“Bah!” interrupted Canivet. “On the contrary, you seem to me disposed to apoplexy. And what’s more, that doesn’t surprise me; because you gentlemen, you pharmacists, are always cooped up in your kitchens, which must end by altering your constitutions. Now, look at me: Every day I get up at four in the morning, I shave in cold water (I’m never cold), and I don’t wear flannel, I never catch cold, I’m sound in wind and limb! I eat sometimes one way, sometimes another, and accept it philosophically, taking my meals where I can. That’s why I’m not delicate like you, and it’s all the same to me whether I cut up a good Christian or some chicken that’s put in front of me. It’s all a matter of habit, you’ll say …, just habit! …”

Then, without any regard for Hippolyte, who was sweating with anguish under his bedclothes, the two gentlemen embarked on a conversation in which the apothecary compared the coolness of a surgeon to that of a general; and this comparison was agreeable to Canivet, who launched into some remarks on the demands of his art. He looked upon it as a sacred calling, though the officers of health brought dishonor to it. At last, returning to the patient, he examined the bandages Homais had brought, the same ones that had appeared at the time of the clubfoot operation, and asked for someone to hold the limb for him. They sent for Lestiboudois, and Monsieur Canivet, having rolled up his sleeves, went into the billiards room, while the apothecary remained with Artémise and the innkeeper, both of them whiter than their aprons and straining their ears toward the door.

At the unexpected shock of that sentence falling upon her thoughts like a lead ball on a silver plate, Emma, with a shudder, lifted her head to try to understand what he meant; and they looked at each other in silence, almost dumbfounded to see each other there, so far apart had their thoughts taken them. Charles was contemplating her with the clouded gaze of a drunken man, even as he listened, motionless, to the amputee’s last cries, which followed one another in lingering modulations punctuated by sharp shrieks, like the howling of some animal whose throat is being cut in the distance. Emma was biting her pale lips, and, as she rolled in her fingers one of the fragments of coral she had broken off, she fastened on Charles the burning points of her eyes, like two arrows of fire about to be loosed. Everything about him irritated her now—his face, his clothes, what he was not saying, his entire person, his very existence. She repented her past virtue as though it had been a crime, and what remained of it crumbled under the furious blows of her pride. She relished all the wretched ironies of triumphant adultery. The memory of her lover returned to her with dizzying enticements: she flung her soul at it, swept away toward that image by a new fervor; and Charles seemed to her as detached from her life, as forever absent, as impossible and annihilated, as if he were about to die and were suffering his death throes before her eyes.

He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them. Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language. He could not perceive—this man of such broad experience—the difference in feelings that might underlie similarities of expression. Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness; one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.

Never had Madame Bovary been as lovely as she was during this time; hers was that indefinable beauty that comes from joy, enthusiasm, success, and that is nothing more than a harmony of temperament and circumstances. Her desires, her sorrows, her experience of pleasure, and her ever-youthful illusions had had the same effect as manure, rain, wind, and sun on a flower, developing her by degrees, and she was at last blooming in the fullness of her nature. Her eyelids seemed shaped expressly for those long, loving glances in which her pupils would disappear, while a heavy sigh would widen her delicate nostrils and lift the fleshy corners of her lips, shadowed, in the light, by a trace of dark down. Some artist skilled in depravity might have arranged the coil of her hair over the nape of her neck; it was looped in a heavy mass, carelessly, according to the chance dictates of her adulterous affair, which loosened it every day. Her voice now took on softer inflections, her body, too; something subtle and penetrating emanated even from the folds of her dress and the arch of her foot. Charles, as in the early days of his marriage, found her delicious and quite irresistible.

Then Homais asked how this accident had happened. Charles answered that she had been stricken suddenly while eating apricots.

“Extraordinary! …” said the pharmacist. “Why, it’s quite possible that the apricots brought on the syncope! Some people are so naturally impressionable when coming into contact with certain odors! And this would actually be a nice topic to study, from the point of view of both its pathology and its physiology. The priests recognize its importance; they’ve always brought aromatics into their ceremonies. They do it to stupefy the understanding and provoke a state of ecstasy, which, of course, is easy enough to achieve in persons of the female sex, who are more delicate than the others. Cases have been cited of women fainting at the smell of burned horn, fresh bread …”

One day at the height of her illness, when she believed she was dying, she had asked to be given Communion; and as her room was prepared for the sacrament, as the chest of drawers crowded with syrups was transformed into an altar and Félicité scattered dahlia flowers over the floor, Emma felt some powerful force pass over her that rid her of all her suffering, of all perception, of all feeling. Her flesh, relieved, no longer weighed her down; a new life was beginning; it seemed to her that her whole being, ascending toward God, would dissolve in that love as burning incense dissipates into smoke. Holy water was sprinkled over the sheets of the bed; the priest withdrew the white host from the holy ciborium; and, fainting with heavenly joy, she put her lips forward to receive the proffered body of the Savior. The curtains of her alcove swelled out softly around her, like clouds, and the rays from the two wax tapers burning on the chest seemed to her like dazzling halos. Then she let her head fall back, thinking she could hear, through the vastnesses of space, the music of seraphic harps, and could see in an azure sky, on a throne of gold, surrounded by the saints holding fronds of green palm, God the Father in all His brilliant majesty, who with a sign sent angels with flaming wings down to the earth to carry her away in their arms.

This splendid vision lingered in her memory as the most beautiful thing she could ever have dreamed; so that now she kept striving to recapture the sensation of it, which persisted in a less all-encompassing manner but with a sweetness as profound. Her soul, exhausted by pride, was at last reposing in Christian humility; and, savoring the pleasure of being weak, Emma watched within herself the destruction of her will, which was to open wide the way for incursions of grace. So there existed greater delights in place of mere happiness, a love above all other loves, without interruption and without end, one that would continue to increase through all eternity! She could glimpse, among the illusions born of her hopes, a state of purity floating above the earth, merging with heaven, and this was where she aspired to be. She wanted to become a saint. She bought rosaries, she carried amulets; she wished she had a reliquary studded with emeralds in her room, by the head of her bed, so that she could kiss it every night.

From the very first scene, he enthralled them. He clasped Lucie in his arms, he left her, he came back, he seemed in despair: he had outbursts of anger, then moments of infinitely sweet elegiac huskiness, and the notes that slipped from his bare throat mingled with sobs and kisses. Emma leaned forward to watch him, scratching the velvet of her box with her fingernails. She absorbed into her heart the melodious laments that drifted along to the accompaniment of the double basses like the cries of the shipwrecked in the tumult of a storm. She recognized all the intoxicating delights, all the agonies, that had nearly killed her. Lucie’s voice seemed the echo of Emma’s own consciousness, and the illusion that so charmed her, something from her own life. But no one on earth had loved her with such a love. He had not wept, as Edgar was weeping, on that last evening, in the moonlight, when they had said to each other: “Tomorrow; tomorrow! …” The hall shook with shouts of “Bravo”; they began the entire stretto again; the lovers sang about the flowers on their graves, about their vows, their exile, their destiny, their hopes; and when they uttered their final farewell, Emma gave a sharp cry that merged with the vibrations of the closing chords.

“Now, why,” asked Bovary, “is that lord persecuting her so?”

“But he isn’t!” she answered; “he’s her lover.”

“But he swears he’ll take his revenge on her family, whereas the other one, the one who came on a little while ago, said: ‘I love Lucie and I believe she loves me.’ Besides, he walked off arm in arm with her father. Because that was her father, wasn’t it, the ugly little man with a cock’s feather in his hat?”

Then, when he saw her again after an absence of three years, his passion reawakened. He must at last resolve, he thought, to attempt to possess her. What was more, his shyness had worn away from contact with wild companions, and he returned to the provinces scornful of all who had not stepped with a patent-leather foot on the asphalt of the boulevards. Before a Parisienne in lace, in the salon of some illustrious physician, a person of importance with medals and a carriage, the poor clerk, no doubt, would have trembled like a child; but here in Rouen, by the quay, with the wife of this small country practitioner, he felt at ease, certain in advance that he would dazzle her. Self-confidence depends upon surroundings: one does not speak the same way in a grand apartment as in a garret, and a rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.

Nothing really obliged her to leave; but she had given her word that she would return that evening. Besides, Charles was waiting for her; and already she felt in her heart that craven docility that is, for many women, at once the punishment for their adultery, and the price they pay to redeem it.

When the cloth was removed, Bovary did not get up, nor did Emma; and as she contemplated him, the monotony of the spectacle gradually drove all compassion from her heart. He seemed to her puny, weak, worthless, in fact a poor man in every way. How could she get rid of him? What an interminable evening! She felt numbed, as though by something stupefying like the fumes of opium.