Charles (Part One, Chapters 1–5)

PART ONE

We were in the study hall when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy dressed in ordinary clothes and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who were asleep woke up, and everyone rose as if caught at his work.

The headmaster made a sign for us to sit down; then, turning to the master of the study hall: "Monsieur Roger," he said in a low voice, "here is a pupil I am placing in your charge. He is going into the fifth form. If his work and conduct are satisfactory, he will move up to the senior forms, as his age warrants."

The new boy, standing in the corner behind the door so that he could hardly be seen, was a country lad of about fifteen, and taller than any of us. His hair was cut straight across his forehead, like a village choirboy's; he looked sensible and very ill at ease. His green cloth jacket with black buttons must have been tight under the arms, and showed, at the opening of the cuffs, red wrists accustomed to being bare.

He kept his cap on his knees during prayers. It was one of those composite headgears in which one finds elements of the bearskin, the lancer's cap, the bowler, the otter-skin cap and the cotton nightcap; one of those poor things, in short, whose mute ugliness has depths of expression like the face of an imbecile. It was oval, stiffened with whalebone, and began with three round sausages; then, separated by a red band, alternating lozenges of velvet and rabbit fur; then came a sort of bag, ending in a cardboard polygon covered with complicated braid, from which hung, at the end of a long, too-thin cord, a little cross of gold thread, like a tassel. It was new; its peak shone.

"Stand up," said the master.

He stood; his cap fell. The whole class began to laugh.

The master asked him his name. The new boy, in a stammering voice, articulated an unintelligible name.

"Again!"

The same stammer of syllables was heard, drowned by the hooting of the class.

"Louder!" cried the master. "Louder!"

Then the new boy, taking an extreme resolution, opened an inordinately large mouth and shouted at the top of his lungs, as if calling someone, this word: Charbovari.

There was an uproar. He was given five hundred lines of "Ridiculus sum" to copy out, and sent to sit on the dunce's bench, at the foot of the master's desk.

His name was Charles Bovary. His father, a former army surgeon's assistant, compromised around 1812 in some conscription scandal, a handsome man, a boaster, who rattled his spurs, had married for her dowry the daughter of a hosier, and lived on her money, drank, chased the servants, and failed at farming. His mother had loved her husband at first with a thousand servilities, which only detached him further; then she had turned all her thwarted ambition onto the child. She wanted him to be a doctor.

Charles studied medicine in Rouen. The lectures were beyond him; he listened without understanding; he learned his lessons by heart, like a horse turning a mill, without knowing what he was grinding. He discovered the tavern and dominoes, and failed his examination. The second time, with his mother's help, he passed, and set up as a public health officer, not a full doctor, at Tostes. His mother found him a wife: the widow of a bailiff from Dieppe, forty-five years old, with twelve hundred francs a year. Though she was ugly, as dry as a stick, and had as many pimples as a spring bud, Madame Dubuc did not lack suitors. She was jealous; she listened behind the partition to the women who came to consult him; she opened his letters; she had to have her chocolate every morning, and complained endlessly of her nerves, her chest, her moods.

One night, a messenger came on horseback: a farmer named Rouault, at Les Bertaux, had broken his leg. Charles rode out before dawn. At the farm, a young woman in a blue merino dress with three flounces came to the door to receive him: Mademoiselle Emma, the farmer's daughter.

It was a simple fracture, without complications. While Charles splinted it, Mademoiselle Emma sewed pads, pricking her fingers, which she then put to her mouth to suck. Charles was surprised at the whiteness of her nails. They were shiny, delicate at the tips, cleaner than the ivories of Dieppe, and cut in an almond shape. Yet her hand was not beautiful, perhaps not white enough, and a little dry at the knuckles; it was too long, too, with no soft curves at the outlines. What was beautiful in her was her eyes: although they were brown, they seemed black because of the lashes, and her gaze came frankly to you with a candid boldness.

He came back to Les Bertaux more often than the leg required. The bailiff's widow noticed, and made him swear on the prayer book never to go there again. Then, that spring, a notary in Ingouville, who held her funds, fled with all the money in his office; her fortune turned out to be far less than she had claimed. There were scenes. A week later, as she was hanging out washing in the yard, she coughed up blood, and the next day, as Charles had his back turned, drawing the curtain, she said: "Ah, my God!", sighed, and fainted. She was dead. How surprising!

Old Rouault, who was a widower, and who found his daughter of little use on the farm, since she had been educated in a convent, saw very well what the young doctor wanted. When Charles stammered his request, the old man went to speak to his daughter, and agreed to signal her answer by pushing back the shutter against the wall. Charles waited at the hedge for a long time, his watch in his hand. Suddenly there was a noise against the wall; the shutter had been pushed back; its catch was still trembling.

The wedding was held at Les Bertaux, the following spring. The guests arrived from early morning in carriages of every kind, and there were forty-three at table. They ate for sixteen hours. A pastry cook from Yvetot had made a wedding cake that was the sensation of the day: a cardboard temple, a donjon of Savoy cake, and on top a green meadow with lakes of jam and boats of nutshells, where a little Cupid swung in a chocolate swing.

Emma would have liked to be married at midnight, by torchlight; but old Rouault would not hear of it.

At Tostes, she ran his small house well. She sent the patients' bills in well-turned letters that did not look like bills. On Sundays, when they had a neighbor to dinner, she found ways to present a dish elegantly, played with the arrangement of plums on vine leaves, and served jam in pots turned out onto a plate. Charles was happy, and thought of nothing. A meal together, a walk in the evening on the high road, a gesture of her hand on her hair, the sight of her straw hat hung on a window catch: these were his happiness now. In the morning, in bed, he watched the sunlight passing through the down of her pale cheeks, and her eyes, which looked larger, especially when she opened them several times on waking. Then he rode off to his patients, his heart full of the joys of the night, his mind at peace, his flesh content, chewing over his happiness like those who, after dinner, still taste the truffles they are digesting.

Before her marriage, she had believed she was in love. But the happiness that should have come of that love had not come, and she thought she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to discover what exactly was meant in life by the words bliss, passion and rapture, which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

(End of Episode 1 — continued in Episode 2: The Ball)