فصل 11

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Goodbye

The letter Rodolphe wrote that evening ended with the words:

… I shall be far away when you read these sad lines. I have made up my mind to go at once, so that I cannot see you again! I shall come back, no doubt, and perhaps one day we shall talk together of the time when we were lovers.

Your Friend.

As she read these words the next morning, Emma’s first thought was to kill herself. Life no longer had meaning; how could she eat another meal, sit in the same room as her husband? Rodolphe! How could she live without him? The room started to spin around her, nothing was still, she could not see, and everything went black.

Then Charles was shouting for help, Berthe was screaming, and Felicite, the maid, with shaking hands, was loosening her mistress’s clothing. Emma herself lay stretched out on the floor, shaking from head to foot.

‘Speak! speak!’ Charles kept on saying. ‘Emma! It’s me, your own Charles, who loves you. Don’t you know me? Here! Here’s your little one. Kiss her, Emma!’

The child stretched out her arms to her mother, to put them round her neck. But Emma turned away her head and cried, ‘No, no… No one!’

She fainted away again. They carried her up to bed. She lay there, her mouth open, her eyes shut, her hands open, quite still. The tears ran from her eyes on to the pillow.

For forty-three days Charles never left Emma’s side. His patients had to take care of themselves. He called in Monsieur Canivet, in consultation. He sent to Rouen for Dr Lariviere, his old master; he was desperate. What scared him most was Emma’s depressed condition. She did not speak, took no notice of anything, and did not even seem to suffer - as if her soul and body were both resting after the shock through which they had passed.

About halfway through October she was able to sit up in bed, supported by pillows. Charles cried when he saw her eating her first piece of bread and jam. She began to recover her strength and got up for an hour or two in the afternoons, and one day, when she was feeling much better, he persuaded her to walk a little in the garden, leaning on his arm. So they went, arm in arm, to the bottom of the garden and its low wall. Slowly she looked up and, shading her eyes with her hand, she looked away, far, far away, into the distance. But there was nothing on the skyline except the smoke of burning grass on the hills.

She turned back to look into the garden, and remembered Rodolphe, remembered their nights of love in this place, and fell back into Charles’s arms, seeing nothing. That night she was as ill as before, though this time her condition was more complicated. First it was her heart that troubled her. Then her chest, or her head. Then she had attacks of vomiting, which Charles thought might be the early signs of cancer. And on top of all this trouble, the poor man was worried about money.

First, he did not know how he was going to pay Monsieur Homais for all the medicines he had had from him. And the bills kept pouring in. Monsieur Lheureux, the draper, was especially difficult. In fact, when Emma’s illness was at its worst, Lheureux, taking advantage of the situation, had rushed over with the coat, the travelling bag, two travelling boxes instead of one, and other unordered items as well! Charles, of course, said he had no use for them, but it was no good; the goods had been ordered, and the draper was not going to take them back. In the end, Bovary found himself signing a document promising to pay in six months - and then borrowing another thousand francs! So Charles’s problems worsened, while Lheureux was delighted to have both husband and wife in his debt. He saw it as a good investment.

Charles often wondered how he was going to pay all this money back next year. He thought and thought; maybe he should ask his father for help, or sell something. But his father would not listen, and he - well, he had nothing to sell. And then the whole situation began to look so black that he hurriedly pushed it out of his mind.

The winter was a hard one, and Emma took longer to recover this time. When the weather was fine, they pushed her chair up to the window, so that she could look out on the square. She had now taken a violent dislike to the garden, and the curtains on that side were always closed. Now she passed her time reading religious texts which the priest brought for her, and Rodolphe was pushed back into a hidden place in her heart. And although her recovery continued, she was so much changed that she even enjoyed the company of the respectable married women of Yonville.

When the spring came, she had the whole garden torn up from end to end. Her old energy had begun to return as her health improved, and although Monsieur Bournisien, the priest, still continued to visit her every day, she went to church less often. She began to enjoy time spent out of doors, looking over the new garden, even sitting outside with Charles and Monsieur Homais in the warmer evenings. It was on one of these evenings, as Monsieur Homais talked about the pleasures one could gain from literature and music, that the idea of going to see Lucia di Lammermoor at the theatre in Rouen was raised. Emma was against the idea at first, but Charles felt that the change would do her good, and he wanted to give her a little pleasure, despite his debts and their other worries. So Monsieur and Madame Bovary drove in to Rouen on the Friday coach and got down at the Hotel de la Croix Rouge, in the place Beauvoisine. Leaving Emma at the hotel, Charles at once went out to buy tickets for the theatre.