 Part 1 Chapter 1 of Madame Bovary This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Eleanor Marx Averling. Part 1 Chapter 1 We were in class when the Headmaster came in, followed by a new fellow, not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and everyone rose as if just surprised at his work. The Headmaster made a sign to us to sit down, then, turning to the classmaster, he said to him in a low voice, Monsieur Roger, here is a pupil whom I recommend to your care. He'll be in the second. If his work and conduct are satisfactory, he will go into one of the upper classes, as becomes his age. The new fellow, standing in the corner behind the door, so that he could hardly be seen, was a country lad of about fifteen, and taller than any of us. His hair was cut square on his forehead like a village choristers. He looked reliable, but very ill at ease. Although he was not broad-shouldered, his short school jacket of green cloth with black buttons must have been tight above the armholes, and showed at the opening of the cuffs red wrists accustomed to being bare. His legs, in blue stockings, looked out from beneath yellow trousers, drawn tight by braces. He wore stout, ill-cleaned, hobnailed boots. We began repeating the lesson. He listened with all his ears, as attentive as if at a sermon, not daring even to cross his legs, or lean on his elbow, and when at two o'clock the bell rang, the master was obliged to tell him to fall into line with the rest of us. When we came back to work, we were in the habit of throwing our caps on the ground, so as to have our hands more free. We used from the door to toss them under the form, so that they hit against the wall and made a lot of dust. It was the thing. But whether he had not noticed the trick, or did not dare to attempt it, the new fellow was still holding his cap on his knees, even after prayers were over. It was one of those headgears of composite order, in which we can find traces of the bare skin, shackle, billycock hat, seal skin cap, and cotton night cap. One of those poor things, in fine, whose dumb ugliness has depths of expression, like an imbecile's face. Oval, stiffened with whalebone, it began with three round knobs, then came in succession lozages of velvet and rabbit skin, separated by a red band. After that a sort of bag that ended in a cardboard polygon, covered with complicated braiding, from which hung, at the end of a long, thin cord, small twisted gold threads, in the manner of a tassel. The cap was new, its peak shone. Rise, said the master. He stood up, his cap fell, the whole class began to laugh. He stooped to pick it up, a neighbour knocked it down again with his elbow. He picked it up once more. Get rid of your helmet, said the master, who was a bit of a wag. There was a burst of laughter from the boys, which so thoroughly put the poor lad out of countenance, that he did not know whether to keep his cap in his hand, leave it on the ground, or put it on his head. He sat down again, and placed it on his knee. Rise, repeated the master, and tell me your name. The new boy articulated in a stammering voice an unintelligible name. Again the same sputtering of syllables was heard, drowned by the tittering of the class. Louder, cried the master, louder. The new fellow then took a supreme resolution, opened an inordinately large mouth, and shouted at the top of his voice as if calling someone in. The word, Shabovary. A hubbub broke out, rose in crescendo with bursts of shrill voices. They yelled, barked, stamped, repeated, Shabovary, Shabovary. Then died away into single notes, growing quieter, only with great difficulty. And now and again, suddenly recommencing along the line of a form, whence rows here and there, like a damp cracker going off, a stifled laugh. However, amid a rain of impositions, order was gradually re-established in the class, and the master, having succeeded in catching the name of Shabovary, having had it dictated to him, spelt out and reread, at once ordered the poor devil to go and sit down on the punishment form at the foot of the master's desk. He got up, but before going, hesitated. What are you looking for? asked the master. My CAP, timidly said the new fellow, casting troubled looks around him. Five hundred lines for all the class, shouted in a furious voice, stopped, like the close ego, a fresh out burst. Silence continued the master indignantly, wiping his brow with his handkerchief, which he had just taken from his cap. As to you, new boy, you will conjugate ridiculous sum twenty times. Then, in a gentler tone, come, you'll find your CAP again. It hasn't been stolen. Quiet was restored, heads bent over desks, and the new fellow remained for two hours in an exemplary attitude. Although, from time to time, some paper pellet flipped from the tip of a pen came bang in his face. But he wiped his face with one hand and continued motionless, his eyes lowered. In the evening, at preparation, he pulled out his pens from his desk, arranged his small belongings, and carefully ruled his paper. We saw him working conscientiously, looking up every word in the dictionary, and taking the greatest pains. Thanks, no doubt, to the willingness he showed, he had not to go down to the class below. But though he knew his rules passably, he had little finish in composition. It was the curae of his village who had taught him his first Latin, his parents, from motives of economy, having sent him to school as late as possible. His father, Monsieur Charles Denis Batolome Bovary, retired assistant surgeon major, compromised about 1812 in certain conscription scandals, and forced at this time to leave the service, had taken advantage of his fine figure to get hold of a dowry of 60,000 francs that offered in the person of a hosier's daughter who had fallen in love with his good looks. A fine man, a great talker, making his spurs ring as he walked, wearing whiskers that ran into his moustache, his fingers always garnished with rings and dressed in loud colours, he had the dash of a military man with the easy go of a commercial traveller. Once married he lived for three or four years on his wife's fortune, dining well, rising late, smoking long porcelain pipes, not coming in at night till after the theatre and haunting cafes. The father-in-law died, leaving little. He was indignant at this, went in for the business, lost some money in it, then retired to the country where he thought he would make money. But as he knew no more about farming than Calico, as he rode his horses, instead of sending them to plough, drank his cider in bottle, instead of selling it in cask, ate the finest poultry in his farmyard, and greased his hunting boots with the fat of his pigs, he was not long in finding out that he would do better to give up all speculation. For two hundred francs a year he managed to live on the border of the provinces of Caul and Picardy, in a kind of place half-farm, half-private house, and here, soured, eaten up with regrets, cursing his luck, jealous of everyone, he shut himself up at the age of forty-five, sick of men, he said, and determined to live at peace. His wife had adored him once on a time. She had bored him with a thousand servilities that had only estranged him the more. Lively once, expansive and affectionate, in growing older, she had become, after the fashion of wine, that exposed to air turns to vinegar, ill-tempered, grumbling, irritable. She had suffered so much without complaint at first, until she had seen him, going after all the village drabs, and until a score of bad houses sent him back to her at night, weary, stinking drunk. Then her pride revolted. After that she was silent, burying her anger in a dumb stoicism that she maintained till her death. She was constantly going about looking after business matters. She called on the lawyers, the president, remembered when bills fell due, got them renewed, and at home, ironed, sewed, washed, looked after the workmen, paid the accounts. While he, troubling himself about nothing, eternally besotted in sleepy silkiness, whence he only roused himself to say disagreeable things to her, sat smoking by the fire, and spitting into the cinders. When she had a child it had to be sent out to nurse. When he came home the lad was spoiled as if he were a prince. His mother stuffed him with jam, his father let him run about barefoot, and playing the philosopher, even said he might as well go about quite naked, like the young of animals. As opposed to the maternal ideas, he had a certain virile idea of childhood, on which he sought to mould his son, wishing him to be brought up hardily, like a Spartan, to give him a strong constitution. He sent him to bed without any fire, taught him to drink off large draughts of rum, and to jeer at religious processions. But peaceable by nature the lad answered only poorly to his notions. His mother always kept him near her. She cut out cardboard for him, told him tales, entertained him with endless monologues full of melancholy, gaiety, and charming nonsense. In her life's isolation she centred on the child's head all her shattered, broken little vanities. She dreamt of high station. She already saw him tall, handsome, clever, settled as an engineer or in the law. She taught him to read, and even on an old piano she had taught him two or three little songs. But to all this, Monsieur Boverie, carrying little for letters, said, it was not worthwhile would they ever have the means to send him to a public school to buy him a practice or start him in business. Besides, with cheek a man always gets on in the world. Madame Boverie bit her lips, and the child knocked about the village. He went after the labourers, drove away with clods of earth the ravens that were flying about. He ate blackberries along the hedges, minded the geese with a long switch, went hay-making during harvest, ran about in the woods, played hopscotch under the church porch on rainy days, and at great fates begged the beetle to let him toll the bells, that he might hang all his weight on the long rope and feel himself borne upward by it in its swing. Meanwhile he grew like an oak. He was strong on hand, fresh of colour. When he was twelve years old his mother had her own way. He began lessons. The cuiré took him in hand, but the lessons were so short and irregular that they could not be of much use. They were given at spare moments in the sacristy, standing up hurriedly between a baptism and a burial, or else the cuiré, if he had not to go out, sent for his pupil after the Angelus. They went up to his room and settled down. The flies and moths fluttered round the candle. It was close. The child fell asleep, and the good man, beginning to doze with his hands on his stomach, was soon snoring with his mouth wide open. On other occasions, when Monsieur le cuiré, on his way back after administering the viaticum to some sick person in the neighbourhood, caught sight of Charles playing about the fields, he called him, lectured him for a quarter of an hour, and took advantage of the occasion to make him conjugate his verb at the foot of a tree. The rain interrupted them, or an acquaintance passed. All the same, he was always pleased with him, and even said the young man had a very good memory. Charles could not go on like this. Madame Bouverie took strong steps. Ashamed, or rather tired out, Monsieur Bouverie gave in without a struggle, and they waited one year longer, so that the lad should take his first communion. Six months more passed, and the year after, Charles was finally sent to school at Rouen, where his father took him towards the end of October, at the time of the Saint-Roman affair. It would now be impossible for any of us to remember anything about him. He was a youth of even temperament, who played in playtime, worked in school hours, was attentive in class, slept well in the dormitory, and ate well in the refactory. He had in local parentis, a wholesale ironmonger in the Rouen-Ganterie, who took him out once a month on Sundays, after his shop was shut, sent him for a walk on the quay to look at the boats, and then brought him back to college at seven o'clock before supper. Every Thursday evening, he wrote a long letter to his mother, with red ink and three wafers. Then he went over his history notebooks, or read an old volume of anacasis that was knocking about the study. When he went for walks, he talked to the servant who, like himself, came from the country. By dint of hard work, he kept always about the middle of the class. Once even, he got a certificate in natural history, but at the end of his third year, his parents withdrew him from the school to make him study medicine, convinced that he could even take his degree by himself. His mother chose a room for him in the fourth floor of a dyer's she knew, overlooking the Alder-Rebec. She made arrangements for his board, got him furniture, a table, and two chairs, sent home for an old cherry-tree bed-stead, and bought, besides a small cast-iron stove, with the supply of wood, that was to warm the poor child. Then, at the end of a week, she departed after a thousand injunctions to be good now that he was going to be left to himself. The syllabus that he read on the notice-board stunned him. Lectures on anatomy, lectures on pathology, lectures on physiology, lectures on pharmacy, lectures on botany and clinical medicine, and therapeutics without counting hygiene and materia medica, all names of whose etymologies he was ignorant, and that were to him as so many doors to sanctuaries filled with magnificent darkness. He understood nothing of it all. It was all very well to listen. He did not follow. Still, he worked. He had bound notebooks. He attended all the courses. He did his little daily task like a mill-horse who goes round and round with his eyes bandaged, not knowing what work he is doing. To spare him expanse, his mother sent him every week by the carrier a piece of veal baked in the oven, with which he lunched when he came back from the hospital while he sat kicking his feet against the wall. After this, he had to run off to lectures, to the operation room, to the hospital, at the other end of the town. In the evening, after the poor dinner of his landlord, he went back to his room and set to work again in his wet clothes, which smoked as he sat in front of the hot stove. On the fine summer evenings, at the time when the close streets are empty, when the servants are playing shuttlecock at the doors, he opened his window and lent out. The river that makes of this quarter of Rouen, a wretched little Venice, flowed beneath him between the bridges and the railings, yellow, violet or blue. Working men kneeling on the banks washed their bare arms in the water. On poles projecting from the attics, skeins of cotton were drying in the air. Opposite, beyond the roofs, spread the pure heaven with the red sun setting. How pleasant it must be at home, how fresh under the beech tree! And he expanded his nostrils to breathe in the sweet odours of the country which did not reach him. He grew thin, his figure became taller, his face took a saddened look that made it nearly interesting. Naturally, through indifference, he abandoned all the resolutions he had made. Once he missed a lecture, the next day all the lectures and enjoying his idleness little by little, he gave up work altogether. He got into the habit of going to the public house and had a passion for dominoes. To shut himself up every evening in the dirty public room to push about on marble tables the small sheet-bones with black dots seemed to him a fine proof of his freedom which raised him in his own esteem. It was beginning to see life, the sweetness of stolen pleasures and when he entered he put his hand on the door handle with a joy almost sensual. Then many things hidden within him came out. He learnt couplets by heart and sang them to his boon companions, became enthusiastic about berongi, learnt how to make punch and finally how to make love. Thanks to these preparatory labours he failed completely in his examination for an ordinary degree. He was expected home the same night to celebrate his success. He started on foot, stopped at the beginning of the village, sent for his mother and told her all. She excused him through the blame of his failure on the injustice of the examiners, encouraged him a little and took upon herself to set matters straight. It was only five years later that Monsieur Bouverie knew the truth. It was old then and he accepted it. Moreover, he could not believe that a man born of him could be a fool. So Charles set to work again and crammed for his examination ceaselessly learning all the old questions by heart. He passed pretty well. What a happy day for his mother! They gave a grand dinner. Where should he go to practice? To Tost where there was only one old doctor. For a long time Madame Bouverie had been on the lookout for his death and the old fellow had barely been packed off when Charles was installed opposite his place as his successor. But it was not everything to have brought up a son to have had him taught medicine and discovered Tost where he could practice it. He must have a wife. She found him one, the widow of a bailiff at Dieppe who was forty-five and had an income of twelve hundred francs. Though she was ugly, as dry as a bone, her face with as many pimples as the spring has buds, Madame Dubuque had no lack of suitors. To attain her ends he had to oust them all and she even succeeded in very cleverly baffling the intrigues of a pork butcher backed up by the priests. Charles had seen in marriage the advent of an easier life thinking he would be more free to do as he liked with himself and his money. But his wife was master. He had to say this and not say that in company. To fast every Friday he did not pay. She opened his letters, watched his comings and goings and listened at the partition wall when women came to consult him in his surgery. She must have her chocolate every morning, attentions without end. She constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver, the noise of footsteps made her ill. When people left her Solitude became odious to her. If they came back she was outless to see her die. When Charles returned in the evening she stretched forth two long thin arms from beneath the sheets, put them round his neck and having made him sit down on the edge of the bed began to talk to him of her troubles. He was neglecting her. He loved another. She had been warned she would be unhappy and she ended by asking him for a dose of medicine and a little more love. Part 1 Chapter 2 of Madame Bovary This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert translated by Eleanor Marx Aveling Part 1 Chapter 2 One night towards eleven o'clock they were awakened by the noise of a horse pulling up outside their door. The servant opened the garret window and parleyed for some time with a man in the street below. He came for the doctor, had a letter for him. Mastasi came downstairs shivering and undid the bars and bolts one after the other. The man left his horse and following the servant from his wool cap with grey top-knots a letter wrapped up in a rag and presented it gingerly to Shal who rested on his elbow on the pillow to read it. Mastasi standing near the bed held the light. Madame in modesty had turned to the wall and showed only her back. This letter sealed with a small seal in blue wax begged Monsieur Bovary to come immediately to the farm of the Beato to set a broken leg. Now from Tost to the Beato was a good 18 miles across country by way of Longville and Saint-Victor. It was a dark night. Madame Bovary, Jr. was afraid of accidents for her husband so it was decided the stable boy should go on first. Shal would start three hours later when the moon rose. A boy was to be sent to meet him and show him the way to the farm and open the gates for him. It was four o'clock in the morning Shal well wrapped up in his cloak set out for the Beato. Still sleepy from the warmth of his bed he let himself be lulled by the quiet trot of his horse. When it stopped of its own accord in front of those holes surrounded with thorns that are dug on the margin of furrows, Shal awoke with a start. Suddenly remembered the broken leg and tried to call to mind all the fractures he knew. The rain had stopped. Day was breaking and on the branches of the leafless trees birds roosted motionless their little feathers bristling in the cold morning wind. The flat country stretched as far as I could see and the tufts of trees round the farms at long intervals seemed like dark violet stains on the vast grey surface that on the horizon faded into the gloom of the sky. Shal from time to time opened his eyes, his mind grew weary and sleep coming upon him he soon fell into a dose wherein his recent sensations blending with memories he became conscious of a double self at once student and married man lying in his bed as but now and crossing the operation theatre as of old. The warm smell of poultices mingled in his brain with the fresh odor of dew. He heard the iron rings rattling along the curtain rods and saw his wife sleeping. As he passed Vasonville he came upon a boy sitting on the grass at the edge of a ditch. Are you the doctor? asked the child and on shards his answer he took his wooden shoes in his hands and ran on in front of him. The general practitioner riding along gathered from his guide's talk that Mr. Roul must be one of the well-to-do farmers. He had broken his leg the evening before on his way home from a twelfth night feast at a neighbour's. His wife had been dead for two years. There was with him only his daughter who helped him to keep house. The ruts were becoming deeper. They were approaching the Berto. The little lad slipping through a hole in the hedge disappeared then he came back to the end of a courtyard to open the gate. The horse slipped on the wet grass and Charles had to stoop to pass under the branches. The watchdogs in their kennels barked dragging at their chains. As he entered the Berto the horse took fright and stumbled. It was a substantial looking farm. In the stables over the top of the open doors one could see great cart horses quietly feeding from new racks. Right along the outbuildings extended a large dung hill from which manure liquid oozed while amidst fowls and turkeys five or six peacocks, a luxury in Joshua farmyards were foraging on the top of it. The sheetfold was long the barn high with walls smooth as your hand. Under the cart shed were two large carts and four plows with their whips, shafts and harnesses complete whose fleeces of blue wool were getting soiled by the fine dust that fell from the granaries. The courtyard sloped upwards, planted with trees set out symmetrically and the chattering noise of a flock of geese was heard near the pond. A young woman in a blue merino dress with three flounces came to the threshold of the door to receive Mr. Buvery whom she led to the kitchen where a large fire was blazing. The servant's breakfast was boiling beside it in small pots of all sizes. Some damp clothes were drying inside the chimney corner. The shovel, the tongs and the nozzle of the bellows all of colossal size shone like polished steel while along the walls hung many pots and pans in which the clear flame of the hearth mingling with the first rays of the sun coming in through the window was mirrored fitfully. Charles went up to the first floor to see the patient. He found him in his bed sweating under his bed clothes having thrown his cotton nightcap right away from him. A little man of fifty with white skin and blue eyes the four part of his head balled and he wore earrings. By his side on a chair stood a large decanter of brandy whence he poured himself a little from time to time to keep up his spirits but as soon as he caught sight of the doctor his elation subsided and instead of swearing as he had been doing for the last twelve hours he began to groan freely. The fracture was a simple one without any kind of complication. Charles could not have hoped for an easier case. Then calling to mind the devices of his masters at the bedsides of patients he comforted the sufferer with all sorts of kindly remarks. Those caresses of the surgeon that are likely oil they put on bistouries. In order to make some splints a bundle of laths was brought up from the cart house. Charles selected one, cut it into two pieces with a fragment of windowpane while the servant tore up sheets to make bandages and mademoiselle Emma tried to sew some pads. As she was a long time before she found her work case her father grew impatient. She did not answer but as she sewed she pricked her fingers which she then put to her mouth to suck them. Charles was surprised at the whiteness of her nails. They were shiny, delicate at the tips more polished than the ivory of Dieppe and almond shaped yet her hand was not beautiful perhaps not white enough and a little hard at the knuckles besides it was too long with no soft inflections in the outlines. Her real beauty was in her eyes although brown they seemed black because of the lashes and her look came at you frankly with a candid boldness. The bandaging over the doctor was invited by Monsieur Roux himself to pick a bit before he left. Charles went down into the room on the ground floor knives and forks and silver goblets were laid for two on a little table at the foot of a huge bed that had a canopy of printed cotton with figures representing Turks. There was an odor of iris root and damp sheets that escaped from a large oak chest opposite the window. On the floor in corners were sacks of flower stuck upright in rows. These were the overflow from the neighbouring granary to which three stone steps led. By way of decoration for the apartment hanging to a nail in the middle of the wall whose green paint scaled off from the effects of the saltpeter was a crayon head of Minerva in gold frame underneath which was written in gothic letters to dear papa. First they spoke of the patient then of the weather of the great cold that infested the fields at night. Mademoiselle Rour did not at all like the country especially now that she had to look after the farm almost alone. As the room was chilly she shivered as yet. This showed something of her full lips that she had a habit of biting when silent. Her neck stood out from a white turned-down collar. Her hair, whose two black folds seemed each of a single piece was parted in the middle by a delicate line that curved slightly with the curve of the head and just showing the tip of the ear it was joined behind in a thick chignon with a wavy movement at the temples that the country doctor saw now for the first time in his life. The upper part of her cheek was rose-coloured. She had, like a man, thrust in between two buttons of her bodice a tortoiseshell eyeglass. When Sharl, after bidding farewell to Old Ruul, returned to the room before leaving, he found her standing, her forehead against the window, looking into the garden where the bean-props had been knocked down by the wind. She turned round. Are you looking for anything? she asked. My whip, if you please, he answered. He began rummaging on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs. It had fallen to the floor between the sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle Emma saw it and bent over the flower sacks. Sharl, out of politeness made a dash also, and as he stretched out his arm, at the same moment felt his breast brush against the back of the young girl bending beneath him. She drew herself up, scarlet, and looked at him over her shoulder as she handed him his whip. Instead of returning to the Beattel in three days as he had promised, he went back the very next day, then regularly twice a week, without counting the visits he paid now and then as if by accident. Everything, moreover, went well. The patient progressed favorably, and when, at the end of 46 days, Old Rouen was seen trying to walk alone in his den, Monsieur Bouverie began to be looked upon as a man of great capacity. Old Rouen said that he could not have been cured better by the first Doctor of Yves-Tour or even of Rouen. As to Charles, he did not stop to ask himself why it was a pleasure to him to go to the Beattel. Had he done so, he would no doubt have attributed his zeal to the importance of the case, or perhaps to the money he hoped to make by it. Was it for this, however, that his visits to the farm formed a delightful exception to the meager occupations of his life? On these days he rose early, set off at a gallop, urging on his horse, then got down to wipe his boots in the grass and put on black gloves before entering. He liked going into the courtyard and noticing the gate turn against his shoulder, the cock-crow on the wall, the lads run to meet him. He liked the granary and the stables. He liked Old Rouen who pressed his hand and called him his saviour. He liked the small wooden shoes of Mademoiselle Emma on the scoured flags of the kitchen. Her high heels made her a little taller, and when she walked in front of him the wooden soles springing up quickly struck with a sharp sound against the leather of her boots. She always accompanied him to the first step of the stairs. When his horse had not yet been brought round, she stayed there. They had said goodbye, there was no more talking. The open-air wrapped her round, playing with the soft down on the back of her neck, or blew to and fro on her hips the apron strings like streamers. Once during a thaw the bark of the trees in the yard was oozing. The snow on the roofs of the outbuildings was melting. She stood on the threshold and went to fetch her sunshade and opened it. The sunshade of silk of the colour of pigeon's breasts, through which the sun shone, lighted up with shifting hues the white skin of her face. She smiled under the tender warmth and drops of water could be heard falling by one on the stretched silk. During the first period of Charles's visits to the Belle Tour, Madame Bovary, Jr. never failed to inquire after the Invalid, and she had even chosen in the book that she kept on a system of double entry a clean blank page for Monsieur Rouen. But when she heard he had a daughter she began to make inquiries and she learnt that Mademoiselle Rouen, brought up at the Ursuline Convent, had received what is called a good education and so knew dancing, geography, drawing, how to embroider and play the piano. That was the last straw. So it is for this, she said to herself that his face beams when he goes to see her, and that he puts on his new waistcoat at the risk of spoiling it with the rain. Ah, that woman, that woman! And she detested her instinctively. At first she solaced herself by allusions that Charles did not understand. Then, by casual observations that he let pass for fear of a storm. Finally, by open apostrophes to which he knew not what to answer. Why did he go back to the Béatour now that Monsieur Rouen was cured and that these folks hadn't paid yet? Ah, it was because a young lady was there, someone who knew how to talk to embroider to be witty. That was what he cared about. He wanted town, Mrs. and she went on. The daughter of old Rouen, a town miss, get out! Their grandfather was a shepherd, and they have a cousin who was almost up at their sizes for a nasty blow in a quarrel. It is not worthwhile making such a fuss or showing herself at church on Sundays in a silk gown like a Countess. Besides the poor old chap, if it hadn't been for the cause of last year, would have had much ado to pay up his arrears. For very weariness, Charles left off going to the Béatour. Eloise made him swear, his hand on the prayer book, that he would go there no more after much sobbing and many kisses in a great outburst of love. He obeyed then, but the strength of his desire protested against the servility of his conduct and he thought, with a kind of naive hypocrisy, that his interdict to see her gave him a sort of right to love her. And then the widow was thin, she had long teeth, wore in all weathers a little black shawl, the edge of which hung down between her shoulder blades. Her bony figure was sheathed in her clothes as if they were a scabbard. They were too short and displayed her ankles with the laces of her large boots crossed over grey stockings. Charles' mother came to see them from time to time, but after a few days the daughter-in-law seemed to put her own edge on her and then, like two knives, they scarified him with their reflections and observations. It was wrong of him to eat so much. Why did he always offer a glass of something to everyone who came? What obstinacy not to wear flannels! In the spring it came about that a notary at Anguville, the holder of the widow-du-book's property, one fine day went off taking with him all the money in his office. Hello, ease it is true, still possessed by her eyes a share in a boat valued at six thousand francs, her house in the Rue Saint-François and yet with all this fortune that had been so trumpeted abroad nothing, excepting perhaps a little furniture and a few clothes had appeared in the household. The matter had to be gone into. The house at Dieppe was found to be eaten up with mortgages to its foundations. What she had placed with the notary God only knew, and her share of the boat did not exceed one thousand crowns. She had lied the good lady. In his exasperation M. Bovary, the elder, smashing a chair on the flags, accused his wife of having caused misfortune to the son by harnessing him to such a harridan whose harness wasn't worth her hide. They came to tossed, explanations followed, there were scenes, Eloise in tears throwing her arms about her husband to send her from his parents. Charles tried to speak up for her. They grew angry and left the house. But the blow had struck home. A week after, as she was hanging up some washing in her yard, she was seized with the spitting of blood and the next day, while Charles had his back turned to her, drawing the window curtain, she said, Oh God! gave a sigh and fainted. She was dead. What a surprise! The ball was over at the cemetery. Charles went home. He found no one downstairs. He went up to the first floor to their room. Saw her dress still hanging at the foot of the alcove. Then, leaning against the writing table, he stayed until the evening, buried in sorrowful reverie. She had loved him after all. End of Part 1, Chapter 2. Part 1, Chapter 3 of Lord Bovary. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert translated by Elinor Marx-Averling Part 1, Chapter 3. One morning, Old Rourou brought Sharl the money for setting his leg. Seventy-five francs in forty-sous pieces, and a turkey. He had heard of his loss, and consoled him as well as he could. "'I know what it is,' said he, clapping him on the shoulder. "'I've been through it. When I lost my dear departed, I went into the fields to be quite alone. I fell at the foot of a tree. I cried. I called on God. I talked nonsense to him. I wanted to be like the moles that I saw on the branches. They're inside, swarming with worms, dead, and an end of it. And when I thought that there were others at that very moment, with their nice little wives holding them in their embrace, I struck great blows on the earth with my stick. I was pretty well mad with not eating. The very idea of going to a café disgusted me. You wouldn't believe it." Well, quite softly, one day following another, a spring on a winter, and an autumn after a summer, this wore away, piece by piece, crumb by crumb. It passed away. It is gone. I should say it is sunk, for something always remains at the bottom, as one would say, a weight here at one's heart. But since it is the lot of all of us, one must not give way altogether, and, because others have died, want to die too. You must pull yourself together, Mr. Bovary. It will pass away. Come to see us. My daughter thinks of you now and again, you know, and she says you are forgetting her. Spring will soon be here. We'll have some rabbit-shooting in the Warrens to amuse you a bit." Charles followed his advice. He went back to the Boutel. He found all as he had left it, that is to say, as it was five months ago. The pear-trees were already in blossom, and Farmer Raw, on his legs again, came and went, making the farm more full of life. Thinking it is duty to heap the greatest attention upon the doctor, because of his sad position, he begged him not to take his hat off, spoke to him in an undertone as if he had been ill, and even pretended to be angry because nothing rather lighter had been prepared for him than for the others, such as a little clotted cream or stewed pears. He told stories. Charles found himself laughing, but the remembrance of his wife suddenly coming back to him depressed him. Coffee was brought in. He thought no more about her. He thought less of her as he grew accustomed to living alone. The new delight of independence soon made his loneliness bearable. He could now change his mealtimes, go in or out without explanation, and when he was very tired, stretch himself at full length on his bed. So he nursed and coddled himself, and accepted the consolations that were offered him. On the other hand, the death of his wife had not served him ill in his business, since for a month people had been saying, the poor young man, what a loss! His name had been talked about, his practice had increased, and moreover he could go to the beateau just as he liked. He had an aimless hope, and was vaguely happy. He thought himself better looking, as he brushed his whiskers before the looking glass. One day he got there about three o'clock. Everybody was in the fields. He went into the kitchen, but did not at once catch sight of Emma. The outside shutters were closed. Through the chinks of the wood the sun sent across the flooring long, fine rays that were broken at the corners of the furniture and trembled along the ceiling. Some flies on the table were crawling up the glasses that had been used, and buzzing as they drowned themselves in the dregs of the cider. The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace, and touched with blue the cold cinders. Between the window and the hearth Emma was sowing. She wore no fissue. He could see small drops of perspiration on her bare shoulders. After the fashion of country folks, she asked him to have something to drink. He said no. She insisted, and at last laughingly offered to have a glass of liqueur with him. So she went to fetch a bottle of curacao from the cupboard, reaching down two small glasses, filled one to the brim, poured scarcely anything into the other, and after having clinked glasses carried hers to her mouth. As it was almost empty she bent back to drink, her head thrown back, her lips pouting, her neck on the strain. She laughed at getting none of it, while with the tip of her tongue passing between her small teeth she licked drop by drop the bottom of her glass. She sat down again and took up her work, a white cotton stocking she was darning. She worked with her head bent down. She did not speak, nor did Sharl. The air coming under the door blew a little dust over the flags. He watched it drift along, and heard nothing but the throbbing in his head, and the faint clucking of a hen that had laid an egg in the yard. Emma, from time to time, called her cheeks with the palms of her hands, and called these again on the knobs of the huge fire-dogs. She complained of suffering since the beginning of the season from giddiness. She asked if sea baths would do her any good. She began talking of her convent, Sharl of his school. Words came to them. They went up into her bedroom. She showed him her old music books, the little prizes she had won, and the oak leaf crowns left at the bottom of a cupboard. She spoke to him too of her mother, of the country, and even showed him the bed in the garden where, on the first Friday of every month, she gathered flowers to put on her mother's tomb. But the gardener they had never knew anything about it. Servants are so stupid. She would have dearly liked, if only for the winter, to live in town. Although the length of the fine days made the country, perhaps, even more wearisome in the summer. And, according to what she was saying, her voice was clear, sharp, or, on a sudden, all-langer, drawn out in modulations that ended almost in murmurs as she spoke to herself. Now joyous, opening big naive eyes, then with her eyelids half closed, her look full of boredom, her thoughts wondering. Going home at night, Sharl went over her words one by one, trying to recall them, to fill out their sense, that he might peace out the life she had lived before he knew her. But he never saw her in his thoughts other than he had seen her the first time, or as he had just left her. Then he asked himself, what would become of her, if she would be married, and to whom? Alas, old Ruel was rich, and she so beautiful. But Emma's face always rose before his eyes, and a monotone, like the humming of a top, sounded in his ears. If you should marry after all, if you should marry. At night he could not sleep, his throat was parched, he was a thirst. He got up to drink from the water-bottle, and opened the window. The night was covered with stars, a warm wind blowing in the distance, the dogs were barking. He turned his head towards Berthol. Thinking that, after all, he should lose nothing, Sharl promised himself to ask her in marriage as soon as occasion offered. But each time such occasion did offer, the fear of not finding the right words sealed his lips. Old Ruel would not have been sorry to be rid of his daughter, who was of no use to him in the house. In his heart he excused her, thinking her too clever for farming, a calling under the ban of heaven, since one never saw a millionaire in it. Far from having made a fortune by it, the good man was losing every year. For if he was good in bargaining, in which he enjoyed the dodges of the trade, on the other hand agriculture properly so-called, and the internal management of the farm, suited him less than most people. He did not willingly take his hands out of his pockets, and did not spare expense in all that concerned himself. Liking to eat well, to have good fires, and to sleep well, he liked old Sider, underdone legs of mutton, glorious well-beaten up. He took his meals in the kitchen alone opposite the fire on a little table brought to him already laid, as on the stage. When therefore he perceived that Sharl's cheeks grew red if near his daughter, which meant that he would propose for her one of these days, he chewed the cut of the matter beforehand. He certainly thought him a little meager, and not quite the son-in-law he would have liked, but he was said to be well brought up, economical, very learned, and no doubt would not make too many difficulties about the dowry. Now, as old War would soon be forced to sell twenty-two acres of his property, as he owed a good deal to the mason, to the harness-maker, and, as the shaft of the Sider-press wanted renewing, if he asks for her, he said to himself, I'll give her to him. At Mikkelmus, Sharl went to spend three days at the Bertol. The last had passed like the others in procrastinating from hour to hour. Old War was seeing him off. They were walking along the road full of ruts. They were about to part. This was the time. Sharl gave himself as far as to the corner of the hedge, and at last, when passed it, Monsieur Rohe, he murmured, I should like to say something to you. They stopped. Sharl was silent. Well, tell me your story. Don't I know all about it? Said Old Rohe, laughing softly. Monsieur Rohe, Monsieur Rohe, stammered Sharl. I asked nothing better, the farmer went on, although no doubt the little one is of my mind. Still we must ask her opinion. So you get off, I'll go back home. If it is yes, you needn't return because of all the people about, and besides it would upset her too much. But so that you might be eating your heart, I'll open wide the outer shutter of the window against the wall. You can see it from the back by leaning over the hedge. And he went off. Sharl fastened his horse to a tree. He ran into the road and waited. Half an hour passed. Then he counted 19 minutes by his watch. Suddenly a noise was heard against the wall. The shutter had been thrown back. The hook was still swinging. The next day by nine o'clock he was at the farm. Emma blushed as he entered and she gave a little forced laugh to keep herself in countenance. Old Rohe embraced his future son-in-law. The discussion of money matters was put off. Moreover there was plenty of time before them, as the marriage could not decently take place till Sharl was out of mourning, that is to say, about the spring of the next year. The winter passed waiting for this. Mademoiselle Rouen was busy with her trousseau. Part of it was ordered at Rouen, and she made herself chemises and night-caps after fashion-plates that she borrowed. When Sharl visited the farmer, the preparations for the wedding were talked over. They wondered in what room they should have dinner. They dreamt of the number of dishes that would be wanted, and what should be entrees. Emma would, on the contrary, have preferred to have a midnight wedding with torches, but Old Rohe could not understand such an idea. So there was a wedding at which forty-three persons were present, at which they remained sixteen hours at table. Began again the next day, and to some extent, on the days following. End of Part 1, Chapter 3. Part 1, Chapter 4 of Madame Bovary. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Translated by Eleanor Marx-Averling. Part 1, Chapter 4. The guests arrived early in carriages, in one-horse chases, to wheeled cars, old open gigs, wagonettes with leather hoods, and the young people from the nearer villages in carts, in which they stood up in rows, holding on to the sides so as not to fall, going at a trot and well shaken up. Some came from a distance of thirty miles, from Godairville, from Normandville, and from Cunney. All the relatives of both families had been invited, quarrels between friends arranged, acquaintances long since lost sight of, written to. From time to time, one heard the crack of a whip behind the hedge, then the gates opened, and a chaise entered. Galloping up to the foot of the steps, it stopped short and emptied its load. They got down from all sides, rubbing knees and stretching arms. The ladies, wearing bonnets, had on dresses in the town fashion, gold watch chains, pelarines with the ends tucked into belts, or little-coloured fissues, fastened down behind with a pin, and that left the back of the neck bare. The lads, dressed like their papars, seemed uncomfortable in their new clothes. Many that day hand-sewed their first pair of boots, and by their sides, speaking never a word, wearing the white dress of their first communion lengthened for the occasion, were some big girls of fourteen or sixteen, cousins or elder sisters, no doubt. Rubikand bewildered, their hair greasy with rose pomade, and very much afraid of dirtying their gloves. As there were not enough stableboys to unharness all the carriages, the gentlemen turned up their sleeves and set about it themselves. According to their different social positions, they wore tailcoats, overcoats, shooting jackets, cutaway coats, fine tailcoats, redolent of family respectability, that only came out of the wardrobe on state occasions, overcoats with long tails flapping in the wind, and round capes and pockets like sacks. Shooting jackets of coarse cloth generally worn with a cap with a brass-bound peak, very short cutaway coats with two small buttons in the back, close together like a pair of eyes, and the tails of which seemed cut out of one piece by a carpenter's hatchet. Some, too, but these you may be sure would sit at the bottom of the table, wore their best blouses, that is to say, with collars turned down to the shoulders, the back gathered into small plates, and the waist fastened very low down with a worked belt, and the shirt stood out from the chests, like curasses. Everyone had just had his hair cut, ears stood out from the heads, they had been close shaved. A few even, who had had to get up before daybreak, and not been able to see to shave, had diagonal gashes under their noses, or cuts the size of a three-frank piece along the jaws, which the fresh air en route had inflamed, so that the great white beaming faces were mottled here and there with red dabs. The Mary was a mile and a half from the farm, and they went thither on foot, returning in the same way after the ceremony in the church. The procession first united like one long-coloured scarf that undulated across the fields, along the narrow path winding amid the green corn, soon lengthened out, and broke up into different groups that loitered to talk. The fiddler walked in front with his violin, gay with ribbons at its pegs. Then came the married pair, the relations, the friends, all following pale male. The children stayed behind amusing themselves, plucking the bellflowers from oat ears, or playing amongst themselves unseen. Emma's dress, too long, trailed a little on the ground. From time to time she stopped to pull it up, and then delicately, with her gloved hands, she picked off the coarse grass and the thistle-downs, while Sharl, empty-handed, waited till she had finished. Old Gaul, with a new silk hat, and the cuffs of his black coat covering his hands up to the nails, gave his arm to Madame Bouvary-senia. As to Monsieur Bouvary-senia, who heartily despising all these folk, had come simply in a frock coat of military cut, with one row of buttons, he was passing compliments of the bar to a fair young peasant. She bowed, blushed, and did not know what to say. The other wedding guests talked of their business or played tricks behind each other's backs, egging one another on in advance to be jolly. Those who listened could always catch the squeaking of the fiddler who went on playing across the fields. When he saw that the rest were far behind, he stopped to take breath, slowly rosined his bow, so that the strings should sound more shrilly, then set off again, by turns lowering and raising his neck, the better to mark time for himself. The noise of the instrument drove away the little birds from afar. The table was laid under the cart shed, on it were four sirloins, six chicken fricacies, stewed veal, three legs of mutton, and in the middle a fine roast-suckling pig, flanked by four chitterlings with sorrel. At the corners were decanters of brandy, sweet bottled cider frothed round the corks, and all the glasses had been filled to the brim with wine beforehand. Large dishes of yellow cream that trembled with the least shake of the table had designed on their smooth surface the initials of the newly wedded pair in non-paray arabesques. The confectioner of Yvetor had been entrusted with the tarts and sweets. As he had only just set up on the place, he had taken a lot of trouble, and at dessert he himself brought in a set dish that evoked loud cries of wonderment. To begin with, at its base, there was a square of blue cardboard, representing a temple with porticoes, colonnades, and stucco statuettes all around, and in the niches, constellations of gilt paper stars. Then, on the second stage, was a dungeon of Savoy Cake, surrounded by many fortifications in Candid Angelica, almonds, raisins, and quarters of oranges, and finally, on the upper platform, a green field with rocks set in lakes of jam, nutshell boats, and a small cupid, balancing himself in a chocolate swing whose two uprights ended in real roses for balls at the top. Until night they ate. When any of them were too tired of sitting, they went out for a stroll in the yard, offer a game with corks in the granary, and then returned to table. Some, towards the finish, went to sleep and snored, but with the coffee everyone woke up. Then they began songs, showed off tricks, raised heavy weights, performed feats with their fingers, then tried lifting carts on their shoulders, made broad jokes, kissed the women. At night when they left, the horses, stuffed up to the nostrils with oats, could hardly be got into the shafts. They kicked, reared, the harness broke, their masters laughed or swore, and all night in the light of the moon, along country roads, there were runaway carts at full gallop, plunging into the ditches, jumping over yard after yard of stones, clambering up the hills with women leaning out from the tilt to catch hold of the reins. Those who stayed at the Beattel spent the night drinking in the kitchen. The children had fallen asleep under the seats. The bride had begged her father to be spared the usual marriage pleasantries. However, a fishmonger, one of their cousins, who had even brought a pair of souls for his wedding present, began to squirt water from his mouth through the keyhole, when Old Wall came up just in time to stop him, and explained to him that the distinguished position of his son-in-law would not allow of such liberties. The cousin all the same did not give in to these reasons readily. In his heart he accused Old Wall of being proud, and he joined four or five other guests in a corner, who, having, through mere chance, been several times running served with the worst helpings of meat, also were of opinion they had been badly used, and were whispering about their host, and with covered hints hoping he would ruin himself. Madame Bovary, Sr., had not opened her mouth all day. She had been consulted neither as to the dress of her daughter-in-law, nor as to the arrangement of the feast. She went to bed early. Her husband, instead of following her, sent to St. Victor for some cigars, and smoked till daybreak, drinking Kiersh Punch, a mixture unknown to the company. This added greatly to the consideration in which he was held. Charles, who was not of a facetious turn, did not shine at the wedding. He answered feebly to the puns, double-on-tones, compliments and chaff, that it was felt a duty to let off at him as soon as the soup appeared. The next day, on the other hand, he seemed another man. It was he who might have been taken for the virgin of the evening before, whilst the bride gave no sign that revealed anything. The shrewdest did not know what to make of it, and they looked at her when she passed near them, with an unbounded concentration of mind. But Charles concealed nothing. He called her my wife, to toyed her, asked for her of everyone, looked for her everywhere, and often he dragged her into the yards, where he could be seen from far between the trees, putting his arm around her waist, and walking half-bending over her, ruffling the chemizette of her bodice with his head. Two days after the wedding the married pair left. Charles, on account of his patience, could not be away longer. Old Rool had them driven back in his cart, and himself accompanied them as far as Vassonville. Here he embraced his daughter for the last time, got down, and went his way. When he had gone about a hundred paces he stopped, and as he saw the cart disappearing, its wheels turning in the dust, he gave a deep sigh. Then he remembered his wedding, the old times, the first pregnancy of his wife. He too had been very happy the day when he had taken her from her father to his home, and had carried her off on a pillion, trotting through the snow, for it was near Christmas time, and the country was all white. She held him by one arm, her basket hanging from the other. The wind blew the long lace of her cauchois headdress, so that it sometimes flapped across his mouth, and when he turned his head he saw near him, on his shoulder, her little rosy face, smiling silently under the gold bands of her cap. To warm her hands she put them from time to time in his breast, how long ago it all was. Their son would have been thirty by now. Then he looked back and saw nothing on the road. He felt dreary as an empty house, and tender memories mingling with the sad thoughts in his brain, addled by the fumes of the feast. He felt inclined for a moment to take a turn towards the church. As he was afraid, however, that this sight would make him yet more sad, he went right away home. Monsieur and Madame Charle arrived at Toast about six o'clock. The neighbours came to the windows to see their doctor's new wife. The old servant presented herself, curtsied to her, apologised for not having dinner ready, and suggested that Madame, in the meantime, should look over her house. End of Part 1, Chapter 4. Part 1, Chapter 5. The brick front was just in a line with the street, or rather the road. Behind the door hung a cloak with a small collar, a bridle, and a black leather cap, and on the floor in a corner were a pair of leggings still covered with dry mud. On the right was the one apartment that was both dining and sitting-room. A canary yellow paper, relieved at the top by a garland of pale flowers, was puckered everywhere over the badly stretched canvas. White calico curtains with a red border hung crossways at the length of the window, and on the narrow mantelpiece a clock with a head of Hippocrates shone resplendent between two plate candlesticks under oval shades. On the other side of the passage was Schaar's Consulting Room, a little room about six paces wide, with a table, three chairs, and an office chair. Volumes of the Dictionary of Medical Science uncut, but the binding rather the worse for the successive sales through which they had gone, occupied almost along the six shelves of a deal bookcase. The smell of melted butter penetrated through the walls when he saw patients, just as in the kitchen one could hear the people coughing in the Consulting Room and recounting their histories. Then, opening on the yard where the stable was, came a large dilapidated room with a stove, now used as a woodhouse, cellar, and pantry, full of old rubbish, of empty casks, agricultural implements, past service, and a mass of dusty things whose use it was impossible to guess. The garden, longer than wide, ran between two mud walls with the spalliard apricots to a hawthorn hedge that separated it from the field. In the middle was a slate sundial on a brick pedestal. Four flower beds with eglentines surrounded symmetrically the more useful kitchen-garden bed. Right at the bottom, under the spruce bushes, was a cuiré in plaster, reading his breviary. Emma went upstairs. The first room was not furnished, but in the second, which was their bedroom, was a mahogany bedstead in an alcove with red drapery. A shell-box adorned the chest of drawers, and on the secretary near the window, a bouquet of orange blossoms tied with white satin ribbons, stood in a bottle. It was a bride's bouquet. It was the other one's. She looked at it. Charles noticed it. He took it and carried it up to the attic, while Emma seated in an armchair. They were putting her things down around her, thought of her bridal flowers packed up in a band-box, and wondered, dreaming, what would be done with them if she were to die. During the first days she occupied herself in thinking about changes in the house. She took the shades off the candlesticks, had new wallpaper put up, the staircase repainted, and seats made in the garden round the sundial. She even inquired how she could get a basin with a jet fountain and fishes. Finally her husband, knowing that she liked to drive out, picked up a second-hand dog-cart, which, with new lamps and splash-board in striped leather, looked almost like a tilbury. He was happy then, and without a care in the world. A meal together, a walk in the evening on the high-road, a gesture of her hands over her hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging from the window-fastener, and many another thing in which Charles had never dreamed of pleasure, now made up the endless round of his happiness. In bed in the morning, by her side, on the pillow, he watched the sunlight sinking into the down on her fair cheek, half hidden by the lappets of her night-cap. Seen thus closely, her eyes looked to him enlarged, especially when, on waking up, she opened and shut them rapidly many times. Black in the shade, dark blue in broad daylight, they had, as it were, depths of different colors, that darker in the centre grew paler towards the surface of the eye. His own eyes lost themselves in these depths. He saw himself in miniature down to the shoulders, with his handkerchief round his head and the top of his shirt open. He rose. She came to the window to see him off, and stayed leaning on the sill between two pots of geranium, clad in her dressing-gown hanging loosely about her. Charles, in the street, buckled his spurs, his foot on the mounting-stone, while she talked to him from above, picking with her mouth some scrap of flower or leaf that she blew out at him. Then this, eddying, floating, described semicircles in the air like a bird, and was caught before it reached the ground in the ill-groomed mane of the old white mare standing motionless at the door. Charles from horseback threw her a kiss. She answered with a nod. She shut the window, and he set off. And then, along the high road, spreading out its long ribbon of dust, along the deep lanes that the trees bent over as in arbours, along paths where the corn reached to the knees, with the sun on his back and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the joys of the past night, his mind at rest, his flesh at ease. He went on, re-chewing his happiness, like those who after dinner taste again the truffles which they are digesting. Until now, what good had he had of his life! His time at school, when he remained shut up within the high walls, alone in the midst of companions richer than he, or cleverer at their work, who laughed at his accent, who jeered at his clothes, and whose mothers came to the school with cakes in their muffs. Later on, when he studied medicine, and never had his purse full enough to treat some little work-girl who would have become his mistress. Afterwards he had lived fourteen months with the widow whose feet in bed were cold as icicles. But now he had for life this beautiful woman whom he adored. For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat, and he reproached himself with not loving her. He wanted to see her again. He turned back quickly, ran up the stairs with a beating heart. Emma in her room was dressing. He came up on tiptoe, kissed her back. She gave a cry. He could not keep from constantly touching her comb, her ring, her fissue. Sometimes he gave her great sounding kisses with all his mouth on her cheeks, or else little kisses in a row all along her bare arm, from the tip of her fingers up to her shoulder. And she put him away, half smiling, half vexed, as you do a child who hangs about you. Before marriage she thought herself in love. But the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life, by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ruth Golding. She had read Paul and Virginia, and she had dreamt of the little bamboo house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fiddle, but above all of the sweet friendship of some dear little brother, who seeks red fruit for you on trees taller than steeples, or who runs barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird's nest. When she was thirteen, her father himself took her to town to place her in the convent. They stopped at an inn in the Saint-Gervais quarter, where at their supper they used painted plates that set forth the story of Mamzelle de la Valière. The explanatory legends chipped here and there by the scratching of knives, all glorified religion, the tendernesses of the heart, and the pumps of court. Far from being bored at first at the convent, she took pleasure in the society of the good sisters, who, to amuse her, took her to the chapel, which one entered from the refectory by a long corridor. She played very little during recreation hours, knew her catechism well, and it was she who always answered Monsieur le Vicaire's difficult questions. Living thus, without ever leaving the warm atmosphere of the classrooms, and amid these pale-faced women wearing rosaries with brass crosses, she was softly lulled by the mystic langer exhaled in the perfumes of the altar, the freshness of the holy water, and the lights of the tapers. Instead of attending to Mass, she looked at the pious vignette with the azure borders in her book, and she loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries. She tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing a whole day. She puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfil. When she went to confession, she invented little sins, in order that she might stay there longer, kneeling in the shadow, her hands joined, her face against the grating beneath the whispering of the priest. The comparisons of betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal marriage, that recur in sermons, stirred within her soul depths of unexpected sweetness. In the evening before prayers, there was some religious reading in the study. On weeknights it was some abstract of sacred history, or the lectures of the Abbe Fressinou, and on Sundays passages from the Genie du Christianisme as a recreation. How she listened at first to the sonorous lamentations of its romantic melancholys re-echoing through the world and eternity. If her childhood had been spent in the shop parlour of some business quarter, she might perhaps have opened her heart to those lyrical invasions of nature, which usually come to us only through translation in books. But she knew the country too well. She knew the lowing of cattle, the milking, the plows. A accustomed to calm aspects of life, she turned, on the contrary, to those of excitement. She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins. She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes. At the convent there was an old maid who came for a week each month to mend the linen. Patronised by the clergy, because she belonged to an ancient family of noblemen ruined by the revolution, she dined in the refectory at the table of the good sisters, and after the meal had a bit of chat with them before going back to her work. The girls often slipped out from the study to go and see her. She knew by heart the love songs of the last century, and sang them in a low voice as she stitched away. She told stories, gave them news, went errands in the town, and on the sly lent the big girls some novel that she always carried in the pockets of her apron, and of which the good lady herself swallowed long chapters in the intervals of her work. They were all love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postillions killed at every stage, horses written to death on every page, somber forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well-dressed and weeping like fountains. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries. Through Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guardrooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor house, like those long-wasted chattel-en, who in the shade of pointed arches spent their days leaning on the stone chin in hand, watching a cavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant fields. At this time she had a cult for Mary's stewart, and enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan of Arc, Eloise, Agnès Sorel, the beautiful ferronnière, and Clémence Isor, stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of heaven, where also were seen lost in shadow and all-unconnected Saint Louis with his oak, the dying Bayard, some cruelties of Louis XI, a little of Saint Bartholomew's Day, the plume of the Bearnet, and always the remembrance of the plates painted in honour of Louis XIV. In the music class, in the ballads she sang, there was nothing but little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagoons, gondoliers, mild compositions that allowed her to catch a glimpse of thought the obscurity of style and the weakness of the music of the attractive fantasmagoria of sentimental realities. Some of her companions brought keepsakes, given them as New Year's gifts, to the convent. These had to be hidden. It was quite an undertaking. They were red in the dormitory. Delicately handling the beautiful satin bindings, Emma looked with dazzled eyes at the names of the unknown authors, who had signed their verses for the most part as counts or viscounts. She trembled as she blew back the tissue paper over the engraving, and so it folded in two, and fall gently against the page. Here, behind the balustrade of a balcony, was a young man in a short cloak, holding in his arms a young girl in a white dress, wearing an arms-bag at her belt. Or there were nameless portraits of English ladies with fair curls, who looked at you from under their round straw hats, with their large, clear eyes. Some there were lounging in their carriages, gliding through parks, a greyhound bounding along in front of the equipage, driven at a trot by two midget postillions in white britches. Others, dreaming on sofas with an open letter, gazed at the moon through a slightly open window, half draped by a black curtain. The naive ones, a tear on their cheeks, were kissing doves through the bars of a gothic cage. Or, smiling, their heads on one side were plucking the leaves of a margarite with their taper fingers, that curved at the tips like peaked shoes. And you, too, were there, sultans with long pipes reclining beneath arbours in the arms of Bayarder, Dior, Turkish sabers, Greek caps, and you especially, pale landscapes of disirambic lands, that often show us at once palm trees and furs, tigers on the right, a lion to the left, tartar minarets on the horizon, the whole framed by a very neat virgin forest, and with a great perpendicular sunbeam trembling in the water, where, standing out in relief, like white excoriations on a steel-grey ground, swans are swimming about. And the shade of the argon lamp, fastened to the wall above Emma's head, lighted up all these pictures of the world, that passed before her one by one in the silence of the dormitory, and to the distant noise of some belated carriage rolling over the boulevards. When her mother died, she cried much the first few days. She had a funeral picture made with the hair of the deceased, and in a letter sent to the Bertil, full of sad reflections on life, she asked to be buried later on in the same grave. The good man thought she must be ill, and came to see her. Emma was secretly pleased that she had reached at her first attempt the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts. She let herself glide along with lamartine meanderings, listened to harps on lakes, to all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of the leaves, the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of the eternal discoursing down the valleys. She, wearied of it, would not confess it, continued from habit, and at last was surprised to feel herself soothed, and with no more sadness at heart than wrinkles on her brow. The good nuns, who had been so sure of her vocation, perceived with great astonishment that Mamzelle Roua seemed to be slipping from them. They had indeed been so lavish to her of prayers, retreats, novenas, and sermons. They had so often preached the respect due to saints and martyrs, and given so much good advice as to the modesty of the body and the salvation of her soul, that she did as tightly reigned horses. She pulled up short, and the bit slipped from her teeth. This nature, positive in the midst of its enthusiasm, that had loved the church for the sake of the flowers, and music for the words of the songs, and literature for its passional stimulus, rebelled against the mysteries of faith, as it grew irritated by discipline, a thing antipathetic to her constitution. When her father took her from school, no one was sorry to see her go. The Lady Superior even thought that she had latterly been somewhat irreverent to the community. Emma, at home once more, first took pleasure in looking after the servants, then grew disgusted with the country, and missed her convent. When Charles came to the Berto for the first time, she thought herself quite disillusioned, with nothing more to learn, and nothing more to feel. But the uneasiness of her new position, or perhaps the disturbance caused by the presence of this man, had sufficed to make her believe that she at last felt that wondrous passion, which till then, like a great bird with rose-coloured wings, hung in the splendour of the skies of poesy. And now she could not think that the calm in which she lived was the happiness she had dreamed. End of Part 1 Chapter 6 Recording by Ruth Golding Part 1 Chapter 7 Of Madame Bovary This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ruth Golding Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert Translated by Eleanor Marks Averling Part 1 Chapter 7 She thought sometimes that, after all, this was the happiest time of her life, the honeymoon, as people called it. To taste the full sweetness of it, it would have been necessary doubtless to fly to those lands with sonorous names, where the days after marriage are full of laziness most suave. In post-chairs behind blue-silken curtains, to ride slowly up steep roads, listening to the song of the postillian re-echoed by the mountains, along with the bells of goats, and the muffled sound of a waterfall. At sunset, on the shores of gulfs, to breathe in the perfume of lemon trees. Then, in the evening, on the villa terraces above, hand in hand to look at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could she not lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a scotch cottage, with a husband, dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat, and frills? Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone, but how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds. Words failed her. The opportunity. The courage. If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed it, if his look had but once met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden plenty would have gone out from her heart, as the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by a hand. But as the intimacy of their life became deeper, the greater became the gulf that separated her from him. Charles' conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone's ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter or thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris. He could neither swim nor fence nor shoot, and one day he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come across in a novel. A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries. But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing. He thought her happy, and she resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him. Sometimes she would draw, and it was great amusement to Charles to stand there boat upright and watch her bend over her cardboard with eyes half closed, the better to see her work, or rolling between her fingers little bread-pellets. As to the piano, the more quickly her fingers glided over it, the more he wandered. She struck the notes with a plum, and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clock, passing along the high-road bare-headed and enlist slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand. Emma, on the other hand, knew how to look after her house. She sent the patient's accounts in well-phrased letters that had no suggestion of a bill. When they had a neighbour to dinner on Sundays, she managed to have some tasty dish, piled up pyramids of green gauges on vine-leaves, served up preserves turned out into plates, and even spoke of buying finger-glasses for dessert. From all this much consideration was extended to Bowery. Charles finished by rising in his own esteem for possessing such a wife. He showed with pride in the sitting-room two small pencil sketches by her that he had had framed in very large frames, and hung up against the wallpaper by long green cords. People returning from Mass saw him at his door in his wool-work slippers. He came home late at ten o'clock at midnight sometimes, then he asked her something to eat, and as the servant had gone to bed Emma waited on him. He took off his coat to dine more at his ease. He told her one after the other the people he had met, the villages where he had been, the prescriptions he had written, and well pleased with himself, he finished the remainder of the boiled beef and onions, picked pieces off the cheese, munched an apple, emptied his water-bottle, and then went to bed, and lay on his back, and snored. As he had been for a time accustomed to wear night-caps, his handkerchief would not keep down over his ears, so that his hair in the morning was all tumbled pel-mel about his face, and whitened with the feathers of the pillow whose strings came untied during the night. He always wore thick boots that had too long creases over the instep, running obliquely towards the ankle, while the rest of the upper continued in a straight line as if stretched on a wooden foot. He said that was quite good enough for the country. His mother approved of his economy, for she came to see him as formally when there had been some violent row at her place, and yet Madame Bovary Sr. seemed prejudiced against her daughter-in-law. She thought her way is too fine for their position. The wood, the sugar, and the candles disappeared as at a grand establishment, and the amount of firing in the kitchen would have been enough for twenty-five courses. She put her linen in order for her in the presses, and taught her to keep an eye on the butcher when he brought the meat. Emma put up with these lessons. Madame Bovary was lavish of them, and the words daughter and mother were exchanged all day long, accompanied by little quiverings of the lips, each one uttering gentle words in a voice trembling with anger. In Madame Dubuk's time the old woman felt that she was still the favourite, but now the love of Charles for Emma seemed to her a desertion from her tenderness, an encroachment upon what was hers, and she watched her son's happiness in sad silence as a ruined man looks through the windows at people dining in his old house. She recalled to him as remembrances her troubles and her sacrifices, and comparing these with Emma's negligence came to the conclusion that it was not reasonable to adore her so exclusively. Charles knew not what to answer. He respected his mother, and he loved his wife infinitely. He considered the judgment of the one infallible, and yet he thought the conduct of the other irreproachable. When Madame Bovary had gone he tried timidly and in the same terms to hazard one or two of the more anodyne observations he had heard from his mama. Emma proved to him with a word that he was mistaken, and sent him off to his patience. And yet in accord with theories she believed right she wanted to make herself in love with him. By moonlight in the garden she recited all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and sighing sang to him many melancholy adagios, but she found herself as calm after as before, and Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved. When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without getting a spark, incapable moreover of understanding what she did not experience, as of believing anything that did not present itself in conventional forms, she persuaded herself without difficulty that Charles' passion was nothing very exorbitant. His outbursts became regular. He embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one habit among other habits, and like a dessert looked forward to after the monotony of dinner. A gamekeeper, cured by the doctor of inflammation of the lungs, had given Madame a little Italian greyhound. She took her out walking, for she went out sometimes in order to be alone for a moment, and not to see before her eyes the eternal garden and the dusty road. She went as far as the beaches of Banneville, near the deserted pavilion, which forms an angle of the wall on the side of the country. Amidst the vegetation of the ditch there are long reeds with leaves that cut you. She began by looking round her to see if nothing had changed since last she had been there. She found again in the same places the fox-cloths and wall-flowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and the patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts, aimless at first, wandered at random like her greyhound, who ran round and round in the fields, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing the shrew-mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge of a cornfield. Then gradually her ideas took definite shape, and sitting on the grass that she dug up with little prods of her sunshade, Emma repeated to herself, Good heavens, why did I marry? She asked herself if by some other chance-combination it would not have been possible to meet another man, and she tried to imagine what would have been these unrealised events, this different life, this unknown husband. All surely could not be like this one. He might have been handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive, such as no doubt her old companions of the convent had married. What were they doing now? In town, with the noise of the streets, the buzz of the theatres, and the lights of the ballroom, they were living lives where the heart expands, the senses burgeon out. But she, her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and on we the silent spider was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart. She recalled the prized days when she mounted the platform to receive her little crowns with her hair in long plaques. In her white frock and open prunella shoes she had a pretty way, and when she went back to her seat the gentleman bent over her to congratulate her. The courtyard was full of carriages, farewells were called to her through their windows, the musicmaster with his violin case bowed in passing by. How far, all of this, how far away! She called Jolly, took her between her knees, and smoothed the long delicate head, saying, Come, kiss Mistress, you have no troubles. Then, noting the melancholy face of the graceful animal who yawned slowly, she softened, and comparing her to herself, spoke to her aloud as to somebody in trouble whom one is consoling. Occasionally there came gusts of winds, breezes from the sea, rolling in one sweep over the whole plateau of the co-country, which brought even to these fields assaults freshness. The rushes close to the ground whistled, the branches trembled in a swift rustling, while their summits, ceaselessly swaying, kept up a deep murmur. Emma drew her shawl round her shoulders and rose. In the avenue a green light dimmed by the leaves lit up the short moss that crackled softly beneath her feet. The sun was setting, the sky showed red between the branches, and the trunks of the trees uniform and planted in a straight line seemed a brown colonnade standing out against a background of gold. A fear took hold of her. She called Jolly, and hurriedly returned to Tost by the High Road, threw herself into an armchair, and for the rest of the evening did not speak. But towards the end of September something extraordinary fell upon her life. She was invited by the Marquis d'Andardilier to Vaubiosar. Secretary of State under the Restoration, the Marquis, anxious to re-enter political life, set about preparing for his candidature to the Chamber of Deputies long beforehand. In the winter he distributed a great deal of wood, and in the conseil général always enthusiastically demanded new roads for his arrondissement. During the dog-days he had suffered from an abscess which Charles had cured, as if by miracle, by giving a timely little touch with the Lancet. The steward sent to Tost to pay for the operation, reported in the evening that he had seen some superb cherries in the doctor's little garden. Now cherry-trees did not thrive at Vaubiosar. The Marquis asked to bovary for some slips, made it his business to thank him personally, saw Emma, thought she had a pretty figure, and that she did not bow like a peasant, so that he did not think he was going beyond the bounds of condescension, nor, on the other hand, making a mistake, in inviting the young couple. On Wednesday at three o'clock, Monsieur and Madame Bovary seated in their dog-cut, set out for Vaubiosar, with a great trunk strapped on behind, and a bonnet-box in front of the apron. Besides these, Charles held a band-box between his knees. They arrived at nightfall, just as the lamps in the park were being lit to show the way for the carriages.