The Greatest Works of Gustave Flaubert. Gustave Flaubert
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than those of the still willows that lengthened out over the grass. Often some night-animal, hedgehog or weasel, setting out on the hunt, disturbed the lovers, or sometimes they heard a ripe peach falling all alone from the espalier.
“Ah! what a lovely night!” said Rodolphe.
“We shall have others,” replied Emma; and, as if speaking to herself: “Yet, it will be good to travel. And yet, why should my heart be so heavy? Is it dread of the unknown? The effect of habits left? Or rather — ? No; it is the excess of happiness. How weak I am, am I not? Forgive me!”
“There is still time!” he cried. “Reflect! perhaps you may repent!”
“Never!” she cried impetuously. And coming closer to him: “What ill could come to me? There is no desert, no precipice, no ocean I would not traverse with you. The longer we live together the more it will be like an embrace, every day closer, more heart to heart. There will be nothing to trouble us, no cares, no obstacle. We shall be alone, all to ourselves eternally. Oh, speak! Answer me!”
At regular intervals he answered, “Yes — Yes — ” She had passed her hands through his hair, and she repeated in a childlike voice, despite the big tears which were falling, “Rodolphe! Rodolphe! Ah! Rodolphe! dear little Rodolphe!”
Midnight struck.
“Midnight!” said she. “Come, it is tomorrow. One day more!”
He rose to go; and as if the movement he made had been the signal for their flight, Emma said, suddenly assuming a gay air —
“You have the passports?”
“Yes.”
“You are forgetting nothing?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Certainly.”
“It is at the Hotel de Provence, is it not, that you will wait for me at midday?”
He nodded.
“Till tomorrow then!” said Emma in a last caress; and she watched him go.
He did not turn round. She ran after him, and, leaning over the water’s edge between the bulrushes —
“Tomorrow!” she cried.
He was already on the other side of the river and walking fast across the meadow.
After a few moments Rodolphe stopped; and when he saw her with her white gown gradually fade away in the shade like a ghost, he was seized with such a beating of the heart that he leant against a tree lest he should fall.
“What an imbecile I am!” he said with a fearful oath. “No matter! She was a pretty mistress!”
And immediately Emma’s beauty, with all the pleasures of their love, came back to him. For a moment he softened; then he rebelled against her.
“For, after all,” he exclaimed, gesticulating, “I can’t exile myself — have a child on my hands.”
He was saying these things to give himself firmness.
“And besides, the worry, the expense! Ah! no, no, no, no! a thousand times no! That would be too stupid.”
Chapter Thirteen
No sooner was Rodolphe at home than he sat down quickly at his bureau under the stag’s head that hung as a trophy on the wall. But when he had the pen between his fingers, he could think of nothing, so that, resting on his elbows, he began to reflect. Emma seemed to him to have receded into a far-off past, as if the resolution he had taken had suddenly placed a distance between them.
To get back something of her, he fetched from the cupboard at the bedside an old Rheims biscuit-box, in which he usually kept his letters from women, and from it came an odour of dry dust and withered roses. First he saw a handkerchief with pale little spots. It was a handkerchief of hers. Once when they were walking her nose had bled; he had forgotten it. Near it, chipped at all the corners, was a miniature given him by Emma: her toilette seemed to him pretentious, and her languishing look in the worst possible taste. Then, from looking at this image and recalling the memory of its original, Emma’s features little by little grew confused in his remembrance, as if the living and the painted face, rubbing one against the other, had effaced each other. Finally, he read some of her letters; they were full of explanations relating to their journey, short, technical, and urgent, like business notes. He wanted to see the long ones again, those of old times. In order to find them at the bottom of the box, Rodolphe disturbed all the others, and mechanically began rummaging amidst this mass of papers and things, finding pellmell bouquets, garters, a black mask, pins, and hair — hair! dark and fair, some even, catching in the hinges of the box, broke when it was opened.
Thus dallying with his souvenirs, he examined the writing and the style of the letters, as varied as their orthography. They were tender or jovial, facetious, melancholy; there were some that asked for love, others that asked for money. A word recalled faces to him, certain gestures, the sound of a voice; sometimes, however, he remembered nothing at all.
In fact, these women, rushing at once into his thoughts, cramped each other and lessened, as reduced to a uniform level of love that equalised them all. So taking handfuls of the mixed-up letters, he amused himself for some moments with letting them fall in cascades from his right into his left hand. At last, bored and weary, Rodolphe took back the box to the cupboard, saying to himself, “What a lot of rubbish!” Which summed up his opinion; for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall.
“Come,” said he, “let’s begin.”
He wrote —
“Courage, Emma! courage! I would not bring misery into your life.”
“After all, that’s true,” thought Rodolphe. “I am acting in her interest; I am honest.”
“Have you carefully weighed your resolution? Do you know to what an abyss I was dragging you, poor angel? No, you do not, do you? You were coming confident and fearless, believing in happiness in the future. Ah! unhappy that we are — insensate!”
Rodolphe stopped here to think of some good excuse.
“If I told her all my fortune is lost? No! Besides, that would stop nothing. It would all have to be begun over again later on. As if one could make women like that listen to reason!” He reflected, then went on —
“I shall not forget you, oh believe it; and I shall ever have a profound devotion for you; but some day, sooner or later, this ardour (such is the fate of human things) would have grown less, no doubt. Lassitude would have come to us, and who knows if I should not even have had the atrocious pain of witnessing your remorse, of sharing it myself, since I should have been its cause? The mere idea of the grief that would come to you tortures me, Emma. Forget me! Why did I ever know you? Why were you so beautiful? Is it my fault? O my God! No, no! Accuse only fate.”
“That’s a word that always tells,” he said to himself.
“Ah, if you had been one of those frivolous women that one sees, certainly I might, through egotism, have tried an experiment, in that case without danger for you. But that delicious exaltation, at once your charm and your torment, has prevented you from understanding, adorable woman that you are, the falseness of our future position. Nor had I reflected upon this at first, and I rested in the shade of that ideal happiness as beneath that of the manchineel tree, without foreseeing the consequences.”
“Perhaps she’ll think I’m giving it up from avarice. Ah, well! so much the worse; it must be stopped!”
“The world is cruel, Emma. Wherever