are my king, my idol! You are good, you are beautiful, you are clever, you are strong!”

      He had so often heard these things said that they did not strike him as original. Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

      But with that superior critical judgment that belongs to him who, in no matter what circumstance, holds back, Rodolphe saw other delights to be got out of this love. He thought all modesty in the way. He treated her quite sans facon.* He made of her something supple and corrupt. Hers was an idiotic sort of attachment, full of admiration for him, of voluptuousness for her, a beatitude that benumbed her; her soul sank into this drunkenness, shrivelled up, drowned in it, like Clarence in his butt of Malmsey.

      *Offhandedly.

      By the mere effect of her love Madame Bovary’s manners changed. Her looks grew bolder, her speech more free; she even committed the impropriety of walking out with Monsieur Rodolphe, a cigarette in her mouth, “as if to defy the people.” At last, those who still doubted doubted no longer when one day they saw her getting out of the “Hirondelle,” her waist squeezed into a waistcoat like a man; and Madame Bovary senior, who, after a fearful scene with her husband, had taken refuge at her son’s, was not the least scandalised of the women-folk. Many other things displeased her. First, Charles had not attended to her advice about the forbidding of novels; then the “ways of the house” annoyed her; she allowed herself to make some remarks, and there were quarrels, especially one on account of Felicite.

      Madame Bovary senior, the evening before, passing along the passage, had surprised her in company of a man — a man with a brown collar, about forty years old, who, at the sound of her step, had quickly escaped through the kitchen. Then Emma began to laugh, but the good lady grew angry, declaring that unless morals were to be laughed at one ought to look after those of one’s servants.

      “Where were you brought up?” asked the daughter-in-law, with so impertinent a look that Madame Bovary asked her if she were not perhaps defending her own case.

      “Leave the room!” said the young woman, springing up with a bound.

      “Emma! Mamma!” cried Charles, trying to reconcile them.

      But both had fled in their exasperation. Emma was stamping her feet as she repeated —

      “Oh! what manners! What a peasant!”

      He ran to his mother; she was beside herself. She stammered

      “She is an insolent, giddy-headed thing, or perhaps worse!”

      And she was for leaving at once if the other did not apologise. So Charles went back again to his wife and implored her to give way; he knelt to her; she ended by saying —

      “Very well! I’ll go to her.”

      And in fact she held out her hand to her mother-in-law with the dignity of a marchioness as she said —

      “Excuse me, madame.”

      Then, having gone up again to her room, she threw herself flat on her bed and cried there like a child, her face buried in the pillow.

      She and Rodolphe had agreed that in the event of anything extraordinary occurring, she should fasten a small piece of white paper to the blind, so that if by chance he happened to be in Yonville, he could hurry to the lane behind the house. Emma made the signal; she had been waiting three-quarters of an hour when she suddenly caught sight of Rodolphe at the corner of the market. She felt tempted to open the window and call him, but he had already disappeared. She fell back in despair.

      Soon, however, it seemed to her that someone was walking on the pavement. It was he, no doubt. She went downstairs, crossed the yard. He was there outside. She threw herself into his arms.

      “Do take care!” he said.

      “Ah! if you knew!” she replied.

      And she began telling him everything, hurriedly, disjointedly, exaggerating the facts, inventing many, and so prodigal of parentheses that he understood nothing of it.

      “Come, my poor angel, courage! Be comforted! be patient!”

      “But I have been patient; I have suffered for four years. A love like ours ought to show itself in the face of heaven. They torture me! I can bear it no longer! Save me!”

      She clung to Rodolphe. Her eyes, full of tears, flashed like flames beneath a wave; her breast heaved; he had never loved her so much, so that he lost his head and said “What is, it? What do you wish?”

      “Take me away,” she cried, “carry me off! Oh, I pray you!”

      And she threw herself upon his mouth, as if to seize there the unexpected consent if breathed forth in a kiss.

      “But — ” Rodolphe resumed.

      “What?”

      “Your little girl!”

      She reflected a few moments, then replied —

      “We will take her! It can’t be helped!”

      “What a woman!” he said to himself, watching her as she went. For she had run into the garden. Someone was calling her.

      On the following days Madame Bovary senior was much surprised at the change in her daughter-in-law. Emma, in fact, was showing herself more docile, and even carried her deference so far as to ask for a recipe for pickling gherkins.

      Was it the better to deceive them both? Or did she wish by a sort of voluptuous stoicism to feel the more profoundly the bitterness of the things she was about to leave?

      But she paid no heed to them; on the contrary, she lived as lost in the anticipated delight of her coming happiness.

      It was an eternal subject for conversation with Rodolphe. She leant on his shoulder murmuring —

      “Ah! when we are in the mail-coach! Do you think about it? Can it be? It seems to me that the moment I feel the carriage start, it will be as if we were rising in a balloon, as if we were setting