Part I: Chapter Six

by Gustave Flaubert

　　She had read "Paul and Virginia," and she had dreamed of thelittle bamboo-house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fiddle, butabove all of the sweet friendship of some dear little brother,who seeks red fruit for you on trees taller than steeples, or whoruns barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird's nest.

　　When she was thirteen, her father himself took her to town toplace her in the convent. They stopped at an inn in the St.Gervais quarter, where, at their supper, they used painted platesthat set forth the story of Mademoiselle de la Valliere. Theexplanatory legends, chipped here and there by the scratching ofknives, all glorified religion, the tendernesses of the heart,and the pomps of court.

　　Far from being bored at first at the convent, she took pleasurein the society of the good sisters, who, to amuse her, took herto the chapel, which one entered from the refectory by a longcorridor. She played very little during recreation hours, knewher catechism well, and it was she who always answered Monsieurle Vicaire's difficult questions. Living thus, without everyleaving the warm atmosphere of the classrooms, and amid thesepale-faced women wearing rosaries with brass crosses, she wassoftly lulled by the mystic languor exhaled in the perfumes ofthe altar, the freshness of the holy water, and the lights of thetapers. Instead of attending to mass, she looked at the piousvignettes with their azure borders in her book, and she loved thesick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or thepoor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries. She tried, byway of mortification, to eat nothing a whole day. She puzzled herhead to find some vow to fulfil.

　　When she went to confession, she invented little sins in orderthat she might stay there longer, kneeling in the shadow, herhands joined, her face against the grating beneath the whisperingof the priest. The comparisons of betrothed, husband, celestiallover, and eternal marriage, that recur in sermons, stirredwithin her soul depths of unexpected sweetness.

　　In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious readingin the study. On week-nights it was some abstract of sacredhistory or the Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous, and on Sundayspassages from the "Genie du Christianisme," as a recreation. Howshe listened at first to the sonorous lamentations of itsromantic melancholies reechoing through the world and eternity!If her childhood had been spent in the shop-parlour of somebusiness quarter, she might perhaps have opened her heart tothose lyrical invasions of Nature, which usually come to us onlythrough translation in books. But she knew the country too well;she knew the lowing of cattle, the milking, the ploughs.

　　Accustomed to calm aspects of life, she turned, on the contrary,to those of excitement. She loved the sea only for the sake ofits storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins.

　　She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and sherejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediatedesires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimentalthan artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes.

　　At the convent there was an old maid who came for a week eachmonth to mend the linen. Patronized by the clergy, because shebelonged to an ancient family of noblemen ruined by theRevolution, she dined in the refectory at the table of the goodsisters, and after the meal had a bit of chat with them beforegoing back to her work. The girls often slipped out from thestudy to go and see her. She knew by heart the love songs of thelast century, and sang them in a low voice as she stitched away.

　　She told stories, gave them news, went errands in the town, andon the sly lent the big girls some novel, that she always carriedin the pockets of her apron, and of which the good lady herselfswallowed long chapters in the intervals of her work. They wereall love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting inlonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses riddento death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs,tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales inshady groves, "gentlemen" brave as lions, gentle as lambs,virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weepinglike fountains. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years ofage, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

　　Through Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historicalevents, dreamed of old chests, guard-rooms and minstrels. Shewould have liked to live in some old manor-house, like thoselong-waisted chatelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches,spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching acavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from thedistant fields. At this time she had a cult for Mary Stuart andenthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan ofArc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, the beautiful Ferroniere, and ClemenceIsaure stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity ofheaven, where also were seen, lost in shadow, and allunconnected, St. Louis with his oak, the dying Bayard, somecruelties of Louis XI, a little of St. Bartholomew's Day, theplume of the Bearnais, and always the remembrance of the platespainted in honour of Louis XIV.

　　In the music class, in the ballads she sang, there was nothingbut little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagunes,gondoliers;-mild compositions that allowed her to catch a glimpseathwart the obscurity of style and the weakness of the music ofthe attractive phantasmagoria of sentimental realities. Some ofher companions brought "keepsakes" given them as new year's giftsto the convent. These had to be hidden; it was quite anundertaking; they were read in the dormitory. Delicately handlingthe beautiful satin bindings, Emma looked with dazzled eyes atthe names of the unknown authors, who had signed their verses forthe most part as counts or viscounts.

　　She trembled as she blew back the tissue paper over the engravingand saw it folded in two and fall gently against the page. Herebehind the balustrade of a balcony was a young man in a shortcloak, holding in his arms a young girl in a white dress wearingan alms-bag at her belt; or there were nameless portraits ofEnglish ladies with fair curls, who looked at you from undertheir round straw hats with their large clear eyes. Some therewere lounging in their carriages, gliding through parks, agreyhound bounding along in front of the equipage driven at atrot by two midget postilions in white breeches. Others, dreamingon sofas with an open letter, gazed at the moon through aslightly open window half draped by a black curtain. The naiveones, a tear on their cheeks, were kissing doves through the barsof a Gothic cage, or, smiling, their heads on one side, wereplucking the leaves of a marguerite with their taper fingers,that curved at the tips like peaked shoes. And you, too, werethere, Sultans with long pipes reclining beneath arbours in thearms of Bayaderes; Djiaours, Turkish sabres, Greek caps; and youespecially, pale landscapes of dithyrambic lands, that often showus at once palm trees and firs, tigers on the right, a lion tothe left, Tartar minarets on the horizon; the whole framed by avery neat virgin forest, and with a great perpendicular sunbeamtrembling in the water, where, standing out in relief like whiteexcoriations on a steel-grey ground, swans are swimming about.

　　And the shade of the argand lamp fastened to the wall aboveEmma's head lighted up all these pictures of the world, thatpassed before her one by one in the silence of the dormitory, andto the distant noise of some belated carriage rolling over theBoulevards.

　　When her mother died she cried much the first few days. She had afuneral picture made with the hair of the deceased, and, in aletter sent to the Bertaux full of sad reflections on life, sheasked to be buried later on in the same grave. The goodmanthought she must be ill, and came to see her. Emma was secretlypleased that she had reached at a first attempt the rare ideal ofpale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts. She let herselfglide along with Lamartine meanderings, listened to harps onlakes, to all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of theleaves, the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice ofthe Eternal discoursing down the valleys. She wearied of it,would not confess it, continued from habit, and at last wassurprised to feel herself soothed, and with no more sadness atheart than wrinkles on her brow.

　　The good nuns, who had been so sure of her vocation, perceivedwith great astonishment that Mademoiselle Rouault seemed to beslipping from them. They had indeed been so lavish to her ofprayers, retreats, novenas, and sermons, they had so oftenpreached the respect due to saints and martyrs, and given so muchgood advice as to the modesty of the body and the salvation ofher soul, that she did as tightly reined horses; she pulled upshort and the bit slipped from her teeth. This nature, positivein the midst of its enthusiasms, that had loved the church forthe sake of the flowers, and music for the words of the songs,and literature for its passional stimulus, rebelled against themysteries of faith as it grew irritated by discipline, a thingantipathetic to her constitution. When her father took her fromschool, no one was sorry to see her go. The Lady Superior eventhought that she had latterly been somewhat irreverent to thecommunity.

　　Emma, at home once more, first took pleasure in looking after theservants, then grew disgusted with the country and missed herconvent. When Charles came to the Bertaux for the first time, shethought herself quite disillusioned, with nothing more to learn,and nothing more to feel.

　　But the uneasiness of her new position, or perhaps thedisturbance caused by the presence of this man, had sufficed tomake her believe that she at last felt that wondrous passionwhich, till then, like a great bird with rose-coloured wings,hung in the splendour of the skies of poesy; and now she couldnot think that the calm in which she lived was the happiness shehad dreamed.