Madame Bovary (Hackett Classics) by Gustave Flaubert

Author:Gustave Flaubert [Flaubert, Gustave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Book, ebook
Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Published: 2010-04-09T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 91

Six weeks passed by. Rodolphe did not return. One evening, at last, he appeared.

“Better not come around too soon,” he had said to himself the day after the agricultural fair. “That would be a mistake.”

So, at the end of that week, he had left to go hunting.

When the hunt was over, he worried that perhaps he was proceeding too slowly, but then he reasoned to himself:

“But if she loved me from that very first day, she’ll have to love me even more out of her impatience to see me again. So let’s carry on!”

And he knew that he had calculated correctly when, coming into the room now, he saw Emma go pale.

She was alone. Daylight was fading. The thin muslin curtains across the windows thickened in the dusk, and the gilt front of the barometer, struck by a ray of the sun, reflected like fire in the coral-edged mirror.

Rodolphe remained standing; and Emma scarcely made any replies to his opening polite sentences.

“As for me,” he said, “I’ve been busy. I’ve been sick.”

“Seriously sick?” she cried.

“Well!” Rodolphe said, sitting down on a stool next to her. “No! … It’s more that I didn’t want to come back.”

“Why?”

“You can’t guess?”

He looked directly at her now, and so intensely that she lowered her head and reddened. He continued:

“Emma …”

“Sir!” she said, and moved slightly away from him.

“Ah, you see,” he continued in a melancholic tone, “that I was right not to want to come back; because this name, this name that fills my heart and just now slipped out, you deny it to me! Madame Bovary! … Yes, everybody calls you that! … But it’s not your name, after all; it’s another man’s name!”

And he repeated: “Another man’s!”

And he hid his face in his hands.

“Yes, I think about you continually! … The memory of you tears at me! … Oh, forgive me! … I’ll leave you alone … Farewell! I’ll go far away … so far that you’ll never hear anyone speak of me again! But still … today … I can’t say what force it was that drove me toward you! Because you can’t fight against heaven, you can’t resist the smiles of the angels! You simply have to let yourself be pulled along by the beautiful, the charming, the adorable!”

This was the first time Emma had had such things said to her; and her pride, like someone relaxing in a steam bath, languorously stretched out its whole length in the warmth of this language.

“But,” he went on, “if I had not come, if I hadn’t been able to see you, ah, at least I know your surroundings so very well. At night, every night, I got up, I came by here, I gazed at your house, the roof shining in the moonlight, the trees in the garden swaying against your window, and the small lamp, that glow, shining through the curtains, in the darkness. Ah, you couldn’t know that there was, so close and yet so far from you, a poor, miserable …”

She turned toward him with a sob.

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