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pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/07.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_6_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 7

chapter 7

{"name": "Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary17.asp", "summary": "Emma is disappointed with her honeymoon, which is not romantic, although she had expected it to be. She is unable to express this \"intangible unease\" to her husband, who does not have the sensitivity to understand her. As their outward familiarity grows, she inwardly withdraws from him. His conversation, she notes, is \"as flat as a street pavement.\" He seems to lack general knowledge as well. For Emma, \"a man... should know everything.\" But Charles is painfully unambitious, and Emma is frustrated by him. In addition to managing the house, Emma spends her time sketching and playing the piano. Charles has absolutely no cause for complaint. His mother, however, \"seemed to be prejudiced against her daughter-in-law.\" Although Emma behaves like a dutiful daughter-in-law, Flaubert makes it clear that there is no love between the two women. Charles' mother is resentful of Emma because she did not have problems interacting with Charles' first wife and she did not feel her own intimacy with her son to be threatened.\" But now she in Charles' love for Emma a kind of defection from her own love...and she her son's happiness in gloomy silence. \" Charles is aware of the differences between his wife and his mother, but he can do nothing about them. Emma genuinely tries hard to ignite a romantic passion for Charles, but she fails miserably. Charles' passionate embraces do not move her because they follow a set pattern: \"it was just one more habit, a sort of dessert he looked forward to after the monotony of dinner.\" Emma tries to release some of her frustrations. She often walks the dog to a derelict summerhouse in Banneville. It is here that she gives vent to some of her emotions. She longs for a more active life and talks to Djali, the Italian greyhound, about her troubles. All of nature seems to coincide with her growing misery; she notices the dog's melancholy features and the sighing sea breeze. Even the beauty of the trees and the sunset cannot shake her mood. The Bovarys receive a pleasantly unexpected invitation; a patient of Charles, Marquis d'Andervilliers, asks Emma and Charles to come to his home, La Vaubyessard. Emma is delighted, and the Bovary couple accepts the invitation.", "analysis": "Notes Emma is greatly disappointed to find that her husband is insensitive and coarse. She cannot share her emotional life with him because he just cannot understand her. She also finds that his habits repulse her. In fact she begins to ask, \"O God, O God, why did I get married? \" It is obvious that Emma finds married life extremely dull; she also feels deprived of living out her romantic fantasies. She again turns to her imagination as an outlet for relief. At least in her dreams, Emma finds some excitement. Flaubert is laying the foundation for Emma's later escapades. Despite her disappointment in Charles, Emma considers it her 'duty' to find him physically attractive and sexually acceptable. Such an attitude reveals the woman's subordinate position in society during Flaubert's time; the wife was usually blamed for any marital discord and was expected to solve the marital problems on her own. As a result of societal pressures, Emma is seen trying hard to ignite a passion for Charles. She cannot succeed, however, because she does not love him. She has only married him in order to change her life-style. Now that the initial glamour or marriage is past, Emma regrets her decision. She is at least relieved the she and Charles have received at invitation to La Vaubyessard. Emma's mother-in-law poses another problem. She nurses an intense jealousy of and dislike for Emma. Charles' mother had hoped to always hold on to her son's affections and influence his decisions, but his new wife has changed all that. Emma refuses to be manipulated like Heloise; therefore, Mrs. Bovary sees Emma as her rival, and in spite of her son's happiness, she cannot be happy herself."}

She thought, sometimes, that, after all, this was the happiest time of her life--the honeymoon, as people called it. To taste the full sweetness of it, it would have been necessary doubtless to fly to those lands with sonorous names where the days after marriage are full of laziness most suave. In post chaises behind blue silken curtains to ride slowly up steep road, listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed by the mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled sound of a waterfall; at sunset on the shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume of lemon trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces above, hand in hand to look at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills? Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her--the opportunity, the courage. If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed it, if his look had but once met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden plenty would have gone out from her heart, as the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by a hand. But as the intimacy of their life became deeper, the greater became the gulf that separated her from him. Charles's conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone's ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris. He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come across in a novel. A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him. Sometimes she would draw; and it was great amusement to Charles to stand there bolt upright and watch her bend over her cardboard, with eyes half-closed the better to see her work, or rolling, between her fingers, little bread-pellets. As to the piano, the more quickly her fingers glided over it the more he wondered. She struck the notes with aplomb, and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad bare-headed and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand. Emma, on the other hand, knew how to look after her house. She sent the patients' accounts in well-phrased letters that had no suggestion of a bill. When they had a neighbour to dinner on Sundays, she managed to have some tasty dish--piled up pyramids of greengages on vine leaves, served up preserves turned out into plates--and even spoke of buying finger-glasses for dessert. From all this much consideration was extended to Bovary. Charles finished by rising in his own esteem for possessing such a wife. He showed with pride in the sitting room two small pencil sketches by her that he had had framed in very large frames, and hung up against the wallpaper by long green cords. People returning from mass saw him at his door in his wool-work slippers. He came home late--at ten o'clock, at midnight sometimes. Then he asked for something to eat, and as the servant had gone to bed, Emma waited on him. He took off his coat to dine more at his ease. He told her, one after the other, the people he had met, the villages where he had been, the prescriptions he had written, and, well pleased with himself, he finished the remainder of the boiled beef and onions, picked pieces off the cheese, munched an apple, emptied his water-bottle, and then went to bed, and lay on his back and snored. As he had been for a time accustomed to wear nightcaps, his handkerchief would not keep down over his ears, so that his hair in the morning was all tumbled pell-mell about his face and whitened with the feathers of the pillow, whose strings came untied during the night. He always wore thick boots that had two long creases over the instep running obliquely towards the ankle, while the rest of the upper continued in a straight line as if stretched on a wooden foot. He said that "was quite good enough for the country." His mother approved of his economy, for she came to see him as formerly when there had been some violent row at her place; and yet Madame Bovary senior seemed prejudiced against her daughter-in-law. She thought "her ways too fine for their position"; the wood, the sugar, and the candles disappeared as "at a grand establishment," and the amount of firing in the kitchen would have been enough for twenty-five courses. She put her linen in order for her in the presses, and taught her to keep an eye on the butcher when he brought the meat. Emma put up with these lessons. Madame Bovary was lavish of them; and the words "daughter" and "mother" were exchanged all day long, accompanied by little quiverings of the lips, each one uttering gentle words in a voice trembling with anger. In Madame Dubuc's time the old woman felt that she was still the favorite; but now the love of Charles for Emma seemed to her a desertion from her tenderness, an encroachment upon what was hers, and she watched her son's happiness in sad silence, as a ruined man looks through the windows at people dining in his old house. She recalled to him as remembrances her troubles and her sacrifices, and, comparing these with Emma's negligence, came to the conclusion that it was not reasonable to adore her so exclusively. Charles knew not what to answer: he respected his mother, and he loved his wife infinitely; he considered the judgment of the one infallible, and yet he thought the conduct of the other irreproachable. When Madam Bovary had gone, he tried timidly and in the same terms to hazard one or two of the more anodyne observations he had heard from his mamma. Emma proved to him with a word that he was mistaken, and sent him off to his patients. And yet, in accord with theories she believed right, she wanted to make herself in love with him. By moonlight in the garden she recited all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him many melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after as before, and Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved. When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did not experience as of believing anything that did not present itself in conventional forms, she persuaded herself without difficulty that Charles's passion was nothing very exorbitant. His outbursts became regular; he embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one habit among other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony of dinner. A gamekeeper, cured by the doctor of inflammation of the lungs, had given madame a little Italian greyhound; she took her out walking, for she went out sometimes in order to be alone for a moment, and not to see before her eyes the eternal garden and the dusty road. She went as far as the beeches of Banneville, near the deserted pavilion which forms an angle of the wall on the side of the country. Amidst the vegetation of the ditch there are long reeds with leaves that cut you. She began by looking round her to see if nothing had changed since last she had been there. She found again in the same places the foxgloves and wallflowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and the patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts, aimless at first, wandered at random, like her greyhound, who ran round and round in the fields, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing the shrew-mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge of a cornfield. Then gradually her ideas took definite shape, and, sitting on the grass that she dug up with little prods of her sunshade, Emma repeated to herself, "Good heavens! Why did I marry?" She asked herself if by some other chance combination it would have not been possible to meet another man; and she tried to imagine what would have been these unrealised events, this different life, this unknown husband. All, surely, could not be like this one. He might have been handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive, such as, no doubt, her old companions of the convent had married. What were they doing now? In town, with the noise of the streets, the buzz of the theatres and the lights of the ballroom, they were living lives where the heart expands, the senses bourgeon out. But she--her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart. She recalled the prize days, when she mounted the platform to receive her little crowns, with her hair in long plaits. In her white frock and open prunella shoes she had a pretty way, and when she went back to her seat, the gentlemen bent over her to congratulate her; the courtyard was full of carriages; farewells were called to her through their windows; the music master with his violin case bowed in passing by. How far all of this! How far away! She called Djali, took her between her knees, and smoothed the long delicate head, saying, "Come, kiss mistress; you have no troubles." Then noting the melancholy face of the graceful animal, who yawned slowly, she softened, and comparing her to herself, spoke to her aloud as to somebody in trouble whom one is consoling. Occasionally there came gusts of winds, breezes from the sea rolling in one sweep over the whole plateau of the Caux country, which brought even to these fields a salt freshness. The rushes, close to the ground, whistled; the branches trembled in a swift rustling, while their summits, ceaselessly swaying, kept up a deep murmur. Emma drew her shawl round her shoulders and rose. In the avenue a green light dimmed by the leaves lit up the short moss that crackled softly beneath her feet. The sun was setting; the sky showed red between the branches, and the trunks of the trees, uniform, and planted in a straight line, seemed a brown colonnade standing out against a background of gold. A fear took hold of her; she called Djali, and hurriedly returned to Tostes by the high road, threw herself into an armchair, and for the rest of the evening did not speak. But towards the end of September something extraordinary fell upon her life; she was invited by the Marquis d'Andervilliers to Vaubyessard. Secretary of State under the Restoration, the Marquis, anxious to re-enter political life, set about preparing for his candidature to the Chamber of Deputies long beforehand. In the winter he distributed a great deal of wood, and in the Conseil General always enthusiastically demanded new roads for his arrondissement. During the dog-days he had suffered from an abscess, which Charles had cured as if by miracle by giving a timely little touch with the lancet. The steward sent to Tostes to pay for the operation reported in the evening that he had seen some superb cherries in the doctor's little garden. Now cherry trees did not thrive at Vaubyessard; the Marquis asked Bovary for some slips; made it his business to thank his personally; saw Emma; thought she had a pretty figure, and that she did not bow like a peasant; so that he did not think he was going beyond the bounds of condescension, nor, on the other hand, making a mistake, in inviting the young couple. On Wednesday at three o'clock, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, seated in their dog-cart, set out for Vaubyessard, with a great trunk strapped on behind and a bonnet-box in front of the apron. Besides these Charles held a bandbox between his knees. They arrived at nightfall, just as the lamps in the park were being lit to show the way for the carriages.

Chapter 7

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary17.asp

Emma is disappointed with her honeymoon, which is not romantic, although she had expected it to be. She is unable to express this "intangible unease" to her husband, who does not have the sensitivity to understand her. As their outward familiarity grows, she inwardly withdraws from him. His conversation, she notes, is "as flat as a street pavement." He seems to lack general knowledge as well. For Emma, "a man... should know everything." But Charles is painfully unambitious, and Emma is frustrated by him. In addition to managing the house, Emma spends her time sketching and playing the piano. Charles has absolutely no cause for complaint. His mother, however, "seemed to be prejudiced against her daughter-in-law." Although Emma behaves like a dutiful daughter-in-law, Flaubert makes it clear that there is no love between the two women. Charles' mother is resentful of Emma because she did not have problems interacting with Charles' first wife and she did not feel her own intimacy with her son to be threatened." But now she in Charles' love for Emma a kind of defection from her own love...and she her son's happiness in gloomy silence. " Charles is aware of the differences between his wife and his mother, but he can do nothing about them. Emma genuinely tries hard to ignite a romantic passion for Charles, but she fails miserably. Charles' passionate embraces do not move her because they follow a set pattern: "it was just one more habit, a sort of dessert he looked forward to after the monotony of dinner." Emma tries to release some of her frustrations. She often walks the dog to a derelict summerhouse in Banneville. It is here that she gives vent to some of her emotions. She longs for a more active life and talks to Djali, the Italian greyhound, about her troubles. All of nature seems to coincide with her growing misery; she notices the dog's melancholy features and the sighing sea breeze. Even the beauty of the trees and the sunset cannot shake her mood. The Bovarys receive a pleasantly unexpected invitation; a patient of Charles, Marquis d'Andervilliers, asks Emma and Charles to come to his home, La Vaubyessard. Emma is delighted, and the Bovary couple accepts the invitation.

Notes Emma is greatly disappointed to find that her husband is insensitive and coarse. She cannot share her emotional life with him because he just cannot understand her. She also finds that his habits repulse her. In fact she begins to ask, "O God, O God, why did I get married? " It is obvious that Emma finds married life extremely dull; she also feels deprived of living out her romantic fantasies. She again turns to her imagination as an outlet for relief. At least in her dreams, Emma finds some excitement. Flaubert is laying the foundation for Emma's later escapades. Despite her disappointment in Charles, Emma considers it her 'duty' to find him physically attractive and sexually acceptable. Such an attitude reveals the woman's subordinate position in society during Flaubert's time; the wife was usually blamed for any marital discord and was expected to solve the marital problems on her own. As a result of societal pressures, Emma is seen trying hard to ignite a passion for Charles. She cannot succeed, however, because she does not love him. She has only married him in order to change her life-style. Now that the initial glamour or marriage is past, Emma regrets her decision. She is at least relieved the she and Charles have received at invitation to La Vaubyessard. Emma's mother-in-law poses another problem. She nurses an intense jealousy of and dislike for Emma. Charles' mother had hoped to always hold on to her son's affections and influence his decisions, but his new wife has changed all that. Emma refuses to be manipulated like Heloise; therefore, Mrs. Bovary sees Emma as her rival, and in spite of her son's happiness, she cannot be happy herself.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/08.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_7_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 8

chapter 8

{"name": "Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary18.asp", "summary": "La Vaubyessard is a sprawling mansion located on a scenic stretch of land. Emma is taken in by the grandeur of the place and the people who have gathered there. Flaubert describes the dinner scene in vivid detail and through Emma's eyes. As Emma prepares for the ball, she discourages her husband from attempting to dance and repulses his attempts to kiss her, on the grounds that he will crumple her dress. At the ball, she is in her romantic dream and eagerly drinks in all the glamour and conversation that the night has to offer. When a Viscount asks Emma to dance with him, she is thrilled. In fact, the entire evening is wonderful to her. Back in her room after the dance, Emma strains to \"keep awake and so prolong the spell of this luxurious life she must so soon abandon.\" After breakfast the following morning, the Bovarys leave for Tostes. On the way back, while stopping to adjust the harness, Charles spies a cigar case and picks it up. Finding a few cigars in it, he decides to pocket it. Back at home, Emma scornfully watches as the unworldly Charles struggles to smoke a cigar. When he leaves the room, she picks up the cigar case and hides it at the back of the cupboard. She also flies into a temper and dismisses the maid. Emma is obviously not pleased to be home. As the trip to La Vaubyessard is distanced from her memory, \"some of the details vanished, but her yearning for it all remained.\"", "analysis": "Notes For once fantasy and reality merge in Emma's life at the La Vaubyessard ball. Ironically, she gets the chance to rub shoulders with nobility through her lowly husband, who has treated the Marquis as a patient. When she compares Charles to the noble men at the ball, she finds her husband to be clumsy, boring and incapable of mixing with high society. Ironically, no one, except the one Viscount, takes much notice of Emma. She is obviously not a part of this wealthy society that is characterized by snobbery. She thinks, however, that she fits in well and believes she is entitled to better things than what Charles can offer her. Although Emma is firmly rooted in her middle-class, country origins, she will try to move upward socially throughout the novel. Flaubert explains that \"her heart was like that. Contact with riches had left upon it a coating that would never wear off.\" Upon her return to the reality of her life in Tostes, Emma is reminded of its contrast to the Marquis' mansion and doubly disappointed with her own miserable existence. She is repulsed when she sees her uncouth husband struggling to smoke a cigar; as a result, she hides the cigar case that Charles found on the way home from the ball. Later, Emma will look upon the case as a reminder of the time spent at La Vaubyessard."}

The chateau, a modern building in Italian style, with two projecting wings and three flights of steps, lay at the foot of an immense green-sward, on which some cows were grazing among groups of large trees set out at regular intervals, while large beds of arbutus, rhododendron, syringas, and guelder roses bulged out their irregular clusters of green along the curve of the gravel path. A river flowed under a bridge; through the mist one could distinguish buildings with thatched roofs scattered over the field bordered by two gently sloping, well timbered hillocks, and in the background amid the trees rose in two parallel lines the coach houses and stables, all that was left of the ruined old chateau. Charles's dog-cart pulled up before the middle flight of steps; servants appeared; the Marquis came forward, and, offering his arm to the doctor's wife, conducted her to the vestibule. It was paved with marble slabs, was very lofty, and the sound of footsteps and that of voices re-echoed through it as in a church. Opposite rose a straight staircase, and on the left a gallery overlooking the garden led to the billiard room, through whose door one could hear the click of the ivory balls. As she crossed it to go to the drawing room, Emma saw standing round the table men with grave faces, their chins resting on high cravats. They all wore orders, and smiled silently as they made their strokes. On the dark wainscoting of the walls large gold frames bore at the bottom names written in black letters. She read: "Jean-Antoine d'Andervilliers d'Yvervonbille, Count de la Vaubyessard and Baron de la Fresnay, killed at the battle of Coutras on the 20th of October, 1587." And on another: "Jean-Antoine-Henry-Guy d'Andervilliers de la Vaubyessard, Admiral of France and Chevalier of the Order of St. Michael, wounded at the battle of the Hougue-Saint-Vaast on the 29th of May, 1692; died at Vaubyessard on the 23rd of January 1693." One could hardly make out those that followed, for the light of the lamps lowered over the green cloth threw a dim shadow round the room. Burnishing the horizontal pictures, it broke up against these in delicate lines where there were cracks in the varnish, and from all these great black squares framed in with gold stood out here and there some lighter portion of the painting--a pale brow, two eyes that looked at you, perukes flowing over and powdering red-coated shoulders, or the buckle of a garter above a well-rounded calf. The Marquis opened the drawing room door; one of the ladies (the Marchioness herself) came to meet Emma. She made her sit down by her on an ottoman, and began talking to her as amicably as if she had known her a long time. She was a woman of about forty, with fine shoulders, a hook nose, a drawling voice, and on this evening she wore over her brown hair a simple guipure fichu that fell in a point at the back. A fair young woman sat in a high-backed chair in a corner; and gentlemen with flowers in their buttonholes were talking to ladies round the fire. At seven dinner was served. The men, who were in the majority, sat down at the first table in the vestibule; the ladies at the second in the dining room with the Marquis and Marchioness. Emma, on entering, felt herself wrapped round by the warm air, a blending of the perfume of flowers and of the fine linen, of the fumes of the viands, and the odour of the truffles. The silver dish covers reflected the lighted wax candles in the candelabra, the cut crystal covered with light steam reflected from one to the other pale rays; bouquets were placed in a row the whole length of the table; and in the large-bordered plates each napkin, arranged after the fashion of a bishop's mitre, held between its two gaping folds a small oval shaped roll. The red claws of lobsters hung over the dishes; rich fruit in open baskets was piled up on moss; there were quails in their plumage; smoke was rising; and in silk stockings, knee-breeches, white cravat, and frilled shirt, the steward, grave as a judge, offering ready carved dishes between the shoulders of the guests, with a touch of the spoon gave you the piece chosen. On the large stove of porcelain inlaid with copper baguettes the statue of a woman, draped to the chin, gazed motionless on the room full of life. Madame Bovary noticed that many ladies had not put their gloves in their glasses. But at the upper end of the table, alone amongst all these women, bent over his full plate, and his napkin tied round his neck like a child, an old man sat eating, letting drops of gravy drip from his mouth. His eyes were bloodshot, and he wore a little queue tied with black ribbon. He was the Marquis's father-in-law, the old Duke de Laverdiere, once on a time favourite of the Count d'Artois, in the days of the Vaudreuil hunting-parties at the Marquis de Conflans', and had been, it was said, the lover of Queen Marie Antoinette, between Monsieur de Coigny and Monsieur de Lauzun. He had lived a life of noisy debauch, full of duels, bets, elopements; he had squandered his fortune and frightened all his family. A servant behind his chair named aloud to him in his ear the dishes that he pointed to stammering, and constantly Emma's eyes turned involuntarily to this old man with hanging lips, as to something extraordinary. He had lived at court and slept in the bed of queens! Iced champagne was poured out. Emma shivered all over as she felt it cold in her mouth. She had never seen pomegranates nor tasted pineapples. The powdered sugar even seemed to her whiter and finer than elsewhere. The ladies afterwards went to their rooms to prepare for the ball. Emma made her toilet with the fastidious care of an actress on her debut. She did her hair according to the directions of the hairdresser, and put on the barege dress spread out upon the bed. Charles's trousers were tight across the belly. "My trouser-straps will be rather awkward for dancing," he said. "Dancing?" repeated Emma. "Yes!" "Why, you must be mad! They would make fun of you; keep your place. Besides, it is more becoming for a doctor," she added. Charles was silent. He walked up and down waiting for Emma to finish dressing. He saw her from behind in the glass between two lights. Her black eyes seemed blacker than ever. Her hair, undulating towards the ears, shone with a blue lustre; a rose in her chignon trembled on its mobile stalk, with artificial dewdrops on the tip of the leaves. She wore a gown of pale saffron trimmed with three bouquets of pompon roses mixed with green. Charles came and kissed her on her shoulder. "Let me alone!" she said; "you are tumbling me." One could hear the flourish of the violin and the notes of a horn. She went downstairs restraining herself from running. Dancing had begun. Guests were arriving. There was some crushing. She sat down on a form near the door. The quadrille over, the floor was occupied by groups of men standing up and talking and servants in livery bearing large trays. Along the line of seated women painted fans were fluttering, bouquets half hid smiling faces, and gold stoppered scent-bottles were turned in partly-closed hands, whose white gloves outlined the nails and tightened on the flesh at the wrists. Lace trimmings, diamond brooches, medallion bracelets trembled on bodices, gleamed on breasts, clinked on bare arms. The hair, well-smoothed over the temples and knotted at the nape, bore crowns, or bunches, or sprays of mytosotis, jasmine, pomegranate blossoms, ears of corn, and corn-flowers. Calmly seated in their places, mothers with forbidding countenances were wearing red turbans. Emma's heart beat rather faster when, her partner holding her by the tips of the fingers, she took her place in a line with the dancers, and waited for the first note to start. But her emotion soon vanished, and, swaying to the rhythm of the orchestra, she glided forward with slight movements of the neck. A smile rose to her lips at certain delicate phrases of the violin, that sometimes played alone while the other instruments were silent; one could hear the clear clink of the louis d'or that were being thrown down upon the card tables in the next room; then all struck again, the cornet-a-piston uttered its sonorous note, feet marked time, skirts swelled and rustled, hands touched and parted; the same eyes falling before you met yours again. A few men (some fifteen or so), of twenty-five to forty, scattered here and there among the dancers or talking at the doorways, distinguished themselves from the crowd by a certain air of breeding, whatever their differences in age, dress, or face. Their clothes, better made, seemed of finer cloth, and their hair, brought forward in curls towards the temples, glossy with more delicate pomades. They had the complexion of wealth--that clear complexion that is heightened by the pallor of porcelain, the shimmer of satin, the veneer of old furniture, and that an ordered regimen of exquisite nurture maintains at its best. Their necks moved easily in their low cravats, their long whiskers fell over their turned-down collars, they wiped their lips upon handkerchiefs with embroidered initials that gave forth a subtle perfume. Those who were beginning to grow old had an air of youth, while there was something mature in the faces of the young. In their unconcerned looks was the calm of passions daily satiated, and through all their gentleness of manner pierced that peculiar brutality, the result of a command of half-easy things, in which force is exercised and vanity amused--the management of thoroughbred horses and the society of loose women. A few steps from Emma a gentleman in a blue coat was talking of Italy with a pale young woman wearing a parure of pearls. They were praising the breadth of the columns of St. Peter's, Tivoly, Vesuvius, Castellamare, and Cassines, the roses of Genoa, the Coliseum by moonlight. With her other ear Emma was listening to a conversation full of words she did not understand. A circle gathered round a very young man who the week before had beaten "Miss Arabella" and "Romolus," and won two thousand louis jumping a ditch in England. One complained that his racehorses were growing fat; another of the printers' errors that had disfigured the name of his horse. The atmosphere of the ball was heavy; the lamps were growing dim. Guests were flocking to the billiard room. A servant got upon a chair and broke the window-panes. At the crash of the glass Madame Bovary turned her head and saw in the garden the faces of peasants pressed against the window looking in at them. Then the memory of the Bertaux came back to her. She saw the farm again, the muddy pond, her father in a blouse under the apple trees, and she saw herself again as formerly, skimming with her finger the cream off the milk-pans in the dairy. But in the refulgence of the present hour her past life, so distinct until then, faded away completely, and she almost doubted having lived it. She was there; beyond the ball was only shadow overspreading all the rest. She was just eating a maraschino ice that she held with her left hand in a silver-gilt cup, her eyes half-closed, and the spoon between her teeth. A lady near her dropped her fan. A gentlemen was passing. "Would you be so good," said the lady, "as to pick up my fan that has fallen behind the sofa?" The gentleman bowed, and as he moved to stretch out his arm, Emma saw the hand of a young woman throw something white, folded in a triangle, into his hat. The gentleman, picking up the fan, offered it to the lady respectfully; she thanked him with an inclination of the head, and began smelling her bouquet. After supper, where were plenty of Spanish and Rhine wines, soups a la bisque and au lait d'amandes*, puddings a la Trafalgar, and all sorts of cold meats with jellies that trembled in the dishes, the carriages one after the other began to drive off. Raising the corners of the muslin curtain, one could see the light of their lanterns glimmering through the darkness. The seats began to empty, some card-players were still left; the musicians were cooling the tips of their fingers on their tongues. Charles was half asleep, his back propped against a door. *With almond milk At three o'clock the cotillion began. Emma did not know how to waltz. Everyone was waltzing, Mademoiselle d'Andervilliers herself and the Marquis; only the guests staying at the castle were still there, about a dozen persons. One of the waltzers, however, who was familiarly called Viscount, and whose low cut waistcoat seemed moulded to his chest, came a second time to ask Madame Bovary to dance, assuring her that he would guide her, and that she would get through it very well. They began slowly, then went more rapidly. They turned; all around them was turning--the lamps, the furniture, the wainscoting, the floor, like a disc on a pivot. On passing near the doors the bottom of Emma's dress caught against his trousers. Their legs commingled; he looked down at her; she raised her eyes to his. A torpor seized her; she stopped. They started again, and with a more rapid movement; the Viscount, dragging her along disappeared with her to the end of the gallery, where panting, she almost fell, and for a moment rested her head upon his breast. And then, still turning, but more slowly, he guided her back to her seat. She leaned back against the wall and covered her eyes with her hands. When she opened them again, in the middle of the drawing room three waltzers were kneeling before a lady sitting on a stool. She chose the Viscount, and the violin struck up once more. Everyone looked at them. They passed and re-passed, she with rigid body, her chin bent down, and he always in the same pose, his figure curved, his elbow rounded, his chin thrown forward. That woman knew how to waltz! They kept up a long time, and tired out all the others. Then they talked a few moments longer, and after the goodnights, or rather good mornings, the guests of the chateau retired to bed. Charles dragged himself up by the balusters. His "knees were going up into his body." He had spent five consecutive hours standing bolt upright at the card tables, watching them play whist, without understanding anything about it, and it was with a deep sigh of relief that he pulled off his boots. Emma threw a shawl over her shoulders, opened the window, and leant out. The night was dark; some drops of rain were falling. She breathed in the damp wind that refreshed her eyelids. The music of the ball was still murmuring in her ears. And she tried to keep herself awake in order to prolong the illusion of this luxurious life that she would soon have to give up. Day began to break. She looked long at the windows of the chateau, trying to guess which were the rooms of all those she had noticed the evening before. She would fain have known their lives, have penetrated, blended with them. But she was shivering with cold. She undressed, and cowered down between the sheets against Charles, who was asleep. There were a great many people to luncheon. The repast lasted ten minutes; no liqueurs were served, which astonished the doctor. Next, Mademoiselle d'Andervilliers collected some pieces of roll in a small basket to take them to the swans on the ornamental waters, and they went to walk in the hot-houses, where strange plants, bristling with hairs, rose in pyramids under hanging vases, whence, as from over-filled nests of serpents, fell long green cords interlacing. The orangery, which was at the other end, led by a covered way to the outhouses of the chateau. The Marquis, to amuse the young woman, took her to see the stables. Above the basket-shaped racks porcelain slabs bore the names of the horses in black letters. Each animal in its stall whisked its tail when anyone went near and said "Tchk! tchk!" The boards of the harness room shone like the flooring of a drawing room. The carriage harness was piled up in the middle against two twisted columns, and the bits, the whips, the spurs, the curbs, were ranged in a line all along the wall. Charles, meanwhile, went to ask a groom to put his horse to. The dog-cart was brought to the foot of the steps, and, all the parcels being crammed in, the Bovarys paid their respects to the Marquis and Marchioness and set out again for Tostes. Emma watched the turning wheels in silence. Charles, on the extreme edge of the seat, held the reins with his two arms wide apart, and the little horse ambled along in the shafts that were too big for him. The loose reins hanging over his crupper were wet with foam, and the box fastened on behind the chaise gave great regular bumps against it. They were on the heights of Thibourville when suddenly some horsemen with cigars between their lips passed laughing. Emma thought she recognized the Viscount, turned back, and caught on the horizon only the movement of the heads rising or falling with the unequal cadence of the trot or gallop. A mile farther on they had to stop to mend with some string the traces that had broken. But Charles, giving a last look to the harness, saw something on the ground between his horse's legs, and he picked up a cigar-case with a green silk border and beblazoned in the centre like the door of a carriage. "There are even two cigars in it," said he; "they'll do for this evening after dinner." "Why, do you smoke?" she asked. "Sometimes, when I get a chance." He put his find in his pocket and whipped up the nag. When they reached home the dinner was not ready. Madame lost her temper. Nastasie answered rudely. "Leave the room!" said Emma. "You are forgetting yourself. I give you warning." For dinner there was onion soup and a piece of veal with sorrel. Charles, seated opposite Emma, rubbed his hands gleefully. "How good it is to be at home again!" Nastasie could be heard crying. He was rather fond of the poor girl. She had formerly, during the wearisome time of his widowhood, kept him company many an evening. She had been his first patient, his oldest acquaintance in the place. "Have you given her warning for good?" he asked at last. "Yes. Who is to prevent me?" she replied. Then they warmed themselves in the kitchen while their room was being made ready. Charles began to smoke. He smoked with lips protruding, spitting every moment, recoiling at every puff. "You'll make yourself ill," she said scornfully. He put down his cigar and ran to swallow a glass of cold water at the pump. Emma seizing hold of the cigar case threw it quickly to the back of the cupboard. The next day was a long one. She walked about her little garden, up and down the same walks, stopping before the beds, before the espalier, before the plaster curate, looking with amazement at all these things of once-on-a-time that she knew so well. How far off the ball seemed already! What was it that thus set so far asunder the morning of the day before yesterday and the evening of to-day? Her journey to Vaubyessard had made a hole in her life, like one of those great crevices that a storm will sometimes make in one night in mountains. Still she was resigned. She devoutly put away in her drawers her beautiful dress, down to the satin shoes whose soles were yellowed with the slippery wax of the dancing floor. Her heart was like these. In its friction against wealth something had come over it that could not be effaced. The memory of this ball, then, became an occupation for Emma. Whenever the Wednesday came round she said to herself as she awoke, "Ah! I was there a week--a fortnight--three weeks ago." And little by little the faces grew confused in her remembrance. She forgot the tune of the quadrilles; she no longer saw the liveries and appointments so distinctly; some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her.

Chapter 8

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary18.asp

La Vaubyessard is a sprawling mansion located on a scenic stretch of land. Emma is taken in by the grandeur of the place and the people who have gathered there. Flaubert describes the dinner scene in vivid detail and through Emma's eyes. As Emma prepares for the ball, she discourages her husband from attempting to dance and repulses his attempts to kiss her, on the grounds that he will crumple her dress. At the ball, she is in her romantic dream and eagerly drinks in all the glamour and conversation that the night has to offer. When a Viscount asks Emma to dance with him, she is thrilled. In fact, the entire evening is wonderful to her. Back in her room after the dance, Emma strains to "keep awake and so prolong the spell of this luxurious life she must so soon abandon." After breakfast the following morning, the Bovarys leave for Tostes. On the way back, while stopping to adjust the harness, Charles spies a cigar case and picks it up. Finding a few cigars in it, he decides to pocket it. Back at home, Emma scornfully watches as the unworldly Charles struggles to smoke a cigar. When he leaves the room, she picks up the cigar case and hides it at the back of the cupboard. She also flies into a temper and dismisses the maid. Emma is obviously not pleased to be home. As the trip to La Vaubyessard is distanced from her memory, "some of the details vanished, but her yearning for it all remained."

Notes For once fantasy and reality merge in Emma's life at the La Vaubyessard ball. Ironically, she gets the chance to rub shoulders with nobility through her lowly husband, who has treated the Marquis as a patient. When she compares Charles to the noble men at the ball, she finds her husband to be clumsy, boring and incapable of mixing with high society. Ironically, no one, except the one Viscount, takes much notice of Emma. She is obviously not a part of this wealthy society that is characterized by snobbery. She thinks, however, that she fits in well and believes she is entitled to better things than what Charles can offer her. Although Emma is firmly rooted in her middle-class, country origins, she will try to move upward socially throughout the novel. Flaubert explains that "her heart was like that. Contact with riches had left upon it a coating that would never wear off." Upon her return to the reality of her life in Tostes, Emma is reminded of its contrast to the Marquis' mansion and doubly disappointed with her own miserable existence. She is repulsed when she sees her uncouth husband struggling to smoke a cigar; as a result, she hides the cigar case that Charles found on the way home from the ball. Later, Emma will look upon the case as a reminder of the time spent at La Vaubyessard.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/09.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_8_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 9

chapter 9

{"name": "Chapter 9", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary19.asp", "summary": "Life after the ball at La Vaubyessard depresses Emma, and she spends even more time in wild imaginings in order to escape the dull and oppressive reality of her life. She holds onto the cigar case as a memento of that memorable night and weaves a fantastic tale about the case, which she pretends belongs to the Viscount. She also lets her imagination take her to Paris and other fashionable places. She reads magazines to stay abreast of the latest fashions and imagines wearing them. Through her dream wold, Emma imagines the world as she wants it to be, and it is always filled with ambassadors, duchesses, and private rooms in restaurants. Emma takes in a girl of fourteen, Felicite, as the maid and trains her in household management. Although this task is time consuming and despite her many other diversions, Emma feels stifled and cannot concentrate on anything. She thinks anything would be an improvement over Tostes, and she longs to travel or go back to the convent or live in Paris or die. Charles, in the meantime, has prospered in his small medical practice. He has also grown accustomed to returning home in the evening \"to a blazing fire and supper waiting, to a comfortable chair and a neat, attractive wife.\" He could not be any happier. Emma, however, still longs for him to be more refined. \" She would have liked this name of Bovary, that was hers, to be famous. ... But Charles had no ambition. \" With the passage of time, Charles grows even more irritating to Emma. She cannot stand that he dozes off when he tries to read. She resents that he never talks to her. In fact, Emma realizes that she confides more in her greyhound than in her husband. She is also depressed by the winter weather and seems to lose all her zest for living. She neglects her piano, her drawing, and her needlework, and she has read almost everything available in Tostes. Emma grows moody. She is hard to please, and her behavior becomes unpredictable. \"Sometimes she expressed peculiar opinions, censuring what was generally approved, and approving what was perverted or immoral, which made her husband stare at her wide-eyed.\" She was also not in control of her emotions. At one moment she is \"all fire and brimstone;\" at the next moment, she is \"sweetness and light.\" A visit from her father does not improve her condition, and there is still friction with her mother- in-law, especially when she tries to give Emma advice. Emma sinks further into depression, and none of Charles' medications are of any help. Charles blames Emma's behavior on Tostes, for she has always complained about the place. He considers setting up practice elsewhere and looks for suitable opportunities. He hears of a market town in the Neufchatel district, called Yonville-L'Abbaye, where a doctor is needed there. The Bovarys start packing to move out of Tostes. As they pack, Emma comes across her bridal bouquet. One of the wires binding the blossoms pricks her. She reacts strongly and immediately, tossing the bouquet into the fire. Then she watches it burn to cinders; the ashes match her mood. A brief but important statement is made at the chapter's end: \"When they left Tostes in March, Madame Bovary was pregnant.\"", "analysis": "Notes In this chapter, Flaubert exposes the weaknesses of Emma's highly romantic imagination. She spends almost all her waking hours in creating fantasies in order to escape from her general dissatisfaction with life and the miserable relationship with her husband. She dreams of her husband becoming famous, but Charles does not have it in his nature to seek fame or glory. She reads romantic novels, especially those written by Balzac and George Sand. \" And all the time, deep within her, she was waiting for something to happen. . .every morning when she woke up she hoped to find it there.\" Frustrated on all counts when nothing happens in her life, Emma enters a major phase of depression. She cannot sustain an interest in anything, and she suffers from sudden shifts in mood. She feels totally isolated and longs for conversation and attention, but Charles is clearly not suited to the task. The \"peculiar opinions\" that Emma expresses, however, are radical enough for her husband to feel anxious about her. As a result, he decides to find a new medical practice and move Emma out of Tostes, since she has always hated the village. It is important to notice the burning of the bridal bouquet. The action clearly foreshadows the fact that Emma is soon to \"burn\" her marital bond to Charles by having an adulterous affair. It is also important to notice that the chapter and Part One closes with the announcement that Emma is pregnant."}

Often when Charles was out she took from the cupboard, between the folds of the linen where she had left it, the green silk cigar case. She looked at it, opened it, and even smelt the odour of the lining--a mixture of verbena and tobacco. Whose was it? The Viscount's? Perhaps it was a present from his mistress. It had been embroidered on some rosewood frame, a pretty little thing, hidden from all eyes, that had occupied many hours, and over which had fallen the soft curls of the pensive worker. A breath of love had passed over the stitches on the canvas; each prick of the needle had fixed there a hope or a memory, and all those interwoven threads of silk were but the continuity of the same silent passion. And then one morning the Viscount had taken it away with him. Of what had they spoken when it lay upon the wide-mantelled chimneys between flower-vases and Pompadour clocks? She was at Tostes; he was at Paris now, far away! What was this Paris like? What a vague name! She repeated it in a low voice, for the mere pleasure of it; it rang in her ears like a great cathedral bell; it shone before her eyes, even on the labels of her pomade-pots. At night, when the carriers passed under her windows in their carts singing the "Marjolaine," she awoke, and listened to the noise of the iron-bound wheels, which, as they gained the country road, was soon deadened by the soil. "They will be there to-morrow!" she said to herself. And she followed them in thought up and down the hills, traversing villages, gliding along the highroads by the light of the stars. At the end of some indefinite distance there was always a confused spot, into which her dream died. She bought a plan of Paris, and with the tip of her finger on the map she walked about the capital. She went up the boulevards, stopping at every turning, between the lines of the streets, in front of the white squares that represented the houses. At last she would close the lids of her weary eyes, and see in the darkness the gas jets flaring in the wind and the steps of carriages lowered with much noise before the peristyles of theatres. She took in "La Corbeille," a lady's journal, and the "Sylphe des Salons." She devoured, without skipping a word, all the accounts of first nights, races, and soirees, took interest in the debut of a singer, in the opening of a new shop. She knew the latest fashions, the addresses of the best tailors, the days of the Bois and the Opera. In Eugene Sue she studied descriptions of furniture; she read Balzac and George Sand, seeking in them imaginary satisfaction for her own desires. Even at table she had her book by her, and turned over the pages while Charles ate and talked to her. The memory of the Viscount always returned as she read. Between him and the imaginary personages she made comparisons. But the circle of which he was the centre gradually widened round him, and the aureole that he bore, fading from his form, broadened out beyond, lighting up her other dreams. Paris, more vague than the ocean, glimmered before Emma's eyes in an atmosphere of vermilion. The many lives that stirred amid this tumult were, however, divided into parts, classed as distinct pictures. Emma perceived only two or three that hid from her all the rest, and in themselves represented all humanity. The world of ambassadors moved over polished floors in drawing rooms lined with mirrors, round oval tables covered with velvet and gold-fringed cloths. There were dresses with trains, deep mysteries, anguish hidden beneath smiles. Then came the society of the duchesses; all were pale; all got up at four o'clock; the women, poor angels, wore English point on their petticoats; and the men, unappreciated geniuses under a frivolous outward seeming, rode horses to death at pleasure parties, spent the summer season at Baden, and towards the forties married heiresses. In the private rooms of restaurants, where one sups after midnight by the light of wax candles, laughed the motley crowd of men of letters and actresses. They were prodigal as kings, full of ideal, ambitious, fantastic frenzy. This was an existence outside that of all others, between heaven and earth, in the midst of storms, having something of the sublime. For the rest of the world it was lost, with no particular place and as if non-existent. The nearer things were, moreover, the more her thoughts turned away from them. All her immediate surroundings, the wearisome country, the middle-class imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to her exceptional, a peculiar chance that had caught hold of her, while beyond stretched, as far as eye could see, an immense land of joys and passions. She confused in her desire the sensualities of luxury with the delights of the heart, elegance of manners with delicacy of sentiment. Did not love, like Indian plants, need a special soil, a particular temperature? Signs by moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over yielded hands, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness could not be separated from the balconies of great castles full of indolence, from boudoirs with silken curtains and thick carpets, well-filled flower-stands, a bed on a raised dias, nor from the flashing of precious stones and the shoulder-knots of liveries. The lad from the posting house who came to groom the mare every morning passed through the passage with his heavy wooden shoes; there were holes in his blouse; his feet were bare in list slippers. And this was the groom in knee-britches with whom she had to be content! His work done, he did not come back again all day, for Charles on his return put up his horse himself, unsaddled him and put on the halter, while the servant-girl brought a bundle of straw and threw it as best she could into the manger. To replace Nastasie (who left Tostes shedding torrents of tears) Emma took into her service a young girl of fourteen, an orphan with a sweet face. She forbade her wearing cotton caps, taught her to address her in the third person, to bring a glass of water on a plate, to knock before coming into a room, to iron, starch, and to dress her--wanted to make a lady's-maid of her. The new servant obeyed without a murmur, so as not to be sent away; and as madame usually left the key in the sideboard, Felicite every evening took a small supply of sugar that she ate alone in her bed after she had said her prayers. Sometimes in the afternoon she went to chat with the postilions. Madame was in her room upstairs. She wore an open dressing gown that showed between the shawl facings of her bodice a pleated chamisette with three gold buttons. Her belt was a corded girdle with great tassels, and her small garnet coloured slippers had a large knot of ribbon that fell over her instep. She had bought herself a blotting book, writing case, pen-holder, and envelopes, although she had no one to write to; she dusted her what-not, looked at herself in the glass, picked up a book, and then, dreaming between the lines, let it drop on her knees. She longed to travel or to go back to her convent. She wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris. Charles in snow and rain trotted across country. He ate omelettes on farmhouse tables, poked his arm into damp beds, received the tepid spurt of blood-lettings in his face, listened to death-rattles, examined basins, turned over a good deal of dirty linen; but every evening he found a blazing fire, his dinner ready, easy-chairs, and a well-dressed woman, charming with an odour of freshness, though no one could say whence the perfume came, or if it were not her skin that made odorous her chemise. She charmed him by numerous attentions; now it was some new way of arranging paper sconces for the candles, a flounce that she altered on her gown, or an extraordinary name for some very simple dish that the servant had spoilt, but that Charles swallowed with pleasure to the last mouthful. At Rouen she saw some ladies who wore a bunch of charms on the watch-chains; she bought some charms. She wanted for her mantelpiece two large blue glass vases, and some time after an ivory necessaire with a silver-gilt thimble. The less Charles understood these refinements the more they seduced him. They added something to the pleasure of the senses and to the comfort of his fireside. It was like a golden dust sanding all along the narrow path of his life. He was well, looked well; his reputation was firmly established. The country-folk loved him because he was not proud. He petted the children, never went to the public house, and, moreover, his morals inspired confidence. He was specially successful with catarrhs and chest complaints. Being much afraid of killing his patients, Charles, in fact only prescribed sedatives, from time to time and emetic, a footbath, or leeches. It was not that he was afraid of surgery; he bled people copiously like horses, and for the taking out of teeth he had the "devil's own wrist." Finally, to keep up with the times, he took in "La Ruche Medicale," a new journal whose prospectus had been sent him. He read it a little after dinner, but in about five minutes the warmth of the room added to the effect of his dinner sent him to sleep; and he sat there, his chin on his two hands and his hair spreading like a mane to the foot of the lamp. Emma looked at him and shrugged her shoulders. Why, at least, was not her husband one of those men of taciturn passions who work at their books all night, and at last, when about sixty, the age of rheumatism sets in, wear a string of orders on their ill-fitting black coat? She could have wished this name of Bovary, which was hers, had been illustrious, to see it displayed at the booksellers', repeated in the newspapers, known to all France. But Charles had no ambition. An Yvetot doctor whom he had lately met in consultation had somewhat humiliated him at the very bedside of the patient, before the assembled relatives. When, in the evening, Charles told her this anecdote, Emma inveighed loudly against his colleague. Charles was much touched. He kissed her forehead with a tear in his eyes. But she was angered with shame; she felt a wild desire to strike him; she went to open the window in the passage and breathed in the fresh air to calm herself. "What a man! What a man!" she said in a low voice, biting her lips. Besides, she was becoming more irritated with him. As he grew older his manner grew heavier; at dessert he cut the corks of the empty bottles; after eating he cleaned his teeth with his tongue; in taking soup he made a gurgling noise with every spoonful; and, as he was getting fatter, the puffed-out cheeks seemed to push the eyes, always small, up to the temples. Sometimes Emma tucked the red borders of his under-vest unto his waistcoat, rearranged his cravat, and threw away the dirty gloves he was going to put on; and this was not, as he fancied, for himself; it was for herself, by a diffusion of egotism, of nervous irritation. Sometimes, too, she told him of what she had read, such as a passage in a novel, of a new play, or an anecdote of the "upper ten" that she had seen in a feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was something, an ever-open ear, and ever-ready approbation. She confided many a thing to her greyhound. She would have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to the pendulum of the clock. At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow. Spring came round. With the first warm weather, when the pear trees began to blossom, she suffered from dyspnoea. From the beginning of July she counted how many weeks there were to October, thinking that perhaps the Marquis d'Andervilliers would give another ball at Vaubyessard. But all September passed without letters or visits. After the ennui of this disappointment her heart once more remained empty, and then the same series of days recommenced. So now they would thus follow one another, always the same, immovable, and bringing nothing. Other lives, however flat, had at least the chance of some event. One adventure sometimes brought with it infinite consequences and the scene changed. But nothing happened to her; God had willed it so! The future was a dark corridor, with its door at the end shut fast. She gave up music. What was the good of playing? Who would hear her? Since she could never, in a velvet gown with short sleeves, striking with her light fingers the ivory keys of an Erard at a concert, feel the murmur of ecstasy envelop her like a breeze, it was not worth while boring herself with practicing. Her drawing cardboard and her embroidery she left in the cupboard. What was the good? What was the good? Sewing irritated her. "I have read everything," she said to herself. And she sat there making the tongs red-hot, or looked at the rain falling. How sad she was on Sundays when vespers sounded! She listened with dull attention to each stroke of the cracked bell. A cat slowly walking over some roof put up his back in the pale rays of the sun. The wind on the highroad blew up clouds of dust. Afar off a dog sometimes howled; and the bell, keeping time, continued its monotonous ringing that died away over the fields. But the people came out from church. The women in waxed clogs, the peasants in new blouses, the little bare-headed children skipping along in front of them, all were going home. And till nightfall, five or six men, always the same, stayed playing at corks in front of the large door of the inn. The winter was severe. The windows every morning were covered with rime, and the light shining through them, dim as through ground-glass, sometimes did not change the whole day long. At four o'clock the lamp had to be lighted. On fine days she went down into the garden. The dew had left on the cabbages a silver lace with long transparent threads spreading from one to the other. No birds were to be heard; everything seemed asleep, the espalier covered with straw, and the vine, like a great sick serpent under the coping of the wall, along which, on drawing near, one saw the many-footed woodlice crawling. Under the spruce by the hedgerow, the curie in the three-cornered hat reading his breviary had lost his right foot, and the very plaster, scaling off with the frost, had left white scabs on his face. Then she went up again, shut her door, put on coals, and fainting with the heat of the hearth, felt her boredom weigh more heavily than ever. She would have liked to go down and talk to the servant, but a sense of shame restrained her. Every day at the same time the schoolmaster in a black skullcap opened the shutters of his house, and the rural policeman, wearing his sabre over his blouse, passed by. Night and morning the post-horses, three by three, crossed the street to water at the pond. From time to time the bell of a public house door rang, and when it was windy one could hear the little brass basins that served as signs for the hairdresser's shop creaking on their two rods. This shop had as decoration an old engraving of a fashion-plate stuck against a windowpane and the wax bust of a woman with yellow hair. He, too, the hairdresser, lamented his wasted calling, his hopeless future, and dreaming of some shop in a big town--at Rouen, for example, overlooking the harbour, near the theatre--he walked up and down all day from the mairie to the church, sombre and waiting for customers. When Madame Bovary looked up, she always saw him there, like a sentinel on duty, with his skullcap over his ears and his vest of lasting. Sometimes in the afternoon outside the window of her room, the head of a man appeared, a swarthy head with black whiskers, smiling slowly, with a broad, gentle smile that showed his white teeth. A waltz immediately began and on the organ, in a little drawing room, dancers the size of a finger, women in pink turbans, Tyrolians in jackets, monkeys in frock coats, gentlemen in knee-breeches, turned and turned between the sofas, the consoles, multiplied in the bits of looking glass held together at their corners by a piece of gold paper. The man turned his handle, looking to the right and left, and up at the windows. Now and again, while he shot out a long squirt of brown saliva against the milestone, with his knee raised his instrument, whose hard straps tired his shoulder; and now, doleful and drawling, or gay and hurried, the music escaped from the box, droning through a curtain of pink taffeta under a brass claw in arabesque. They were airs played in other places at the theatres, sung in drawing rooms, danced to at night under lighted lustres, echoes of the world that reached even to Emma. Endless sarabands ran through her head, and, like an Indian dancing girl on the flowers of a carpet, her thoughts leapt with the notes, swung from dream to dream, from sadness to sadness. When the man had caught some coppers in his cap, he drew down an old cover of blue cloth, hitched his organ on to his back, and went off with a heavy tread. She watched him going. But it was above all the meal-times that were unbearable to her, in this small room on the ground floor, with its smoking stove, its creaking door, the walls that sweated, the damp flags; all the bitterness in life seemed served up on her plate, and with smoke of the boiled beef there rose from her secret soul whiffs of sickliness. Charles was a slow eater; she played with a few nuts, or, leaning on her elbow, amused herself with drawing lines along the oilcloth table cover with the point of her knife. She now let everything in her household take care of itself, and Madame Bovary senior, when she came to spend part of Lent at Tostes, was much surprised at the change. She who was formerly so careful, so dainty, now passed whole days without dressing, wore grey cotton stockings, and burnt tallow candles. She kept saying they must be economical since they were not rich, adding that she was very contented, very happy, that Tostes pleased her very much, with other speeches that closed the mouth of her mother-in-law. Besides, Emma no longer seemed inclined to follow her advice; once even, Madame Bovary having thought fit to maintain that mistresses ought to keep an eye on the religion of their servants, she had answered with so angry a look and so cold a smile that the good woman did not interfere again. Emma was growing difficult, capricious. She ordered dishes for herself, then she did not touch them; one day drank only pure milk, the next cups of tea by the dozen. Often she persisted in not going out, then, stifling, threw open the windows and put on light dresses. After she had well scolded her servant she gave her presents or sent her out to see neighbours, just as she sometimes threw beggars all the silver in her purse, although she was by no means tender-hearted or easily accessible to the feelings of others, like most country-bred people, who always retain in their souls something of the horny hardness of the paternal hands. Towards the end of February old Rouault, in memory of his cure, himself brought his son-in-law a superb turkey, and stayed three days at Tostes. Charles being with his patients, Emma kept him company. He smoked in the room, spat on the firedogs, talked farming, calves, cows, poultry, and municipal council, so that when he left she closed the door on him with a feeling of satisfaction that surprised even herself. Moreover she no longer concealed her contempt for anything or anybody, and at times she set herself to express singular opinions, finding fault with that which others approved, and approving things perverse and immoral, all of which made her husband open his eyes widely. Would this misery last for ever? Would she never issue from it? Yet she was as good as all the women who were living happily. She had seen duchesses at Vaubyessard with clumsier waists and commoner ways, and she execrated the injustice of God. She leant her head against the walls to weep; she envied lives of stir; longed for masked balls, for violent pleasures, with all the wildness that she did not know, but that these must surely yield. She grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the heart. Charles prescribed valerian and camphor baths. Everything that was tried only seemed to irritate her the more. On certain days she chatted with feverish rapidity, and this over-excitement was suddenly followed by a state of torpor, in which she remained without speaking, without moving. What then revived her was pouring a bottle of eau-de-cologne over her arms. As she was constantly complaining about Tostes, Charles fancied that her illness was no doubt due to some local cause, and fixing on this idea, began to think seriously of setting up elsewhere. From that moment she drank vinegar, contracted a sharp little cough, and completely lost her appetite. It cost Charles much to give up Tostes after living there four years and "when he was beginning to get on there." Yet if it must be! He took her to Rouen to see his old master. It was a nervous complaint: change of air was needed. After looking about him on this side and on that, Charles learnt that in the Neufchatel arrondissement there was a considerable market town called Yonville-l'Abbaye, whose doctor, a Polish refugee, had decamped a week before. Then he wrote to the chemist of the place to ask the number of the population, the distance from the nearest doctor, what his predecessor had made a year, and so forth; and the answer being satisfactory, he made up his mind to move towards the spring, if Emma's health did not improve. One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer, something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding bouquet. The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver bordered satin ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was, like a red bush in the cinders, slowly devoured. She watched it burn. The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold lace melted; and the shriveled paper corollas, fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at last flew up the chimney. When they left Tostes at the month of March, Madame Bovary was pregnant. Part II

Chapter 9

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary19.asp

Life after the ball at La Vaubyessard depresses Emma, and she spends even more time in wild imaginings in order to escape the dull and oppressive reality of her life. She holds onto the cigar case as a memento of that memorable night and weaves a fantastic tale about the case, which she pretends belongs to the Viscount. She also lets her imagination take her to Paris and other fashionable places. She reads magazines to stay abreast of the latest fashions and imagines wearing them. Through her dream wold, Emma imagines the world as she wants it to be, and it is always filled with ambassadors, duchesses, and private rooms in restaurants. Emma takes in a girl of fourteen, Felicite, as the maid and trains her in household management. Although this task is time consuming and despite her many other diversions, Emma feels stifled and cannot concentrate on anything. She thinks anything would be an improvement over Tostes, and she longs to travel or go back to the convent or live in Paris or die. Charles, in the meantime, has prospered in his small medical practice. He has also grown accustomed to returning home in the evening "to a blazing fire and supper waiting, to a comfortable chair and a neat, attractive wife." He could not be any happier. Emma, however, still longs for him to be more refined. " She would have liked this name of Bovary, that was hers, to be famous. ... But Charles had no ambition. " With the passage of time, Charles grows even more irritating to Emma. She cannot stand that he dozes off when he tries to read. She resents that he never talks to her. In fact, Emma realizes that she confides more in her greyhound than in her husband. She is also depressed by the winter weather and seems to lose all her zest for living. She neglects her piano, her drawing, and her needlework, and she has read almost everything available in Tostes. Emma grows moody. She is hard to please, and her behavior becomes unpredictable. "Sometimes she expressed peculiar opinions, censuring what was generally approved, and approving what was perverted or immoral, which made her husband stare at her wide-eyed." She was also not in control of her emotions. At one moment she is "all fire and brimstone;" at the next moment, she is "sweetness and light." A visit from her father does not improve her condition, and there is still friction with her mother- in-law, especially when she tries to give Emma advice. Emma sinks further into depression, and none of Charles' medications are of any help. Charles blames Emma's behavior on Tostes, for she has always complained about the place. He considers setting up practice elsewhere and looks for suitable opportunities. He hears of a market town in the Neufchatel district, called Yonville-L'Abbaye, where a doctor is needed there. The Bovarys start packing to move out of Tostes. As they pack, Emma comes across her bridal bouquet. One of the wires binding the blossoms pricks her. She reacts strongly and immediately, tossing the bouquet into the fire. Then she watches it burn to cinders; the ashes match her mood. A brief but important statement is made at the chapter's end: "When they left Tostes in March, Madame Bovary was pregnant."

Notes In this chapter, Flaubert exposes the weaknesses of Emma's highly romantic imagination. She spends almost all her waking hours in creating fantasies in order to escape from her general dissatisfaction with life and the miserable relationship with her husband. She dreams of her husband becoming famous, but Charles does not have it in his nature to seek fame or glory. She reads romantic novels, especially those written by Balzac and George Sand. " And all the time, deep within her, she was waiting for something to happen. . .every morning when she woke up she hoped to find it there." Frustrated on all counts when nothing happens in her life, Emma enters a major phase of depression. She cannot sustain an interest in anything, and she suffers from sudden shifts in mood. She feels totally isolated and longs for conversation and attention, but Charles is clearly not suited to the task. The "peculiar opinions" that Emma expresses, however, are radical enough for her husband to feel anxious about her. As a result, he decides to find a new medical practice and move Emma out of Tostes, since she has always hated the village. It is important to notice the burning of the bridal bouquet. The action clearly foreshadows the fact that Emma is soon to "burn" her marital bond to Charles by having an adulterous affair. It is also important to notice that the chapter and Part One closes with the announcement that Emma is pregnant.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/10.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_9_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 1

chapter 1

{"name": "Chapter 1", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary21.asp", "summary": "Yonville is a sleepy little town that Flaubert intimately describes, giving details about the church, the market place, the chemist's shop, and the Golden Lion Inn. He also introduces Madame Lefrancois , Monsieur Homais , Monsieur Binet , and the priest. It is a busy night in Yonville, for the market is open the next day. Amidst the activity, Emma and Charges Bovary arrive in a coach, the Hirondelle. Emma is extremely upset at having lost her greyhound during the journey. Monsieur Lheureux, one of her fellow passengers who is a draper, tries to console her.", "analysis": "Notes As Flaubert describes the route to Yonville and the surroundings of the town, it is clear to see why he is judged as such an outstanding writer of realistic fiction. The minute details that he gives help to familiarize the reader with the place even before the Bovarys arrive. Flaubert also makes it obvious that Yonville is a sleepy little town, with no more activity or possibility than Tostes. The reader is made to think that Emma probably will not like it here either. In fact, she arrives in a foul mood, for she has lost her greyhound during the journey. This chapter also introduces some of the characters whose actions gain importance later in the plot. The reader learns that Madame Lefrancois is a shrewd businesswoman; Homais is anti-church; the cure is a timid sort; and Binet is soldier-like in all his habits. Lheureux is also introduced, and he will assume villainous dimensions later in the novel. He is the first of several characters who betray Emma after she relies on them for comfort."}

Yonville-l'Abbaye (so called from an old Capuchin abbey of which not even the ruins remain) is a market-town twenty-four miles from Rouen, between the Abbeville and Beauvais roads, at the foot of a valley watered by the Rieule, a little river that runs into the Andelle after turning three water-mills near its mouth, where there are a few trout that the lads amuse themselves by fishing for on Sundays. We leave the highroad at La Boissiere and keep straight on to the top of the Leux hill, whence the valley is seen. The river that runs through it makes of it, as it were, two regions with distinct physiognomies--all on the left is pasture land, all of the right arable. The meadow stretches under a bulge of low hills to join at the back with the pasture land of the Bray country, while on the eastern side, the plain, gently rising, broadens out, showing as far as eye can follow its blond cornfields. The water, flowing by the grass, divides with a white line the colour of the roads and of the plains, and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver. Before us, on the verge of the horizon, lie the oaks of the forest of Argueil, with the steeps of the Saint-Jean hills scarred from top to bottom with red irregular lines; they are rain tracks, and these brick-tones standing out in narrow streaks against the grey colour of the mountain are due to the quantity of iron springs that flow beyond in the neighboring country. Here we are on the confines of Normandy, Picardy, and the Ile-de-France, a bastard land whose language is without accent and its landscape is without character. It is there that they make the worst Neufchatel cheeses of all the arrondissement; and, on the other hand, farming is costly because so much manure is needed to enrich this friable soil full of sand and flints. Up to 1835 there was no practicable road for getting to Yonville, but about this time a cross-road was made which joins that of Abbeville to that of Amiens, and is occasionally used by the Rouen wagoners on their way to Flanders. Yonville-l'Abbaye has remained stationary in spite of its "new outlet." Instead of improving the soil, they persist in keeping up the pasture lands, however depreciated they may be in value, and the lazy borough, growing away from the plain, has naturally spread riverwards. It is seem from afar sprawling along the banks like a cowherd taking a siesta by the water-side. At the foot of the hill beyond the bridge begins a roadway, planted with young aspens, that leads in a straight line to the first houses in the place. These, fenced in by hedges, are in the middle of courtyards full of straggling buildings, wine-presses, cart-sheds and distilleries scattered under thick trees, with ladders, poles, or scythes hung on to the branches. The thatched roofs, like fur caps drawn over eyes, reach down over about a third of the low windows, whose coarse convex glasses have knots in the middle like the bottoms of bottles. Against the plaster wall diagonally crossed by black joists, a meagre pear-tree sometimes leans and the ground-floors have at their door a small swing-gate to keep out the chicks that come pilfering crumbs of bread steeped in cider on the threshold. But the courtyards grow narrower, the houses closer together, and the fences disappear; a bundle of ferns swings under a window from the end of a broomstick; there is a blacksmith's forge and then a wheelwright's, with two or three new carts outside that partly block the way. Then across an open space appears a white house beyond a grass mound ornamented by a Cupid, his finger on his lips; two brass vases are at each end of a flight of steps; scutcheons* blaze upon the door. It is the notary's house, and the finest in the place. *The panonceaux that have to be hung over the doors of notaries. The Church is on the other side of the street, twenty paces farther down, at the entrance of the square. The little cemetery that surrounds it, closed in by a wall breast high, is so full of graves that the old stones, level with the ground, form a continuous pavement, on which the grass of itself has marked out regular green squares. The church was rebuilt during the last years of the reign of Charles X. The wooden roof is beginning to rot from the top, and here and there has black hollows in its blue colour. Over the door, where the organ should be, is a loft for the men, with a spiral staircase that reverberates under their wooden shoes. The daylight coming through the plain glass windows falls obliquely upon the pews ranged along the walls, which are adorned here and there with a straw mat bearing beneath it the words in large letters, "Mr. So-and-so's pew." Farther on, at a spot where the building narrows, the confessional forms a pendant to a statuette of the Virgin, clothed in a satin robe, coifed with a tulle veil sprinkled with silver stars, and with red cheeks, like an idol of the Sandwich Islands; and, finally, a copy of the "Holy Family, presented by the Minister of the Interior," overlooking the high altar, between four candlesticks, closes in the perspective. The choir stalls, of deal wood, have been left unpainted. The market, that is to say, a tiled roof supported by some twenty posts, occupies of itself about half the public square of Yonville. The town hall, constructed "from the designs of a Paris architect," is a sort of Greek temple that forms the corner next to the chemist's shop. On the ground-floor are three Ionic columns and on the first floor a semicircular gallery, while the dome that crowns it is occupied by a Gallic cock, resting one foot upon the "Charte" and holding in the other the scales of Justice. But that which most attracts the eye is opposite the Lion d'Or inn, the chemist's shop of Monsieur Homais. In the evening especially its argand lamp is lit up and the red and green jars that embellish his shop-front throw far across the street their two streams of colour; then across them as if in Bengal lights is seen the shadow of the chemist leaning over his desk. His house from top to bottom is placarded with inscriptions written in large hand, round hand, printed hand: "Vichy, Seltzer, Barege waters, blood purifiers, Raspail patent medicine, Arabian racahout, Darcet lozenges, Regnault paste, trusses, baths, hygienic chocolate," etc. And the signboard, which takes up all the breadth of the shop, bears in gold letters, "Homais, Chemist." Then at the back of the shop, behind the great scales fixed to the counter, the word "Laboratory" appears on a scroll above a glass door, which about half-way up once more repeats "Homais" in gold letters on a black ground. Beyond this there is nothing to see at Yonville. The street (the only one) a gunshot in length and flanked by a few shops on either side stops short at the turn of the highroad. If it is left on the right hand and the foot of the Saint-Jean hills followed the cemetery is soon reached. At the time of the cholera, in order to enlarge this, a piece of wall was pulled down, and three acres of land by its side purchased; but all the new portion is almost tenantless; the tombs, as heretofore, continue to crowd together towards the gate. The keeper, who is at once gravedigger and church beadle (thus making a double profit out of the parish corpses), has taken advantage of the unused plot of ground to plant potatoes there. From year to year, however, his small field grows smaller, and when there is an epidemic, he does not know whether to rejoice at the deaths or regret the burials. "You live on the dead, Lestiboudois!" the curie at last said to him one day. This grim remark made him reflect; it checked him for some time; but to this day he carries on the cultivation of his little tubers, and even maintains stoutly that they grow naturally. Since the events about to be narrated, nothing in fact has changed at Yonville. The tin tricolour flag still swings at the top of the church-steeple; the two chintz streamers still flutter in the wind from the linen-draper's; the chemist's fetuses, like lumps of white amadou, rot more and more in their turbid alcohol, and above the big door of the inn the old golden lion, faded by rain, still shows passers-by its poodle mane. On the evening when the Bovarys were to arrive at Yonville, Widow Lefrancois, the landlady of this inn, was so very busy that she sweated great drops as she moved her saucepans. To-morrow was market-day. The meat had to be cut beforehand, the fowls drawn, the soup and coffee made. Moreover, she had the boarders' meal to see to, and that of the doctor, his wife, and their servant; the billiard-room was echoing with bursts of laughter; three millers in a small parlour were calling for brandy; the wood was blazing, the brazen pan was hissing, and on the long kitchen table, amid the quarters of raw mutton, rose piles of plates that rattled with the shaking of the block on which spinach was being chopped. From the poultry-yard was heard the screaming of the fowls whom the servant was chasing in order to wring their necks. A man slightly marked with small-pox, in green leather slippers, and wearing a velvet cap with a gold tassel, was warming his back at the chimney. His face expressed nothing but self-satisfaction, and he appeared to take life as calmly as the goldfinch suspended over his head in its wicker cage: this was the chemist. "Artemise!" shouted the landlady, "chop some wood, fill the water bottles, bring some brandy, look sharp! If only I knew what dessert to offer the guests you are expecting! Good heavens! Those furniture-movers are beginning their racket in the billiard-room again; and their van has been left before the front door! The 'Hirondelle' might run into it when it draws up. Call Polyte and tell him to put it up. Only think, Monsieur Homais, that since morning they have had about fifteen games, and drunk eight jars of cider! Why, they'll tear my cloth for me," she went on, looking at them from a distance, her strainer in her hand. "That wouldn't be much of a loss," replied Monsieur Homais. "You would buy another." "Another billiard-table!" exclaimed the widow. "Since that one is coming to pieces, Madame Lefrancois. I tell you again you are doing yourself harm, much harm! And besides, players now want narrow pockets and heavy cues. Hazards aren't played now; everything is changed! One must keep pace with the times! Just look at Tellier!" The hostess reddened with vexation. The chemist went on-- "You may say what you like; his table is better than yours; and if one were to think, for example, of getting up a patriotic pool for Poland or the sufferers from the Lyons floods--" "It isn't beggars like him that'll frighten us," interrupted the landlady, shrugging her fat shoulders. "Come, come, Monsieur Homais; as long as the 'Lion d'Or' exists people will come to it. We've feathered our nest; while one of these days you'll find the 'Cafe Francais' closed with a big placard on the shutters. Change my billiard-table!" she went on, speaking to herself, "the table that comes in so handy for folding the washing, and on which, in the hunting season, I have slept six visitors! But that dawdler, Hivert, doesn't come!" "Are you waiting for him for your gentlemen's dinner?" "Wait for him! And what about Monsieur Binet? As the clock strikes six you'll see him come in, for he hasn't his equal under the sun for punctuality. He must always have his seat in the small parlour. He'd rather die than dine anywhere else. And so squeamish as he is, and so particular about the cider! Not like Monsieur Leon; he sometimes comes at seven, or even half-past, and he doesn't so much as look at what he eats. Such a nice young man! Never speaks a rough word!" "Well, you see, there's a great difference between an educated man and an old carabineer who is now a tax-collector." Six o'clock struck. Binet came in. He wore a blue frock-coat falling in a straight line round his thin body, and his leather cap, with its lappets knotted over the top of his head with string, showed under the turned-up peak a bald forehead, flattened by the constant wearing of a helmet. He wore a black cloth waistcoat, a hair collar, grey trousers, and, all the year round, well-blacked boots, that had two parallel swellings due to the sticking out of his big-toes. Not a hair stood out from the regular line of fair whiskers, which, encircling his jaws, framed, after the fashion of a garden border, his long, wan face, whose eyes were small and the nose hooked. Clever at all games of cards, a good hunter, and writing a fine hand, he had at home a lathe, and amused himself by turning napkin rings, with which he filled up his house, with the jealousy of an artist and the egotism of a bourgeois. He went to the small parlour, but the three millers had to be got out first, and during the whole time necessary for laying the cloth, Binet remained silent in his place near the stove. Then he shut the door and took off his cap in his usual way. "It isn't with saying civil things that he'll wear out his tongue," said the chemist, as soon as he was along with the landlady. "He never talks more," she replied. "Last week two travelers in the cloth line were here--such clever chaps who told such jokes in the evening, that I fairly cried with laughing; and he stood there like a dab fish and never said a word." "Yes," observed the chemist; "no imagination, no sallies, nothing that makes the society-man." "Yet they say he has parts," objected the landlady. "Parts!" replied Monsieur Homais; "he, parts! In his own line it is possible," he added in a calmer tone. And he went on-- "Ah! That a merchant, who has large connections, a jurisconsult, a doctor, a chemist, should be thus absent-minded, that they should become whimsical or even peevish, I can understand; such cases are cited in history. But at least it is because they are thinking of something. Myself, for example, how often has it happened to me to look on the bureau for my pen to write a label, and to find, after all, that I had put it behind my ear!" Madame Lefrancois just then went to the door to see if the "Hirondelle" were not coming. She started. A man dressed in black suddenly came into the kitchen. By the last gleam of the twilight one could see that his face was rubicund and his form athletic. "What can I do for you, Monsieur le Curie?" asked the landlady, as she reached down from the chimney one of the copper candlesticks placed with their candles in a row. "Will you take something? A thimbleful of Cassis*? A glass of wine?" *Black currant liqueur. The priest declined very politely. He had come for his umbrella, that he had forgotten the other day at the Ernemont convent, and after asking Madame Lefrancois to have it sent to him at the presbytery in the evening, he left for the church, from which the Angelus was ringing. When the chemist no longer heard the noise of his boots along the square, he thought the priest's behaviour just now very unbecoming. This refusal to take any refreshment seemed to him the most odious hypocrisy; all priests tippled on the sly, and were trying to bring back the days of the tithe. The landlady took up the defence of her curie. "Besides, he could double up four men like you over his knee. Last year he helped our people to bring in the straw; he carried as many as six trusses at once, he is so strong." "Bravo!" said the chemist. "Now just send your daughters to confess to fellows which such a temperament! I, if I were the Government, I'd have the priests bled once a month. Yes, Madame Lefrancois, every month--a good phlebotomy, in the interests of the police and morals." "Be quiet, Monsieur Homais. You are an infidel; you've no religion." The chemist answered: "I have a religion, my religion, and I even have more than all these others with their mummeries and their juggling. I adore God, on the contrary. I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don't need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one can know Him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the eternal vault like the ancients. My God! Mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I am for the profession of faith of the 'Savoyard Vicar,' and the immortal principles of '89! And I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them." He ceased, looking round for an audience, for in his bubbling over the chemist had for a moment fancied himself in the midst of the town council. But the landlady no longer heeded him; she was listening to a distant rolling. One could distinguish the noise of a carriage mingled with the clattering of loose horseshoes that beat against the ground, and at last the "Hirondelle" stopped at the door. It was a yellow box on two large wheels, that, reaching to the tilt, prevented travelers from seeing the road and dirtied their shoulders. The small panes of the narrow windows rattled in their sashes when the coach was closed, and retained here and there patches of mud amid the old layers of dust, that not even storms of rain had altogether washed away. It was drawn by three horses, the first a leader, and when it came down-hill its bottom jolted against the ground. Some of the inhabitants of Yonville came out into the square; they all spoke at once, asking for news, for explanations, for hampers. Hivert did not know whom to answer. It was he who did the errands of the place in town. He went to the shops and brought back rolls of leather for the shoemaker, old iron for the farrier, a barrel of herrings for his mistress, caps from the milliner's, locks from the hair-dresser's and all along the road on his return journey he distributed his parcels, which he threw, standing upright on his seat and shouting at the top of his voice, over the enclosures of the yards. An accident had delayed him. Madame Bovary's greyhound had run across the field. They had whistled for him a quarter of an hour; Hivert had even gone back a mile and a half expecting every moment to catch sight of her; but it had been necessary to go on. Emma had wept, grown angry; she had accused Charles of this misfortune. Monsieur Lheureux, a draper, who happened to be in the coach with her, had tried to console her by a number of examples of lost dogs recognizing their masters at the end of long years. One, he said had been told of, who had come back to Paris from Constantinople. Another had gone one hundred and fifty miles in a straight line, and swum four rivers; and his own father had possessed a poodle, which, after twelve years of absence, had all of a sudden jumped on his back in the street as he was going to dine in town.

Chapter 1

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary21.asp

Yonville is a sleepy little town that Flaubert intimately describes, giving details about the church, the market place, the chemist's shop, and the Golden Lion Inn. He also introduces Madame Lefrancois , Monsieur Homais , Monsieur Binet , and the priest. It is a busy night in Yonville, for the market is open the next day. Amidst the activity, Emma and Charges Bovary arrive in a coach, the Hirondelle. Emma is extremely upset at having lost her greyhound during the journey. Monsieur Lheureux, one of her fellow passengers who is a draper, tries to console her.

Notes As Flaubert describes the route to Yonville and the surroundings of the town, it is clear to see why he is judged as such an outstanding writer of realistic fiction. The minute details that he gives help to familiarize the reader with the place even before the Bovarys arrive. Flaubert also makes it obvious that Yonville is a sleepy little town, with no more activity or possibility than Tostes. The reader is made to think that Emma probably will not like it here either. In fact, she arrives in a foul mood, for she has lost her greyhound during the journey. This chapter also introduces some of the characters whose actions gain importance later in the plot. The reader learns that Madame Lefrancois is a shrewd businesswoman; Homais is anti-church; the cure is a timid sort; and Binet is soldier-like in all his habits. Lheureux is also introduced, and he will assume villainous dimensions later in the novel. He is the first of several characters who betray Emma after she relies on them for comfort.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/11.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_10_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 2

chapter 2

{"name": "Chapter 2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary22.asp", "summary": "When Charles and Emma finally reach Yonville, they are met by Madame Lefrancois and Leon Dupuis, who lodges with Homais. To unwind from the journey, Emma stretches herself before the kitchen fireplace and \"the flames up her whole body.\" Leon, a young man who works as a clerk at Maitre Guillaumin's, watches Emma closely. When they talk, Leon and Emma discover that they have certain common interests; they are both avid readers and romantics. They speak of the romance of the sunset and the beauty of the sea and mountain scenery. After dinner, the Bovarys leave for their home. Emma realizes that it is only the fourth time ever that she has slept in a strange place. \" The first was at the convent, the second when she arrived at Tostes, the third at La Vaubyessard, and now this was the fourth. \" Before long she will find herself sleeping in several strange places.", "analysis": "Notes As Emma warms herself by the fireplace, she is also warming her latent sexuality. She is bored with life and desirous of an exciting companion. Leon is attracted to her the first time he sets eyes on her and eagerly talks to her. Their conversation reveals that both of them possess a romantic nature. Leon also admits his sensitivity, stating that he is moved by poetry, for \"I find it more tender than prose, and far more affecting.\" Emma tells Leon that she is \"all for stories that rush you along breathlessly and make you frightened. I hate commonplace heroes and moderate feelings such as are to be found in life.\" Every statement that Emma makes has been carefully tailored to demonstrate that Emma has the potential to break away from the norms of society. The reader has been prepared for the Emma-Leon relationship, which begins in this chapter and becomes highly significant in the course of the novel. Emma has longed for some excitement in her life; she has also been depicted as a rebel, unafraid of social convention. Since Yonville is no more interesting than Tostes, she will eagerly welcome the opportunity to disperse her dreariness. She will be attracted to Leon for his youth and romantic ways. Many critics believe that Flaubert is painting a picture of himself in Leon, for as a young man, the author was infatuated with an older lady, whose memory stayed with him throughout life. Homais' character is also exposed in this chapter. He comes across as a typical bore. In the previous chapter, the landlady is repulsed by his insulting statements about the church. Here he narrates technical data about the weather in order to show off his advanced learning. His character will develop on similar lines as the novel progresses."}

Emma got out first, then Felicite, Monsieur Lheureux, and a nurse, and they had to wake up Charles in his corner, where he had slept soundly since night set in. Homais introduced himself; he offered his homages to madame and his respects to monsieur; said he was charmed to have been able to render them some slight service, and added with a cordial air that he had ventured to invite himself, his wife being away. When Madame Bovary was in the kitchen she went up to the chimney. With the tips of her fingers she caught her dress at the knee, and having thus pulled it up to her ankle, held out her foot in its black boot to the fire above the revolving leg of mutton. The flame lit up the whole of her, penetrating with a crude light the woof of her gowns, the fine pores of her fair skin, and even her eyelids, which she blinked now and again. A great red glow passed over her with the blowing of the wind through the half-open door. On the other side of the chimney a young man with fair hair watched her silently. As he was a good deal bored at Yonville, where he was a clerk at the notary's, Monsieur Guillaumin, Monsieur Leon Dupuis (it was he who was the second habitue of the "Lion d'Or") frequently put back his dinner-hour in hope that some traveler might come to the inn, with whom he could chat in the evening. On the days when his work was done early, he had, for want of something else to do, to come punctually, and endure from soup to cheese a tete-a-tete with Binet. It was therefore with delight that he accepted the landlady's suggestion that he should dine in company with the newcomers, and they passed into the large parlour where Madame Lefrancois, for the purpose of showing off, had had the table laid for four. Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his skull-cap, for fear of coryza; then, turning to his neighbour-- "Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so abominably in our 'Hirondelle.'" "That is true," replied Emma; "but moving about always amuses me. I like change of place." "It is so tedious," sighed the clerk, "to be always riveted to the same places." "If you were like me," said Charles, "constantly obliged to be in the saddle"-- "But," Leon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, "nothing, it seems to me, is more pleasant--when one can," he added. "Moreover," said the druggist, "the practice of medicine is not very hard work in our part of the world, for the state of our roads allows us the use of gigs, and generally, as the farmers are prosperous, they pay pretty well. We have, medically speaking, besides the ordinary cases of enteritis, bronchitis, bilious affections, etc., now and then a few intermittent fevers at harvest-time; but on the whole, little of a serious nature, nothing special to note, unless it be a great deal of scrofula, due, no doubt, to the deplorable hygienic conditions of our peasant dwellings. Ah! you will find many prejudices to combat, Monsieur Bovary, much obstinacy of routine, with which all the efforts of your science will daily come into collision; for people still have recourse to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than come straight to the doctor or the chemist. The climate, however, is not, truth to tell, bad, and we even have a few nonagenarians in our parish. The thermometer (I have made some observations) falls in winter to 4 degrees Centigrade at the outside, which gives us 24 degrees Reaumur as the maximum, or otherwise 54 degrees Fahrenheit (English scale), not more. And, as a matter of fact, we are sheltered from the north winds by the forest of Argueil on the one side, from the west winds by the St. Jean range on the other; and this heat, moreover, which, on account of the aqueous vapours given off by the river and the considerable number of cattle in the fields, which, as you know, exhale much ammonia, that is to say, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen (no, nitrogen and hydrogen alone), and which sucking up into itself the humus from the ground, mixing together all those different emanations, unites them into a stack, so to say, and combining with the electricity diffused through the atmosphere, when there is any, might in the long run, as in tropical countries, engender insalubrious miasmata--this heat, I say, finds itself perfectly tempered on the side whence it comes, or rather whence it should come--that is to say, the southern side--by the south-eastern winds, which, having cooled themselves passing over the Seine, reach us sometimes all at once like breezes from Russia." "At any rate, you have some walks in the neighbourhood?" continued Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man. "Oh, very few," he answered. "There is a place they call La Pature, on the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset." "I think there is nothing so admirable as sunsets," she resumed; "but especially by the side of the sea." "Oh, I adore the sea!" said Monsieur Leon. "And then, does it not seem to you," continued Madame Bovary, "that the mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal?" "It is the same with mountainous landscapes," continued Leon. "A cousin of mine who travelled in Switzerland last year told me that one could not picture to oneself the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. One sees pines of incredible size across torrents, cottages suspended over precipices, and, a thousand feet below one, whole valleys when the clouds open. Such spectacles must stir to enthusiasm, incline to prayer, to ecstasy; and I no longer marvel at that celebrated musician who, the better to inspire his imagination, was in the habit of playing the piano before some imposing site." "You play?" she asked. "No, but I am very fond of music," he replied. "Ah! don't you listen to him, Madame Bovary," interrupted Homais, bending over his plate. "That's sheer modesty. Why, my dear fellow, the other day in your room you were singing 'L'Ange Gardien' ravishingly. I heard you from the laboratory. You gave it like an actor." Leon, in fact, lodged at the chemist's where he had a small room on the second floor, overlooking the Place. He blushed at the compliment of his landlord, who had already turned to the doctor, and was enumerating to him, one after the other, all the principal inhabitants of Yonville. He was telling anecdotes, giving information; the fortune of the notary was not known exactly, and "there was the Tuvache household," who made a good deal of show. Emma continued, "And what music do you prefer?" "Oh, German music; that which makes you dream." "Have you been to the opera?" "Not yet; but I shall go next year, when I am living at Paris to finish reading for the bar." "As I had the honour of putting it to your husband," said the chemist, "with regard to this poor Yanoda who has run away, you will find yourself, thanks to his extravagance, in the possession of one of the most comfortable houses of Yonville. Its greatest convenience for a doctor is a door giving on the Walk, where one can go in and out unseen. Moreover, it contains everything that is agreeable in a household--a laundry, kitchen with offices, sitting-room, fruit-room, and so on. He was a gay dog, who didn't care what he spent. At the end of the garden, by the side of the water, he had an arbour built just for the purpose of drinking beer in summer; and if madame is fond of gardening she will be able--" "My wife doesn't care about it," said Charles; "although she has been advised to take exercise, she prefers always sitting in her room reading." "Like me," replied Leon. "And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?" "What, indeed?" she said, fixing her large black eyes wide open upon him. "One thinks of nothing," he continued; "the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes." "That is true! That is true?" she said. "Has it ever happened to you," Leon went on, "to come across some vague idea of one's own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?" "I have experienced it," she replied. "That is why," he said, "I especially love the poets. I think verse more tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears." "Still in the long run it is tiring," continued Emma. "Now I, on the contrary, adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in nature." "In fact," observed the clerk, "these works, not touching the heart, miss, it seems to me, the true end of art. It is so sweet, amid all the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness. For myself, living here far from the world, this is my one distraction; but Yonville affords so few resources." "Like Tostes, no doubt," replied Emma; "and so I always subscribed to a lending library." "If madame will do me the honour of making use of it", said the chemist, who had just caught the last words, "I have at her disposal a library composed of the best authors, Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter Scott, the 'Echo des Feuilletons'; and in addition I receive various periodicals, among them the 'Fanal de Rouen' daily, having the advantage to be its correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchatel, Yonville, and vicinity." For two hours and a half they had been at table; for the servant Artemis, carelessly dragging her old list slippers over the flags, brought one plate after the other, forgot everything, and constantly left the door of the billiard-room half open, so that it beat against the wall with its hooks. Unconsciously, Leon, while talking, had placed his foot on one of the bars of the chair on which Madame Bovary was sitting. She wore a small blue silk necktie, that kept up like a ruff a gauffered cambric collar, and with the movements of her head the lower part of her face gently sunk into the linen or came out from it. Thus side by side, while Charles and the chemist chatted, they entered into one of those vague conversations where the hazard of all that is said brings you back to the fixed centre of a common sympathy. The Paris theatres, titles of novels, new quadrilles, and the world they did not know; Tostes, where she had lived, and Yonville, where they were; they examined all, talked of everything till to the end of dinner. When coffee was served Felicite went away to get ready the room in the new house, and the guests soon raised the siege. Madame Lefrancois was asleep near the cinders, while the stable-boy, lantern in hand, was waiting to show Monsieur and Madame Bovary the way home. Bits of straw stuck in his red hair, and he limped with his left leg. When he had taken in his other hand the cure's umbrella, they started. The town was asleep; the pillars of the market threw great shadows; the earth was all grey as on a summer's night. But as the doctor's house was only some fifty paces from the inn, they had to say good-night almost immediately, and the company dispersed. As soon as she entered the passage, Emma felt the cold of the plaster fall about her shoulders like damp linen. The walls were new and the wooden stairs creaked. In their bedroom, on the first floor, a whitish light passed through the curtainless windows. She could catch glimpses of tree tops, and beyond, the fields, half-drowned in the fog that lay reeking in the moonlight along the course of the river. In the middle of the room, pell-mell, were scattered drawers, bottles, curtain-rods, gilt poles, with mattresses on the chairs and basins on the ground--the two men who had brought the furniture had left everything about carelessly. This was the fourth time that she had slept in a strange place. The first was the day of her going to the convent; the second, of her arrival at Tostes; the third, at Vaubyessard; and this was the fourth. And each one had marked, as it were, the inauguration of a new phase in her life. She did not believe that things could present themselves in the same way in different places, and since the portion of her life lived had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.

Chapter 2

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary22.asp

When Charles and Emma finally reach Yonville, they are met by Madame Lefrancois and Leon Dupuis, who lodges with Homais. To unwind from the journey, Emma stretches herself before the kitchen fireplace and "the flames up her whole body." Leon, a young man who works as a clerk at Maitre Guillaumin's, watches Emma closely. When they talk, Leon and Emma discover that they have certain common interests; they are both avid readers and romantics. They speak of the romance of the sunset and the beauty of the sea and mountain scenery. After dinner, the Bovarys leave for their home. Emma realizes that it is only the fourth time ever that she has slept in a strange place. " The first was at the convent, the second when she arrived at Tostes, the third at La Vaubyessard, and now this was the fourth. " Before long she will find herself sleeping in several strange places.

Notes As Emma warms herself by the fireplace, she is also warming her latent sexuality. She is bored with life and desirous of an exciting companion. Leon is attracted to her the first time he sets eyes on her and eagerly talks to her. Their conversation reveals that both of them possess a romantic nature. Leon also admits his sensitivity, stating that he is moved by poetry, for "I find it more tender than prose, and far more affecting." Emma tells Leon that she is "all for stories that rush you along breathlessly and make you frightened. I hate commonplace heroes and moderate feelings such as are to be found in life." Every statement that Emma makes has been carefully tailored to demonstrate that Emma has the potential to break away from the norms of society. The reader has been prepared for the Emma-Leon relationship, which begins in this chapter and becomes highly significant in the course of the novel. Emma has longed for some excitement in her life; she has also been depicted as a rebel, unafraid of social convention. Since Yonville is no more interesting than Tostes, she will eagerly welcome the opportunity to disperse her dreariness. She will be attracted to Leon for his youth and romantic ways. Many critics believe that Flaubert is painting a picture of himself in Leon, for as a young man, the author was infatuated with an older lady, whose memory stayed with him throughout life. Homais' character is also exposed in this chapter. He comes across as a typical bore. In the previous chapter, the landlady is repulsed by his insulting statements about the church. Here he narrates technical data about the weather in order to show off his advanced learning. His character will develop on similar lines as the novel progresses.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/12.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_11_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 3

chapter 3

{"name": "Chapter 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary23.asp", "summary": "Leon is clearly smitten with Emma and is pleased at having conversed with her for so long. The people of Yonville see Leon as a talented individual and consider him \"a real gentleman.\" Homais respects him for his education, and Madame Homais likes him for his good nature. Besides helping in Homais' chemist shop, Leon also performs domestic duties for the Homais family. Homais is very cordial to the Bovarys, but there is a reason behind his kindness. Homais has been reprimanded by the court for practicing medicine without holding a diploma. He is upset about the decision and has continued to give \"innocuous consultations\" from time to time. His attentiveness to the Bovarys is a ploy to put Charles \"under an obligation and ensure his silence in case he ever noticed anything.\" Charles is not concerned with Homais, for he has many other things to worry about. Yonville does not provide him with the clients he has expected. Money matters weigh him down, for he has little left of his savings or of Emma's dowry. His wife's pregnancy, however, lifts his spirits, and he is \"overjoyed at the idea of becoming a father.\" After her initial repulsion to the thought of being pregnant, Emma also becomes eager to experience motherhood. She wants a son, and is sure that is what she will have. When Emma delivers the baby, it is a girl. Emma faints in disappointment. Choosing a name for the daughter involves much discussion. Finally, Emma chooses the name, \"Berthe,\" because she had heard the Marquis at La Vaubyessard call a young woman by that name. A wet nurse is hired to care for Berthe. One day, on an impulse, Emma wants to see her baby. She goes off to the nurse's house without telling anyone and is overcome by tiredness. On the way, she meets Leon and requests him to accompany her. By nightfall, everyone in Yonville seems to know that Emma and Leon were together. Flaubert describes the path Emma takes in intimate detail. The nurse's house is also similarly etched. Inside the house, Emma is overcome with maternal love as she croons softly to her baby. The nurse pesters Emma with numerous requests for minor things for the infant, to which Emma agrees before leaving. Leon is waiting for her. While Leon and Emma walk together, they are aware of a \"strange sweetness\" overcoming them. After Emma reaches home and Leon is left alone, he ponders the futility of pursuing an intimacy with Emma. He realizes, however, that she is different from the people in Yonville. He is also aware of the \"chasms yawning between himself and her.\"", "analysis": "Notes The third person omniscient narration becomes very obvious in this chapter. Flaubert enters Leon's head and gives his thoughts about Emma. He then goes on to speak about the reasons for Homais' willingness to help the Bovarys. Homais, the shrewd and somewhat dishonest Yonville pharmacist, tries to be on Charles' good side so that the new doctor will not report his forbidden medical activities to the authorities. Flaubert next looks into Charles' thoughts. He is worried about his financial problems, for Emma's extravagant ways have left him with hardly any savings. He is distracted from his troubles by the birth of the baby and accepts fatherhood with joy. It makes him feel as if \"he had been through the whole of human experience.\" Emma's emotions about motherhood are not so straightforward. At first, she had felt no enthusiasm about having a child. Later, infected by her husband's happiness, she becomes eager to experience motherhood and feels certain she will have a son. Her desire for a male child probably rises from her Emma's own deprivation as a woman; she imagines that \"having a male child was like revenge for all her past helplessness. A man, at any rate, is free. He can explore the passions and the continents, can surmount obstacles, reach out to the most distant joys.\" Emma, on the other hand, does not feel free, but thwarted by her physical weakness and legal subordination. When she gives birth to a girl, all the excitement that has been building up in Emma is destroyed. She faints at the news and seems interested only about naming the baby; she impulsively chooses Berthe, a name that reminds her of the ball at La Vaubyessard. On the spur of the moment, Emma also sends her infant daughter to stay with the carpenter's wife, who performs the duty of a wet nurse. Emma's impulsiveness is clearly depicted. During this chapter, Leon begins to spend time with Emma, and a budding romance between the two is suggested. Leon, however, is practical; he is aware of the social consequences of having a relationship with a married woman. For this reason, he is hesitant to express his feelings to Emma; he cannot, however, suppress his natural desires for her."}

The next day, as she was getting up, she saw the clerk on the Place. She had on a dressing-gown. He looked up and bowed. She nodded quickly and reclosed the window. Leon waited all day for six o'clock in the evening to come, but on going to the inn, he found no one but Monsieur Binet, already at table. The dinner of the evening before had been a considerable event for him; he had never till then talked for two hours consecutively to a "lady." How then had he been able to explain, and in such language, the number of things that he could not have said so well before? He was usually shy, and maintained that reserve which partakes at once of modesty and dissimulation. At Yonville he was considered "well-bred." He listened to the arguments of the older people, and did not seem hot about politics--a remarkable thing for a young man. Then he had some accomplishments; he painted in water-colours, could read the key of G, and readily talked literature after dinner when he did not play cards. Monsieur Homais respected him for his education; Madame Homais liked him for his good-nature, for he often took the little Homais into the garden--little brats who were always dirty, very much spoilt, and somewhat lymphatic, like their mother. Besides the servant to look after them, they had Justin, the chemist's apprentice, a second cousin of Monsieur Homais, who had been taken into the house from charity, and who was useful at the same time as a servant. The druggist proved the best of neighbours. He gave Madame Bovary information as to the trades-people, sent expressly for his own cider merchant, tasted the drink himself, and saw that the casks were properly placed in the cellar; he explained how to set about getting in a supply of butter cheap, and made an arrangement with Lestiboudois, the sacristan, who, besides his sacerdotal and funeral functions, looked after the principal gardens at Yonville by the hour or the year, according to the taste of the customers. The need of looking after others was not the only thing that urged the chemist to such obsequious cordiality; there was a plan underneath it all. He had infringed the law of the 19th Ventose, year xi., article I, which forbade all persons not having a diploma to practise medicine; so that, after certain anonymous denunciations, Homais had been summoned to Rouen to see the procurer of the king in his own private room; the magistrate receiving him standing up, ermine on shoulder and cap on head. It was in the morning, before the court opened. In the corridors one heard the heavy boots of the gendarmes walking past, and like a far-off noise great locks that were shut. The druggist's ears tingled as if he were about to have an apoplectic stroke; he saw the depths of dungeons, his family in tears, his shop sold, all the jars dispersed; and he was obliged to enter a cafe and take a glass of rum and seltzer to recover his spirits. Little by little the memory of this reprimand grew fainter, and he continued, as heretofore, to give anodyne consultations in his back-parlour. But the mayor resented it, his colleagues were jealous, everything was to be feared; gaining over Monsieur Bovary by his attentions was to earn his gratitude, and prevent his speaking out later on, should he notice anything. So every morning Homais brought him "the paper," and often in the afternoon left his shop for a few moments to have a chat with the Doctor. Charles was dull: patients did not come. He remained seated for hours without speaking, went into his consulting room to sleep, or watched his wife sewing. Then for diversion he employed himself at home as a workman; he even tried to do up the attic with some paint which had been left behind by the painters. But money matters worried him. He had spent so much for repairs at Tostes, for madame's toilette, and for the moving, that the whole dowry, over three thousand crowns, had slipped away in two years. Then how many things had been spoilt or lost during their carriage from Tostes to Yonville, without counting the plaster cure, who falling out of the coach at an over-severe jolt, had been dashed into a thousand fragments on the pavements of Quincampoix! A pleasanter trouble came to distract him, namely, the pregnancy of his wife. As the time of her confinement approached he cherished her the more. It was another bond of the flesh establishing itself, and, as it were, a continued sentiment of a more complex union. When from afar he saw her languid walk, and her figure without stays turning softly on her hips; when opposite one another he looked at her at his ease, while she took tired poses in her armchair, then his happiness knew no bounds; he got up, embraced her, passed his hands over her face, called her little mamma, wanted to make her dance, and half-laughing, half-crying, uttered all kinds of caressing pleasantries that came into his head. The idea of having begotten a child delighted him. Now he wanted nothing. He knew human life from end to end, and he sat down to it with serenity. Emma at first felt a great astonishment; then was anxious to be delivered that she might know what it was to be a mother. But not being able to spend as much as she would have liked, to have a swing-bassinette with rose silk curtains, and embroidered caps, in a fit of bitterness she gave up looking after the trousseau, and ordered the whole of it from a village needlewoman, without choosing or discussing anything. Thus she did not amuse herself with those preparations that stimulate the tenderness of mothers, and so her affection was from the very outset, perhaps, to some extent attenuated. As Charles, however, spoke of the boy at every meal, she soon began to think of him more consecutively. She hoped for a son; he would be strong and dark; she would call him George; and this idea of having a male child was like an expected revenge for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least, is free; he may travel over passions and over countries, overcome obstacles, taste of the most far-away pleasures. But a woman is always hampered. At once inert and flexible, she has against her the weakness of the flesh and legal dependence. Her will, like the veil of her bonnet, held by a string, flutters in every wind; there is always some desire that draws her, some conventionality that restrains. She was confined on a Sunday at about six o'clock, as the sun was rising. "It is a girl!" said Charles. She turned her head away and fainted. Madame Homais, as well as Madame Lefrancois of the Lion d'Or, almost immediately came running in to embrace her. The chemist, as man of discretion, only offered a few provincial felicitations through the half-opened door. He wished to see the child and thought it well made. Whilst she was getting well she occupied herself much in seeking a name for her daughter. First she went over all those that have Italian endings, such as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala; she liked Galsuinde pretty well, and Yseult or Leocadie still better. Charles wanted the child to be called after her mother; Emma opposed this. They ran over the calendar from end to end, and then consulted outsiders. "Monsieur Leon," said the chemist, "with whom I was talking about it the other day, wonders you do not chose Madeleine. It is very much in fashion just now." But Madame Bovary, senior, cried out loudly against this name of a sinner. As to Monsieur Homais, he had a preference for all those that recalled some great man, an illustrious fact, or a generous idea, and it was on this system that he had baptized his four children. Thus Napoleon represented glory and Franklin liberty; Irma was perhaps a concession to romanticism, but Athalie was a homage to the greatest masterpiece of the French stage. For his philosophical convictions did not interfere with his artistic tastes; in him the thinker did not stifle the man of sentiment; he could make distinctions, make allowances for imagination and fanaticism. In this tragedy, for example, he found fault with the ideas, but admired the style; he detested the conception, but applauded all the details, and loathed the characters while he grew enthusiastic over their dialogue. When he read the fine passages he was transported, but when he thought that mummers would get something out of them for their show, he was disconsolate; and in this confusion of sentiments in which he was involved he would have liked at once to crown Racine with both his hands and discuss with him for a good quarter of an hour. At last Emma remembered that at the chateau of Vaubyessard she had heard the Marchioness call a young lady Berthe; from that moment this name was chosen; and as old Rouault could not come, Monsieur Homais was requested to stand godfather. His gifts were all products from his establishment, to wit: six boxes of jujubes, a whole jar of racahout, three cakes of marshmallow paste, and six sticks of sugar-candy into the bargain that he had come across in a cupboard. On the evening of the ceremony there was a grand dinner; the cure was present; there was much excitement. Monsieur Homais towards liqueur-time began singing "Le Dieu des bonnes gens." Monsieur Leon sang a barcarolle, and Madame Bovary, senior, who was godmother, a romance of the time of the Empire; finally, M. Bovary, senior, insisted on having the child brought down, and began baptizing it with a glass of champagne that he poured over its head. This mockery of the first of the sacraments made the Abbe Bournisien angry; old Bovary replied by a quotation from "La Guerre des Dieux"; the cure wanted to leave; the ladies implored, Homais interfered; and they succeeded in making the priest sit down again, and he quietly went on with the half-finished coffee in his saucer. Monsieur Bovary, senior, stayed at Yonville a month, dazzling the natives by a superb policeman's cap with silver tassels that he wore in the morning when he smoked his pipe in the square. Being also in the habit of drinking a good deal of brandy, he often sent the servant to the Lion d'Or to buy him a bottle, which was put down to his son's account, and to perfume his handkerchiefs he used up his daughter-in-law's whole supply of eau-de-cologne. The latter did not at all dislike his company. He had knocked about the world, he talked about Berlin, Vienna, and Strasbourg, of his soldier times, of the mistresses he had had, the grand luncheons of which he had partaken; then he was amiable, and sometimes even, either on the stairs, or in the garden, would seize hold of her waist, crying, "Charles, look out for yourself." Then Madame Bovary, senior, became alarmed for her son's happiness, and fearing that her husband might in the long-run have an immoral influence upon the ideas of the young woman, took care to hurry their departure. Perhaps she had more serious reasons for uneasiness. Monsieur Bovary was not the man to respect anything. One day Emma was suddenly seized with the desire to see her little girl, who had been put to nurse with the carpenter's wife, and, without looking at the calendar to see whether the six weeks of the Virgin were yet passed, she set out for the Rollets' house, situated at the extreme end of the village, between the highroad and the fields. It was mid-day, the shutters of the houses were closed and the slate roofs that glittered beneath the fierce light of the blue sky seemed to strike sparks from the crest of the gables. A heavy wind was blowing; Emma felt weak as she walked; the stones of the pavement hurt her; she was doubtful whether she would not go home again, or go in somewhere to rest. At this moment Monsieur Leon came out from a neighbouring door with a bundle of papers under his arm. He came to greet her, and stood in the shade in front of the Lheureux's shop under the projecting grey awning. Madame Bovary said she was going to see her baby, but that she was beginning to grow tired. "If--" said Leon, not daring to go on. "Have you any business to attend to?" she asked. And on the clerk's answer, she begged him to accompany her. That same evening this was known in Yonville, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor's wife, declared in the presence of her servant that "Madame Bovary was compromising herself." To get to the nurse's it was necessary to turn to the left on leaving the street, as if making for the cemetery, and to follow between little houses and yards a small path bordered with privet hedges. They were in bloom, and so were the speedwells, eglantines, thistles, and the sweetbriar that sprang up from the thickets. Through openings in the hedges one could see into the huts, some pigs on a dung-heap, or tethered cows rubbing their horns against the trunk of trees. The two, side by side walked slowly, she leaning upon him, and he restraining his pace, which he regulated by hers; in front of them a swarm of midges fluttered, buzzing in the warm air. They recognized the house by an old walnut-tree which shaded it. Low and covered with brown tiles, there hung outside it, beneath the dormer-window of the garret, a string of onions. Faggots upright against a thorn fence surrounded a bed of lettuce, a few square feet of lavender, and sweet peas strung on sticks. Dirty water was running here and there on the grass, and all round were several indefinite rags, knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large sheet of coarse linen spread over the hedge. At the noise of the gate the nurse appeared with a baby she was suckling on one arm. With her other hand she was pulling along a poor puny little fellow, his face covered with scrofula, the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with their business, left in the country. "Go in," she said; "your little one is there asleep." The room on the ground-floor, the only one in the dwelling, had at its farther end, against the wall, a large bed without curtains, while a kneading-trough took up the side by the window, one pane of which was mended with a piece of blue paper. In the corner behind the door, shining hob-nailed shoes stood in a row under the slab of the washstand, near a bottle of oil with a feather stuck in its mouth; a Matthieu Laensberg lay on the dusty mantelpiece amid gunflints, candle-ends, and bits of amadou. Finally, the last luxury in the apartment was a "Fame" blowing her trumpets, a picture cut out, no doubt, from some perfumer's prospectus and nailed to the wall with six wooden shoe-pegs. Emma's child was asleep in a wicker-cradle. She took it up in the wrapping that enveloped it and began singing softly as she rocked herself to and fro. Leon walked up and down the room; it seemed strange to him to see this beautiful woman in her nankeen dress in the midst of all this poverty. Madam Bovary reddened; he turned away, thinking perhaps there had been an impertinent look in his eyes. Then she put back the little girl, who had just been sick over her collar. The nurse at once came to dry her, protesting that it wouldn't show. "She gives me other doses," she said: "I am always a-washing of her. If you would have the goodness to order Camus, the grocer, to let me have a little soap, it would really be more convenient for you, as I needn't trouble you then." "Very well! very well!" said Emma. "Good morning, Madame Rollet," and she went out, wiping her shoes at the door. The good woman accompanied her to the end of the garden, talking all the time of the trouble she had getting up of nights. "I'm that worn out sometimes as I drop asleep on my chair. I'm sure you might at least give me just a pound of ground coffee; that'd last me a month, and I'd take it of a morning with some milk." After having submitted to her thanks, Madam Bovary left. She had gone a little way down the path when, at the sound of wooden shoes, she turned round. It was the nurse. "What is it?" Then the peasant woman, taking her aside behind an elm tree, began talking to her of her husband, who with his trade and six francs a year that the captain-- "Oh, be quick!" said Emma. "Well," the nurse went on, heaving sighs between each word, "I'm afraid he'll be put out seeing me have coffee alone, you know men--" "But you are to have some," Emma repeated; "I will give you some. You bother me!" "Oh, dear! my poor, dear lady! you see in consequence of his wounds he has terrible cramps in the chest. He even says that cider weakens him." "Do make haste, Mere Rollet!" "Well," the latter continued, making a curtsey, "if it weren't asking too much," and she curtsied once more, "if you would"--and her eyes begged--"a jar of brandy," she said at last, "and I'd rub your little one's feet with it; they're as tender as one's tongue." Once rid of the nurse, Emma again took Monsieur Leon's arm. She walked fast for some time, then more slowly, and looking straight in front of her, her eyes rested on the shoulder of the young man, whose frock-coat had a black-velvety collar. His brown hair fell over it, straight and carefully arranged. She noticed his nails which were longer than one wore them at Yonville. It was one of the clerk's chief occupations to trim them, and for this purpose he kept a special knife in his writing desk. They returned to Yonville by the water-side. In the warm season the bank, wider than at other times, showed to their foot the garden walls whence a few steps led to the river. It flowed noiselessly, swift, and cold to the eye; long, thin grasses huddled together in it as the current drove them, and spread themselves upon the limpid water like streaming hair; sometimes at the tip of the reeds or on the leaf of a water-lily an insect with fine legs crawled or rested. The sun pierced with a ray the small blue bubbles of the waves that, breaking, followed each other; branchless old willows mirrored their grey backs in the water; beyond, all around, the meadows seemed empty. It was the dinner-hour at the farms, and the young woman and her companion heard nothing as they walked but the fall of their steps on the earth of the path, the words they spoke, and the sound of Emma's dress rustling round her. The walls of the gardens with pieces of bottle on their coping were hot as the glass windows of a conservatory. Wallflowers had sprung up between the bricks, and with the tip of her open sunshade Madame Bovary, as she passed, made some of their faded flowers crumble into a yellow dust, or a spray of overhanging honeysuckle and clematis caught in its fringe and dangled for a moment over the silk. They were talking of a troupe of Spanish dancers who were expected shortly at the Rouen theatre. "Are you going?" she asked. "If I can," he answered. Had they nothing else to say to one another? Yet their eyes were full of more serious speech, and while they forced themselves to find trivial phrases, they felt the same languor stealing over them both. It was the whisper of the soul, deep, continuous, dominating that of their voices. Surprised with wonder at this strange sweetness, they did not think of speaking of the sensation or of seeking its cause. Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know. In one place the ground had been trodden down by the cattle; they had to step on large green stones put here and there in the mud. She often stopped a moment to look where to place her foot, and tottering on a stone that shook, her arms outspread, her form bent forward with a look of indecision, she would laugh, afraid of falling into the puddles of water. When they arrived in front of her garden, Madame Bovary opened the little gate, ran up the steps and disappeared. Leon returned to his office. His chief was away; he just glanced at the briefs, then cut himself a pen, and at last took up his hat and went out. He went to La Pature at the top of the Argueil hills at the beginning of the forest; he threw himself upon the ground under the pines and watched the sky through his fingers. "How bored I am!" he said to himself, "how bored I am!" He thought he was to be pitied for living in this village, with Homais for a friend and Monsieru Guillaumin for master. The latter, entirely absorbed by his business, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and red whiskers over a white cravat, understood nothing of mental refinements, although he affected a stiff English manner, which in the beginning had impressed the clerk. As to the chemist's spouse, she was the best wife in Normandy, gentle as a sheep, loving her children, her father, her mother, her cousins, weeping for other's woes, letting everything go in her household, and detesting corsets; but so slow of movement, such a bore to listen to, so common in appearance, and of such restricted conversation, that although she was thirty, he only twenty, although they slept in rooms next each other and he spoke to her daily, he never thought that she might be a woman for another, or that she possessed anything else of her sex than the gown. And what else was there? Binet, a few shopkeepers, two or three publicans, the cure, and finally, Monsieur Tuvache, the mayor, with his two sons, rich, crabbed, obtuse persons, who farmed their own lands and had feasts among themselves, bigoted to boot, and quite unbearable companions. But from the general background of all these human faces Emma's stood out isolated and yet farthest off; for between her and him he seemed to see a vague abyss. In the beginning he had called on her several times along with the druggist. Charles had not appeared particularly anxious to see him again, and Leon did not know what to do between his fear of being indiscreet and the desire for an intimacy that seemed almost impossible.

Chapter 3

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary23.asp

Leon is clearly smitten with Emma and is pleased at having conversed with her for so long. The people of Yonville see Leon as a talented individual and consider him "a real gentleman." Homais respects him for his education, and Madame Homais likes him for his good nature. Besides helping in Homais' chemist shop, Leon also performs domestic duties for the Homais family. Homais is very cordial to the Bovarys, but there is a reason behind his kindness. Homais has been reprimanded by the court for practicing medicine without holding a diploma. He is upset about the decision and has continued to give "innocuous consultations" from time to time. His attentiveness to the Bovarys is a ploy to put Charles "under an obligation and ensure his silence in case he ever noticed anything." Charles is not concerned with Homais, for he has many other things to worry about. Yonville does not provide him with the clients he has expected. Money matters weigh him down, for he has little left of his savings or of Emma's dowry. His wife's pregnancy, however, lifts his spirits, and he is "overjoyed at the idea of becoming a father." After her initial repulsion to the thought of being pregnant, Emma also becomes eager to experience motherhood. She wants a son, and is sure that is what she will have. When Emma delivers the baby, it is a girl. Emma faints in disappointment. Choosing a name for the daughter involves much discussion. Finally, Emma chooses the name, "Berthe," because she had heard the Marquis at La Vaubyessard call a young woman by that name. A wet nurse is hired to care for Berthe. One day, on an impulse, Emma wants to see her baby. She goes off to the nurse's house without telling anyone and is overcome by tiredness. On the way, she meets Leon and requests him to accompany her. By nightfall, everyone in Yonville seems to know that Emma and Leon were together. Flaubert describes the path Emma takes in intimate detail. The nurse's house is also similarly etched. Inside the house, Emma is overcome with maternal love as she croons softly to her baby. The nurse pesters Emma with numerous requests for minor things for the infant, to which Emma agrees before leaving. Leon is waiting for her. While Leon and Emma walk together, they are aware of a "strange sweetness" overcoming them. After Emma reaches home and Leon is left alone, he ponders the futility of pursuing an intimacy with Emma. He realizes, however, that she is different from the people in Yonville. He is also aware of the "chasms yawning between himself and her."

Notes The third person omniscient narration becomes very obvious in this chapter. Flaubert enters Leon's head and gives his thoughts about Emma. He then goes on to speak about the reasons for Homais' willingness to help the Bovarys. Homais, the shrewd and somewhat dishonest Yonville pharmacist, tries to be on Charles' good side so that the new doctor will not report his forbidden medical activities to the authorities. Flaubert next looks into Charles' thoughts. He is worried about his financial problems, for Emma's extravagant ways have left him with hardly any savings. He is distracted from his troubles by the birth of the baby and accepts fatherhood with joy. It makes him feel as if "he had been through the whole of human experience." Emma's emotions about motherhood are not so straightforward. At first, she had felt no enthusiasm about having a child. Later, infected by her husband's happiness, she becomes eager to experience motherhood and feels certain she will have a son. Her desire for a male child probably rises from her Emma's own deprivation as a woman; she imagines that "having a male child was like revenge for all her past helplessness. A man, at any rate, is free. He can explore the passions and the continents, can surmount obstacles, reach out to the most distant joys." Emma, on the other hand, does not feel free, but thwarted by her physical weakness and legal subordination. When she gives birth to a girl, all the excitement that has been building up in Emma is destroyed. She faints at the news and seems interested only about naming the baby; she impulsively chooses Berthe, a name that reminds her of the ball at La Vaubyessard. On the spur of the moment, Emma also sends her infant daughter to stay with the carpenter's wife, who performs the duty of a wet nurse. Emma's impulsiveness is clearly depicted. During this chapter, Leon begins to spend time with Emma, and a budding romance between the two is suggested. Leon, however, is practical; he is aware of the social consequences of having a relationship with a married woman. For this reason, he is hesitant to express his feelings to Emma; he cannot, however, suppress his natural desires for her.

pinkmonkey

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finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_12_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 4

chapter 4

{"name": "Chapter 4", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary25.asp", "summary": "With winter setting in, Emma develops the habit of sitting in the parlor by the window, watching the passers-by. This way she sees Leon quite often. She also sees Homais, who makes frequent visits to the Bovarys' house. He engages Charles in political and journalistic discussions and speaks with Emma about recipes. During dinner, it is invariably Homais who speaks the most. The Bovarys also attend Homais' Sunday evening gatherings. Emma plays cards with Homais, while Leon advises her. When Homais is busy entertaining the doctor, Leon and Emma discuss fashion and poetry. Their mutual interest in \"books and ballads\" creates a bond between them. Charles, who is not of a jealous disposition, sees nothing odd in their relationship. Emma gives Leon a rug, a gesture that causes gossip throughout the town. Leon does not know how to handle his feelings for Emma. Her very presence makes him indecisive. He cannot guess whether expressing himself would help or harm his case. Emma, on the other hand, is blissfully unaware of her own feelings for Leon.", "analysis": "Notes In this chapter, Flaubert sets the stage for the relationship of Emma and Leon to progress. Leon is enamored with Emma, but does not know how to convey his feelings to her. He also worries about the consequences his relationship with Emma will have. Still, Leon cannot keep her off his mind and is constantly talking about her \"charms and her wit.\" Monsieur Binet, who shares Leon's lodgings, is sick of Leon's constant references the young lady. Emma also causes people to react to her. When she gives Leon a gift, it causes a minor scandal in Yonville, and people begin to wonder if she is Leon's mistress. In this nineteenth century society, a married woman must only seek fulfillment within the bounds of marriage; even a casual friendship with a man provokes a negative societal response. Ironically, at this point in the book, Emma is unaware of her own growing attachment to Leon. For her, love \"must come suddenly, with thunder and lightning, a hurricane from on high that swoops down into your life and turns it topsy-turvy, snatches away your will-power like a leaf, hurls you heart and soul into the abyss.\" Flaubert intentionally overdoes Emma's idealism in a satiric manner to drive home the point that it is futile to be as romantic as she is. It really becomes a plea on the author's part for rationalism and realism. Homais' character is further developed in the chapter. He is seen performing his neighborly duties to perfection, calling on the Bovarys frequently and having appropriate conversations with both husband and wife. It becomes obvious, however, that Homais is a bore who enjoys showing off his knowledge to Charles and Emma. The Sunday evening gatherings that Homais hosts serve to bring Emma and Leon closer. Charles is not the jealous type, and he does not find anything wrong with the developing relationship between Emma and Leon. In fact, he accepts a birthday gift from Leon and considers the latter to be a kind young man."}

When the first cold days set in Emma left her bedroom for the sitting-room, a long apartment with a low ceiling, in which there was on the mantelpiece a large bunch of coral spread out against the looking-glass. Seated in her arm chair near the window, she could see the villagers pass along the pavement. Twice a day Leon went from his office to the Lion d'Or. Emma could hear him coming from afar; she leant forward listening, and the young man glided past the curtain, always dressed in the same way, and without turning his head. But in the twilight, when, her chin resting on her left hand, she let the embroidery she had begun fall on her knees, she often shuddered at the apparition of this shadow suddenly gliding past. She would get up and order the table to be laid. Monsieur Homais called at dinner-time. Skull-cap in hand, he came in on tiptoe, in order to disturb no one, always repeating the same phrase, "Good evening, everybody." Then, when he had taken his seat at the table between the pair, he asked the doctor about his patients, and the latter consulted his as to the probability of their payment. Next they talked of "what was in the paper." Homais by this hour knew it almost by heart, and he repeated it from end to end, with the reflections of the penny-a-liners, and all the stories of individual catastrophes that had occurred in France or abroad. But the subject becoming exhausted, he was not slow in throwing out some remarks on the dishes before him. Sometimes even, half-rising, he delicately pointed out to madame the tenderest morsel, or turning to the servant, gave her some advice on the manipulation of stews and the hygiene of seasoning. He talked aroma, osmazome, juices, and gelatine in a bewildering manner. Moreover, Homais, with his head fuller of recipes than his shop of jars, excelled in making all kinds of preserves, vinegars, and sweet liqueurs; he knew also all the latest inventions in economic stoves, together with the art of preserving cheese and of curing sick wines. At eight o'clock Justin came to fetch him to shut up the shop. Then Monsieur Homais gave him a sly look, especially if Felicite was there, for he half noticed that his apprentice was fond of the doctor's house. "The young dog," he said, "is beginning to have ideas, and the devil take me if I don't believe he's in love with your servant!" But a more serious fault with which he reproached Justin was his constantly listening to conversation. On Sunday, for example, one could not get him out of the drawing-room, whither Madame Homais had called him to fetch the children, who were falling asleep in the arm-chairs, and dragging down with their backs calico chair-covers that were too large. Not many people came to these soirees at the chemist's, his scandal-mongering and political opinions having successfully alienated various respectable persons from him. The clerk never failed to be there. As soon as he heard the bell he ran to meet Madame Bovary, took her shawl, and put away under the shop-counter the thick list shoes that she wore over her boots when there was snow. First they played some hands at trente-et-un; next Monsieur Homais played ecarte with Emma; Leon behind her gave her advice. Standing up with his hands on the back of her chair he saw the teeth of her comb that bit into her chignon. With every movement that she made to throw her cards the right side of her dress was drawn up. From her turned-up hair a dark colour fell over her back, and growing gradually paler, lost itself little by little in the shade. Then her dress fell on both sides of her chair, puffing out full of folds, and reached the ground. When Leon occasionally felt the sole of his boot resting on it, he drew back as if he had trodden upon some one. When the game of cards was over, the druggist and the Doctor played dominoes, and Emma, changing her place, leant her elbow on the table, turning over the leaves of "L'Illustration". She had brought her ladies' journal with her. Leon sat down near her; they looked at the engravings together, and waited for one another at the bottom of the pages. She often begged him to read her the verses; Leon declaimed them in a languid voice, to which he carefully gave a dying fall in the love passages. But the noise of the dominoes annoyed him. Monsieur Homais was strong at the game; he could beat Charles and give him a double-six. Then the three hundred finished, they both stretched themselves out in front of the fire, and were soon asleep. The fire was dying out in the cinders; the teapot was empty, Leon was still reading. Emma listened to him, mechanically turning around the lampshade, on the gauze of which were painted clowns in carriages, and tight-rope dances with their balancing-poles. Leon stopped, pointing with a gesture to his sleeping audience; then they talked in low tones, and their conversation seemed the more sweet to them because it was unheard. Thus a kind of bond was established between them, a constant commerce of books and of romances. Monsieur Bovary, little given to jealousy, did not trouble himself about it. On his birthday he received a beautiful phrenological head, all marked with figures to the thorax and painted blue. This was an attention of the clerk's. He showed him many others, even to doing errands for him at Rouen; and the book of a novelist having made the mania for cactuses fashionable, Leon bought some for Madame Bovary, bringing them back on his knees in the "Hirondelle," pricking his fingers on their hard hairs. She had a board with a balustrade fixed against her window to hold the pots. The clerk, too, had his small hanging garden; they saw each other tending their flowers at their windows. Of the windows of the village there was one yet more often occupied; for on Sundays from morning to night, and every morning when the weather was bright, one could see at the dormer-window of the garret the profile of Monsieur Binet bending over his lathe, whose monotonous humming could be heard at the Lion d'Or. One evening on coming home Leon found in his room a rug in velvet and wool with leaves on a pale ground. He called Madame Homais, Monsieur Homais, Justin, the children, the cook; he spoke of it to his chief; every one wanted to see this rug. Why did the doctor's wife give the clerk presents? It looked queer. They decided that she must be his lover. He made this seem likely, so ceaselessly did he talk of her charms and of her wit; so much so, that Binet once roughly answered him-- "What does it matter to me since I'm not in her set?" He tortured himself to find out how he could make his declaration to her, and always halting between the fear of displeasing her and the shame of being such a coward, he wept with discouragement and desire. Then he took energetic resolutions, wrote letters that he tore up, put it off to times that he again deferred. Often he set out with the determination to dare all; but this resolution soon deserted him in Emma's presence, and when Charles, dropping in, invited him to jump into his chaise to go with him to see some patient in the neighbourhood, he at once accepted, bowed to madame, and went out. Her husband, was he not something belonging to her? As to Emma, she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss. She did not know that on the terrace of houses it makes lakes when the pipes are choked, and she would thus have remained in her security when she suddenly discovered a rent in the wall of it.

Chapter 4

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary25.asp

With winter setting in, Emma develops the habit of sitting in the parlor by the window, watching the passers-by. This way she sees Leon quite often. She also sees Homais, who makes frequent visits to the Bovarys' house. He engages Charles in political and journalistic discussions and speaks with Emma about recipes. During dinner, it is invariably Homais who speaks the most. The Bovarys also attend Homais' Sunday evening gatherings. Emma plays cards with Homais, while Leon advises her. When Homais is busy entertaining the doctor, Leon and Emma discuss fashion and poetry. Their mutual interest in "books and ballads" creates a bond between them. Charles, who is not of a jealous disposition, sees nothing odd in their relationship. Emma gives Leon a rug, a gesture that causes gossip throughout the town. Leon does not know how to handle his feelings for Emma. Her very presence makes him indecisive. He cannot guess whether expressing himself would help or harm his case. Emma, on the other hand, is blissfully unaware of her own feelings for Leon.

Notes In this chapter, Flaubert sets the stage for the relationship of Emma and Leon to progress. Leon is enamored with Emma, but does not know how to convey his feelings to her. He also worries about the consequences his relationship with Emma will have. Still, Leon cannot keep her off his mind and is constantly talking about her "charms and her wit." Monsieur Binet, who shares Leon's lodgings, is sick of Leon's constant references the young lady. Emma also causes people to react to her. When she gives Leon a gift, it causes a minor scandal in Yonville, and people begin to wonder if she is Leon's mistress. In this nineteenth century society, a married woman must only seek fulfillment within the bounds of marriage; even a casual friendship with a man provokes a negative societal response. Ironically, at this point in the book, Emma is unaware of her own growing attachment to Leon. For her, love "must come suddenly, with thunder and lightning, a hurricane from on high that swoops down into your life and turns it topsy-turvy, snatches away your will-power like a leaf, hurls you heart and soul into the abyss." Flaubert intentionally overdoes Emma's idealism in a satiric manner to drive home the point that it is futile to be as romantic as she is. It really becomes a plea on the author's part for rationalism and realism. Homais' character is further developed in the chapter. He is seen performing his neighborly duties to perfection, calling on the Bovarys frequently and having appropriate conversations with both husband and wife. It becomes obvious, however, that Homais is a bore who enjoys showing off his knowledge to Charles and Emma. The Sunday evening gatherings that Homais hosts serve to bring Emma and Leon closer. Charles is not the jealous type, and he does not find anything wrong with the developing relationship between Emma and Leon. In fact, he accepts a birthday gift from Leon and considers the latter to be a kind young man.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/14.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_13_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 5

chapter 5

{"name": "Chapter 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary26.asp", "summary": "Homais and his children, accompanied by Justin, the Bovarys, and Leon, go for an outing one Sunday afternoon. It is the end of winter, and there is nothing interesting to observe. To pass the time, Emma surveys the men and finds Charles stupid in appearance and behavior; in contrast, she finds Leon attractive. That night, as Emma muses over the happenings of the day, she recollects past instances of Leon's behavior with her. She suddenly realizes that he is in love with her. She laments her own marital status, but at the same time, \"her heart filled with a new enchantment.\" The draper, Monsieur Lheureux, pays Emma a visit. He offers to supply her anything she might want in accessories, linen, or fancy goods. While exhibiting his wares, Lheureux hints that he is also a moneylender and would be willing to make a loan to Emma if she should ever be in need of cash. His offer becomes significant later in the plot. After Lheureux leaves, Leon arrives. He is clearly uneasy and does not know what to say to her. Emma, for her part, chooses to discourage him by playing the dutiful wife. She praises her husband repeatedly and plays the part of mother to the hilt. Leon is upset by Emma's strange behavior, but he still idolizes her. As time passes, Emma admits to herself that she loves Leon, but makes no attempt to tell the young man. Instead, she grows thin with worry over her feelings and often weeps over her state of despair. Charles is totally oblivious to her turmoil. For Emma, his faith in her is \"a stupid insult.\" She blames him for all her frustrations and wonders if she could elope with Leon and start life anew. One day while Emma is weeping in her room, Felicite, her maid, enters. She tells Emma of how marriage cured a girl she had known who was suffering from nerves and depression. Emma's response to Felicite is classic: \"But with me. . . it didn't come on until I was married.\" At least sometimes Emma can be truthful with herself.", "analysis": "Notes The seasons usually mirror Emma's state of mind. It is normally winter when she is undergoing a major depression. In this chapter, winter is also indicative of the coldness of her feelings for her husband. Emma, who has always been repulsed by Charles' commonness, now begins to hate him for his meekness. Flaubert states that \"she would have liked Charles to hit her, that she might have just cause for hatred and revenge.\" Instead, Charles continues to idolize Emma and has no idea about her emotions towards him. The chapter also throws Emma into a self-confrontation. She finally realizes that she loves Leon, which presents a classic dilemma for her; she has to choose between the security of marriage or the passion of love. Although in appearance she clings to her husband and child, inwardly, \"she all desire and rage and hatred. . . and she solitude that she might revel in his image undisturbed.\" Emma is also frustrated that Leon is so passive about his emotions; she knows that he loves her and wishes that he would be more bold in expressing it. Lheureux, the draper, is presented in this chapter as a sharp, but somewhat shady, businessman. He has cultivated the genteel manners common to fashionable circles in order to ingratiate himself to his clients. His name, when translated into English, is appropriate for a salesman, for it means 'the happy one.' When Lheureux calls on Emma, he graciously shows her his fabrics, but he also offers to lend her money if she should ever be in need. Flaubert is clearly foreshadowing that this moneylender will become part of Emma's life later in the plot."}

It was a Sunday in February, an afternoon when the snow was falling. They had all, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais, and Monsieur Leon, gone to see a yarn-mill that was being built in the valley a mile and a half from Yonville. The druggist had taken Napoleon and Athalie to give them some exercise, and Justin accompanied them, carrying the umbrellas on his shoulder. Nothing, however, could be less curious than this curiosity. A great piece of waste ground, on which pell-mell, amid a mass of sand and stones, were a few break-wheels, already rusty, surrounded by a quadrangular building pierced by a number of little windows. The building was unfinished; the sky could be seen through the joists of the roofing. Attached to the stop-plank of the gable a bunch of straw mixed with corn-ears fluttered its tricoloured ribbons in the wind. Homais was talking. He explained to the company the future importance of this establishment, computed the strength of the floorings, the thickness of the walls, and regretted extremely not having a yard-stick such as Monsieur Binet possessed for his own special use. Emma, who had taken his arm, bent lightly against his shoulder, and she looked at the sun's disc shedding afar through the mist his pale splendour. She turned. Charles was there. His cap was drawn down over his eyebrows, and his two thick lips were trembling, which added a look of stupidity to his face; his very back, his calm back, was irritating to behold, and she saw written upon his coat all the platitude of the bearer. While she was considering him thus, tasting in her irritation a sort of depraved pleasure, Leon made a step forward. The cold that made him pale seemed to add a more gentle languor to his face; between his cravat and his neck the somewhat loose collar of his shirt showed the skin; the lobe of his ear looked out from beneath a lock of hair, and his large blue eyes, raised to the clouds, seemed to Emma more limpid and more beautiful than those mountain-lakes where the heavens are mirrored. "Wretched boy!" suddenly cried the chemist. And he ran to his son, who had just precipitated himself into a heap of lime in order to whiten his boots. At the reproaches with which he was being overwhelmed Napoleon began to roar, while Justin dried his shoes with a wisp of straw. But a knife was wanted; Charles offered his. "Ah!" she said to herself, "he carried a knife in his pocket like a peasant." The hoar-frost was falling, and they turned back to Yonville. In the evening Madame Bovary did not go to her neighbour's, and when Charles had left and she felt herself alone, the comparison re-began with the clearness of a sensation almost actual, and with that lengthening of perspective which memory gives to things. Looking from her bed at the clean fire that was burning, she still saw, as she had down there, Leon standing up with one hand behind his cane, and with the other holding Athalie, who was quietly sucking a piece of ice. She thought him charming; she could not tear herself away from him; she recalled his other attitudes on other days, the words he had spoken, the sound of his voice, his whole person; and she repeated, pouting out her lips as if for a kiss-- "Yes, charming! charming! Is he not in love?" she asked herself; "but with whom? With me?" All the proofs arose before her at once; her heart leapt. The flame of the fire threw a joyous light upon the ceiling; she turned on her back, stretching out her arms. Then began the eternal lamentation: "Oh, if Heaven had not willed it! And why not? What prevented it?" When Charles came home at midnight, she seemed to have just awakened, and as he made a noise undressing, she complained of a headache, then asked carelessly what had happened that evening. "Monsieur Leon," he said, "went to his room early." She could not help smiling, and she fell asleep, her soul filled with a new delight. The next day, at dusk, she received a visit from Monsieur Lherueux, the draper. He was a man of ability, was this shopkeeper. Born a Gascon but bred a Norman, he grafted upon his southern volubility the cunning of the Cauchois. His fat, flabby, beardless face seemed dyed by a decoction of liquorice, and his white hair made even more vivid the keen brilliance of his small black eyes. No one knew what he had been formerly; a pedlar said some, a banker at Routot according to others. What was certain was that he made complex calculations in his head that would have frightened Binet himself. Polite to obsequiousness, he always held himself with his back bent in the position of one who bows or who invites. After leaving at the door his hat surrounded with crape, he put down a green bandbox on the table, and began by complaining to madame, with many civilities, that he should have remained till that day without gaining her confidence. A poor shop like his was not made to attract a "fashionable lady"; he emphasized the words; yet she had only to command, and he would undertake to provide her with anything she might wish, either in haberdashery or linen, millinery or fancy goods, for he went to town regularly four times a month. He was connected with the best houses. You could speak of him at the "Trois Freres," at the "Barbe d'Or," or at the "Grand Sauvage"; all these gentlemen knew him as well as the insides of their pockets. To-day, then he had come to show madame, in passing, various articles he happened to have, thanks to the most rare opportunity. And he pulled out half-a-dozen embroidered collars from the box. Madame Bovary examined them. "I do not require anything," she said. Then Monsieur Lheureux delicately exhibited three Algerian scarves, several packets of English needles, a pair of straw slippers, and finally, four eggcups in cocoanut wood, carved in open work by convicts. Then, with both hands on the table, his neck stretched out, his figure bent forward, open-mouthed, he watched Emma's look, who was walking up and down undecided amid these goods. From time to time, as if to remove some dust, he filliped with his nail the silk of the scarves spread out at full length, and they rustled with a little noise, making in the green twilight the gold spangles of their tissue scintillate like little stars. "How much are they?" "A mere nothing," he replied, "a mere nothing. But there's no hurry; whenever it's convenient. We are not Jews." She reflected for a few moments, and ended by again declining Monsieur Lheureux's offer. He replied quite unconcernedly-- "Very well. We shall understand one another by and by. I have always got on with ladies--if I didn't with my own!" Emma smiled. "I wanted to tell you," he went on good-naturedly, after his joke, "that it isn't the money I should trouble about. Why, I could give you some, if need be." She made a gesture of surprise. "Ah!" said he quickly and in a low voice, "I shouldn't have to go far to find you some, rely on that." And he began asking after Pere Tellier, the proprietor of the "Cafe Francais," whom Monsieur Bovary was then attending. "What's the matter with Pere Tellier? He coughs so that he shakes his whole house, and I'm afraid he'll soon want a deal covering rather than a flannel vest. He was such a rake as a young man! Those sort of people, madame, have not the least regularity; he's burnt up with brandy. Still it's sad, all the same, to see an acquaintance go off." And while he fastened up his box he discoursed about the doctor's patients. "It's the weather, no doubt," he said, looking frowningly at the floor, "that causes these illnesses. I, too, don't feel the thing. One of these days I shall even have to consult the doctor for a pain I have in my back. Well, good-bye, Madame Bovary. At your service; your very humble servant." And he closed the door gently. Emma had her dinner served in her bedroom on a tray by the fireside; she was a long time over it; everything was well with her. "How good I was!" she said to herself, thinking of the scarves. She heard some steps on the stairs. It was Leon. She got up and took from the chest of drawers the first pile of dusters to be hemmed. When he came in she seemed very busy. The conversation languished; Madame Bovary gave it up every few minutes, whilst he himself seemed quite embarrassed. Seated on a low chair near the fire, he turned round in his fingers the ivory thimble-case. She stitched on, or from time to time turned down the hem of the cloth with her nail. She did not speak; he was silent, captivated by her silence, as he would have been by her speech. "Poor fellow!" she thought. "How have I displeased her?" he asked himself. At last, however, Leon said that he should have, one of these days, to go to Rouen on some office business. "Your music subscription is out; am I to renew it?" "No," she replied. "Why?" "Because--" And pursing her lips she slowly drew a long stitch of grey thread. This work irritated Leon. It seemed to roughen the ends of her fingers. A gallant phrase came into his head, but he did not risk it. "Then you are giving it up?" he went on. "What?" she asked hurriedly. "Music? Ah! yes! Have I not my house to look after, my husband to attend to, a thousand things, in fact, many duties that must be considered first?" She looked at the clock. Charles was late. Then, she affected anxiety. Two or three times she even repeated, "He is so good!" The clerk was fond of Monsieur Bovary. But this tenderness on his behalf astonished him unpleasantly; nevertheless he took up on his praises, which he said everyone was singing, especially the chemist. "Ah! he is a good fellow," continued Emma. "Certainly," replied the clerk. And he began talking of Madame Homais, whose very untidy appearance generally made them laugh. "What does it matter?" interrupted Emma. "A good housewife does not trouble about her appearance." Then she relapsed into silence. It was the same on the following days; her talks, her manners, everything changed. She took interest in the housework, went to church regularly, and looked after her servant with more severity. She took Berthe from nurse. When visitors called, Felicite brought her in, and Madame Bovary undressed her to show off her limbs. She declared she adored children; this was her consolation, her joy, her passion, and she accompanied her caresses with lyrical outburst which would have reminded anyone but the Yonville people of Sachette in "Notre Dame de Paris." When Charles came home he found his slippers put to warm near the fire. His waistcoat now never wanted lining, nor his shirt buttons, and it was quite a pleasure to see in the cupboard the night-caps arranged in piles of the same height. She no longer grumbled as formerly at taking a turn in the garden; what he proposed was always done, although she did not understand the wishes to which she submitted without a murmur; and when Leon saw him by his fireside after dinner, his two hands on his stomach, his two feet on the fender, his two cheeks red with feeding, his eyes moist with happiness, the child crawling along the carpet, and this woman with the slender waist who came behind his arm-chair to kiss his forehead: "What madness!" he said to himself. "And how to reach her!" And thus she seemed so virtuous and inaccessible to him that he lost all hope, even the faintest. But by this renunciation he placed her on an extraordinary pinnacle. To him she stood outside those fleshly attributes from which he had nothing to obtain, and in his heart she rose ever, and became farther removed from him after the magnificent manner of an apotheosis that is taking wing. It was one of those pure feelings that do not interfere with life, that are cultivated because they are rare, and whose loss would afflict more than their passion rejoices. Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paler, her face longer. With her black hair, her large eyes, her aquiline nose, her birdlike walk, and always silent now, did she not seem to be passing through life scarcely touching it, and to bear on her brow the vague impress of some divine destiny? She was so sad and so calm, at once so gentle and so reserved, that near her one felt oneself seized by an icy charm, as we shudder in churches at the perfume of the flowers mingling with the cold of the marble. The others even did not escape from this seduction. The chemist said-- "She is a woman of great parts, who wouldn't be misplaced in a sub-prefecture." The housewives admired her economy, the patients her politeness, the poor her charity. But she was eaten up with desires, with rage, with hate. That dress with the narrow folds hid a distracted fear, of whose torment those chaste lips said nothing. She was in love with Leon, and sought solitude that she might with the more ease delight in his image. The sight of his form troubled the voluptuousness of this mediation. Emma thrilled at the sound of his step; then in his presence the emotion subsided, and afterwards there remained to her only an immense astonishment that ended in sorrow. Leon did not know that when he left her in despair she rose after he had gone to see him in the street. She concerned herself about his comings and goings; she watched his face; she invented quite a history to find an excuse for going to his room. The chemist's wife seemed happy to her to sleep under the same roof, and her thoughts constantly centered upon this house, like the "Lion d'Or" pigeons, who came there to dip their red feet and white wings in its gutters. But the more Emma recognised her love, the more she crushed it down, that it might not be evident, that she might make it less. She would have liked Leon to guess it, and she imagined chances, catastrophes that should facilitate this. What restrained her was, no doubt, idleness and fear, and a sense of shame also. She thought she had repulsed him too much, that the time was past, that all was lost. Then, pride, and joy of being able to say to herself, "I am virtuous," and to look at herself in the glass taking resigned poses, consoled her a little for the sacrifice she believed she was making. Then the lusts of the flesh, the longing for money, and the melancholy of passion all blended themselves into one suffering, and instead of turning her thoughts from it, she clave to it the more, urging herself to pain, and seeking everywhere occasion for it. She was irritated by an ill-served dish or by a half-open door; bewailed the velvets she had not, the happiness she had missed, her too exalted dreams, her narrow home. What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness on this point ingratitude. For whose sake, then was she virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all felicity, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of that complex strap that bucked her in on all sides. On him alone, then, she concentrated all the various hatreds that resulted from her boredom, and every effort to diminish only augmented it; for this useless trouble was added to the other reasons for despair, and contributed still more to the separation between them. Her own gentleness to herself made her rebel against him. Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires. She would have liked Charles to beat her, that she might have a better right to hate him, to revenge herself upon him. She was surprised sometimes at the atrocious conjectures that came into her thoughts, and she had to go on smiling, to hear repeated to her at all hours that she was happy, to pretend to be happy, to let it be believed. Yet she had loathing of this hypocrisy. She was seized with the temptation to flee somewhere with Leon to try a new life; but at once a vague chasm full of darkness opened within her soul. "Besides, he no longer loves me," she thought. "What is to become of me? What help is to be hoped for, what consolation, what solace?" She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in a low voice, with flowing tears. "Why don't you tell master?" the servant asked her when she came in during these crises. "It is the nerves," said Emma. "Do not speak to him of it; it would worry him." "Ah! yes," Felicite went on, "you are just like La Guerine, Pere Guerin's daughter, the fisherman at Pollet, that I used to know at Dieppe before I came to you. She was so sad, so sad, to see her standing upright on the threshold of her house, she seemed to you like a winding-sheet spread out before the door. Her illness, it appears, was a kind of fog that she had in her head, and the doctors could not do anything, nor the priest either. When she was taken too bad she went off quite alone to the sea-shore, so that the customs officer, going his rounds, often found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle. Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say." "But with me," replied Emma, "it was after marriage that it began."

Chapter 5

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary26.asp

Homais and his children, accompanied by Justin, the Bovarys, and Leon, go for an outing one Sunday afternoon. It is the end of winter, and there is nothing interesting to observe. To pass the time, Emma surveys the men and finds Charles stupid in appearance and behavior; in contrast, she finds Leon attractive. That night, as Emma muses over the happenings of the day, she recollects past instances of Leon's behavior with her. She suddenly realizes that he is in love with her. She laments her own marital status, but at the same time, "her heart filled with a new enchantment." The draper, Monsieur Lheureux, pays Emma a visit. He offers to supply her anything she might want in accessories, linen, or fancy goods. While exhibiting his wares, Lheureux hints that he is also a moneylender and would be willing to make a loan to Emma if she should ever be in need of cash. His offer becomes significant later in the plot. After Lheureux leaves, Leon arrives. He is clearly uneasy and does not know what to say to her. Emma, for her part, chooses to discourage him by playing the dutiful wife. She praises her husband repeatedly and plays the part of mother to the hilt. Leon is upset by Emma's strange behavior, but he still idolizes her. As time passes, Emma admits to herself that she loves Leon, but makes no attempt to tell the young man. Instead, she grows thin with worry over her feelings and often weeps over her state of despair. Charles is totally oblivious to her turmoil. For Emma, his faith in her is "a stupid insult." She blames him for all her frustrations and wonders if she could elope with Leon and start life anew. One day while Emma is weeping in her room, Felicite, her maid, enters. She tells Emma of how marriage cured a girl she had known who was suffering from nerves and depression. Emma's response to Felicite is classic: "But with me. . . it didn't come on until I was married." At least sometimes Emma can be truthful with herself.

Notes The seasons usually mirror Emma's state of mind. It is normally winter when she is undergoing a major depression. In this chapter, winter is also indicative of the coldness of her feelings for her husband. Emma, who has always been repulsed by Charles' commonness, now begins to hate him for his meekness. Flaubert states that "she would have liked Charles to hit her, that she might have just cause for hatred and revenge." Instead, Charles continues to idolize Emma and has no idea about her emotions towards him. The chapter also throws Emma into a self-confrontation. She finally realizes that she loves Leon, which presents a classic dilemma for her; she has to choose between the security of marriage or the passion of love. Although in appearance she clings to her husband and child, inwardly, "she all desire and rage and hatred. . . and she solitude that she might revel in his image undisturbed." Emma is also frustrated that Leon is so passive about his emotions; she knows that he loves her and wishes that he would be more bold in expressing it. Lheureux, the draper, is presented in this chapter as a sharp, but somewhat shady, businessman. He has cultivated the genteel manners common to fashionable circles in order to ingratiate himself to his clients. His name, when translated into English, is appropriate for a salesman, for it means 'the happy one.' When Lheureux calls on Emma, he graciously shows her his fabrics, but he also offers to lend her money if she should ever be in need. Flaubert is clearly foreshadowing that this moneylender will become part of Emma's life later in the plot.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/15.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_14_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 6

chapter 6

{"name": "Chapter 6", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary27.asp", "summary": "Sitting by the open window one evening, Emma is in a reflective mood. The chime of the church bells takes her to her childhood days when she would worship in church with the nuns. She feels moved enough to visit the church, and once there, she seeks out the cure, Abbe Bournisien. When she tries to hint that she needs spiritual healing, the cure relates a list of problems he encounters in the parish. He is very distracted and when he asks why Emma might have approached him, she merely responds, \"Oh no, nothing -- nothing. \" They look at each other, both speechless for a moment before going their separate ways. Emma returns home in a state of shock. She is astonished \"that there should be calm about her and such turmoil within.\" She pushes Berthe away when the baby attempts to play with her. Berthe falls against a chest of drawers and hurts herself. Emma calls for help, claiming that the fall has been an accident. Later, Emma watches the sleeping child and is struck by Berthe's ugliness. That night Charles 'comforts' his wife. Life in Yonville becomes unbearable for Leon, for he is \"tired of loving without results. \" Paris, where he intends to study law, beckons him with all its glamour. Having made the necessary arrangements to move, Leon pays Emma a final visit. The meeting is brief but full of restrained feeling. After Leon has left, Emma is shocked and crushed. When Homais visits the Bovarys later in the evening, Emma is forced to listen to a discussion about the pros and cons of Parisian life.", "analysis": "Notes Struggling with her inner turmoil, Emma hears the church bells and is reminded of her youthful days in the convent. She responds to the desire swelling within her to speak to an authority-figure about her problem. She, therefore, goes to the church, seeks out the local parish priest, and tries to tell him of her conflict. He does not hear her at all, but talks about his own problems in the parish. Flaubert is definitely criticizing the insensitivity of the clergy to the problems of the lay people and their inability to minister to spiritual needs. When Emma returns home, her anxiety has reached a peak. The cure has done nothing to \"heal\" her of her \"ills.\" In this state of depression, she is cruel to her daughter, pushing her away when she seeks attention. Berthe's fall shows just how selfish Emma has become. The incident also foreshadows Emma's future attempts to cut herself off from her immediate family and shows how deceptive Emma can be. The relationship between Emma and Leon is ended by Leon's decision to leave Yonville for Paris. Their love remains undeclared although both are aware of their pent-up emotions. The reader can easily surmise what Leon's departure will do to Emma's emotional state."}

One evening when the window was open, and she, sitting by it, had been watching Lestiboudois, the beadle, trimming the box, she suddenly heard the Angelus ringing. It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are in bloom, and a warm wind blows over the flower-beds newly turned, and the gardens, like women, seem to be getting ready for the summer fetes. Through the bars of the arbour and away beyond the river seen in the fields, meandering through the grass in wandering curves. The evening vapours rose between the leafless poplars, touching their outlines with a violet tint, paler and more transparent than a subtle gauze caught athwart their branches. In the distance cattle moved about; neither their steps nor their lowing could be heard; and the bell, still ringing through the air, kept up its peaceful lamentation. With this repeated tinkling the thoughts of the young woman lost themselves in old memories of her youth and school-days. She remembered the great candlesticks that rose above the vases full of flowers on the altar, and the tabernacle with its small columns. She would have liked to be once more lost in the long line of white veils, marked off here and there by the stuff black hoods of the good sisters bending over their prie-Dieu. At mass on Sundays, when she looked up, she saw the gentle face of the Virgin amid the blue smoke of the rising incense. Then she was moved; she felt herself weak and quite deserted, like the down of a bird whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she went towards the church, included to no matter what devotions, so that her soul was absorbed and all existence lost in it. On the Place she met Lestivoudois on his way back, for, in order not to shorten his day's labour, he preferred interrupting his work, then beginning it again, so that he rang the Angelus to suit his own convenience. Besides, the ringing over a little earlier warned the lads of catechism hour. Already a few who had arrived were playing marbles on the stones of the cemetery. Others, astride the wall, swung their legs, kicking with their clogs the large nettles growing between the little enclosure and the newest graves. This was the only green spot. All the rest was but stones, always covered with a fine powder, despite the vestry-broom. The children in list shoes ran about there as if it were an enclosure made for them. The shouts of their voices could be heard through the humming of the bell. This grew less and less with the swinging of the great rope that, hanging from the top of the belfry, dragged its end on the ground. Swallows flitted to and fro uttering little cries, cut the air with the edge of their wings, and swiftly returned to their yellow nests under the tiles of the coping. At the end of the church a lamp was burning, the wick of a night-light in a glass hung up. Its light from a distance looked like a white stain trembling in the oil. A long ray of the sun fell across the nave and seemed to darken the lower sides and the corners. "Where is the cure?" asked Madame Bovary of one of the lads, who was amusing himself by shaking a swivel in a hole too large for it. "He is just coming," he answered. And in fact the door of the presbytery grated; Abbe Bournisien appeared; the children, pell-mell, fled into the church. "These young scamps!" murmured the priest, "always the same!" Then, picking up a catechism all in rags that he had struck with is foot, "They respect nothing!" But as soon as he caught sight of Madame Bovary, "Excuse me," he said; "I did not recognise you." He thrust the catechism into his pocket, and stopped short, balancing the heavy vestry key between his two fingers. The light of the setting sun that fell full upon his face paled the lasting of his cassock, shiny at the elbows, unravelled at the hem. Grease and tobacco stains followed along his broad chest the lines of the buttons, and grew more numerous the farther they were from his neckcloth, in which the massive folds of his red chin rested; this was dotted with yellow spots, that disappeared beneath the coarse hair of his greyish beard. He had just dined and was breathing noisily. "How are you?" he added. "Not well," replied Emma; "I am ill." "Well, and so am I," answered the priest. "These first warm days weaken one most remarkably, don't they? But, after all, we are born to suffer, as St. Paul says. But what does Monsieur Bovary think of it?" "He!" she said with a gesture of contempt. "What!" replied the good fellow, quite astonished, "doesn't he prescribe something for you?" "Ah!" said Emma, "it is no earthly remedy I need." But the cure from time to time looked into the church, where the kneeling boys were shouldering one another, and tumbling over like packs of cards. "I should like to know--" she went on. "You look out, Riboudet," cried the priest in an angry voice; "I'll warm your ears, you imp!" Then turning to Emma, "He's Boudet the carpenter's son; his parents are well off, and let him do just as he pleases. Yet he could learn quickly if he would, for he is very sharp. And so sometimes for a joke I call him Riboudet (like the road one takes to go to Maromme) and I even say 'Mon Riboudet.' Ha! Ha! 'Mont Riboudet.' The other day I repeated that just to Monsignor, and he laughed at it; he condescended to laugh at it. And how is Monsieur Bovary?" She seemed not to hear him. And he went on-- "Always very busy, no doubt; for he and I are certainly the busiest people in the parish. But he is doctor of the body," he added with a thick laugh, "and I of the soul." She fixed her pleading eyes upon the priest. "Yes," she said, "you solace all sorrows." "Ah! don't talk to me of it, Madame Bovary. This morning I had to go to Bas-Diauville for a cow that was ill; they thought it was under a spell. All their cows, I don't know how it is--But pardon me! Longuemarre and Boudet! Bless me! Will you leave off?" And with a bound he ran into the church. The boys were just then clustering round the large desk, climbing over the precentor's footstool, opening the missal; and others on tiptoe were just about to venture into the confessional. But the priest suddenly distributed a shower of cuffs among them. Seizing them by the collars of their coats, he lifted them from the ground, and deposited them on their knees on the stones of the choir, firmly, as if he meant planting them there. "Yes," said he, when he returned to Emma, unfolding his large cotton handkerchief, one corner of which he put between his teeth, "farmers are much to be pitied." "Others, too," she replied. "Assuredly. Town-labourers, for example." "It is not they--" "Pardon! I've there known poor mothers of families, virtuous women, I assure you, real saints, who wanted even bread." "But those," replied Emma, and the corners of her mouth twitched as she spoke, "those, Monsieur le Cure, who have bread and have no--" "Fire in the winter," said the priest. "Oh, what does that matter?" "What! What does it matter? It seems to me that when one has firing and food--for, after all--" "My God! my God!" she sighed. "It is indigestion, no doubt? You must get home, Madame Bovary; drink a little tea, that will strengthen you, or else a glass of fresh water with a little moist sugar." "Why?" And she looked like one awaking from a dream. "Well, you see, you were putting your hand to your forehead. I thought you felt faint." Then, bethinking himself, "But you were asking me something? What was it? I really don't remember." "I? Nothing! nothing!" repeated Emma. And the glance she cast round her slowly fell upon the old man in the cassock. They looked at one another face to face without speaking. "Then, Madame Bovary," he said at last, "excuse me, but duty first, you know; I must look after my good-for-nothings. The first communion will soon be upon us, and I fear we shall be behind after all. So after Ascension Day I keep them recta* an extra hour every Wednesday. Poor children! One cannot lead them too soon into the path of the Lord, as, moreover, he has himself recommended us to do by the mouth of his Divine Son. Good health to you, madame; my respects to your husband." *On the straight and narrow path. And he went into the church making a genuflexion as soon as he reached the door. Emma saw him disappear between the double row of forms, walking with a heavy tread, his head a little bent over his shoulder, and with his two hands half-open behind him. Then she turned on her heel all of one piece, like a statue on a pivot, and went homewards. But the loud voice of the priest, the clear voices of the boys still reached her ears, and went on behind her. "Are you a Christian?" "Yes, I am a Christian." "What is a Christian?" "He who, being baptized-baptized-baptized--" She went up the steps of the staircase holding on to the banisters, and when she was in her room threw herself into an arm-chair. The whitish light of the window-panes fell with soft undulations. The furniture in its place seemed to have become more immobile, and to lose itself in the shadow as in an ocean of darkness. The fire was out, the clock went on ticking, and Emma vaguely marvelled at this calm of all things while within herself was such tumult. But little Berthe was there, between the window and the work-table, tottering on her knitted shoes, and trying to come to her mother to catch hold of the ends of her apron-strings. "Leave me alone," said the latter, putting her from her with her hand. The little girl soon came up closer against her knees, and leaning on them with her arms, she looked up with her large blue eyes, while a small thread of pure saliva dribbled from her lips on to the silk apron. "Leave me alone," repeated the young woman quite irritably. Her face frightened the child, who began to scream. "Will you leave me alone?" she said, pushing her with her elbow. Berthe fell at the foot of the drawers against the brass handle, cutting her cheek, which began to bleed, against it. Madame Bovary sprang to lift her up, broke the bell-rope, called for the servant with all her might, and she was just going to curse herself when Charles appeared. It was the dinner-hour; he had come home. "Look, dear!" said Emma, in a calm voice, "the little one fell down while she was playing, and has hurt herself." Charles reassured her; the case was not a serious one, and he went for some sticking plaster. Madame Bovary did not go downstairs to the dining-room; she wished to remain alone to look after the child. Then watching her sleep, the little anxiety she felt gradually wore off, and she seemed very stupid to herself, and very good to have been so worried just now at so little. Berthe, in fact, no longer sobbed. Her breathing now imperceptibly raised the cotton covering. Big tears lay in the corner of the half-closed eyelids, through whose lashes one could see two pale sunken pupils; the plaster stuck on her cheek drew the skin obliquely. "It is very strange," thought Emma, "how ugly this child is!" When at eleven o'clock Charles came back from the chemist's shop, whither he had gone after dinner to return the remainder of the sticking-plaster, he found his wife standing by the cradle. "I assure you it's nothing." he said, kissing her on the forehead. "Don't worry, my poor darling; you will make yourself ill." He had stayed a long time at the chemist's. Although he had not seemed much moved, Homais, nevertheless, had exerted himself to buoy him up, to "keep up his spirits." Then they had talked of the various dangers that threaten childhood, of the carelessness of servants. Madame Homais knew something of it, having still upon her chest the marks left by a basin full of soup that a cook had formerly dropped on her pinafore, and her good parents took no end of trouble for her. The knives were not sharpened, nor the floors waxed; there were iron gratings to the windows and strong bars across the fireplace; the little Homais, in spite of their spirit, could not stir without someone watching them; at the slightest cold their father stuffed them with pectorals; and until they were turned four they all, without pity, had to wear wadded head-protectors. This, it is true, was a fancy of Madame Homais'; her husband was inwardly afflicted at it. Fearing the possible consequences of such compression to the intellectual organs. He even went so far as to say to her, "Do you want to make Caribs or Botocudos of them?" Charles, however, had several times tried to interrupt the conversation. "I should like to speak to you," he had whispered in the clerk's ear, who went upstairs in front of him. "Can he suspect anything?" Leon asked himself. His heart beat, and he racked his brain with surmises. At last, Charles, having shut the door, asked him to see himself what would be the price at Rouen of a fine daguerreotypes. It was a sentimental surprise he intended for his wife, a delicate attention--his portrait in a frock-coat. But he wanted first to know "how much it would be." The inquiries would not put Monsieur Leon out, since he went to town almost every week. Why? Monsieur Homais suspected some "young man's affair" at the bottom of it, an intrigue. But he was mistaken. Leon was after no love-making. He was sadder than ever, as Madame Lefrancois saw from the amount of food he left on his plate. To find out more about it she questioned the tax-collector. Binet answered roughly that he "wasn't paid by the police." All the same, his companion seemed very strange to him, for Leon often threw himself back in his chair, and stretching out his arms, complained vaguely of life. "It's because you don't take enough recreation," said the collector. "What recreation?" "If I were you I'd have a lathe." "But I don't know how to turn," answered the clerk. "Ah! that's true," said the other, rubbing his chin with an air of mingled contempt and satisfaction. Leon was weary of loving without any result; moreover he was beginning to feel that depression caused by the repetition of the same kind of life, when no interest inspires and no hope sustains it. He was so bored with Yonville and its inhabitants, that the sight of certain persons, of certain houses, irritated him beyond endurance; and the chemist, good fellow though he was, was becoming absolutely unbearable to him. Yet the prospect of a new condition of life frightened as much as it seduced him. This apprehension soon changed into impatience, and then Paris from afar sounded its fanfare of masked balls with the laugh of grisettes. As he was to finish reading there, why not set out at once? What prevented him? And he began making home-preparations; he arranged his occupations beforehand. He furnished in his head an apartment. He would lead an artist's life there! He would take lessons on the guitar! He would have a dressing-gown, a Basque cap, blue velvet slippers! He even already was admiring two crossed foils over his chimney-piece, with a death's head on the guitar above them. The difficulty was the consent of his mother; nothing, however, seemed more reasonable. Even his employer advised him to go to some other chambers where he could advance more rapidly. Taking a middle course, then, Leon looked for some place as second clerk at Rouen; found none, and at last wrote his mother a long letter full of details, in which he set forth the reasons for going to live at Paris immediately. She consented. He did not hurry. Every day for a month Hivert carried boxes, valises, parcels for him from Yonville to Rouen and from Rouen to Yonville; and when Leon had packed up his wardrobe, had his three arm-chairs restuffed, bought a stock of neckties, in a word, had made more preparations than for a voyage around the world, he put it off from week to week, until he received a second letter from his mother urging him to leave, since he wanted to pass his examination before the vacation. When the moment for the farewells had come, Madame Homais wept, Justin sobbed; Homais, as a man of nerve, concealed his emotion; he wished to carry his friend's overcoat himself as far as the gate of the notary, who was taking Leon to Rouen in his carriage. The latter had just time to bid farewell to Monsieur Bovary. When he reached the head of the stairs, he stopped, he was so out of breath. As he came in, Madame Bovary arose hurriedly. "It is I again!" said Leon. "I was sure of it!" She bit her lips, and a rush of blood flowing under her skin made her red from the roots of her hair to the top of her collar. She remained standing, leaning with her shoulder against the wainscot. "The doctor is not here?" he went on. "He is out." She repeated, "He is out." Then there was silence. They looked at one another and their thoughts, confounded in the same agony, clung close together like two throbbing breasts. "I should like to kiss Berthe," said Leon. Emma went down a few steps and called Felicite. He threw one long look around him that took in the walls, the decorations, the fireplace, as if to penetrate everything, carry away everything. But she returned, and the servant brought Berthe, who was swinging a windmill roof downwards at the end of a string. Leon kissed her several times on the neck. "Good-bye, poor child! good-bye, dear little one! good-bye!" And he gave her back to her mother. "Take her away," she said. They remained alone--Madame Bovary, her back turned, her face pressed against a window-pane; Leon held his cap in his hand, knocking it softly against his thigh. "It is going to rain," said Emma. "I have a cloak," he answered. "Ah!" She turned around, her chin lowered, her forehead bent forward. The light fell on it as on a piece of marble, to the curve of the eyebrows, without one's being able to guess what Emma was seeing on the horizon or what she was thinking within herself. "Well, good-bye," he sighed. She raised her head with a quick movement. "Yes, good-bye--go!" They advanced towards each other; he held out his hand; she hesitated. "In the English fashion, then," she said, giving her own hand wholly to him, and forcing a laugh. Leon felt it between his fingers, and the very essence of all his being seemed to pass down into that moist palm. Then he opened his hand; their eyes met again, and he disappeared. When he reached the market-place, he stopped and hid behind a pillar to look for the last time at this white house with the four green blinds. He thought he saw a shadow behind the window in the room; but the curtain, sliding along the pole as though no one were touching it, slowly opened its long oblique folds that spread out with a single movement, and thus hung straight and motionless as a plaster wall. Leon set off running. From afar he saw his employer's gig in the road, and by it a man in a coarse apron holding the horse. Homais and Monsieur Guillaumin were talking. They were waiting for him. "Embrace me," said the druggist with tears in his eyes. "Here is your coat, my good friend. Mind the cold; take care of yourself; look after yourself." "Come, Leon, jump in," said the notary. Homais bent over the splash-board, and in a voice broken by sobs uttered these three sad words-- "A pleasant journey!" "Good-night," said Monsieur Guillaumin. "Give him his head." They set out, and Homais went back. Madame Bovary had opened her window overlooking the garden and watched the clouds. They gathered around the sunset on the side of Rouen and then swiftly rolled back their black columns, behind which the great rays of the sun looked out like the golden arrows of a suspended trophy, while the rest of the empty heavens was white as porcelain. But a gust of wind bowed the poplars, and suddenly the rain fell; it pattered against the green leaves. Then the sun reappeared, the hens clucked, sparrows shook their wings in the damp thickets, and the pools of water on the gravel as they flowed away carried off the pink flowers of an acacia. "Ah! how far off he must be already!" she thought. Monsieur Homais, as usual, came at half-past six during dinner. "Well," said he, "so we've sent off our young friend!" "So it seems," replied the doctor. Then turning on his chair; "Any news at home?" "Nothing much. Only my wife was a little moved this afternoon. You know women--a nothing upsets them, especially my wife. And we should be wrong to object to that, since their nervous organization is much more malleable than ours." "Poor Leon!" said Charles. "How will he live at Paris? Will he get used to it?" Madame Bovary sighed. "Get along!" said the chemist, smacking his lips. "The outings at restaurants, the masked balls, the champagne--all that'll be jolly enough, I assure you." "I don't think he'll go wrong," objected Bovary. "Nor do I," said Monsieur Homais quickly; "although he'll have to do like the rest for fear of passing for a Jesuit. And you don't know what a life those dogs lead in the Latin quarter with actresses. Besides, students are thought a great deal of in Paris. Provided they have a few accomplishments, they are received in the best society; there are even ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who fall in love with them, which subsequently furnishes them opportunities for making very good matches." "But," said the doctor, "I fear for him that down there--" "You are right," interrupted the chemist; "that is the reverse of the medal. And one is constantly obliged to keep one's hand in one's pocket there. Thus, we will suppose you are in a public garden. An individual presents himself, well dressed, even wearing an order, and whom one would take for a diplomatist. He approaches you, he insinuates himself; offers you a pinch of snuff, or picks up your hat. Then you become more intimate; he takes you to a cafe, invites you to his country-house, introduces you, between two drinks, to all sorts of people; and three-fourths of the time it's only to plunder your watch or lead you into some pernicious step. "That is true," said Charles; "but I was thinking especially of illnesses--of typhoid fever, for example, that attacks students from the provinces." Emma shuddered. "Because of the change of regimen," continued the chemist, "and of the perturbation that results therefrom in the whole system. And then the water at Paris, don't you know! The dishes at restaurants, all the spiced food, end by heating the blood, and are not worth, whatever people may say of them, a good soup. For my own part, I have always preferred plain living; it is more healthy. So when I was studying pharmacy at Rouen, I boarded in a boarding house; I dined with the professors." And thus he went on, expounding his opinions generally and his personal likings, until Justin came to fetch him for a mulled egg that was wanted. "Not a moment's peace!" he cried; "always at it! I can't go out for a minute! Like a plough-horse, I have always to be moiling and toiling. What drudgery!" Then, when he was at the door, "By the way, do you know the news?" "What news?" "That it is very likely," Homais went on, raising his eyebrows and assuming one of his most serious expression, "that the agricultural meeting of the Seine-Inferieure will be held this year at Yonville-l'Abbaye. The rumour, at all events, is going the round. This morning the paper alluded to it. It would be of the utmost importance for our district. But we'll talk it over later on. I can see, thank you; Justin has the lantern."

Chapter 6

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary27.asp

Sitting by the open window one evening, Emma is in a reflective mood. The chime of the church bells takes her to her childhood days when she would worship in church with the nuns. She feels moved enough to visit the church, and once there, she seeks out the cure, Abbe Bournisien. When she tries to hint that she needs spiritual healing, the cure relates a list of problems he encounters in the parish. He is very distracted and when he asks why Emma might have approached him, she merely responds, "Oh no, nothing -- nothing. " They look at each other, both speechless for a moment before going their separate ways. Emma returns home in a state of shock. She is astonished "that there should be calm about her and such turmoil within." She pushes Berthe away when the baby attempts to play with her. Berthe falls against a chest of drawers and hurts herself. Emma calls for help, claiming that the fall has been an accident. Later, Emma watches the sleeping child and is struck by Berthe's ugliness. That night Charles 'comforts' his wife. Life in Yonville becomes unbearable for Leon, for he is "tired of loving without results. " Paris, where he intends to study law, beckons him with all its glamour. Having made the necessary arrangements to move, Leon pays Emma a final visit. The meeting is brief but full of restrained feeling. After Leon has left, Emma is shocked and crushed. When Homais visits the Bovarys later in the evening, Emma is forced to listen to a discussion about the pros and cons of Parisian life.

Notes Struggling with her inner turmoil, Emma hears the church bells and is reminded of her youthful days in the convent. She responds to the desire swelling within her to speak to an authority-figure about her problem. She, therefore, goes to the church, seeks out the local parish priest, and tries to tell him of her conflict. He does not hear her at all, but talks about his own problems in the parish. Flaubert is definitely criticizing the insensitivity of the clergy to the problems of the lay people and their inability to minister to spiritual needs. When Emma returns home, her anxiety has reached a peak. The cure has done nothing to "heal" her of her "ills." In this state of depression, she is cruel to her daughter, pushing her away when she seeks attention. Berthe's fall shows just how selfish Emma has become. The incident also foreshadows Emma's future attempts to cut herself off from her immediate family and shows how deceptive Emma can be. The relationship between Emma and Leon is ended by Leon's decision to leave Yonville for Paris. Their love remains undeclared although both are aware of their pent-up emotions. The reader can easily surmise what Leon's departure will do to Emma's emotional state.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/16.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_15_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 7

chapter 7

{"name": "Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary28.asp", "summary": "Emma mourns the departure of Leon. Gloom pervades her thoughts over the loss, and romanticism colors her vision, as she makes him into \"a taller, handsomer, a more delightful, and a vaguer Leon. \" With the passage of time, her passion dims, and \"the black days she had known at Tostes again. \" She becomes unpredictable, given to strange whims. Charles' mother only makes things worse. In the midst of Emma's depression, Rodolphe Boulanger, a wealthy bachelor and landowner, calls on Charles when one of his servants needs urgent medical treatment. Boulanger sees Emma as she helps her husband and notices her sensuousness. Attracted to Emma, he wonders how to get rid of his present mistress.", "analysis": "Notes Flaubert constantly portrays Emma as overtly romantic and sentimental. She wallows in grief over the loss of Leon and berates herself for not wanting to get involved with him. The thought that she had happiness within her reach and had let it go nearly drives her crazy. Emma has an impulse \"to run after him, to throw herself into his arms and say 'It is I! I am yours!'. \" It is only her status of wife and mother that prevents her from doing so. As time passes, her passion for Leon subsides and is replaced by a black depression, similar to what she had experienced at Tostes. This time, however, she finds herself \"far more wretched and acts in an erratic manner. Neither Charles, nor his mother, is able to see that her uncontrollable behavior is the sign of a more serious problem. Monsieur Boulanger is introduced in the chapter. He is a well-to- do bachelor whose eye is always trained on beautiful women. He is also used to getting what he wants. Emma captures his attention because she seems different and more sensuous than the ordinary middle-class ladies of Yonville. Boulanger is attracted to her and immediately wonders how he can get rid of his present mistress; he correctly assumes that Emma will be interested in him. It is ironic to note that the very reason for which Boulanger chooses Emma, her difference from others of her class, is ultimately the thing that causes her doom."}

The next day was a dreary one for Emma. Everything seemed to her enveloped in a black atmosphere floating confusedly over the exterior of things, and sorrow was engulfed within her soul with soft shrieks such as the winter wind makes in ruined castles. It was that reverie which we give to things that will not return, the lassitude that seizes you after everything was done; that pain, in fine, that the interruption of every wonted movement, the sudden cessation of any prolonged vibration, brings on. As on the return from Vaubyessard, when the quadrilles were running in her head, she was full of a gloomy melancholy, of a numb despair. Leon reappeared, taller, handsomer, more charming, more vague. Though separated from her, he had not left her; he was there, and the walls of the house seemed to hold his shadow. She could not detach her eyes from the carpet where he had walked, from those empty chairs where he had sat. The river still flowed on, and slowly drove its ripples along the slippery banks. They had often walked there to the murmur of the waves over the moss-covered pebbles. How bright the sun had been! What happy afternoons they had seen alone in the shade at the end of the garden! He read aloud, bareheaded, sitting on a footstool of dry sticks; the fresh wind of the meadow set trembling the leaves of the book and the nasturtiums of the arbour. Ah! he was gone, the only charm of her life, the only possible hope of joy. Why had she not seized this happiness when it came to her? Why not have kept hold of it with both hands, with both knees, when it was about to flee from her? And she cursed herself for not having loved Leon. She thirsted for his lips. The wish took possession of her to run after and rejoin him, throw herself into his arms and say to him, "It is I; I am yours." But Emma recoiled beforehand at the difficulties of the enterprise, and her desires, increased by regret, became only the more acute. Henceforth the memory of Leon was the centre of her boredom; it burnt there more brightly than the fire travellers have left on the snow of a Russian steppe. She sprang towards him, she pressed against him, she stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything that could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined, her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tete-a-tete--she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy. The flames, however, subsided, either because the supply had exhausted itself, or because it had been piled up too much. Love, little by little, was quelled by absence; regret stifled beneath habit; and this incendiary light that had empurpled her pale sky was overspread and faded by degrees. In the supineness of her conscience she even took her repugnance towards her husband for aspirations towards her lover, the burning of hate for the warmth of tenderness; but as the tempest still raged, and as passion burnt itself down to the very cinders, and no help came, no sun rose, there was night on all sides, and she was lost in the terrible cold that pierced her. Then the evil days of Tostes began again. She thought herself now far more unhappy; for she had the experience of grief, with the certainty that it would not end. A woman who had laid on herself such sacrifices could well allow herself certain whims. She bought a Gothic prie-dieu, and in a month spent fourteen francs on lemons for polishing her nails; she wrote to Rouen for a blue cashmere gown; she chose one of Lheureux's finest scarves, and wore it knotted around her waist over her dressing-gown; and, with closed blinds and a book in her hand, she lay stretched out on a couch in this garb. She often changed her coiffure; she did her hair a la Chinoise, in flowing curls, in plaited coils; she parted in on one side and rolled it under like a man's. She wanted to learn Italian; she bought dictionaries, a grammar, and a supply of white paper. She tried serious reading, history, and philosophy. Sometimes in the night Charles woke up with a start, thinking he was being called to a patient. "I'm coming," he stammered; and it was the noise of a match Emma had struck to relight the lamp. But her reading fared like her piece of embroidery, all of which, only just begun, filled her cupboard; she took it up, left it, passed on to other books. She had attacks in which she could easily have been driven to commit any folly. She maintained one day, in opposition to her husband, that she could drink off a large glass of brandy, and, as Charles was stupid enough to dare her to, she swallowed the brandy to the last drop. In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed. She was pale all over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old age. She often fainted. One day she even spat blood, and, as Charles fussed around her showing his anxiety-- "Bah!" she answered, "what does it matter?" Charles fled to his study and wept there, both his elbows on the table, sitting in an arm-chair at his bureau under the phrenological head. Then he wrote to his mother begging her to come, and they had many long consultations together on the subject of Emma. What should they decide? What was to be done since she rejected all medical treatment? "Do you know what your wife wants?" replied Madame Bovary senior. "She wants to be forced to occupy herself with some manual work. If she were obliged, like so many others, to earn her living, she wouldn't have these vapours, that come to her from a lot of ideas she stuffs into her head, and from the idleness in which she lives." "Yet she is always busy," said Charles. "Ah! always busy at what? Reading novels, bad books, works against religion, and in which they mock at priests in speeches taken from Voltaire. But all that leads you far astray, my poor child. Anyone who has no religion always ends by turning out badly." So it was decided to stop Emma reading novels. The enterprise did not seem easy. The good lady undertook it. She was, when she passed through Rouen, to go herself to the lending-library and represent that Emma had discontinued her subscription. Would they not have a right to apply to the police if the librarian persisted all the same in his poisonous trade? The farewells of mother and daughter-in-law were cold. During the three weeks that they had been together they had not exchanged half-a-dozen words apart from the inquiries and phrases when they met at table and in the evening before going to bed. Madame Bovary left on a Wednesday, the market-day at Yonville. The Place since morning had been blocked by a row of carts, which, on end and their shafts in the air, spread all along the line of houses from the church to the inn. On the other side there were canvas booths, where cotton checks, blankets, and woollen stockings were sold, together with harness for horses, and packets of blue ribbon, whose ends fluttered in the wind. The coarse hardware was spread out on the ground between pyramids of eggs and hampers of cheeses, from which sticky straw stuck out. Near the corn-machines clucking hens passed their necks through the bars of flat cages. The people, crowding in the same place and unwilling to move thence, sometimes threatened to smash the shop front of the chemist. On Wednesdays his shop was never empty, and the people pushed in less to buy drugs than for consultations. So great was Homais' reputation in the neighbouring villages. His robust aplomb had fascinated the rustics. They considered him a greater doctor than all the doctors. Emma was leaning out at the window; she was often there. The window in the provinces replaces the theatre and the promenade, she was amusing herself with watching the crowd of boors when she saw a gentleman in a green velvet coat. He had on yellow gloves, although he wore heavy gaiters; he was coming towards the doctor's house, followed by a peasant walking with a bent head and quite a thoughtful air. "Can I see the doctor?" he asked Justin, who was talking on the doorsteps with Felicite, and, taking him for a servant of the house--"Tell him that Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger of La Huchette is here." It was not from territorial vanity that the new arrival added "of La Huchette" to his name, but to make himself the better known. La Huchette, in fact, was an estate near Yonville, where he had just bought the chateau and two farms that he cultivated himself, without, however, troubling very much about them. He lived as a bachelor, and was supposed to have "at least fifteen thousand francs a year." Charles came into the room. Monsieur Boulanger introduced his man, who wanted to be bled because he felt "a tingling all over." "That'll purge me," he urged as an objection to all reasoning. So Bovary ordered a bandage and a basin, and asked Justin to hold it. Then addressing the peasant, who was already pale-- "Don't be afraid, my lad." "No, no, sir," said the other; "get on." And with an air of bravado he held out his great arm. At the prick of the lancet the blood spurted out, splashing against the looking-glass. "Hold the basin nearer," exclaimed Charles. "Lor!" said the peasant, "one would swear it was a little fountain flowing. How red my blood is! That's a good sign, isn't it?" "Sometimes," answered the doctor, "one feels nothing at first, and then syncope sets in, and more especially with people of strong constitution like this man." At these words the rustic let go the lancet-case he was twisting between his fingers. A shudder of his shoulders made the chair-back creak. His hat fell off. "I thought as much," said Bovary, pressing his finger on the vein. The basin was beginning to tremble in Justin's hands; his knees shook, he turned pale. "Emma! Emma!" called Charles. With one bound she came down the staircase. "Some vinegar," he cried. "O dear! two at once!" And in his emotion he could hardly put on the compress. "It is nothing," said Monsieur Boulanger quietly, taking Justin in his arms. He seated him on the table with his back resting against the wall. Madame Bovary began taking off his cravat. The strings of his shirt had got into a knot, and she was for some minutes moving her light fingers about the young fellow's neck. Then she poured some vinegar on her cambric handkerchief; she moistened his temples with little dabs, and then blew upon them softly. The ploughman revived, but Justin's syncope still lasted, and his eyeballs disappeared in the pale sclerotics like blue flowers in milk. "We must hide this from him," said Charles. Madame Bovary took the basin to put it under the table. With the movement she made in bending down, her dress (it was a summer dress with four flounces, yellow, long in the waist and wide in the skirt) spread out around her on the flags of the room; and as Emma stooping, staggered a little as she stretched out her arms. The stuff here and there gave with the inflections of her bust. Then she went to fetch a bottle of water, and she was melting some pieces of sugar when the chemist arrived. The servant had been to fetch him in the tumult. Seeing his pupil's eyes staring he drew a long breath; then going around him he looked at him from head to foot. "Fool!" he said, "really a little fool! A fool in four letters! A phlebotomy's a big affair, isn't it! And a fellow who isn't afraid of anything; a kind of squirrel, just as he is who climbs to vertiginous heights to shake down nuts. Oh, yes! you just talk to me, boast about yourself! Here's a fine fitness for practising pharmacy later on; for under serious circumstances you may be called before the tribunals in order to enlighten the minds of the magistrates, and you would have to keep your head then, to reason, show yourself a man, or else pass for an imbecile." Justin did not answer. The chemist went on-- "Who asked you to come? You are always pestering the doctor and madame. On Wednesday, moreover, your presence is indispensable to me. There are now twenty people in the shop. I left everything because of the interest I take in you. Come, get along! Sharp! Wait for me, and keep an eye on the jars." When Justin, who was rearranging his dress, had gone, they talked for a little while about fainting-fits. Madame Bovary had never fainted. "That is extraordinary for a lady," said Monsieur Boulanger; "but some people are very susceptible. Thus in a duel, I have seen a second lose consciousness at the mere sound of the loading of pistols." "For my part," said the chemist, "the sight of other people's blood doesn't affect me at all, but the mere thought of my own flowing would make me faint if I reflected upon it too much." Monsieur Boulanger, however, dismissed his servant, advising him to calm himself, since his fancy was over. "It procured me the advantage of making your acquaintance," he added, and he looked at Emma as he said this. Then he put three francs on the corner of the table, bowed negligently, and went out. He was soon on the other side of the river (this was his way back to La Huchette), and Emma saw him in the meadow, walking under the poplars, slackening his pace now and then as one who reflects. "She is very pretty," he said to himself; "she is very pretty, this doctor's wife. Fine teeth, black eyes, a dainty foot, a figure like a Parisienne's. Where the devil does she come from? Wherever did that fat fellow pick her up?" Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger was thirty-four; he was of brutal temperament and intelligent perspicacity, having, moreover, had much to do with women, and knowing them well. This one had seemed pretty to him; so he was thinking about her and her husband. "I think he is very stupid. She is tired of him, no doubt. He has dirty nails, and hasn't shaved for three days. While he is trotting after his patients, she sits there botching socks. And she gets bored! She would like to live in town and dance polkas every evening. Poor little woman! She is gaping after love like a carp after water on a kitchen-table. With three words of gallantry she'd adore one, I'm sure of it. She'd be tender, charming. Yes; but how to get rid of her afterwards?" Then the difficulties of love-making seen in the distance made him by contrast think of his mistress. She was an actress at Rouen, whom he kept; and when he had pondered over this image, with which, even in remembrance, he was satiated-- "Ah! Madame Bovary," he thought, "is much prettier, especially fresher. Virginie is decidedly beginning to grow fat. She is so finiky about her pleasures; and, besides, she has a mania for prawns." The fields were empty, and around him Rodolphe only heard the regular beating of the grass striking against his boots, with a cry of the grasshopper hidden at a distance among the oats. He again saw Emma in her room, dressed as he had seen her, and he undressed her. "Oh, I will have her," he cried, striking a blow with his stick at a clod in front of him. And he at once began to consider the political part of the enterprise. He asked himself-- "Where shall we meet? By what means? We shall always be having the brat on our hands, and the servant, the neighbours, and husband, all sorts of worries. Pshaw! one would lose too much time over it." Then he resumed, "She really has eyes that pierce one's heart like a gimlet. And that pale complexion! I adore pale women!" When he reached the top of the Arguiel hills he had made up his mind. "It's only finding the opportunities. Well, I will call in now and then. I'll send them venison, poultry; I'll have myself bled, if need be. We shall become friends; I'll invite them to my place. By Jove!" added he, "there's the agricultural show coming on. She'll be there. I shall see her. We'll begin boldly, for that's the surest way."

Chapter 7

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary28.asp

Emma mourns the departure of Leon. Gloom pervades her thoughts over the loss, and romanticism colors her vision, as she makes him into "a taller, handsomer, a more delightful, and a vaguer Leon. " With the passage of time, her passion dims, and "the black days she had known at Tostes again. " She becomes unpredictable, given to strange whims. Charles' mother only makes things worse. In the midst of Emma's depression, Rodolphe Boulanger, a wealthy bachelor and landowner, calls on Charles when one of his servants needs urgent medical treatment. Boulanger sees Emma as she helps her husband and notices her sensuousness. Attracted to Emma, he wonders how to get rid of his present mistress.

Notes Flaubert constantly portrays Emma as overtly romantic and sentimental. She wallows in grief over the loss of Leon and berates herself for not wanting to get involved with him. The thought that she had happiness within her reach and had let it go nearly drives her crazy. Emma has an impulse "to run after him, to throw herself into his arms and say 'It is I! I am yours!'. " It is only her status of wife and mother that prevents her from doing so. As time passes, her passion for Leon subsides and is replaced by a black depression, similar to what she had experienced at Tostes. This time, however, she finds herself "far more wretched and acts in an erratic manner. Neither Charles, nor his mother, is able to see that her uncontrollable behavior is the sign of a more serious problem. Monsieur Boulanger is introduced in the chapter. He is a well-to- do bachelor whose eye is always trained on beautiful women. He is also used to getting what he wants. Emma captures his attention because she seems different and more sensuous than the ordinary middle-class ladies of Yonville. Boulanger is attracted to her and immediately wonders how he can get rid of his present mistress; he correctly assumes that Emma will be interested in him. It is ironic to note that the very reason for which Boulanger chooses Emma, her difference from others of her class, is ultimately the thing that causes her doom.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/17.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_16_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 8

chapter 8

{"name": "Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary29.asp", "summary": "An Agricultural Show is organized in Yonville, and many visitors come to town. It is a great occasion for the village folk, and there is a fine display of decoration and patriotism. It is in such an atmosphere that Emma and Rodolphe meet for the second time. They have to avoid certain people, like Homais and Lheureux, to be together, but they manage to be alone. Rodolphe passes little hints to Emma about love, and she is flattered. There is a livestock competition and the judges are doing their rounds. The chairman of the judges, Monsieur Derozerays de la Panville, invites Rodolphe to join the team. Rodolphe tells Emma that he prefers her company by far. The topic of conversation shifts to attire, and they agree that there is no point in dressing up in the country. Rodolphe even admits to feeling depressed, a fact that surprises Emma. He states that he has no friends and thinks no one cares about him. He is obviously playing to Emma's emotions. Rodolphe and Emma watch the proceedings from the secluded Council Chamber of the Town Hall. Lieuvain, the Prefect's deputy, makes a speech that forms the backdrop of the amorous conversation Rodolphe engages in with Emma. When Lieuvain pauses in the course of his speech, ending with a few words on civic duty, Rodolphe speaks to Emma about emotions, stating that \"to feel nobly and love what is beautiful -- that's our duty.\" Emma reminds him of the need to conform to the world's morality. To this he replies that there are \"two moralities. \" One is petty and conventional, and the other is eternal. When Lieuvain continues, Rodolphe draws closer to Emma and speaks to her about escaping from the \"conspiracy of society.\" Emma is visibly attracted to Rodolphe and is filled with romantic visions of herself with him. He plays to her feelings and desires. As the announcement of prizes begins, Rodolphe takes Emma's hand, and every award that is announced is juxtaposed with a passionate declaration of love for Emma by Rodolphe. As their fingers intertwine, their passion is at a peak. When the ceremony ends, Rodolphe ushers Emma home. They see each other again in the evening at the fireworks, but Emma is accompanied by her husband and Homais. The fireworks show draws an enthusiastic response from the crowd, despite the fact that most of the fireworks cannot be lit because the powder is damp. In the dark, Rodolphe gazes at Emma, who is by her husband's side. Later he agrees with Madame Homais' view about it having been a lovely day, and with that a tender look creeps into his eyes. Two days later, Homais' exaggerated report about the show appears in the Rouen Beacon. His style is overblown, and his report ends with his observation that the clergy had remained absent throughout the festivities.", "analysis": "Notes This chapter significantly advances the plot of the story, for it is here that the relationship between Emma and Rodolphe begins. The previous chapter had indicated Rodolphe's interest in Emma; now the Agricultural Show in Yonville provides the setting for the two of them to meet and spend time with each other. It is evident that Emma falls for Rodolphe's charm; and it is equally evident that Rodolphe takes advantage of her gullibility. There are many ironies in the chapter. Flaubert's description of the preparations made by the Yonville citizens depicts the grandiose visions of these small townsfolk. Then in a setting where citizens are being honored for loyalty and service, Rodolphe encourages Emma to defy social conventions and moral duty in order to respond to her passions. Emma half-heartedly warns him about the social pressure that cripples such freedom, but Rodolphe easily convinces her to abandon such fears. Carried away in a flood of passion, \"they at one another, and their dry lips in a supreme desire. Gently, effortlessly, their fingers intertwine. \" Flaubert's handling of Rodolphe's declarations of love to Emma is masterful. Lieuvain's speech is effectively alternated with Rodolphe's statements to Emma. The former's speech is delivered from a platform in front of the Town Hall. The latter's statements are made in the privacy of the Council Chamber. The juxtaposition of the sublime with the mundane produces humor. In a way, it also suggests the non-serious nature of Rodolphe's intentions. He obviously looks at Emma as a temporary means to relieve his passions. Unlike Emma, he does not see their budding relationship as something permanent. His denouncing of the \"petty, conventional morality of men\" clearly indicates that he possesses little virtue himself. The use of contrast makes Rodolphe's attitude about love and sex evident to the reader, but naive and romantic Emma clings to his every word and decides to reject her previously moral way of life. Flaubert has carefully developed Emma's dissatisfaction to such a point that this decision is not shocking. The official speeches do not say anything new, and the people who listen to them with enthusiasm have probably heard the same things repeatedly over the years. Still Flaubert's reason for inserting large sections of the speeches within the narrative is to contrast it with Rodolphe's words. Neither the official speaker nor Rodolphe cares about their words, only the affect of them; the officials want to excite the crowd, while Rodolphe wants to excite Emma. Rodolphe chooses his words carefully and presents his case very well. Emma cannot challenge his argument that fate has brought them together. The announcement of the prizes is also carefully placed to create irony and humor. Rodolphe's declaration of his passion for Emma is juxtaposed next to the prize announcement for manure. When Rodolphe urges Emma to voice her emotions, a prize is announced for pigs. It is also significant that Emma and Rodolphe begin their passionate relationship against the backdrop of the Agricultural Show. The relationship and the show are both superficial and ultimately disappointing. Neither is it a coincidence that the lovers throb with desire when Catherine Leroux, an old peasant woman, is honored for her many years of service. This is an ironic commentary on Emma's lack of devotion to her own family. Flaubert is skilled at sketching vignettes that add more substance to the reader's understanding of the later events in the novel. In this chapter, he provides a short, seemingly unimportant interchange between Madame Lefrancois and Homais. She tells Homais about Lheureux, whose efforts have led to the undoing a rival business establishment. At this point in the novel, little significance is attached to this revelation. Later, when Emma is brought to ruin by this man, the reader perceives the importance of this passage. It is also significant to notice the details about Homais' newspaper article. When he describes the events of the day, which were in many ways disastrous, he renders everything in a positive light. It is clear that this man has a natural talent for misrepresenting the facts. He also manages to insert his dislike of the clergy into the report."}

At last it came, the famous agricultural show. On the morning of the solemnity all the inhabitants at their doors were chatting over the preparations. The pediment of the town hall had been hung with garlands of ivy; a tent had been erected in a meadow for the banquet; and in the middle of the Place, in front of the church, a kind of bombarde was to announce the arrival of the prefect and the names of the successful farmers who had obtained prizes. The National Guard of Buchy (there was none at Yonville) had come to join the corps of firemen, of whom Binet was captain. On that day he wore a collar even higher than usual; and, tightly buttoned in his tunic, his figure was so stiff and motionless that the whole vital portion of his person seemed to have descended into his legs, which rose in a cadence of set steps with a single movement. As there was some rivalry between the tax-collector and the colonel, both, to show off their talents, drilled their men separately. One saw the red epaulettes and the black breastplates pass and re-pass alternately; there was no end to it, and it constantly began again. There had never been such a display of pomp. Several citizens had scoured their houses the evening before; tri-coloured flags hung from half-open windows; all the public-houses were full; and in the lovely weather the starched caps, the golden crosses, and the coloured neckerchiefs seemed whiter than snow, shone in the sun, and relieved with the motley colours the sombre monotony of the frock-coats and blue smocks. The neighbouring farmers' wives, when they got off their horses, pulled out the long pins that fastened around them their dresses, turned up for fear of mud; and the husbands, for their part, in order to save their hats, kept their handkerchiefs around them, holding one corner between their teeth. The crowd came into the main street from both ends of the village. People poured in from the lanes, the alleys, the houses; and from time to time one heard knockers banging against doors closing behind women with their gloves, who were going out to see the fete. What was most admired were two long lamp-stands covered with lanterns, that flanked a platform on which the authorities were to sit. Besides this there were against the four columns of the town hall four kinds of poles, each bearing a small standard of greenish cloth, embellished with inscriptions in gold letters. On one was written, "To Commerce"; on the other, "To Agriculture"; on the third, "To Industry"; and on the fourth, "To the Fine Arts." But the jubilation that brightened all faces seemed to darken that of Madame Lefrancois, the innkeeper. Standing on her kitchen-steps she muttered to herself, "What rubbish! what rubbish! With their canvas booth! Do they think the prefect will be glad to dine down there under a tent like a gipsy? They call all this fussing doing good to the place! Then it wasn't worth while sending to Neufchatel for the keeper of a cookshop! And for whom? For cowherds! tatterdemalions!" The druggist was passing. He had on a frock-coat, nankeen trousers, beaver shoes, and, for a wonder, a hat with a low crown. "Your servant! Excuse me, I am in a hurry." And as the fat widow asked where he was going-- "It seems odd to you, doesn't it, I who am always more cooped up in my laboratory than the man's rat in his cheese." "What cheese?" asked the landlady. "Oh, nothing! nothing!" Homais continued. "I merely wished to convey to you, Madame Lefrancois, that I usually live at home like a recluse. To-day, however, considering the circumstances, it is necessary--" "Oh, you're going down there!" she said contemptuously. "Yes, I am going," replied the druggist, astonished. "Am I not a member of the consulting commission?" Mere Lefrancois looked at him for a few moments, and ended by saying with a smile-- "That's another pair of shoes! But what does agriculture matter to you? Do you understand anything about it?" "Certainly I understand it, since I am a druggist--that is to say, a chemist. And the object of chemistry, Madame Lefrancois, being the knowledge of the reciprocal and molecular action of all natural bodies, it follows that agriculture is comprised within its domain. And, in fact, the composition of the manure, the fermentation of liquids, the analyses of gases, and the influence of miasmata, what, I ask you, is all this, if it isn't chemistry, pure and simple?" The landlady did not answer. Homais went on-- "Do you think that to be an agriculturist it is necessary to have tilled the earth or fattened fowls oneself? It is necessary rather to know the composition of the substances in question--the geological strata, the atmospheric actions, the quality of the soil, the minerals, the waters, the density of the different bodies, their capillarity, and what not. And one must be master of all the principles of hygiene in order to direct, criticize the construction of buildings, the feeding of animals, the diet of domestics. And, moreover, Madame Lefrancois, one must know botany, be able to distinguish between plants, you understand, which are the wholesome and those that are deleterious, which are unproductive and which nutritive, if it is well to pull them up here and re-sow them there, to propagate some, destroy others; in brief, one must keep pace with science by means of pamphlets and public papers, be always on the alert to find out improvements." The landlady never took her eyes off the "Cafe Francois" and the chemist went on-- "Would to God our agriculturists were chemists, or that at least they would pay more attention to the counsels of science. Thus lately I myself wrote a considerable tract, a memoir of over seventy-two pages, entitled, 'Cider, its Manufacture and its Effects, together with some New Reflections on the Subject,' that I sent to the Agricultural Society of Rouen, and which even procured me the honour of being received among its members--Section, Agriculture; Class, Pomological. Well, if my work had been given to the public--" But the druggist stopped, Madame Lefrancois seemed so preoccupied. "Just look at them!" she said. "It's past comprehension! Such a cookshop as that!" And with a shrug of the shoulders that stretched out over her breast the stitches of her knitted bodice, she pointed with both hands at her rival's inn, whence songs were heard issuing. "Well, it won't last long," she added. "It'll be over before a week." Homais drew back with stupefaction. She came down three steps and whispered in his ear-- "What! you didn't know it? There is to be an execution in next week. It's Lheureux who is selling him out; he has killed him with bills." "What a terrible catastrophe!" cried the druggist, who always found expressions in harmony with all imaginable circumstances. Then the landlady began telling him the story that she had heard from Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's servant, and although she detested Tellier, she blamed Lheureux. He was "a wheedler, a sneak." "There!" she said. "Look at him! he is in the market; he is bowing to Madame Bovary, who's got on a green bonnet. Why, she's taking Monsieur Boulanger's arm." "Madame Bovary!" exclaimed Homais. "I must go at once and pay her my respects. Perhaps she'll be very glad to have a seat in the enclosure under the peristyle." And, without heeding Madame Lefrancois, who was calling him back to tell him more about it, the druggist walked off rapidly with a smile on his lips, with straight knees, bowing copiously to right and left, and taking up much room with the large tails of his frock-coat that fluttered behind him in the wind. Rodolphe, having caught sight of him from afar, hurried on, but Madame Bovary lost her breath; so he walked more slowly, and, smiling at her, said in a rough tone-- "It's only to get away from that fat fellow, you know, the druggist." She pressed his elbow. "What's the meaning of that?" he asked himself. And he looked at her out of the corner of his eyes. Her profile was so calm that one could guess nothing from it. It stood out in the light from the oval of her bonnet, with pale ribbons on it like the leaves of weeds. Her eyes with their long curved lashes looked straight before her, and though wide open, they seemed slightly puckered by the cheek-bones, because of the blood pulsing gently under the delicate skin. A pink line ran along the partition between her nostrils. Her head was bent upon her shoulder, and the pearl tips of her white teeth were seen between her lips. "Is she making fun of me?" thought Rodolphe. Emma's gesture, however, had only been meant for a warning; for Monsieur Lheureux was accompanying them, and spoke now and again as if to enter into the conversation. "What a superb day! Everybody is out! The wind is east!" And neither Madame Bovary nor Rodolphe answered him, whilst at the slightest movement made by them he drew near, saying, "I beg your pardon!" and raised his hat. When they reached the farrier's house, instead of following the road up to the fence, Rodolphe suddenly turned down a path, drawing with him Madame Bovary. He called out-- "Good evening, Monsieur Lheureux! See you again presently." "How you got rid of him!" she said, laughing. "Why," he went on, "allow oneself to be intruded upon by others? And as to-day I have the happiness of being with you--" Emma blushed. He did not finish his sentence. Then he talked of the fine weather and of the pleasure of walking on the grass. A few daisies had sprung up again. "Here are some pretty Easter daisies," he said, "and enough of them to furnish oracles to all the amorous maids in the place." He added, "Shall I pick some? What do you think?" "Are you in love?" she asked, coughing a little. "H'm, h'm! who knows?" answered Rodolphe. The meadow began to fill, and the housewives hustled you with their great umbrellas, their baskets, and their babies. One had often to get out of the way of a long file of country folk, servant-maids with blue stockings, flat shoes, silver rings, and who smelt of milk, when one passed close to them. They walked along holding one another by the hand, and thus they spread over the whole field from the row of open trees to the banquet tent. But this was the examination time, and the farmers one after the other entered a kind of enclosure formed by a long cord supported on sticks. The beasts were there, their noses towards the cord, and making a confused line with their unequal rumps. Drowsy pigs were burrowing in the earth with their snouts, calves were bleating, lambs baaing; the cows, on knees folded in, were stretching their bellies on the grass, slowly chewing the cud, and blinking their heavy eyelids at the gnats that buzzed round them. Plough-men with bare arms were holding by the halter prancing stallions that neighed with dilated nostrils looking towards the mares. These stood quietly, stretching out their heads and flowing manes, while their foals rested in their shadow, or now and then came and sucked them. And above the long undulation of these crowded animals one saw some white mane rising in the wind like a wave, or some sharp horns sticking out, and the heads of men running about. Apart, outside the enclosure, a hundred paces off, was a large black bull, muzzled, with an iron ring in its nostrils, and who moved no more than if he had been in bronze. A child in rags was holding him by a rope. Between the two lines the committee-men were walking with heavy steps, examining each animal, then consulting one another in a low voice. One who seemed of more importance now and then took notes in a book as he walked along. This was the president of the jury, Monsieur Derozerays de la Panville. As soon as he recognised Rodolphe he came forward quickly, and smiling amiably, said-- "What! Monsieur Boulanger, you are deserting us?" Rodolphe protested that he was just coming. But when the president had disappeared-- "Ma foi!*" said he, "I shall not go. Your company is better than his." *Upon my word! And while poking fun at the show, Rodolphe, to move about more easily, showed the gendarme his blue card, and even stopped now and then in front of some fine beast, which Madame Bovary did not at all admire. He noticed this, and began jeering at the Yonville ladies and their dresses; then he apologised for the negligence of his own. He had that incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for social conventions, that seduces or exasperates them. Thus his cambric shirt with plaited cuffs was blown out by the wind in the opening of his waistcoat of grey ticking, and his broad-striped trousers disclosed at the ankle nankeen boots with patent leather gaiters. These were so polished that they reflected the grass. He trampled on horses's dung with them, one hand in the pocket of his jacket and his straw hat on one side. "Besides," added he, "when one lives in the country--" "It's waste of time," said Emma. "That is true," replied Rodolphe. "To think that not one of these people is capable of understanding even the cut of a coat!" Then they talked about provincial mediocrity, of the lives it crushed, the illusions lost there. "And I too," said Rodolphe, "am drifting into depression." "You!" she said in astonishment; "I thought you very light-hearted." "Ah! yes. I seem so, because in the midst of the world I know how to wear the mask of a scoffer upon my face; and yet, how many a time at the sight of a cemetery by moonlight have I not asked myself whether it were not better to join those sleeping there!" "Oh! and your friends?" she said. "You do not think of them." "My friends! What friends? Have I any? Who cares for me?" And he accompanied the last words with a kind of whistling of the lips. But they were obliged to separate from each other because of a great pile of chairs that a man was carrying behind them. He was so overladen with them that one could only see the tips of his wooden shoes and the ends of his two outstretched arms. It was Lestiboudois, the gravedigger, who was carrying the church chairs about amongst the people. Alive to all that concerned his interests, he had hit upon this means of turning the show to account; and his idea was succeeding, for he no longer knew which way to turn. In fact, the villagers, who were hot, quarreled for these seats, whose straw smelt of incense, and they leant against the thick backs, stained with the wax of candles, with a certain veneration. Madame Bovary again took Rodolphe's arm; he went on as if speaking to himself-- "Yes, I have missed so many things. Always alone! Ah! if I had some aim in life, if I had met some love, if I had found someone! Oh, how I would have spent all the energy of which I am capable, surmounted everything, overcome everything!" "Yet it seems to me," said Emma, "that you are not to be pitied." "Ah! you think so?" said Rodolphe. "For, after all," she went on, "you are free--" she hesitated, "rich--" "Do not mock me," he replied. And she protested that she was not mocking him, when the report of a cannon resounded. Immediately all began hustling one another pell-mell towards the village. It was a false alarm. The prefect seemed not to be coming, and the members of the jury felt much embarrassed, not knowing if they ought to begin the meeting or still wait. At last at the end of the Place a large hired landau appeared, drawn by two thin horses, which a coachman in a white hat was whipping lustily. Binet had only just time to shout, "Present arms!" and the colonel to imitate him. All ran towards the enclosure; everyone pushed forward. A few even forgot their collars; but the equipage of the prefect seemed to anticipate the crowd, and the two yoked jades, trapesing in their harness, came up at a little trot in front of the peristyle of the town hall at the very moment when the National Guard and firemen deployed, beating drums and marking time. "Present!" shouted Binet. "Halt!" shouted the colonel. "Left about, march." And after presenting arms, during which the clang of the band, letting loose, rang out like a brass kettle rolling downstairs, all the guns were lowered. Then was seen stepping down from the carriage a gentleman in a short coat with silver braiding, with bald brow, and wearing a tuft of hair at the back of his head, of a sallow complexion and the most benign appearance. His eyes, very large and covered by heavy lids, were half-closed to look at the crowd, while at the same time he raised his sharp nose, and forced a smile upon his sunken mouth. He recognised the mayor by his scarf, and explained to him that the prefect was not able to come. He himself was a councillor at the prefecture; then he added a few apologies. Monsieur Tuvache answered them with compliments; the other confessed himself nervous; and they remained thus, face to face, their foreheads almost touching, with the members of the jury all round, the municipal council, the notable personages, the National Guard and the crowd. The councillor pressing his little cocked hat to his breast repeated his bows, while Tuvache, bent like a bow, also smiled, stammered, tried to say something, protested his devotion to the monarchy and the honour that was being done to Yonville. Hippolyte, the groom from the inn, took the head of the horses from the coachman, and, limping along with his club-foot, led them to the door of the "Lion d'Or", where a number of peasants collected to look at the carriage. The drum beat, the howitzer thundered, and the gentlemen one by one mounted the platform, where they sat down in red utrecht velvet arm-chairs that had been lent by Madame Tuvache. All these people looked alike. Their fair flabby faces, somewhat tanned by the sun, were the colour of sweet cider, and their puffy whiskers emerged from stiff collars, kept up by white cravats with broad bows. All the waist-coats were of velvet, double-breasted; all the watches had, at the end of a long ribbon, an oval cornelian seal; everyone rested his two hands on his thighs, carefully stretching the stride of their trousers, whose unsponged glossy cloth shone more brilliantly than the leather of their heavy boots. The ladies of the company stood at the back under the vestibule between the pillars while the common herd was opposite, standing up or sitting on chairs. As a matter of fact, Lestiboudois had brought thither all those that he had moved from the field, and he even kept running back every minute to fetch others from the church. He caused such confusion with this piece of business that one had great difficulty in getting to the small steps of the platform. "I think," said Monsieur Lheureux to the chemist, who was passing to his place, "that they ought to have put up two Venetian masts with something rather severe and rich for ornaments; it would have been a very pretty effect." "To be sure," replied Homais; "but what can you expect? The mayor took everything on his own shoulders. He hasn't much taste. Poor Tuvache! and he is even completely destitute of what is called the genius of art." Rodolphe, meanwhile, with Madame Bovary, had gone up to the first floor of the town hall, to the "council-room," and, as it was empty, he declared that they could enjoy the sight there more comfortably. He fetched three stools from the round table under the bust of the monarch, and having carried them to one of the windows, they sat down by each other. There was commotion on the platform, long whisperings, much parleying. At last the councillor got up. They knew now that his name was Lieuvain, and in the crowd the name was passed from one to the other. After he had collated a few pages, and bent over them to see better, he began-- "Gentlemen! May I be permitted first of all (before addressing you on the object of our meeting to-day, and this sentiment will, I am sure, be shared by you all), may I be permitted, I say, to pay a tribute to the higher administration, to the government to the monarch, gentle men, our sovereign, to that beloved king, to whom no branch of public or private prosperity is a matter of indifference, and who directs with a hand at once so firm and wise the chariot of the state amid the incessant perils of a stormy sea, knowing, moreover, how to make peace respected as well as war, industry, commerce, agriculture, and the fine arts?" "I ought," said Rodolphe, "to get back a little further." "Why?" said Emma. But at this moment the voice of the councillor rose to an extraordinary pitch. He declaimed-- "This is no longer the time, gentlemen, when civil discord ensanguined our public places, when the landlord, the business-man, the working-man himself, falling asleep at night, lying down to peaceful sleep, trembled lest he should be awakened suddenly by the noise of incendiary tocsins, when the most subversive doctrines audaciously sapped foundations." "Well, someone down there might see me," Rodolphe resumed, "then I should have to invent excuses for a fortnight; and with my bad reputation--" "Oh, you are slandering yourself," said Emma. "No! It is dreadful, I assure you." "But, gentlemen," continued the councillor, "if, banishing from my memory the remembrance of these sad pictures, I carry my eyes back to the actual situation of our dear country, what do I see there? Everywhere commerce and the arts are flourishing; everywhere new means of communication, like so many new arteries in the body of the state, establish within it new relations. Our great industrial centres have recovered all their activity; religion, more consolidated, smiles in all hearts; our ports are full, confidence is born again, and France breathes once more!" "Besides," added Rodolphe, "perhaps from the world's point of view they are right." "How so?" she asked. "What!" said he. "Do you not know that there are souls constantly tormented? They need by turns to dream and to act, the purest passions and the most turbulent joys, and thus they fling themselves into all sorts of fantasies, of follies." Then she looked at him as one looks at a traveller who has voyaged over strange lands, and went on-- "We have not even this distraction, we poor women!" "A sad distraction, for happiness isn't found in it." "But is it ever found?" she asked. "Yes; one day it comes," he answered. "And this is what you have understood," said the councillor. "You, farmers, agricultural labourers! you pacific pioneers of a work that belongs wholly to civilization! you, men of progress and morality, you have understood, I say, that political storms are even more redoubtable than atmospheric disturbances!" "It comes one day," repeated Rodolphe, "one day suddenly, and when one is despairing of it. Then the horizon expands; it is as if a voice cried, 'It is here!' You feel the need of confiding the whole of your life, of giving everything, sacrificing everything to this being. There is no need for explanations; they understand one another. They have seen each other in dreams!" (And he looked at her.) "In fine, here it is, this treasure so sought after, here before you. It glitters, it flashes; yet one still doubts, one does not believe it; one remains dazzled, as if one went out from darkness into light." And as he ended Rodolphe suited the action to the word. He passed his hand over his face, like a man seized with giddiness. Then he let it fall on Emma's. She took hers away. "And who would be surprised at it, gentlemen? He only who is so blind, so plunged (I do not fear to say it), so plunged in the prejudices of another age as still to misunderstand the spirit of agricultural populations. Where, indeed, is to be found more patriotism than in the country, greater devotion to the public welfare, more intelligence, in a word? And, gentlemen, I do not mean that superficial intelligence, vain ornament of idle minds, but rather that profound and balanced intelligence that applies itself above all else to useful objects, thus contributing to the good of all, to the common amelioration and to the support of the state, born of respect for law and the practice of duty--" "Ah! again!" said Rodolphe. "Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us." "Yet--yet--" objected Madame Bovary. "No, no! Why cry out against the passions? Are they not the one beautiful thing on the earth, the source of heroism, of enthusiasm, of poetry, music, the arts, of everything, in a word?" "But one must," said Emma, "to some extent bow to the opinion of the world and accept its moral code." "Ah! but there are two," he replied. "The small, the conventional, that of men, that which constantly changes, that brays out so loudly, that makes such a commotion here below, of the earth earthly, like the mass of imbeciles you see down there. But the other, the eternal, that is about us and above, like the landscape that surrounds us, and the blue heavens that give us light." Monsieur Lieuvain had just wiped his mouth with a pocket-handkerchief. He continued-- "And what should I do here gentlemen, pointing out to you the uses of agriculture? Who supplies our wants? Who provides our means of subsistence? Is it not the agriculturist? The agriculturist, gentlemen, who, sowing with laborious hand the fertile furrows of the country, brings forth the corn, which, being ground, is made into a powder by means of ingenious machinery, comes out thence under the name of flour, and from there, transported to our cities, is soon delivered at the baker's, who makes it into food for poor and rich alike. Again, is it not the agriculturist who fattens, for our clothes, his abundant flocks in the pastures? For how should we clothe ourselves, how nourish ourselves, without the agriculturist? And, gentlemen, is it even necessary to go so far for examples? Who has not frequently reflected on all the momentous things that we get out of that modest animal, the ornament of poultry-yards, that provides us at once with a soft pillow for our bed, with succulent flesh for our tables, and eggs? But I should never end if I were to enumerate one after the other all the different products which the earth, well cultivated, like a generous mother, lavishes upon her children. Here it is the vine, elsewhere the apple tree for cider, there colza, farther on cheeses and flax. Gentlemen, let us not forget flax, which has made such great strides of late years, and to which I will more particularly call your attention." He had no need to call it, for all the mouths of the multitude were wide open, as if to drink in his words. Tuvache by his side listened to him with staring eyes. Monsieur Derozerays from time to time softly closed his eyelids, and farther on the chemist, with his son Napoleon between his knees, put his hand behind his ear in order not to lose a syllable. The chins of the other members of the jury went slowly up and down in their waistcoats in sign of approval. The firemen at the foot of the platform rested on their bayonets; and Binet, motionless, stood with out-turned elbows, the point of his sabre in the air. Perhaps he could hear, but certainly he could see nothing, because of the visor of his helmet, that fell down on his nose. His lieutenant, the youngest son of Monsieur Tuvache, had a bigger one, for his was enormous, and shook on his head, and from it an end of his cotton scarf peeped out. He smiled beneath it with a perfectly infantine sweetness, and his pale little face, whence drops were running, wore an expression of enjoyment and sleepiness. The square as far as the houses was crowded with people. One saw folk leaning on their elbows at all the windows, others standing at doors, and Justin, in front of the chemist's shop, seemed quite transfixed by the sight of what he was looking at. In spite of the silence Monsieur Lieuvain's voice was lost in the air. It reached you in fragments of phrases, and interrupted here and there by the creaking of chairs in the crowd; then you suddenly heard the long bellowing of an ox, or else the bleating of the lambs, who answered one another at street corners. In fact, the cowherds and shepherds had driven their beasts thus far, and these lowed from time to time, while with their tongues they tore down some scrap of foliage that hung above their mouths. Rodolphe had drawn nearer to Emma, and said to her in a low voice, speaking rapidly-- "Does not this conspiracy of the world revolt you? Is there a single sentiment it does not condemn? The noblest instincts, the purest sympathies are persecuted, slandered; and if at length two poor souls do meet, all is so organised that they cannot blend together. Yet they will make the attempt; they will flutter their wings; they will call upon each other. Oh! no matter. Sooner or later, in six months, ten years, they will come together, will love; for fate has decreed it, and they are born one for the other." His arms were folded across his knees, and thus lifting his face towards Emma, close by her, he looked fixedly at her. She noticed in his eyes small golden lines radiating from black pupils; she even smelt the perfume of the pomade that made his hair glossy. Then a faintness came over her; she recalled the Viscount who had waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his beard exhaled like this air an odour of vanilla and citron, and mechanically she half-closed her eyes the better to breathe it in. But in making this movement, as she leant back in her chair, she saw in the distance, right on the line of the horizon, the old diligence, the "Hirondelle," that was slowly descending the hill of Leux, dragging after it a long trail of dust. It was in this yellow carriage that Leon had so often come back to her, and by this route down there that he had gone for ever. She fancied she saw him opposite at his windows; then all grew confused; clouds gathered; it seemed to her that she was again turning in the waltz under the light of the lustres on the arm of the Viscount, and that Leon was not far away, that he was coming; and yet all the time she was conscious of the scent of Rodolphe's head by her side. This sweetness of sensation pierced through her old desires, and these, like grains of sand under a gust of wind, eddied to and fro in the subtle breath of the perfume which suffused her soul. She opened wide her nostrils several times to drink in the freshness of the ivy round the capitals. She took off her gloves, she wiped her hands, then fanned her face with her handkerchief, while athwart the throbbing of her temples she heard the murmur of the crowd and the voice of the councillor intoning his phrases. He said--"Continue, persevere; listen neither to the suggestions of routine, nor to the over-hasty councils of a rash empiricism. "Apply yourselves, above all, to the amelioration of the soil, to good manures, to the development of the equine, bovine, ovine, and porcine races. Let these shows be to you pacific arenas, where the victor in leaving it will hold forth a hand to the vanquished, and will fraternise with him in the hope of better success. And you, aged servants, humble domestics, whose hard labour no Government up to this day has taken into consideration, come hither to receive the reward of your silent virtues, and be assured that the state henceforward has its eye upon you; that it encourages you, protects you; that it will accede to your just demands, and alleviate as much as in it lies the burden of your painful sacrifices." Monsieur Lieuvain then sat down; Monsieur Derozerays got up, beginning another speech. His was not perhaps so florid as that of the councillor, but it recommended itself by a more direct style, that is to say, by more special knowledge and more elevated considerations. Thus the praise of the Government took up less space in it; religion and agriculture more. He showed in it the relations of these two, and how they had always contributed to civilisation. Rodolphe with Madame Bovary was talking dreams, presentiments, magnetism. Going back to the cradle of society, the orator painted those fierce times when men lived on acorns in the heart of woods. Then they had left off the skins of beasts, had put on cloth, tilled the soil, planted the vine. Was this a good, and in this discovery was there not more of injury than of gain? Monsieur Derozerays set himself this problem. From magnetism little by little Rodolphe had come to affinities, and while the president was citing Cincinnatus and his plough, Diocletian, planting his cabbages, and the Emperors of China inaugurating the year by the sowing of seed, the young man was explaining to the young woman that these irresistible attractions find their cause in some previous state of existence. "Thus we," he said, "why did we come to know one another? What chance willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that flow but to unite; our special bents of mind had driven us towards each other." And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it. "For good farming generally!" cried the president. "Just now, for example, when I went to your house." "To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix." "Did I know I should accompany you?" "Seventy francs." "A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you--I remained." "Manures!" "And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!" "To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!" "For I have never in the society of any other person found so complete a charm." "To Monsieur Bain of Givry-Saint-Martin." "And I shall carry away with me the remembrance of you." "For a merino ram!" "But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow." "To Monsieur Belot of Notre-Dame." "Oh, no! I shall be something in your thought, in your life, shall I not?" "Porcine race; prizes--equal, to Messrs. Leherisse and Cullembourg, sixty francs!" Rodolphe was pressing her hand, and he felt it all warm and quivering like a captive dove that wants to fly away; but, whether she was trying to take it away or whether she was answering his pressure; she made a movement with her fingers. He exclaimed-- "Oh, I thank you! You do not repulse me! You are good! You understand that I am yours! Let me look at you; let me contemplate you!" A gust of wind that blew in at the window ruffled the cloth on the table, and in the square below all the great caps of the peasant women were uplifted by it like the wings of white butterflies fluttering. "Use of oil-cakes," continued the president. He was hurrying on: "Flemish manure-flax-growing-drainage-long leases-domestic service." Rodolphe was no longer speaking. They looked at one another. A supreme desire made their dry lips tremble, and wearily, without an effort, their fingers intertwined. "Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux, of Sassetot-la-Guerriere, for fifty-four years of service at the same farm, a silver medal--value, twenty-five francs!" "Where is Catherine Leroux?" repeated the councillor. She did not present herself, and one could hear voices whispering-- "Go up!" "Don't be afraid!" "Oh, how stupid she is!" "Well, is she there?" cried Tuvache. "Yes; here she is." "Then let her come up!" Then there came forward on the platform a little old woman with timid bearing, who seemed to shrink within her poor clothes. On her feet she wore heavy wooden clogs, and from her hips hung a large blue apron. Her pale face framed in a borderless cap was more wrinkled than a withered russet apple. And from the sleeves of her red jacket looked out two large hands with knotty joints, the dust of barns, the potash of washing the grease of wools had so encrusted, roughened, hardened these that they seemed dirty, although they had been rinsed in clear water; and by dint of long service they remained half open, as if to bear humble witness for themselves of so much suffering endured. Something of monastic rigidity dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion weakened that pale look. In her constant living with animals she had caught their dumbness and their calm. It was the first time that she found herself in the midst of so large a company, and inwardly scared by the flags, the drums, the gentlemen in frock-coats, and the order of the councillor, she stood motionless, not knowing whether to advance or run away, nor why the crowd was pushing her and the jury were smiling at her. Thus stood before these radiant bourgeois this half-century of servitude. "Approach, venerable Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux!" said the councillor, who had taken the list of prize-winners from the president; and, looking at the piece of paper and the old woman by turns, he repeated in a fatherly tone--"Approach! approach!" "Are you deaf?" said Tuvache, fidgeting in his armchair; and he began shouting in her ear, "Fifty-four years of service. A silver medal! Twenty-five francs! For you!" Then, when she had her medal, she looked at it, and a smile of beatitude spread over her face; and as she walked away they could hear her muttering "I'll give it to our cure up home, to say some masses for me!" "What fanaticism!" exclaimed the chemist, leaning across to the notary. The meeting was over, the crowd dispersed, and now that the speeches had been read, each one fell back into his place again, and everything into the old grooves; the masters bullied the servants, and these struck the animals, indolent victors, going back to the stalls, a green-crown on their horns. The National Guards, however, had gone up to the first floor of the town hall with buns spitted on their bayonets, and the drummer of the battalion carried a basket with bottles. Madame Bovary took Rodolphe's arm; he saw her home; they separated at her door; then he walked about alone in the meadow while he waited for the time of the banquet. The feast was long, noisy, ill served; the guests were so crowded that they could hardly move their elbows; and the narrow planks used for forms almost broke down under their weight. They ate hugely. Each one stuffed himself on his own account. Sweat stood on every brow, and a whitish steam, like the vapour of a stream on an autumn morning, floated above the table between the hanging lamps. Rodolphe, leaning against the calico of the tent was thinking so earnestly of Emma that he heard nothing. Behind him on the grass the servants were piling up the dirty plates, his neighbours were talking; he did not answer them; they filled his glass, and there was silence in his thoughts in spite of the growing noise. He was dreaming of what she had said, of the line of her lips; her face, as in a magic mirror, shone on the plates of the shakos, the folds of her gown fell along the walls, and days of love unrolled to all infinity before him in the vistas of the future. He saw her again in the evening during the fireworks, but she was with her husband, Madame Homais, and the druggist, who was worrying about the danger of stray rockets, and every moment he left the company to go and give some advice to Binet. The pyrotechnic pieces sent to Monsieur Tuvache had, through an excess of caution, been shut up in his cellar, and so the damp powder would not light, and the principal set piece, that was to represent a dragon biting his tail, failed completely. Now and then a meagre Roman-candle went off; then the gaping crowd sent up a shout that mingled with the cry of the women, whose waists were being squeezed in the darkness. Emma silently nestled against Charles's shoulder; then, raising her chin, she watched the luminous rays of the rockets against the dark sky. Rodolphe gazed at her in the light of the burning lanterns. They went out one by one. The stars shone out. A few crops of rain began to fall. She knotted her fichu round her bare head. At this moment the councillor's carriage came out from the inn. His coachman, who was drunk, suddenly dozed off, and one could see from the distance, above the hood, between the two lanterns, the mass of his body, that swayed from right to left with the giving of the traces. "Truly," said the druggist, "one ought to proceed most rigorously against drunkenness! I should like to see written up weekly at the door of the town hall on a board ad hoc* the names of all those who during the week got intoxicated on alcohol. Besides, with regard to statistics, one would thus have, as it were, public records that one could refer to in case of need. But excuse me!" *Specifically for that. And he once more ran off to the captain. The latter was going back to see his lathe again. "Perhaps you would not do ill," Homais said to him, "to send one of your men, or to go yourself--" "Leave me alone!" answered the tax-collector. "It's all right!" "Do not be uneasy," said the druggist, when he returned to his friends. "Monsieur Binet has assured me that all precautions have been taken. No sparks have fallen; the pumps are full. Let us go to rest." "Ma foi! I want it," said Madame Homais, yawning at large. "But never mind; we've had a beautiful day for our fete." Rodolphe repeated in a low voice, and with a tender look, "Oh, yes! very beautiful!" And having bowed to one another, they separated. Two days later, in the "Final de Rouen," there was a long article on the show. Homais had composed it with verve the very next morning. "Why these festoons, these flowers, these garlands? Whither hurries this crowd like the waves of a furious sea under the torrents of a tropical sun pouring its heat upon our heads?" Then he spoke of the condition of the peasants. Certainly the Government was doing much, but not enough. "Courage!" he cried to it; "a thousand reforms are indispensable; let us accomplish them!" Then touching on the entry of the councillor, he did not forget "the martial air of our militia;" nor "our most merry village maidens;" nor the "bald-headed old men like patriarchs who were there, and of whom some, the remnants of our phalanxes, still felt their hearts beat at the manly sound of the drums." He cited himself among the first of the members of the jury, and he even called attention in a note to the fact that Monsieur Homais, chemist, had sent a memoir on cider to the agricultural society. When he came to the distribution of the prizes, he painted the joy of the prize-winners in dithyrambic strophes. "The father embraced the son, the brother the brother, the husband his consort. More than one showed his humble medal with pride; and no doubt when he got home to his good housewife, he hung it up weeping on the modest walls of his cot. "About six o'clock a banquet prepared in the meadow of Monsieur Leigeard brought together the principal personages of the fete. The greatest cordiality reigned here. Divers toasts were proposed: Monsieur Lieuvain, the King; Monsieur Tuvache, the Prefect; Monsieur Derozerays, Agriculture; Monsieur Homais, Industry and the Fine Arts, those twin sisters; Monsieur Leplichey, Progress. In the evening some brilliant fireworks on a sudden illumined the air. One would have called it a veritable kaleidoscope, a real operatic scene; and for a moment our little locality might have thought itself transported into the midst of a dream of the 'Thousand and One Nights.' Let us state that no untoward event disturbed this family meeting." And he added "Only the absence of the clergy was remarked. No doubt the priests understand progress in another fashion. Just as you please, messieurs the followers of Loyola!"

Chapter 8

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An Agricultural Show is organized in Yonville, and many visitors come to town. It is a great occasion for the village folk, and there is a fine display of decoration and patriotism. It is in such an atmosphere that Emma and Rodolphe meet for the second time. They have to avoid certain people, like Homais and Lheureux, to be together, but they manage to be alone. Rodolphe passes little hints to Emma about love, and she is flattered. There is a livestock competition and the judges are doing their rounds. The chairman of the judges, Monsieur Derozerays de la Panville, invites Rodolphe to join the team. Rodolphe tells Emma that he prefers her company by far. The topic of conversation shifts to attire, and they agree that there is no point in dressing up in the country. Rodolphe even admits to feeling depressed, a fact that surprises Emma. He states that he has no friends and thinks no one cares about him. He is obviously playing to Emma's emotions. Rodolphe and Emma watch the proceedings from the secluded Council Chamber of the Town Hall. Lieuvain, the Prefect's deputy, makes a speech that forms the backdrop of the amorous conversation Rodolphe engages in with Emma. When Lieuvain pauses in the course of his speech, ending with a few words on civic duty, Rodolphe speaks to Emma about emotions, stating that "to feel nobly and love what is beautiful -- that's our duty." Emma reminds him of the need to conform to the world's morality. To this he replies that there are "two moralities. " One is petty and conventional, and the other is eternal. When Lieuvain continues, Rodolphe draws closer to Emma and speaks to her about escaping from the "conspiracy of society." Emma is visibly attracted to Rodolphe and is filled with romantic visions of herself with him. He plays to her feelings and desires. As the announcement of prizes begins, Rodolphe takes Emma's hand, and every award that is announced is juxtaposed with a passionate declaration of love for Emma by Rodolphe. As their fingers intertwine, their passion is at a peak. When the ceremony ends, Rodolphe ushers Emma home. They see each other again in the evening at the fireworks, but Emma is accompanied by her husband and Homais. The fireworks show draws an enthusiastic response from the crowd, despite the fact that most of the fireworks cannot be lit because the powder is damp. In the dark, Rodolphe gazes at Emma, who is by her husband's side. Later he agrees with Madame Homais' view about it having been a lovely day, and with that a tender look creeps into his eyes. Two days later, Homais' exaggerated report about the show appears in the Rouen Beacon. His style is overblown, and his report ends with his observation that the clergy had remained absent throughout the festivities.

Notes This chapter significantly advances the plot of the story, for it is here that the relationship between Emma and Rodolphe begins. The previous chapter had indicated Rodolphe's interest in Emma; now the Agricultural Show in Yonville provides the setting for the two of them to meet and spend time with each other. It is evident that Emma falls for Rodolphe's charm; and it is equally evident that Rodolphe takes advantage of her gullibility. There are many ironies in the chapter. Flaubert's description of the preparations made by the Yonville citizens depicts the grandiose visions of these small townsfolk. Then in a setting where citizens are being honored for loyalty and service, Rodolphe encourages Emma to defy social conventions and moral duty in order to respond to her passions. Emma half-heartedly warns him about the social pressure that cripples such freedom, but Rodolphe easily convinces her to abandon such fears. Carried away in a flood of passion, "they at one another, and their dry lips in a supreme desire. Gently, effortlessly, their fingers intertwine. " Flaubert's handling of Rodolphe's declarations of love to Emma is masterful. Lieuvain's speech is effectively alternated with Rodolphe's statements to Emma. The former's speech is delivered from a platform in front of the Town Hall. The latter's statements are made in the privacy of the Council Chamber. The juxtaposition of the sublime with the mundane produces humor. In a way, it also suggests the non-serious nature of Rodolphe's intentions. He obviously looks at Emma as a temporary means to relieve his passions. Unlike Emma, he does not see their budding relationship as something permanent. His denouncing of the "petty, conventional morality of men" clearly indicates that he possesses little virtue himself. The use of contrast makes Rodolphe's attitude about love and sex evident to the reader, but naive and romantic Emma clings to his every word and decides to reject her previously moral way of life. Flaubert has carefully developed Emma's dissatisfaction to such a point that this decision is not shocking. The official speeches do not say anything new, and the people who listen to them with enthusiasm have probably heard the same things repeatedly over the years. Still Flaubert's reason for inserting large sections of the speeches within the narrative is to contrast it with Rodolphe's words. Neither the official speaker nor Rodolphe cares about their words, only the affect of them; the officials want to excite the crowd, while Rodolphe wants to excite Emma. Rodolphe chooses his words carefully and presents his case very well. Emma cannot challenge his argument that fate has brought them together. The announcement of the prizes is also carefully placed to create irony and humor. Rodolphe's declaration of his passion for Emma is juxtaposed next to the prize announcement for manure. When Rodolphe urges Emma to voice her emotions, a prize is announced for pigs. It is also significant that Emma and Rodolphe begin their passionate relationship against the backdrop of the Agricultural Show. The relationship and the show are both superficial and ultimately disappointing. Neither is it a coincidence that the lovers throb with desire when Catherine Leroux, an old peasant woman, is honored for her many years of service. This is an ironic commentary on Emma's lack of devotion to her own family. Flaubert is skilled at sketching vignettes that add more substance to the reader's understanding of the later events in the novel. In this chapter, he provides a short, seemingly unimportant interchange between Madame Lefrancois and Homais. She tells Homais about Lheureux, whose efforts have led to the undoing a rival business establishment. At this point in the novel, little significance is attached to this revelation. Later, when Emma is brought to ruin by this man, the reader perceives the importance of this passage. It is also significant to notice the details about Homais' newspaper article. When he describes the events of the day, which were in many ways disastrous, he renders everything in a positive light. It is clear that this man has a natural talent for misrepresenting the facts. He also manages to insert his dislike of the clergy into the report.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/18.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_17_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 9

chapter 9

{"name": "Chapter 9", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary31.asp", "summary": "Rodolphe keeps away from Emma for some time. He reasons that Emma will love him more passionately after the interval. He visits her six weeks later and observes her turn pale at his entrance. He looks at her with passion, and she is flustered. He bemoans her married state and reiterates that fate has brought him to her. He goes on to tell her how he \"kept a watchful eye on all about her\" during the period he stayed away. He declares his love for Emma and is about to go down on his knees, when Charles returns home. Emma's ill health becomes the topic of their conversation. Rodolphe suggests that riding would help and offers one of his horses for the purpose. After Rodolphe leaves, Charles persuades a \"reluctant\" Emma to reconsider Rodolphe's offer. He also sees to it that she is provided with riding-gear. He writes to \"Monsieur Boulanger,\" accepting the offer. The next day at noon, Rodolphe presents himself at the Bovarys' house with two saddle horses. Emma and Rodolphe ride until they reach the pine woods outside Yonville. Few words are exchanged between them, and Emma turns away a few times to avoid eye contact with him. Once in the forest they dismount. In a clearing, they sit on a log where Rodolphe, in a \"calm, serious, melancholy\" manner, declares his love to Emma. She protests when he insists that they have a common destiny. But when he holds her wrist, she gazes at him \"with moist, loving eyes. \" Then she abruptly demands to be taken back. Seeing that she is disturbed, Rodolphe becomes all respect and attention. He pleads with Emma to be his \"friend...sister...angel.\" As she tries to reason with him, she leans on his shoulder and then yields to him. When she recovers her senses, it is evening. As they ride into Yonville, \"Eyes her from windows. \" Charles observes her return to health and informs her that he has bought a mare for her. Later, when she is alone in her room, she relives the moments of ecstasy with Rodolphe that afternoon. Noticing her reflection in the mirror, she realizes that \"her whole person had undergone some subtle transformation.\" \"I have a lover, a lover,\" are the words she chants, \"reveling in the thought as if she had attained a second puberty. \" The next day is equally ecstatic. When Emma sees Rodolphe, she makes him call out her name again and again and tell her that he loves her. The lovers begin to exchange passionate letters. One morning when Charles goes on a visit before daybreak, Emma is \"taken with a fancy to see Rodolphe on the instant. \" She walks all the way to La Huchette, Rodolphe's residence, and slips into his bedroom. The first venture is successful, and whenever Charles leaves home early, Emma slips off to see Rodolphe. This continues for some time until Rodolphe warns Emma about her indiscretion.", "analysis": "Notes Rodolphe's calculating nature is revealed here. He suggests to Charles that horse back riding will be good for Emma's health; in reality, he just wants to get Emma alone. The reader realizes the difference between his and Emma's passion. He is attracted to her but does not look upon her as a 'soulmate'. His need is purely physical. For Emma, Rodolphe is her savior, someone with whom to share her sorrows. Having sensed Emma's need, Rodolphe plans his moves. He stays away for six weeks, so that when he meets Emma again she will be desperate for him. During this meeting, he states that it is \"fate\" that has brought him to her. Thus, he makes her believe that their relationship is predestined. Emma's horseback rides with Rodolphe raise quite a few eyebrows in Yonville. Charles, however, is his simple, unsuspecting self and sees nothing unusual in his wife going off for rides with a bachelor. Their first ride into the wood is a beautifully constructed section that presents a marvelous description of nature. The beauty of the natural setting corresponds with the passion of the young lovers. In the woods, Rodolphe is gentle yet persuasive. At first Emma is unyielding but soon succumbs to Rodolphe's charms. \" She tilted back her white neck, her throat swelled with a sigh, and, swooning, weeping, with a long shudder, hiding her face, she surrendered. \" After the lovers' passions have been satisfied, Flaubert contrasts the emotions of Emma and Rodolphe. For her, \"silence was everywhere. Sweetness seemed to breathe from the trees. She felt her heart beginning to beat again, and the blood flowing inside her flesh like a river of milk. In contrast, Rodolphe is a picture of nonchalance with 'cigar in mouth. . . mending one of the bridles with his pocket-knife.\" Ironically, he is just as insensitive as Charles. In spite of their differing attitudes, their affair develops. Emma, obviously in love with Rodolphe, becomes submissive, complying with his every demand. She boldly visits Rodolphe at his residence whenever she gets the opportunity. Her repeated visits begin to annoy Rodolphe, and one day he tells her that \"she compromising herself.\" When the chapter ends, Flaubert has clearly foreshadowed that this affair is bound to fail."}

Six weeks passed. Rodolphe did not come again. At last one evening he appeared. The day after the show he had said to himself--"We mustn't go back too soon; that would be a mistake." And at the end of a week he had gone off hunting. After the hunting he had thought it was too late, and then he reasoned thus-- "If from the first day she loved me, she must from impatience to see me again love me more. Let's go on with it!" And he knew that his calculation had been right when, on entering the room, he saw Emma turn pale. She was alone. The day was drawing in. The small muslin curtain along the windows deepened the twilight, and the gilding of the barometer, on which the rays of the sun fell, shone in the looking-glass between the meshes of the coral. Rodolphe remained standing, and Emma hardly answered his first conventional phrases. "I," he said, "have been busy. I have been ill." "Seriously?" she cried. "Well," said Rodolphe, sitting down at her side on a footstool, "no; it was because I did not want to come back." "Why?" "Can you not guess?" He looked at her again, but so hard that she lowered her head, blushing. He went on-- "Emma!" "Sir," she said, drawing back a little. "Ah! you see," replied he in a melancholy voice, "that I was right not to come back; for this name, this name that fills my whole soul, and that escaped me, you forbid me to use! Madame Bovary! why all the world calls you thus! Besides, it is not your name; it is the name of another!" He repeated, "of another!" And he hid his face in his hands. "Yes, I think of you constantly. The memory of you drives me to despair. Ah! forgive me! I will leave you! Farewell! I will go far away, so far that you will never hear of me again; and yet--to-day--I know not what force impelled me towards you. For one does not struggle against Heaven; one cannot resist the smile of angels; one is carried away by that which is beautiful, charming, adorable." It was the first time that Emma had heard such words spoken to herself, and her pride, like one who reposes bathed in warmth, expanded softly and fully at this glowing language. "But if I did not come," he continued, "if I could not see you, at least I have gazed long on all that surrounds you. At night-every night-I arose; I came hither; I watched your house, its glimmering in the moon, the trees in the garden swaying before your window, and the little lamp, a gleam shining through the window-panes in the darkness. Ah! you never knew that there, so near you, so far from you, was a poor wretch!" She turned towards him with a sob. "Oh, you are good!" she said. "No, I love you, that is all! You do not doubt that! Tell me--one word--only one word!" And Rodolphe imperceptibly glided from the footstool to the ground; but a sound of wooden shoes was heard in the kitchen, and he noticed the door of the room was not closed. "How kind it would be of you," he went on, rising, "if you would humour a whim of mine." It was to go over her house; he wanted to know it; and Madame Bovary seeing no objection to this, they both rose, when Charles came in. "Good morning, doctor," Rodolphe said to him. The doctor, flattered at this unexpected title, launched out into obsequious phrases. Of this the other took advantage to pull himself together a little. "Madame was speaking to me," he then said, "about her health." Charles interrupted him; he had indeed a thousand anxieties; his wife's palpitations of the heart were beginning again. Then Rodolphe asked if riding would not be good. "Certainly! excellent! just the thing! There's an idea! You ought to follow it up." And as she objected that she had no horse, Monsieur Rodolphe offered one. She refused his offer; he did not insist. Then to explain his visit he said that his ploughman, the man of the blood-letting, still suffered from giddiness. "I'll call around," said Bovary. "No, no! I'll send him to you; we'll come; that will be more convenient for you." "Ah! very good! I thank you." And as soon as they were alone, "Why don't you accept Monsieur Boulanger's kind offer?" She assumed a sulky air, invented a thousand excuses, and finally declared that perhaps it would look odd. "Well, what the deuce do I care for that?" said Charles, making a pirouette. "Health before everything! You are wrong." "And how do you think I can ride when I haven't got a habit?" "You must order one," he answered. The riding-habit decided her. When the habit was ready, Charles wrote to Monsieur Boulanger that his wife was at his command, and that they counted on his good-nature. The next day at noon Rodolphe appeared at Charles's door with two saddle-horses. One had pink rosettes at his ears and a deerskin side-saddle. Rodolphe had put on high soft boots, saying to himself that no doubt she had never seen anything like them. In fact, Emma was charmed with his appearance as he stood on the landing in his great velvet coat and white corduroy breeches. She was ready; she was waiting for him. Justin escaped from the chemist's to see her start, and the chemist also came out. He was giving Monsieur Boulanger a little good advice. "An accident happens so easily. Be careful! Your horses perhaps are mettlesome." She heard a noise above her; it was Felicite drumming on the windowpanes to amuse little Berthe. The child blew her a kiss; her mother answered with a wave of her whip. "A pleasant ride!" cried Monsieur Homais. "Prudence! above all, prudence!" And he flourished his newspaper as he saw them disappear. As soon as he felt the ground, Emma's horse set off at a gallop. Rodolphe galloped by her side. Now and then they exchanged a word. Her figure slightly bent, her hand well up, and her right arm stretched out, she gave herself up to the cadence of the movement that rocked her in her saddle. At the bottom of the hill Rodolphe gave his horse its head; they started together at a bound, then at the top suddenly the horses stopped, and her large blue veil fell about her. It was early in October. There was fog over the land. Hazy clouds hovered on the horizon between the outlines of the hills; others, rent asunder, floated up and disappeared. Sometimes through a rift in the clouds, beneath a ray of sunshine, gleamed from afar the roots of Yonville, with the gardens at the water's edge, the yards, the walls and the church steeple. Emma half closed her eyes to pick out her house, and never had this poor village where she lived appeared so small. From the height on which they were the whole valley seemed an immense pale lake sending off its vapour into the air. Clumps of trees here and there stood out like black rocks, and the tall lines of the poplars that rose above the mist were like a beach stirred by the wind. By the side, on the turf between the pines, a brown light shimmered in the warm atmosphere. The earth, ruddy like the powder of tobacco, deadened the noise of their steps, and with the edge of their shoes the horses as they walked kicked the fallen fir cones in front of them. Rodolphe and Emma thus went along the skirt of the wood. She turned away from time to time to avoid his look, and then she saw only the pine trunks in lines, whose monotonous succession made her a little giddy. The horses were panting; the leather of the saddles creaked. Just as they were entering the forest the sun shone out. "God protects us!" said Rodolphe. "Do you think so?" she said. "Forward! forward!" he continued. He "tchk'd" with his tongue. The two beasts set off at a trot. Long ferns by the roadside caught in Emma's stirrup. Rodolphe leant forward and removed them as they rode along. At other times, to turn aside the branches, he passed close to her, and Emma felt his knee brushing against her leg. The sky was now blue, the leaves no longer stirred. There were spaces full of heather in flower, and plots of violets alternated with the confused patches of the trees that were grey, fawn, or golden coloured, according to the nature of their leaves. Often in the thicket was heard the fluttering of wings, or else the hoarse, soft cry of the ravens flying off amidst the oaks. They dismounted. Rodolphe fastened up the horses. She walked on in front on the moss between the paths. But her long habit got in her way, although she held it up by the skirt; and Rodolphe, walking behind her, saw between the black cloth and the black shoe the fineness of her white stocking, that seemed to him as if it were a part of her nakedness. She stopped. "I am tired," she said. "Come, try again," he went on. "Courage!" Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped, and through her veil, that fell sideways from her man's hat over her hips, her face appeared in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure waves. "But where are we going?" He did not answer. She was breathing irregularly. Rodolphe looked round him biting his moustache. They came to a larger space where the coppice had been cut. They sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, and Rodolphe began speaking to her of his love. He did not begin by frightening her with compliments. He was calm, serious, melancholy. Emma listened to him with bowed head, and stirred the bits of wood on the ground with the tip of her foot. But at the words, "Are not our destinies now one?" "Oh, no!" she replied. "You know that well. It is impossible!" She rose to go. He seized her by the wrist. She stopped. Then, having gazed at him for a few moments with an amorous and humid look, she said hurriedly-- "Ah! do not speak of it again! Where are the horses? Let us go back." He made a gesture of anger and annoyance. She repeated: "Where are the horses? Where are the horses?" Then smiling a strange smile, his pupil fixed, his teeth set, he advanced with outstretched arms. She recoiled trembling. She stammered: "Oh, you frighten me! You hurt me! Let me go!" "If it must be," he went on, his face changing; and he again became respectful, caressing, timid. She gave him her arm. They went back. He said-- "What was the matter with you? Why? I do not understand. You were mistaken, no doubt. In my soul you are as a Madonna on a pedestal, in a place lofty, secure, immaculate. But I need you to live! I must have your eyes, your voice, your thought! Be my friend, my sister, my angel!" And he put out his arm round her waist. She feebly tried to disengage herself. He supported her thus as they walked along. But they heard the two horses browsing on the leaves. "Oh! one moment!" said Rodolphe. "Do not let us go! Stay!" He drew her farther on to a small pool where duckweeds made a greenness on the water. Faded water lilies lay motionless between the reeds. At the noise of their steps in the grass, frogs jumped away to hide themselves. "I am wrong! I am wrong!" she said. "I am mad to listen to you!" "Why? Emma! Emma!" "Oh, Rodolphe!" said the young woman slowly, leaning on his shoulder. The cloth of her habit caught against the velvet of his coat. She threw back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and faltering, in tears, with a long shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself up to him-- The shades of night were falling; the horizontal sun passing between the branches dazzled the eyes. Here and there around her, in the leaves or on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as it hummingbirds flying about had scattered their feathers. Silence was everywhere; something sweet seemed to come forth from the trees; she felt her heart, whose beating had begun again, and the blood coursing through her flesh like a stream of milk. Then far away, beyond the wood, on the other hills, she heard a vague prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in silence she heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his lips, was mending with his penknife one of the two broken bridles. They returned to Yonville by the same road. On the mud they saw again the traces of their horses side by side, the same thickets, the same stones to the grass; nothing around them seemed changed; and yet for her something had happened more stupendous than if the mountains had moved in their places. Rodolphe now and again bent forward and took her hand to kiss it. She was charming on horseback--upright, with her slender waist, her knee bent on the mane of her horse, her face somewhat flushed by the fresh air in the red of the evening. On entering Yonville she made her horse prance in the road. People looked at her from the windows. At dinner her husband thought she looked well, but she pretended not to hear him when he inquired about her ride, and she remained sitting there with her elbow at the side of her plate between the two lighted candles. "Emma!" he said. "What?" "Well, I spent the afternoon at Monsieur Alexandre's. He has an old cob, still very fine, only a little broken-kneed, and that could be bought; I am sure, for a hundred crowns." He added, "And thinking it might please you, I have bespoken it--bought it. Have I done right? Do tell me?" She nodded her head in assent; then a quarter of an hour later-- "Are you going out to-night?" she asked. "Yes. Why?" "Oh, nothing, nothing, my dear!" And as soon as she had got rid of Charles she went and shut herself up in her room. At first she felt stunned; she saw the trees, the paths, the ditches, Rodolphe, and she again felt the pressure of his arm, while the leaves rustled and the reeds whistled. But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, "I have a lover! a lover!" delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary existence appeared only afar off, down below in the shade, through the interspaces of these heights. Then she recalled the heroines of the books that she had read, and the lyric legion of these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with the voice of sisters that charmed her. She became herself, as it were, an actual part of these imaginings, and realised the love-dream of her youth as she saw herself in this type of amorous women whom she had so envied. Besides, Emma felt a satisfaction of revenge. Had she not suffered enough? But now she triumphed, and the love so long pent up burst forth in full joyous bubblings. She tasted it without remorse, without anxiety, without trouble. The day following passed with a new sweetness. They made vows to one another She told him of her sorrows. Rodolphe interrupted her with kisses; and she looking at him through half-closed eyes, asked him to call her again by her name--to say that he loved her They were in the forest, as yesterday, in the shed of some woodenshoe maker. The walls were of straw, and the roof so low they had to stoop. They were seated side by side on a bed of dry leaves. From that day forth they wrote to one another regularly every evening. Emma placed her letter at the end of the garden, by the river, in a fissure of the wall. Rodolphe came to fetch it, and put another there, that she always found fault with as too short. One morning, when Charles had gone out before day break, she was seized with the fancy to see Rodolphe at once. She would go quickly to La Huchette, stay there an hour, and be back again at Yonville while everyone was still asleep. This idea made her pant with desire, and she soon found herself in the middle of the field, walking with rapid steps, without looking behind her. Day was just breaking. Emma from afar recognised her lover's house. Its two dove-tailed weathercocks stood out black against the pale dawn. Beyond the farmyard there was a detached building that she thought must be the chateau She entered--it was if the doors at her approach had opened wide of their own accord. A large straight staircase led up to the corridor. Emma raised the latch of a door, and suddenly at the end of the room she saw a man sleeping. It was Rodolphe. She uttered a cry. "You here? You here?" he repeated. "How did you manage to come? Ah! your dress is damp." "I love you," she answered, throwing her arms about his neck. This first piece of daring successful, now every time Charles went out early Emma dressed quickly and slipped on tiptoe down the steps that led to the waterside. But when the plank for the cows was taken up, she had to go by the walls alongside of the river; the bank was slippery; in order not to fall she caught hold of the tufts of faded wallflowers. Then she went across ploughed fields, in which she sank, stumbling; and clogging her thin shoes. Her scarf, knotted round her head, fluttered to the wind in the meadows. She was afraid of the oxen; she began to run; she arrived out of breath, with rosy cheeks, and breathing out from her whole person a fresh perfume of sap, of verdure, of the open air. At this hour Rodolphe still slept. It was like a spring morning coming into his room. The yellow curtains along the windows let a heavy, whitish light enter softly. Emma felt about, opening and closing her eyes, while the drops of dew hanging from her hair formed, as it were, a topaz aureole around her face. Rodolphe, laughing, drew her to him, and pressed her to his breast. Then she examined the apartment, opened the drawers of the tables, combed her hair with his comb, and looked at herself in his shaving-glass. Often she even put between her teeth the big pipe that lay on the table by the bed, amongst lemons and pieces of sugar near a bottle of water. It took them a good quarter of an hour to say goodbye. Then Emma cried. She would have wished never to leave Rodolphe. Something stronger than herself forced her to him; so much so, that one day, seeing her come unexpectedly, he frowned as one put out. "What is the matter with you?" she said. "Are you ill? Tell me!" At last he declared with a serious air that her visits were becoming imprudent--that she was compromising herself.

Chapter 9

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary31.asp

Rodolphe keeps away from Emma for some time. He reasons that Emma will love him more passionately after the interval. He visits her six weeks later and observes her turn pale at his entrance. He looks at her with passion, and she is flustered. He bemoans her married state and reiterates that fate has brought him to her. He goes on to tell her how he "kept a watchful eye on all about her" during the period he stayed away. He declares his love for Emma and is about to go down on his knees, when Charles returns home. Emma's ill health becomes the topic of their conversation. Rodolphe suggests that riding would help and offers one of his horses for the purpose. After Rodolphe leaves, Charles persuades a "reluctant" Emma to reconsider Rodolphe's offer. He also sees to it that she is provided with riding-gear. He writes to "Monsieur Boulanger," accepting the offer. The next day at noon, Rodolphe presents himself at the Bovarys' house with two saddle horses. Emma and Rodolphe ride until they reach the pine woods outside Yonville. Few words are exchanged between them, and Emma turns away a few times to avoid eye contact with him. Once in the forest they dismount. In a clearing, they sit on a log where Rodolphe, in a "calm, serious, melancholy" manner, declares his love to Emma. She protests when he insists that they have a common destiny. But when he holds her wrist, she gazes at him "with moist, loving eyes. " Then she abruptly demands to be taken back. Seeing that she is disturbed, Rodolphe becomes all respect and attention. He pleads with Emma to be his "friend...sister...angel." As she tries to reason with him, she leans on his shoulder and then yields to him. When she recovers her senses, it is evening. As they ride into Yonville, "Eyes her from windows. " Charles observes her return to health and informs her that he has bought a mare for her. Later, when she is alone in her room, she relives the moments of ecstasy with Rodolphe that afternoon. Noticing her reflection in the mirror, she realizes that "her whole person had undergone some subtle transformation." "I have a lover, a lover," are the words she chants, "reveling in the thought as if she had attained a second puberty. " The next day is equally ecstatic. When Emma sees Rodolphe, she makes him call out her name again and again and tell her that he loves her. The lovers begin to exchange passionate letters. One morning when Charles goes on a visit before daybreak, Emma is "taken with a fancy to see Rodolphe on the instant. " She walks all the way to La Huchette, Rodolphe's residence, and slips into his bedroom. The first venture is successful, and whenever Charles leaves home early, Emma slips off to see Rodolphe. This continues for some time until Rodolphe warns Emma about her indiscretion.

Notes Rodolphe's calculating nature is revealed here. He suggests to Charles that horse back riding will be good for Emma's health; in reality, he just wants to get Emma alone. The reader realizes the difference between his and Emma's passion. He is attracted to her but does not look upon her as a 'soulmate'. His need is purely physical. For Emma, Rodolphe is her savior, someone with whom to share her sorrows. Having sensed Emma's need, Rodolphe plans his moves. He stays away for six weeks, so that when he meets Emma again she will be desperate for him. During this meeting, he states that it is "fate" that has brought him to her. Thus, he makes her believe that their relationship is predestined. Emma's horseback rides with Rodolphe raise quite a few eyebrows in Yonville. Charles, however, is his simple, unsuspecting self and sees nothing unusual in his wife going off for rides with a bachelor. Their first ride into the wood is a beautifully constructed section that presents a marvelous description of nature. The beauty of the natural setting corresponds with the passion of the young lovers. In the woods, Rodolphe is gentle yet persuasive. At first Emma is unyielding but soon succumbs to Rodolphe's charms. " She tilted back her white neck, her throat swelled with a sigh, and, swooning, weeping, with a long shudder, hiding her face, she surrendered. " After the lovers' passions have been satisfied, Flaubert contrasts the emotions of Emma and Rodolphe. For her, "silence was everywhere. Sweetness seemed to breathe from the trees. She felt her heart beginning to beat again, and the blood flowing inside her flesh like a river of milk. In contrast, Rodolphe is a picture of nonchalance with 'cigar in mouth. . . mending one of the bridles with his pocket-knife." Ironically, he is just as insensitive as Charles. In spite of their differing attitudes, their affair develops. Emma, obviously in love with Rodolphe, becomes submissive, complying with his every demand. She boldly visits Rodolphe at his residence whenever she gets the opportunity. Her repeated visits begin to annoy Rodolphe, and one day he tells her that "she compromising herself." When the chapter ends, Flaubert has clearly foreshadowed that this affair is bound to fail.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/19.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_18_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 10

chapter 10

{"name": "Chapter 10", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary32.asp", "summary": "Rodolphe's warning makes Emma nervous, but she does not stop visiting him. One morning while returning from La Huchette, she bumps into Captain Binet, who is out hunting for wild duck. He attempts to involve her in a conversation. Emma tells him that she has been to the nurse's to see her baby and then hurries off. She later realizes that her explanation must have aroused his suspicion, for \"everyone in Yonville knew that the Bovary child had been back at home for the past year. Besides, no one lived in that direction; the path led only to La Huchette. So Binet would have guessed where she'd been. And he wouldn't keep it to himself. He'd chatter, for sure. \" This realization leaves Emma quite worried. The same evening, Emma sees Binet at Homais' shop. She is terrified of what Binet might reveal, but he leaves without doing or saying anything. The next day, Emma discusses with Rodolphe the problem of organizing their meetings. Rodolphe promises to look for a house where they would be safe in Yonville. Meanwhile, all winter he meets Emma in her garden \"in the dead of night\" to exchange loving caresses. In describing these meetings, Flaubert emphasizes the darkness and the silence, accompanied by the winter chill, reflection of the emotions that are beginning to haunt their relationship. Differences between the lovers continue to develop. Emma wants Rodolphe to be \"more serious -- more dramatic.\" She also finds in him \"a kind of coarseness, a straightforward vulgarity that her.\" Rodolphe, on the other hand, finds Emma to be \"very sentimental,\" which both irks and amuses him. He scoffs when she asks him for a token wedding ring that would signify their eternal union and laughs at her claims that their mothers in heaven bless the relationship of her and Rodolphe. Although he is still attracted by her beauty, Rodolphe finds himself becoming indifferent to Emma. She cannot understand Rodolphe's behavior. After six months, the flame of passion has died out. At about this time, Emma receives a letter from her father, which is full of \"kindly thoughts. \" She grows reflective, thinking about her youth, her marriage, her love affair, and her suffering. She is also alerted to her immediate surroundings, noticing the wonderful April weather and her happy daughter shouting with laughter. Moved suddenly, she freely expresses her love for Berthe, who is rolling about on the grass. Emma's display of tenderness is unusual and surprises the maid. That night when she meets Rodolphe, he finds Emma cold and unresponsive. He then stays away for three days in a row and is treated \"disdainfully\" when he finally pays a visit. He ignores \"her doleful sighs\" and \"the handkerchief she kept producing.\" His insensitivity prompts Emma to question herself. She wonders if she would do better to love Charles instead of Rodolphe.", "analysis": "Notes After the first wave of passion has passed, Emma grows nervous about her indiscretion, fearing others in Yonville will learn of her affair. The need for secrecy is greater on Emma's part, for she is supposedly a respectable, married woman, while Rodolphe already has a reputation as a philandering bachelor. Emma's emotions are also much more intense; Rodolphe does not seem to care about the outcome of their affair. When Emma meets Captain Binet in the early morning on the path that leads only to La Huchette, she is startled and produces a foolish explanation of her presence. As a result, she is sure that Binet will spread gossip about her throughout Yonville. When she meets Binet again that day at Homais' shop, the reader observes Emma behaving like a cornered animal. Flaubert's descriptive passages are remarkable. The dark, hidden, sensual nature of the love shared by Emma and Rodolphe is brilliantly captured and reflected in the natural setting that surrounds them. \"Clumps of shadow loomed up here and there in the darkness, rising at times in a concerted shudder and leaning over like immense black waves advancing to engulf them. The chill of the night made them cling the closer, the sighs they breathed seemed louder, their eyes, only just visible in the gloom, looked larger, and in the midst of the silence their whispered words fell clear as crystal on their hearts and lingered there in prolonged vibrations.\" The language, the rhythm, and the very description of nature itself are all sensual, heightening the mood. With romantic expectation, Emma wants Rodolphe to be constantly dramatic; when he falls short, she begins to think he is coarse and unattractive, and \"the grand passion into which she had plunged seemed to be dwindling around her like a river sinking into its bed; she saw the slime at the bottom.\" Rodolphe is equally as tired and displeased with Emma; her romantic, sentimental side, which originally attracted him to her, is particularly bothersome to Rodolphe. Her father's letter causes Emma to re-evaluate her life. She thinks on her past and looks at her present, even paying tender attention to her daughter Berthe. She wonders if her relationship with Rodolphe is really different from any other routine, marital relationship. This train of thought causes her to conclude that it would perhaps be better to love Charles than to pursue the affair."}

Gradually Rodolphe's fears took possession of her. At first, love had intoxicated her; and she had thought of nothing beyond. But now that he was indispensable to her life, she feared to lose anything of this, or even that it should be disturbed. When she came back from his house she looked all about her, anxiously watching every form that passed in the horizon, and every village window from which she could be seen. She listened for steps, cries, the noise of the ploughs, and she stopped short, white, and trembling more than the aspen leaves swaying overhead. One morning as she was thus returning, she suddenly thought she saw the long barrel of a carbine that seemed to be aimed at her. It stuck out sideways from the end of a small tub half-buried in the grass on the edge of a ditch. Emma, half-fainting with terror, nevertheless walked on, and a man stepped out of the tub like a Jack-in-the-box. He had gaiters buckled up to the knees, his cap pulled down over his eyes, trembling lips, and a red nose. It was Captain Binet lying in ambush for wild ducks. "You ought to have called out long ago!" he exclaimed; "When one sees a gun, one should always give warning." The tax-collector was thus trying to hide the fright he had had, for a prefectorial order having prohibited duckhunting except in boats, Monsieur Binet, despite his respect for the laws, was infringing them, and so he every moment expected to see the rural guard turn up. But this anxiety whetted his pleasure, and, all alone in his tub, he congratulated himself on his luck and on his cuteness. At sight of Emma he seemed relieved from a great weight, and at once entered upon a conversation. "It isn't warm; it's nipping." Emma answered nothing. He went on-- "And you're out so early?" "Yes," she said stammering; "I am just coming from the nurse where my child is." "Ah! very good! very good! For myself, I am here, just as you see me, since break of day; but the weather is so muggy, that unless one had the bird at the mouth of the gun--" "Good evening, Monsieur Binet," she interrupted him, turning on her heel. "Your servant, madame," he replied drily; and he went back into his tub. Emma regretted having left the tax-collector so abruptly. No doubt he would form unfavourable conjectures. The story about the nurse was the worst possible excuse, everyone at Yonville knowing that the little Bovary had been at home with her parents for a year. Besides, no one was living in this direction; this path led only to La Huchette. Binet, then, would guess whence she came, and he would not keep silence; he would talk, that was certain. She remained until evening racking her brain with every conceivable lying project, and had constantly before her eyes that imbecile with the game-bag. Charles after dinner, seeing her gloomy, proposed, by way of distraction, to take her to the chemist's, and the first person she caught sight of in the shop was the taxcollector again. He was standing in front of the counter, lit up by the gleams of the red bottle, and was saying-- "Please give me half an ounce of vitriol." "Justin," cried the druggist, "bring us the sulphuric acid." Then to Emma, who was going up to Madame Homais' room, "No, stay here; it isn't worth while going up; she is just coming down. Warm yourself at the stove in the meantime. Excuse me. Good-day, doctor," (for the chemist much enjoyed pronouncing the word "doctor," as if addressing another by it reflected on himself some of the grandeur that he found in it). "Now, take care not to upset the mortars! You'd better fetch some chairs from the little room; you know very well that the arm-chairs are not to be taken out of the drawing-room." And to put his arm-chair back in its place he was darting away from the counter, when Binet asked him for half an ounce of sugar acid. "Sugar acid!" said the chemist contemptuously, "don't know it; I'm ignorant of it! But perhaps you want oxalic acid. It is oxalic acid, isn't it?" Binet explained that he wanted a corrosive to make himself some copperwater with which to remove rust from his hunting things. Emma shuddered. The chemist began saying-- "Indeed the weather is not propitious on account of the damp." "Nevertheless," replied the tax-collector, with a sly look, "there are people who like it." She was stifling. "And give me--" "Will he never go?" thought she. "Half an ounce of resin and turpentine, four ounces of yellow wax, and three half ounces of animal charcoal, if you please, to clean the varnished leather of my togs." The druggist was beginning to cut the wax when Madame Homais appeared, Irma in her arms, Napoleon by her side, and Athalie following. She sat down on the velvet seat by the window, and the lad squatted down on a footstool, while his eldest sister hovered round the jujube box near her papa. The latter was filling funnels and corking phials, sticking on labels, making up parcels. Around him all were silent; only from time to time, were heard the weights jingling in the balance, and a few low words from the chemist giving directions to his pupil. "And how's the little woman?" suddenly asked Madame Homais. "Silence!" exclaimed her husband, who was writing down some figures in his waste-book. "Why didn't you bring her?" she went on in a low voice. "Hush! hush!" said Emma, pointing with her finger to the druggist. But Binet, quite absorbed in looking over his bill, had probably heard nothing. At last he went out. Then Emma, relieved, uttered a deep sigh. "How hard you are breathing!" said Madame Homais. "Well, you see, it's rather warm," she replied. So the next day they talked over how to arrange their rendezvous. Emma wanted to bribe her servant with a present, but it would be better to find some safe house at Yonville. Rodolphe promised to look for one. All through the winter, three or four times a week, in the dead of night he came to the garden. Emma had on purpose taken away the key of the gate, which Charles thought lost. To call her, Rodolphe threw a sprinkle of sand at the shutters. She jumped up with a start; but sometimes he had to wait, for Charles had a mania for chatting by the fireside, and he would not stop. She was wild with impatience; if her eyes could have done it, she would have hurled him out at the window. At last she would begin to undress, then take up a book, and go on reading very quietly as if the book amused her. But Charles, who was in bed, called to her to come too. "Come, now, Emma," he said, "it is time." "Yes, I am coming," she answered. Then, as the candles dazzled him; he turned to the wall and fell asleep. She escaped, smiling, palpitating, undressed. Rodolphe had a large cloak; he wrapped her in it, and putting his arm round her waist, he drew her without a word to the end of the garden. It was in the arbour, on the same seat of old sticks where formerly Leon had looked at her so amorously on the summer evenings. She never thought of him now. The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling of the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the darkness, and sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up and swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them. The cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips seemed to them deeper; their eyes that they could hardly see, larger; and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on their souls sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied vibrations. When the night was rainy, they took refuge in the consulting-room between the cart-shed and the stable. She lighted one of the kitchen candles that she had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe settled down there as if at home. The sight of the library, of the bureau, of the whole apartment, in fine, excited his merriment, and he could not refrain from making jokes about Charles, which rather embarrassed Emma. She would have liked to see him more serious, and even on occasions more dramatic; as, for example, when she thought she heard a noise of approaching steps in the alley. "Someone is coming!" she said. He blew out the light. "Have you your pistols?" "Why?" "Why, to defend yourself," replied Emma. "From your husband? Oh, poor devil!" And Rodolphe finished his sentence with a gesture that said, "I could crush him with a flip of my finger." She was wonder-stricken at his bravery, although she felt in it a sort of indecency and a naive coarseness that scandalised her. Rodolphe reflected a good deal on the affair of the pistols. If she had spoken seriously, it was very ridiculous, he thought, even odious; for he had no reason to hate the good Charles, not being what is called devoured by jealousy; and on this subject Emma had taken a great vow that he did not think in the best of taste. Besides, she was growing very sentimental. She had insisted on exchanging miniatures; they had cut off handfuls of hair, and now she was asking for a ring--a real wedding-ring, in sign of an eternal union. She often spoke to him of the evening chimes, of the voices of nature. Then she talked to him of her mother--hers! and of his mother--his! Rodolphe had lost his twenty years ago. Emma none the less consoled him with caressing words as one would have done a lost child, and she sometimes even said to him, gazing at the moon-- "I am sure that above there together they approve of our love." But she was so pretty. He had possessed so few women of such ingenuousness. This love without debauchery was a new experience for him, and, drawing him out of his lazy habits, caressed at once his pride and his sensuality. Emma's enthusiasm, which his bourgeois good sense disdained, seemed to him in his heart of hearts charming, since it was lavished on him. Then, sure of being loved, he no longer kept up appearances, and insensibly his ways changed. He had no longer, as formerly, words so gentle that they made her cry, nor passionate caresses that made her mad, so that their great love, which engrossed her life, seemed to lessen beneath her like the water of a stream absorbed into its channel, and she could see the bed of it. She would not believe it; she redoubled in tenderness, and Rodolphe concealed his indifference less and less. She did not know if she regretted having yielded to him, or whether she did not wish, on the contrary, to enjoy him the more. The humiliation of feeling herself weak was turning to rancour, tempered by their voluptuous pleasures. It was not affection; it was like a continual seduction. He subjugated her; she almost feared him. Appearances, nevertheless, were calmer than ever, Rodolphe having succeeded in carrying out the adultery after his own fancy; and at the end of six months, when the spring-time came, they were to one another like a married couple, tranquilly keeping up a domestic flame. It was the time of year when old Rouault sent his turkey in remembrance of the setting of his leg. The present always arrived with a letter. Emma cut the string that tied it to the basket, and read the following lines:-- "My Dear Children--I hope this will find you well, and that this one will be as good as the others. For it seems to me a little more tender, if I may venture to say so, and heavier. But next time, for a change, I'll give you a turkeycock, unless you have a preference for some dabs; and send me back the hamper, if you please, with the two old ones. I have had an accident with my cart-sheds, whose covering flew off one windy night among the trees. The harvest has not been overgood either. Finally, I don't know when I shall come to see you. It is so difficult now to leave the house since I am alone, my poor Emma." Here there was a break in the lines, as if the old fellow had dropped his pen to dream a little while. "For myself, I am very well, except for a cold I caught the other day at the fair at Yvetot, where I had gone to hire a shepherd, having turned away mine because he was too dainty. How we are to be pitied with such a lot of thieves! Besides, he was also rude. I heard from a pedlar, who, travelling through your part of the country this winter, had a tooth drawn, that Bovary was as usual working hard. That doesn't surprise me; and he showed me his tooth; we had some coffee together. I asked him if he had seen you, and he said not, but that he had seen two horses in the stables, from which I conclude that business is looking up. So much the better, my dear children, and may God send you every imaginable happiness! It grieves me not yet to have seen my dear little grand-daughter, Berthe Bovary. I have planted an Orleans plum-tree for her in the garden under your room, and I won't have it touched unless it is to have jam made for her by and bye, that I will keep in the cupboard for her when she comes. "Good-bye, my dear children. I kiss you, my girl, you too, my son-in-law, and the little one on both cheeks. I am, with best compliments, your loving father. "Theodore Rouault." She held the coarse paper in her fingers for some minutes. The spelling mistakes were interwoven one with the other, and Emma followed the kindly thought that cackled right through it like a hen half hidden in the hedge of thorns. The writing had been dried with ashes from the hearth, for a little grey powder slipped from the letter on to her dress, and she almost thought she saw her father bending over the hearth to take up the tongs. How long since she had been with him, sitting on the footstool in the chimney-corner, where she used to burn the end of a bit of wood in the great flame of the sea-sedges! She remembered the summer evenings all full of sunshine. The colts neighed when anyone passed by, and galloped, galloped. Under her window there was a beehive, and sometimes the bees wheeling round in the light struck against her window like rebounding balls of gold. What happiness there had been at that time, what freedom, what hope! What an abundance of illusions! Nothing was left of them now. She had got rid of them all in her soul's life, in all her successive conditions of life, maidenhood, her marriage, and her love--thus constantly losing them all her life through, like a traveller who leaves something of his wealth at every inn along his road. But what then, made her so unhappy? What was the extraordinary catastrophe that had transformed her? And she raised her head, looking round as if to seek the cause of that which made her suffer. An April ray was dancing on the china of the whatnot; the fire burned; beneath her slippers she felt the softness of the carpet; the day was bright, the air warm, and she heard her child shouting with laughter. In fact, the little girl was just then rolling on the lawn in the midst of the grass that was being turned. She was lying flat on her stomach at the top of a rick. The servant was holding her by her skirt. Lestiboudois was raking by her side, and every time he came near she lent forward, beating the air with both her arms. "Bring her to me," said her mother, rushing to embrace her. "How I love you, my poor child! How I love you!" Then noticing that the tips of her ears were rather dirty, she rang at once for warm water, and washed her, changed her linen, her stockings, her shoes, asked a thousand questions about her health, as if on the return from a long journey, and finally, kissing her again and crying a little, she gave her back to the servant, who stood quite thunderstricken at this excess of tenderness. That evening Rodolphe found her more serious than usual. "That will pass over," he concluded; "it's a whim:" And he missed three rendezvous running. When he did come, she showed herself cold and almost contemptuous. "Ah! you're losing your time, my lady!" And he pretended not to notice her melancholy sighs, nor the handkerchief she took out. Then Emma repented. She even asked herself why she detested Charles; if it had not been better to have been able to love him? But he gave her no opportunities for such a revival of sentiment, so that she was much embarrassed by her desire for sacrifice, when the druggist came just in time to provide her with an opportunity.

Chapter 10

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary32.asp

Rodolphe's warning makes Emma nervous, but she does not stop visiting him. One morning while returning from La Huchette, she bumps into Captain Binet, who is out hunting for wild duck. He attempts to involve her in a conversation. Emma tells him that she has been to the nurse's to see her baby and then hurries off. She later realizes that her explanation must have aroused his suspicion, for "everyone in Yonville knew that the Bovary child had been back at home for the past year. Besides, no one lived in that direction; the path led only to La Huchette. So Binet would have guessed where she'd been. And he wouldn't keep it to himself. He'd chatter, for sure. " This realization leaves Emma quite worried. The same evening, Emma sees Binet at Homais' shop. She is terrified of what Binet might reveal, but he leaves without doing or saying anything. The next day, Emma discusses with Rodolphe the problem of organizing their meetings. Rodolphe promises to look for a house where they would be safe in Yonville. Meanwhile, all winter he meets Emma in her garden "in the dead of night" to exchange loving caresses. In describing these meetings, Flaubert emphasizes the darkness and the silence, accompanied by the winter chill, reflection of the emotions that are beginning to haunt their relationship. Differences between the lovers continue to develop. Emma wants Rodolphe to be "more serious -- more dramatic." She also finds in him "a kind of coarseness, a straightforward vulgarity that her." Rodolphe, on the other hand, finds Emma to be "very sentimental," which both irks and amuses him. He scoffs when she asks him for a token wedding ring that would signify their eternal union and laughs at her claims that their mothers in heaven bless the relationship of her and Rodolphe. Although he is still attracted by her beauty, Rodolphe finds himself becoming indifferent to Emma. She cannot understand Rodolphe's behavior. After six months, the flame of passion has died out. At about this time, Emma receives a letter from her father, which is full of "kindly thoughts. " She grows reflective, thinking about her youth, her marriage, her love affair, and her suffering. She is also alerted to her immediate surroundings, noticing the wonderful April weather and her happy daughter shouting with laughter. Moved suddenly, she freely expresses her love for Berthe, who is rolling about on the grass. Emma's display of tenderness is unusual and surprises the maid. That night when she meets Rodolphe, he finds Emma cold and unresponsive. He then stays away for three days in a row and is treated "disdainfully" when he finally pays a visit. He ignores "her doleful sighs" and "the handkerchief she kept producing." His insensitivity prompts Emma to question herself. She wonders if she would do better to love Charles instead of Rodolphe.

Notes After the first wave of passion has passed, Emma grows nervous about her indiscretion, fearing others in Yonville will learn of her affair. The need for secrecy is greater on Emma's part, for she is supposedly a respectable, married woman, while Rodolphe already has a reputation as a philandering bachelor. Emma's emotions are also much more intense; Rodolphe does not seem to care about the outcome of their affair. When Emma meets Captain Binet in the early morning on the path that leads only to La Huchette, she is startled and produces a foolish explanation of her presence. As a result, she is sure that Binet will spread gossip about her throughout Yonville. When she meets Binet again that day at Homais' shop, the reader observes Emma behaving like a cornered animal. Flaubert's descriptive passages are remarkable. The dark, hidden, sensual nature of the love shared by Emma and Rodolphe is brilliantly captured and reflected in the natural setting that surrounds them. "Clumps of shadow loomed up here and there in the darkness, rising at times in a concerted shudder and leaning over like immense black waves advancing to engulf them. The chill of the night made them cling the closer, the sighs they breathed seemed louder, their eyes, only just visible in the gloom, looked larger, and in the midst of the silence their whispered words fell clear as crystal on their hearts and lingered there in prolonged vibrations." The language, the rhythm, and the very description of nature itself are all sensual, heightening the mood. With romantic expectation, Emma wants Rodolphe to be constantly dramatic; when he falls short, she begins to think he is coarse and unattractive, and "the grand passion into which she had plunged seemed to be dwindling around her like a river sinking into its bed; she saw the slime at the bottom." Rodolphe is equally as tired and displeased with Emma; her romantic, sentimental side, which originally attracted him to her, is particularly bothersome to Rodolphe. Her father's letter causes Emma to re-evaluate her life. She thinks on her past and looks at her present, even paying tender attention to her daughter Berthe. She wonders if her relationship with Rodolphe is really different from any other routine, marital relationship. This train of thought causes her to conclude that it would perhaps be better to love Charles than to pursue the affair.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/20.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_19_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 11

chapter 11

{"name": "Chapter 11", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary34.asp", "summary": "Homais reads an article about a new treatment for clubfeet and, \"being an apostle of progress and a local patriot,\" he wants Charles to try out this treatment on Hippolyte, a servant at Madame Lefrancois' inn. Emma and Homais both encourage Charles to experiment on Hippolyte, and he agrees to allow Charles to operate on his left foot. Flaubert compares the state of Charles' nerves to that of other surgeons attempting a new operation for the first time. After the operation, Charles returns home to a fawning Emma. They chatter pleasantly and dream of a prosperous future. Homais writes about the 'event' in his article for the Beacon. Five days later, Hippolyte's health takes a bad turn, and the foot appears gangrenous. Three days later, a \"livid tumor\" begins to spread up the leg, and Hippolyte loses hope of recovery. Charles does nothing to treat the infection. The Abbe Bournisien visits Hippolyte and attempts to effect a cure through religion. Madame Lefrancois asks for Charles' consent to send for the well-known Doctor Canivet of Neufchatel, who and declares that he will have to amputate the gangrenous leg at the thigh. Homais does not reveal to Canivet that he has been part of the 'clubfoot operation' and tactfully humors Canivet while assisting in the amputation. During this time, Charles does not leave home. He bemoans his fate and fears the possible controversy that will probably erupt as a result of his actions. Emma is clearly devastated and wonders how she could have pinned her hopes on Charles. When her husband expects Emma to comfort him, she flies into a rage; the naive Charles interprets Emma's strange mood as excessive concern for his personal grief. Emma, feeling \"irrevocably estranged\" from Charles, is drawn to Rodolphe with a \"new enthusiasm. \" That night, Rodolphe and Emma are together again.", "analysis": "Notes This is the first time in the novel that Charles exhibits any real excitement about his professional life. With the club foot operation, he may finally improve his reputation as a doctor, which is what Emma has wanted all along. Emma is pleased to see some ambition in her husband and is glad that she has chosen to try and love Charles again. She dreams of the operation bringing them fame. Flaubert describes the clubfoot in great detail. He also negatively compares Charles' emotional state at the time of the operation with that of other doctors preparing for surgery. He also pokes fun at Homais' pompous article about the success of the operation and the priest's attempt at a religious cure for Hippolyte. The unsuccessful outcome of the operation has several results. Charles is driven into a fit of despair. Homais, never know for loyalty, quickly extricates himself from Charles and the whole this mess and tries to ingratiate himself to Canivet, the new doctor called in for treatment. The Emma-Charles relationship alters again. She is livid at his failure and rejects him as a loser. She realizes that \"everything about him grated on her now, his face, his clothes, the things he didn't say, his whole person, his very existence. She repented her past virtue as though it were a crime; what still remained of it collapsed beneath the savage onslaught of her pride.\" Emma returns to Rodolphe with a passion, acting as if Charles were alien to her."}

He had recently read a eulogy on a new method for curing club-foot, and as he was a partisan of progress, he conceived the patriotic idea that Yonville, in order to keep to the fore, ought to have some operations for strephopody or club-foot. "For," said he to Emma, "what risk is there? See--" (and he enumerated on his fingers the advantages of the attempt), "success, almost certain relief and beautifying of the patient, celebrity acquired by the operator. Why, for example, should not your husband relieve poor Hippolyte of the 'Lion d'Or'? Note that he would not fail to tell about his cure to all the travellers, and then" (Homais lowered his voice and looked round him) "who is to prevent me from sending a short paragraph on the subject to the paper? Eh! goodness me! an article gets about; it is talked of; it ends by making a snowball! And who knows? who knows?" In fact, Bovary might succeed. Nothing proved to Emma that he was not clever; and what a satisfaction for her to have urged him to a step by which his reputation and fortune would be increased! She only wished to lean on something more solid than love. Charles, urged by the druggist and by her, allowed himself to be persuaded. He sent to Rouen for Dr. Duval's volume, and every evening, holding his head between both hands, plunged into the reading of it. While he was studying equinus, varus, and valgus, that is to say, katastrephopody, endostrephopody, and exostrephopody (or better, the various turnings of the foot downwards, inwards, and outwards, with the hypostrephopody and anastrephopody), otherwise torsion downwards and upwards, Monsier Homais, with all sorts of arguments, was exhorting the lad at the inn to submit to the operation. "You will scarcely feel, probably, a slight pain; it is a simple prick, like a little blood-letting, less than the extraction of certain corns." Hippolyte, reflecting, rolled his stupid eyes. "However," continued the chemist, "it doesn't concern me. It's for your sake, for pure humanity! I should like to see you, my friend, rid of your hideous caudication, together with that waddling of the lumbar regions which, whatever you say, must considerably interfere with you in the exercise of your calling." Then Homais represented to him how much jollier and brisker he would feel afterwards, and even gave him to understand that he would be more likely to please the women; and the stable-boy began to smile heavily. Then he attacked him through his vanity: "Aren't you a man? Hang it! what would you have done if you had had to go into the army, to go and fight beneath the standard? Ah! Hippolyte!" And Homais retired, declaring that he could not understand this obstinacy, this blindness in refusing the benefactions of science. The poor fellow gave way, for it was like a conspiracy. Binet, who never interfered with other people's business, Madame Lefrancois, Artemise, the neighbours, even the mayor, Monsieur Tuvache--everyone persuaded him, lectured him, shamed him; but what finally decided him was that it would cost him nothing. Bovary even undertook to provide the machine for the operation. This generosity was an idea of Emma's, and Charles consented to it, thinking in his heart of hearts that his wife was an angel. So by the advice of the chemist, and after three fresh starts, he had a kind of box made by the carpenter, with the aid of the locksmith, that weighed about eight pounds, and in which iron, wood, sheer-iron, leather, screws, and nuts had not been spared. But to know which of Hippolyte's tendons to cut, it was necessary first of all to find out what kind of club-foot he had. He had a foot forming almost a straight line with the leg, which, however, did not prevent it from being turned in, so that it was an equinus together with something of a varus, or else a slight varus with a strong tendency to equinus. But with this equinus, wide in foot like a horse's hoof, with rugose skin, dry tendons, and large toes, on which the black nails looked as if made of iron, the clubfoot ran about like a deer from morn till night. He was constantly to be seen on the Place, jumping round the carts, thrusting his limping foot forwards. He seemed even stronger on that leg than the other. By dint of hard service it had acquired, as it were, moral qualities of patience and energy; and when he was given some heavy work, he stood on it in preference to its fellow. Now, as it was an equinus, it was necessary to cut the tendon of Achilles, and, if need were, the anterior tibial muscle could be seen to afterwards for getting rid of the varus; for the doctor did not dare to risk both operations at once; he was even trembling already for fear of injuring some important region that he did not know. Neither Ambrose Pare, applying for the first time since Celsus, after an interval of fifteen centuries, a ligature to an artery, nor Dupuytren, about to open an abscess in the brain, nor Gensoul when he first took away the superior maxilla, had hearts that trembled, hands that shook, minds so strained as Monsieur Bovary when he approached Hippolyte, his tenotome between his fingers. And as at hospitals, near by on a table lay a heap of lint, with waxed thread, many bandages--a pyramid of bandages--every bandage to be found at the druggist's. It was Monsieur Homais who since morning had been organising all these preparations, as much to dazzle the multitude as to keep up his illusions. Charles pierced the skin; a dry crackling was heard. The tendon was cut, the operation over. Hippolyte could not get over his surprise, but bent over Bovary's hands to cover them with kisses. "Come, be calm," said the druggist; "later on you will show your gratitude to your benefactor." And he went down to tell the result to five or six inquirers who were waiting in the yard, and who fancied that Hippolyte would reappear walking properly. Then Charles, having buckled his patient into the machine, went home, where Emma, all anxiety, awaited him at the door. She threw herself on his neck; they sat down to table; he ate much, and at dessert he even wanted to take a cup of coffee, a luxury he only permitted himself on Sundays when there was company. The evening was charming, full of prattle, of dreams together. They talked about their future fortune, of the improvements to be made in their house; he saw people's estimation of him growing, his comforts increasing, his wife always loving him; and she was happy to refresh herself with a new sentiment, healthier, better, to feel at last some tenderness for this poor fellow who adored her. The thought of Rodolphe for one moment passed through her mind, but her eyes turned again to Charles; she even noticed with surprise that he had not bad teeth. They were in bed when Monsieur Homais, in spite of the servant, suddenly entered the room, holding in his hand a sheet of paper just written. It was the paragraph he intended for the "Fanal de Rouen." He brought it for them to read. "Read it yourself," said Bovary. He read-- "'Despite the prejudices that still invest a part of the face of Europe like a net, the light nevertheless begins to penetrate our country places. Thus on Tuesday our little town of Yonville found itself the scene of a surgical operation which is at the same time an act of loftiest philanthropy. Monsieur Bovary, one of our most distinguished practitioners--'" "Oh, that is too much! too much!" said Charles, choking with emotion. "No, no! not at all! What next!" "'--Performed an operation on a club-footed man.' I have not used the scientific term, because you know in a newspaper everyone would not perhaps understand. The masses must--'" "No doubt," said Bovary; "go on!" "I proceed," said the chemist. "'Monsieur Bovary, one of our most distinguished practitioners, performed an operation on a club-footed man called Hippolyte Tautain, stableman for the last twenty-five years at the hotel of the "Lion d'Or," kept by Widow Lefrancois, at the Place d'Armes. The novelty of the attempt, and the interest incident to the subject, had attracted such a concourse of persons that there was a veritable obstruction on the threshold of the establishment. The operation, moreover, was performed as if by magic, and barely a few drops of blood appeared on the skin, as though to say that the rebellious tendon had at last given way beneath the efforts of art. The patient, strangely enough--we affirm it as an eye-witness--complained of no pain. His condition up to the present time leaves nothing to be desired. Everything tends to show that his convelescence will be brief; and who knows even if at our next village festivity we shall not see our good Hippolyte figuring in the bacchic dance in the midst of a chorus of joyous boon-companions, and thus proving to all eyes by his verve and his capers his complete cure? Honour, then, to the generous savants! Honour to those indefatigable spirits who consecrate their vigils to the amelioration or to the alleviation of their kind! Honour, thrice honour! Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men. We shall keep our readers informed as to the successive phases of this remarkable cure.'" This did not prevent Mere Lefrancois, from coming five days after, scared, and crying out-- "Help! he is dying! I am going crazy!" Charles rushed to the "Lion d'Or," and the chemist, who caught sight of him passing along the Place hatless, abandoned his shop. He appeared himself breathless, red, anxious, and asking everyone who was going up the stairs-- "Why, what's the matter with our interesting strephopode?" The strephopode was writhing in hideous convulsions, so that the machine in which his leg was enclosed was knocked against the wall enough to break it. With many precautions, in order not to disturb the position of the limb, the box was removed, and an awful sight presented itself. The outlines of the foot disappeared in such a swelling that the entire skin seemed about to burst, and it was covered with ecchymosis, caused by the famous machine. Hippolyte had already complained of suffering from it. No attention had been paid to him; they had to acknowledge that he had not been altogether wrong, and he was freed for a few hours. But, hardly had the oedema gone down to some extent, than the two savants thought fit to put back the limb in the apparatus, strapping it tighter to hasten matters. At last, three days after, Hippolyte being unable to endure it any longer, they once more removed the machine, and were much surprised at the result they saw. The livid tumefaction spread over the leg, with blisters here and there, whence there oozed a black liquid. Matters were taking a serious turn. Hippolyte began to worry himself, and Mere Lefrancois, had him installed in the little room near the kitchen, so that he might at least have some distraction. But the tax-collector, who dined there every day, complained bitterly of such companionship. Then Hippolyte was removed to the billiard-room. He lay there moaning under his heavy coverings, pale with long beard, sunken eyes, and from time to time turning his perspiring head on the dirty pillow, where the flies alighted. Madame Bovary went to see him. She brought him linen for his poultices; she comforted, and encouraged him. Besides, he did not want for company, especially on market-days, when the peasants were knocking about the billiard-balls round him, fenced with the cues, smoked, drank, sang, and brawled. "How are you?" they said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Ah! you're not up to much, it seems, but it's your own fault. You should do this! do that!" And then they told him stories of people who had all been cured by other remedies than his. Then by way of consolation they added-- "You give way too much! Get up! You coddle yourself like a king! All the same, old chap, you don't smell nice!" Gangrene, in fact, was spreading more and more. Bovary himself turned sick at it. He came every hour, every moment. Hippolyte looked at him with eyes full of terror, sobbing-- "When shall I get well? Oh, save me! How unfortunate I am! How unfortunate I am!" And the doctor left, always recommending him to diet himself. "Don't listen to him, my lad," said Mere Lefrancois, "Haven't they tortured you enough already? You'll grow still weaker. Here! swallow this." And she gave him some good beef-tea, a slice of mutton, a piece of bacon, and sometimes small glasses of brandy, that he had not the strength to put to his lips. Abbe Bournisien, hearing that he was growing worse, asked to see him. He began by pitying his sufferings, declaring at the same time that he ought to rejoice at them since it was the will of the Lord, and take advantage of the occasion to reconcile himself to Heaven. "For," said the ecclesiastic in a paternal tone, "you rather neglected your duties; you were rarely seen at divine worship. How many years is it since you approached the holy table? I understand that your work, that the whirl of the world may have kept you from care for your salvation. But now is the time to reflect. Yet don't despair. I have known great sinners, who, about to appear before God (you are not yet at this point I know), had implored His mercy, and who certainly died in the best frame of mind. Let us hope that, like them, you will set us a good example. Thus, as a precaution, what is to prevent you from saying morning and evening a 'Hail Mary, full of grace,' and 'Our Father which art in heaven'? Yes, do that, for my sake, to oblige me. That won't cost you anything. Will you promise me?" The poor devil promised. The cure came back day after day. He chatted with the landlady; and even told anecdotes interspersed with jokes and puns that Hippolyte did not understand. Then, as soon as he could, he fell back upon matters of religion, putting on an appropriate expression of face. His zeal seemed successful, for the club-foot soon manifested a desire to go on a pilgrimage to Bon-Secours if he were cured; to which Monsieur Bournisien replied that he saw no objection; two precautions were better than one; it was no risk anyhow. The druggist was indignant at what he called the manoeuvres of the priest; they were prejudicial, he said, to Hippolyte's convalescence, and he kept repeating to Madame Lefrancois, "Leave him alone! leave him alone! You perturb his morals with your mysticism." But the good woman would no longer listen to him; he was the cause of it all. From a spirit of contradiction she hung up near the bedside of the patient a basin filled with holy-water and a branch of box. Religion, however, seemed no more able to succour him than surgery, and the invincible gangrene still spread from the extremities towards the stomach. It was all very well to vary the potions and change the poultices; the muscles each day rotted more and more; and at last Charles replied by an affirmative nod of the head when Mere Lefrancois, asked him if she could not, as a forlorn hope, send for Monsieur Canivet of Neufchatel, who was a celebrity. A doctor of medicine, fifty years of age, enjoying a good position and self-possessed, Charles's colleague did not refrain from laughing disdainfully when he had uncovered the leg, mortified to the knee. Then having flatly declared that it must be amputated, he went off to the chemist's to rail at the asses who could have reduced a poor man to such a state. Shaking Monsieur Homais by the button of his coat, he shouted out in the shop-- "These are the inventions of Paris! These are the ideas of those gentry of the capital! It is like strabismus, chloroform, lithotrity, a heap of monstrosities that the Government ought to prohibit. But they want to do the clever, and they cram you with remedies without, troubling about the consequences. We are not so clever, not we! We are not savants, coxcombs, fops! We are practitioners; we cure people, and we should not dream of operating on anyone who is in perfect health. Straighten club-feet! As if one could straighten club-feet! It is as if one wished, for example, to make a hunchback straight!" Homais suffered as he listened to this discourse, and he concealed his discomfort beneath a courtier's smile; for he needed to humour Monsier Canivet, whose prescriptions sometimes came as far as Yonville. So he did not take up the defence of Bovary; he did not even make a single remark, and, renouncing his principles, he sacrificed his dignity to the more serious interests of his business. This amputation of the thigh by Doctor Canivet was a great event in the village. On that day all the inhabitants got up earlier, and the Grande Rue, although full of people, had something lugubrious about it, as if an execution had been expected. At the grocer's they discussed Hippolyte's illness; the shops did no business, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor's wife, did not stir from her window, such was her impatience to see the operator arrive. He came in his gig, which he drove himself. But the springs of the right side having at length given way beneath the weight of his corpulence, it happened that the carriage as it rolled along leaned over a little, and on the other cushion near him could be seen a large box covered in red sheep-leather, whose three brass clasps shone grandly. After he had entered like a whirlwind the porch of the "Lion d'Or," the doctor, shouting very loud, ordered them to unharness his horse. Then he went into the stable to see that she was eating her oats all right; for on arriving at a patient's he first of all looked after his mare and his gig. People even said about this-- "Ah! Monsieur Canivet's a character!" And he was the more esteemed for this imperturbable coolness. The universe to the last man might have died, and he would not have missed the smallest of his habits. Homais presented himself. "I count on you," said the doctor. "Are we ready? Come along!" But the druggist, turning red, confessed that he was too sensitive to assist at such an operation. "When one is a simple spectator," he said, "the imagination, you know, is impressed. And then I have such a nervous system!" "Pshaw!" interrupted Canivet; "on the contrary, you seem to me inclined to apoplexy. Besides, that doesn't astonish me, for you chemist fellows are always poking about your kitchens, which must end by spoiling your constitutions. Now just look at me. I get up every day at four o'clock; I shave with cold water (and am never cold). I don't wear flannels, and I never catch cold; my carcass is good enough! I live now in one way, now in another, like a philosopher, taking pot-luck; that is why I am not squeamish like you, and it is as indifferent to me to carve a Christian as the first fowl that turns up. Then, perhaps, you will say, habit! habit!" Then, without any consideration for Hippolyte, who was sweating with agony between his sheets, these gentlemen entered into a conversation, in which the druggist compared the coolness of a surgeon to that of a general; and this comparison was pleasing to Canivet, who launched out on the exigencies of his art. He looked upon, it as a sacred office, although the ordinary practitioners dishonoured it. At last, coming back to the patient, he examined the bandages brought by Homais, the same that had appeared for the club-foot, and asked for someone to hold the limb for him. Lestiboudois was sent for, and Monsieur Canivet having turned up his sleeves, passed into the billiard-room, while the druggist stayed with Artemise and the landlady, both whiter than their aprons, and with ears strained towards the door. Bovary during this time did not dare to stir from his house. He kept downstairs in the sitting-room by the side of the fireless chimney, his chin on his breast, his hands clasped, his eyes staring. "What a mishap!" he thought, "what a mishap!" Perhaps, after all, he had made some slip. He thought it over, but could hit upon nothing. But the most famous surgeons also made mistakes; and that is what no one would ever believe! People, on the contrary, would laugh, jeer! It would spread as far as Forges, as Neufchatel, as Rouen, everywhere! Who could say if his colleagues would not write against him. Polemics would ensue; he would have to answer in the papers. Hippolyte might even prosecute him. He saw himself dishonoured, ruined, lost; and his imagination, assailed by a world of hypotheses, tossed amongst them like an empty cask borne by the sea and floating upon the waves. Emma, opposite, watched him; she did not share his humiliation; she felt another--that of having supposed such a man was worth anything. As if twenty times already she had not sufficiently perceived his mediocrity. Charles was walking up and down the room; his boots creaked on the floor. "Sit down," she said; "you fidget me." He sat down again. How was it that she--she, who was so intelligent--could have allowed herself to be deceived again? and through what deplorable madness had she thus ruined her life by continual sacrifices? She recalled all her instincts of luxury, all the privations of her soul, the sordidness of marriage, of the household, her dream sinking into the mire like wounded swallows; all that she had longed for, all that she had denied herself, all that she might have had! And for what? for what? In the midst of the silence that hung over the village a heart-rending cry rose on the air. Bovary turned white to fainting. She knit her brows with a nervous gesture, then went on. And it was for him, for this creature, for this man, who understood nothing, who felt nothing! For he was there quite quiet, not even suspecting that the ridicule of his name would henceforth sully hers as well as his. She had made efforts to love him, and she had repented with tears for having yielded to another! "But it was perhaps a valgus!" suddenly exclaimed Bovary, who was meditating. At the unexpected shock of this phrase falling on her thought like a leaden bullet on a silver plate, Emma, shuddering, raised her head in order to find out what he meant to say; and they looked at the other in silence, almost amazed to see each other, so far sundered were they by their inner thoughts. Charles gazed at her with the dull look of a drunken man, while he listened motionless to the last cries of the sufferer, that followed each other in long-drawn modulations, broken by sharp spasms like the far-off howling of some beast being slaughtered. Emma bit her wan lips, and rolling between her fingers a piece of coral that she had broken, fixed on Charles the burning glance of her eyes like two arrows of fire about to dart forth. Everything in him irritated her now; his face, his dress, what he did not say, his whole person, his existence, in fine. She repented of her past virtue as of a crime, and what still remained of it rumbled away beneath the furious blows of her pride. She revelled in all the evil ironies of triumphant adultery. The memory of her lover came back to her with dazzling attractions; she threw her whole soul into it, borne away towards this image with a fresh enthusiasm; and Charles seemed to her as much removed from her life, as absent forever, as impossible and annihilated, as if he had been about to die and were passing under her eyes. There was a sound of steps on the pavement. Charles looked up, and through the lowered blinds he saw at the corner of the market in the broad sunshine Dr. Canivet, who was wiping his brow with his handkerchief. Homais, behind him, was carrying a large red box in his hand, and both were going towards the chemist's. Then with a feeling of sudden tenderness and discouragement Charles turned to his wife saying to her-- "Oh, kiss me, my own!" "Leave me!" she said, red with anger. "What is the matter?" he asked, stupefied. "Be calm; compose yourself. You know well enough that I love you. Come!" "Enough!" she cried with a terrible look. And escaping from the room, Emma closed the door so violently that the barometer fell from the wall and smashed on the floor. Charles sank back into his arm-chair overwhelmed, trying to discover what could be wrong with her, fancying some nervous illness, weeping, and vaguely feeling something fatal and incomprehensible whirling round him. When Rodolphe came to the garden that evening, he found his mistress waiting for him at the foot of the steps on the lowest stair. They threw their arms round one another, and all their rancour melted like snow beneath the warmth of that kiss.

Chapter 11

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary34.asp

Homais reads an article about a new treatment for clubfeet and, "being an apostle of progress and a local patriot," he wants Charles to try out this treatment on Hippolyte, a servant at Madame Lefrancois' inn. Emma and Homais both encourage Charles to experiment on Hippolyte, and he agrees to allow Charles to operate on his left foot. Flaubert compares the state of Charles' nerves to that of other surgeons attempting a new operation for the first time. After the operation, Charles returns home to a fawning Emma. They chatter pleasantly and dream of a prosperous future. Homais writes about the 'event' in his article for the Beacon. Five days later, Hippolyte's health takes a bad turn, and the foot appears gangrenous. Three days later, a "livid tumor" begins to spread up the leg, and Hippolyte loses hope of recovery. Charles does nothing to treat the infection. The Abbe Bournisien visits Hippolyte and attempts to effect a cure through religion. Madame Lefrancois asks for Charles' consent to send for the well-known Doctor Canivet of Neufchatel, who and declares that he will have to amputate the gangrenous leg at the thigh. Homais does not reveal to Canivet that he has been part of the 'clubfoot operation' and tactfully humors Canivet while assisting in the amputation. During this time, Charles does not leave home. He bemoans his fate and fears the possible controversy that will probably erupt as a result of his actions. Emma is clearly devastated and wonders how she could have pinned her hopes on Charles. When her husband expects Emma to comfort him, she flies into a rage; the naive Charles interprets Emma's strange mood as excessive concern for his personal grief. Emma, feeling "irrevocably estranged" from Charles, is drawn to Rodolphe with a "new enthusiasm. " That night, Rodolphe and Emma are together again.

Notes This is the first time in the novel that Charles exhibits any real excitement about his professional life. With the club foot operation, he may finally improve his reputation as a doctor, which is what Emma has wanted all along. Emma is pleased to see some ambition in her husband and is glad that she has chosen to try and love Charles again. She dreams of the operation bringing them fame. Flaubert describes the clubfoot in great detail. He also negatively compares Charles' emotional state at the time of the operation with that of other doctors preparing for surgery. He also pokes fun at Homais' pompous article about the success of the operation and the priest's attempt at a religious cure for Hippolyte. The unsuccessful outcome of the operation has several results. Charles is driven into a fit of despair. Homais, never know for loyalty, quickly extricates himself from Charles and the whole this mess and tries to ingratiate himself to Canivet, the new doctor called in for treatment. The Emma-Charles relationship alters again. She is livid at his failure and rejects him as a loser. She realizes that "everything about him grated on her now, his face, his clothes, the things he didn't say, his whole person, his very existence. She repented her past virtue as though it were a crime; what still remained of it collapsed beneath the savage onslaught of her pride." Emma returns to Rodolphe with a passion, acting as if Charles were alien to her.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/21.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_20_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 12

chapter 12

{"name": "Chapter 12", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary35.asp", "summary": "Emma continues her affair with Rodolphe, but she often complains to him of her boredom and her husband's behavior. In an impatient outburst, Rodolphe states his inability to solve her marital problems. Emma suggests that they run away together, but he dismisses her notion as madness and changes the subject. Instead, he continues to call on Emma at home. Whenever he is expected, she beautifies herself and her room \"like a courtesan awaiting a prince\" and makes her maid Felicite wash all the linen. Justin, Homais' helper, often helps Emma. He delivers letters for her to Rodolphe and cleans Emma's shoes, encrusted with mud acquired from the journey to and from her meetings with Rodolphe. Felicite wonders at the lad's devotion. Charles, who is financially in trouble, is constantly having to buy new shoes for his wife, who wears them out quickly, but he never complains. \"In the same docile spirit,\" he pays for a wooden leg for Hippolyte at Emma's urging. Lheureux is the one who supplies the leg and also several other things of \"feminine interest\" to Emma. He presents her with a bill of over ten francs. Emma, already in debt, cannot pay Lheureux. Sensing this, Lheureux asks that the riding-whip, which she supposedly purchased for Charles, be returned to him, but she hesitates. Seeing that she is cornered, he leaves. Luckily, one of the patients pays his pending account, and Emma is able to repay Lheureux. Emma has given Rodolphe several expensive things, including the riding whip. Though hesitant, he accepts every gift. In spite of her generosity, Rodolphe does not declare his love for Emma. In response, Emma cries and declares her love for him. Rodolphe, however, has become quite indifferent to her passionate speeches. He shamelessly treats her as he pleases, aware that he has the upper hand in the relationship. Emma grows apathetic, a fact that is noticed by all of Yonville. Her mother-in-law makes life particularly miserable for her. Emma begs Rodolphe to take her away. He tries to get out of the suggestion by reminding Emma about Berthe; she simply declares that the little girl can accompany them. In the days following this incident, she dreams about leaving Yonville with Rodolphe. The thoughts of escape make her more agreeable. Charles finds her \"as delicious, as utterly irresistible, as when they were first married.\" Even her mother-in-law wonders at the change in Emma. One day Emma sends for Lheureux and orders a cloak, a case, and a traveling-bag. She does not reply when he asks if she is going on a journey. She also requests that nothing be delivered to her at home, saying she will collect the items from the workman herself. The plan is to run away with Rodolphe the following month. The details are fairly elaborate, but Rodolphe does not mention Berthe. After a few delays on Rodolphe's side, they plan Monday, the fourth of September, as the day of their departure. Their final night together before they are to run away is a tender, blissful one for Emma and Rodolphe. He looks at Emma \"strangely, with tenderness,\" but his feelings do not match those she is feeling. As Emma looks forward to their future together, Rodolphe merely replies in monosyllables. On his way home, Rodolphe makes the decision to harden his heart against Emma. He concludes that to run away with her \"would have been too stupid!\"", "analysis": "Notes This chapter presents Emma's plan for escape from Charles with Rodolphe, a plan that reveals her total spiritual and moral decay. She has become openly defiant towards a society that expects her to stand by a husband who is weak-willed and unambitious. Frustrated with her life, Emma pursues Rodolphe with an increased passion that is driven by her aversion to her husband; she is also careless about hiding her liaison with Rodolphe. She employs Justin to deliver her letters to Rodolphe. Justin's devotion to Emma is obvious, and Emma's disregard for him is equally obvious. The chapter is replete with indications of Emma's foolishness. It is obvious that she does not really love Rodolphe, she simply wants to escape from Charles, and \"the more she gave herself to the one, the more she loathed the other.\" When she naively questions Rodolphe about his emotions and assumes he has never loved anyone but her, he openly laughs at Emma and says, \"Did you think I was a virgin?\" Emma is also foolish in her spending of money. She orders expensive gifts for Rodolphe from Lheureux even though she has no way to pay for them. The reader knows that this man is sure to take advantage of Emma when she cannot pay him. Emma's greatest foolishness, however, is her excessive romanticism. She dreams of an idealized future with Rodolphe, assuming he is really going to run away from Yonville with her. In this chapter, Flaubert treats Charles in a less satiric tone. He shows him to be generous and loving to Emma and Berthe. It is almost like the author has now developed a sympathy for this naive country doctor who can be so totally blind to the true nature of his wife. In total contrast to the naive Charles, Flaubert depicts Lheureux as a sharp predator looking for a suitable opportunity to capture his prey. It is obvious that he senses that something improper is going on in Emma's life, and the shrewd and unprincipled man is sure to use the knowledge to his own advantage. Finally, mention must be made of the imagery etched within the chapter. Emma's \"indefinable beauty\" is wonderfully described; in her eagerness to start a new life, she has blossomed physically, and Flaubert's words seem to capture the \"subtle, pervasive essence\" that flows from her. He also presents a masterful contrast between the first sexual union between Emma and Rodolphe and their last night together. The first time happened in the light of noonday; the last time in the darkness of night. The contrast suggests that their love has faded from brightness to darkness. The first time was filled with wild passion; the last time is filled with melancholic tenderness, \"soothing sweet as the perfume the white, aromatic flowers wafted, casting larger and more melancholy shadows on their memory than those the unmoving willows laid upon the grass.\" Flaubert, through describing Rodolphe's emotions on this night, prepares the reader for his final decision. On the way home, he hardens his heart against Emma and decides he will not take her away. No one is surprised by his change of plans."}

They began to love one another again. Often, even in the middle of the day, Emma suddenly wrote to him, then from the window made a sign to Justin, who, taking his apron off, quickly ran to La Huchette. Rodolphe would come; she had sent for him to tell him that she was bored, that her husband was odious, her life frightful. "But what can I do?" he cried one day impatiently. "Ah! if you would--" She was sitting on the floor between his knees, her hair loose, her look lost. "Why, what?" said Rodolphe. She sighed. "We would go and live elsewhere--somewhere!" "You are really mad!" he said laughing. "How could that be possible?" She returned to the subject; he pretended not to understand, and turned the conversation. What he did not understand was all this worry about so simple an affair as love. She had a motive, a reason, and, as it were, a pendant to her affection. Her tenderness, in fact, grew each day with her repulsion to her husband. The more she gave up herself to the one, the more she loathed the other. Never had Charles seemed to her so disagreeable, to have such stodgy fingers, such vulgar ways, to be so dull as when they found themselves together after her meeting with Rodolphe. Then, while playing the spouse and virtue, she was burning at the thought of that head whose black hair fell in a curl over the sunburnt brow, of that form at once so strong and elegant, of that man, in a word, who had such experience in his reasoning, such passion in his desires. It was for him that she filed her nails with the care of a chaser, and that there was never enough cold-cream for her skin, nor of patchouli for her handkerchiefs. She loaded herself with bracelets, rings, and necklaces. When he was coming she filled the two large blue glass vases with roses, and prepared her room and her person like a courtesan expecting a prince. The servant had to be constantly washing linen, and all day Felicite did not stir from the kitchen, where little Justin, who often kept her company, watched her at work. With his elbows on the long board on which she was ironing, he greedily watched all these women's clothes spread about him, the dimity petticoats, the fichus, the collars, and the drawers with running strings, wide at the hips and growing narrower below. "What is that for?" asked the young fellow, passing his hand over the crinoline or the hooks and eyes. "Why, haven't you ever seen anything?" Felicite answered laughing. "As if your mistress, Madame Homais, didn't wear the same." "Oh, I daresay! Madame Homais!" And he added with a meditative air, "As if she were a lady like madame!" But Felicite grew impatient of seeing him hanging round her. She was six years older than he, and Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's servant, was beginning to pay court to her. "Let me alone," she said, moving her pot of starch. "You'd better be off and pound almonds; you are always dangling about women. Before you meddle with such things, bad boy, wait till you've got a beard to your chin." "Oh, don't be cross! I'll go and clean her boots." And he at once took down from the shelf Emma's boots, all coated with mud, the mud of the rendezvous, that crumbled into powder beneath his fingers, and that he watched as it gently rose in a ray of sunlight. "How afraid you are of spoiling them!" said the servant, who wasn't so particular when she cleaned them herself, because as soon as the stuff of the boots was no longer fresh madame handed them over to her. Emma had a number in her cupboard that she squandered one after the other, without Charles allowing himself the slightest observation. So also he disbursed three hundred francs for a wooden leg that she thought proper to make a present of to Hippolyte. Its top was covered with cork, and it had spring joints, a complicated mechanism, covered over by black trousers ending in a patent-leather boot. But Hippolyte, not daring to use such a handsome leg every day, begged Madame Bovary to get him another more convenient one. The doctor, of course, had again to defray the expense of this purchase. So little by little the stable-man took up his work again. One saw him running about the village as before, and when Charles heard from afar the sharp noise of the wooden leg, he at once went in another direction. It was Monsieur Lheureux, the shopkeeper, who had undertaken the order; this provided him with an excuse for visiting Emma. He chatted with her about the new goods from Paris, about a thousand feminine trifles, made himself very obliging, and never asked for his money. Emma yielded to this lazy mode of satisfying all her caprices. Thus she wanted to have a very handsome ridding-whip that was at an umbrella-maker's at Rouen to give to Rodolphe. The week after Monsieur Lheureux placed it on her table. But the next day he called on her with a bill for two hundred and seventy francs, not counting the centimes. Emma was much embarrassed; all the drawers of the writing-table were empty; they owed over a fortnight's wages to Lestiboudois, two quarters to the servant, for any quantity of other things, and Bovary was impatiently expecting Monsieur Derozeray's account, which he was in the habit of paying every year about Midsummer. She succeeded at first in putting off Lheureux. At last he lost patience; he was being sued; his capital was out, and unless he got some in he should be forced to take back all the goods she had received. "Oh, very well, take them!" said Emma. "I was only joking," he replied; "the only thing I regret is the whip. My word! I'll ask monsieur to return it to me." "No, no!" she said. "Ah! I've got you!" thought Lheureux. And, certain of his discovery, he went out repeating to himself in an undertone, and with his usual low whistle-- "Good! we shall see! we shall see!" She was thinking how to get out of this when the servant coming in put on the mantelpiece a small roll of blue paper "from Monsieur Derozeray's." Emma pounced upon and opened it. It contained fifteen napoleons; it was the account. She heard Charles on the stairs; threw the gold to the back of her drawer, and took out the key. Three days after Lheureux reappeared. "I have an arrangement to suggest to you," he said. "If, instead of the sum agreed on, you would take--" "Here it is," she said placing fourteen napoleons in his hand. The tradesman was dumfounded. Then, to conceal his disappointment, he was profuse in apologies and proffers of service, all of which Emma declined; then she remained a few moments fingering in the pocket of her apron the two five-franc pieces that he had given her in change. She promised herself she would economise in order to pay back later on. "Pshaw!" she thought, "he won't think about it again." Besides the riding-whip with its silver-gilt handle, Rodolphe had received a seal with the motto Amor nel cor* furthermore, a scarf for a muffler, and, finally, a cigar-case exactly like the Viscount's, that Charles had formerly picked up in the road, and that Emma had kept. These presents, however, humiliated him; he refused several; she insisted, and he ended by obeying, thinking her tyrannical and overexacting. *A loving heart. Then she had strange ideas. "When midnight strikes," she said, "you must think of me." And if he confessed that he had not thought of her, there were floods of reproaches that always ended with the eternal question-- "Do you love me?" "Why, of course I love you," he answered. "A great deal?" "Certainly!" "You haven't loved any others?" "Did you think you'd got a virgin?" he exclaimed laughing. Emma cried, and he tried to console her, adorning his protestations with puns. "Oh," she went on, "I love you! I love you so that I could not live without you, do you see? There are times when I long to see you again, when I am torn by all the anger of love. I ask myself, Where is he? Perhaps he is talking to other women. They smile upon him; he approaches. Oh no; no one else pleases you. There are some more beautiful, but I love you best. I know how to love best. I am your servant, your concubine! You are my king, my idol! You are good, you are beautiful, you are clever, you are strong!" He had so often heard these things said that they did not strike him as original. Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars. But with that superior critical judgment that belongs to him who, in no matter what circumstance, holds back, Rodolphe saw other delights to be got out of this love. He thought all modesty in the way. He treated her quite sans facon.* He made of her something supple and corrupt. Hers was an idiotic sort of attachment, full of admiration for him, of voluptuousness for her, a beatitude that benumbed her; her soul sank into this drunkenness, shrivelled up, drowned in it, like Clarence in his butt of Malmsey. *Off-handedly. By the mere effect of her love Madame Bovary's manners changed. Her looks grew bolder, her speech more free; she even committed the impropriety of walking out with Monsieur Rodolphe, a cigarette in her mouth, "as if to defy the people." At last, those who still doubted doubted no longer when one day they saw her getting out of the "Hirondelle," her waist squeezed into a waistcoat like a man; and Madame Bovary senior, who, after a fearful scene with her husband, had taken refuge at her son's, was not the least scandalised of the women-folk. Many other things displeased her. First, Charles had not attended to her advice about the forbidding of novels; then the "ways of the house" annoyed her; she allowed herself to make some remarks, and there were quarrels, especially one on account of Felicite. Madame Bovary senior, the evening before, passing along the passage, had surprised her in company of a man--a man with a brown collar, about forty years old, who, at the sound of her step, had quickly escaped through the kitchen. Then Emma began to laugh, but the good lady grew angry, declaring that unless morals were to be laughed at one ought to look after those of one's servants. "Where were you brought up?" asked the daughter-in-law, with so impertinent a look that Madame Bovary asked her if she were not perhaps defending her own case. "Leave the room!" said the young woman, springing up with a bound. "Emma! Mamma!" cried Charles, trying to reconcile them. But both had fled in their exasperation. Emma was stamping her feet as she repeated-- "Oh! what manners! What a peasant!" He ran to his mother; she was beside herself. She stammered "She is an insolent, giddy-headed thing, or perhaps worse!" And she was for leaving at once if the other did not apologise. So Charles went back again to his wife and implored her to give way; he knelt to her; she ended by saying-- "Very well! I'll go to her." And in fact she held out her hand to her mother-in-law with the dignity of a marchioness as she said-- "Excuse me, madame." Then, having gone up again to her room, she threw herself flat on her bed and cried there like a child, her face buried in the pillow. She and Rodolphe had agreed that in the event of anything extraordinary occurring, she should fasten a small piece of white paper to the blind, so that if by chance he happened to be in Yonville, he could hurry to the lane behind the house. Emma made the signal; she had been waiting three-quarters of an hour when she suddenly caught sight of Rodolphe at the corner of the market. She felt tempted to open the window and call him, but he had already disappeared. She fell back in despair. Soon, however, it seemed to her that someone was walking on the pavement. It was he, no doubt. She went downstairs, crossed the yard. He was there outside. She threw herself into his arms. "Do take care!" he said. "Ah! if you knew!" she replied. And she began telling him everything, hurriedly, disjointedly, exaggerating the facts, inventing many, and so prodigal of parentheses that he understood nothing of it. "Come, my poor angel, courage! Be comforted! be patient!" "But I have been patient; I have suffered for four years. A love like ours ought to show itself in the face of heaven. They torture me! I can bear it no longer! Save me!" She clung to Rodolphe. Her eyes, full of tears, flashed like flames beneath a wave; her breast heaved; he had never loved her so much, so that he lost his head and said "What is, it? What do you wish?" "Take me away," she cried, "carry me off! Oh, I pray you!" And she threw herself upon his mouth, as if to seize there the unexpected consent if breathed forth in a kiss. "But--" Rodolphe resumed. "What?" "Your little girl!" She reflected a few moments, then replied-- "We will take her! It can't be helped!" "What a woman!" he said to himself, watching her as she went. For she had run into the garden. Someone was calling her. On the following days Madame Bovary senior was much surprised at the change in her daughter-in-law. Emma, in fact, was showing herself more docile, and even carried her deference so far as to ask for a recipe for pickling gherkins. Was it the better to deceive them both? Or did she wish by a sort of voluptuous stoicism to feel the more profoundly the bitterness of the things she was about to leave? But she paid no heed to them; on the contrary, she lived as lost in the anticipated delight of her coming happiness. It was an eternal subject for conversation with Rodolphe. She leant on his shoulder murmuring-- "Ah! when we are in the mail-coach! Do you think about it? Can it be? It seems to me that the moment I feel the carriage start, it will be as if we were rising in a balloon, as if we were setting out for the clouds. Do you know that I count the hours? And you?" Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this period; she had that indefinable beauty that results from joy, from enthusiasm, from success, and that is only the harmony of temperament with circumstances. Her desires, her sorrows, the experience of pleasure, and her ever-young illusions, that had, as soil and rain and winds and the sun make flowers grow, gradually developed her, and she at length blossomed forth in all the plenitude of her nature. Her eyelids seemed chiselled expressly for her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down. One would have thought that an artist apt in conception had arranged the curls of hair upon her neck; they fell in a thick mass, negligently, and with the changing chances of their adultery, that unbound them every day. Her voice now took more mellow infections, her figure also; something subtle and penetrating escaped even from the folds of her gown and from the line of her foot. Charles, as when they were first married, thought her delicious and quite irresistible. When he came home in the middle of the night, he did not dare to wake her. The porcelain night-light threw a round trembling gleam upon the ceiling, and the drawn curtains of the little cot formed as it were a white hut standing out in the shade, and by the bedside Charles looked at them. He seemed to hear the light breathing of his child. She would grow big now; every season would bring rapid progress. He already saw her coming from school as the day drew in, laughing, with ink-stains on her jacket, and carrying her basket on her arm. Then she would have to be sent to the boarding-school; that would cost much; how was it to be done? Then he reflected. He thought of hiring a small farm in the neighbourhood, that he would superintend every morning on his way to his patients. He would save up what he brought in; he would put it in the savings-bank. Then he would buy shares somewhere, no matter where; besides, his practice would increase; he counted upon that, for he wanted Berthe to be well-educated, to be accomplished, to learn to play the piano. Ah! how pretty she would be later on when she was fifteen, when, resembling her mother, she would, like her, wear large straw hats in the summer-time; from a distance they would be taken for two sisters. He pictured her to himself working in the evening by their side beneath the light of the lamp; she would embroider him slippers; she would look after the house; she would fill all the home with her charm and her gaiety. At last, they would think of her marriage; they would find her some good young fellow with a steady business; he would make her happy; this would last for ever. Emma was not asleep; she pretended to be; and while he dozed off by her side she awakened to other dreams. To the gallop of four horses she was carried away for a week towards a new land, whence they would return no more. They went on and on, their arms entwined, without a word. Often from the top of a mountain there suddenly glimpsed some splendid city with domes, and bridges, and ships, forests of citron trees, and cathedrals of white marble, on whose pointed steeples were storks' nests. They went at a walking-pace because of the great flag-stones, and on the ground there were bouquets of flowers, offered you by women dressed in red bodices. They heard the chiming of bells, the neighing of mules, together with the murmur of guitars and the noise of fountains, whose rising spray refreshed heaps of fruit arranged like a pyramid at the foot of pale statues that smiled beneath playing waters. And then, one night they came to a fishing village, where brown nets were drying in the wind along the cliffs and in front of the huts. It was there that they would stay; they would live in a low, flat-roofed house, shaded by a palm-tree, in the heart of a gulf, by the sea. They would row in gondolas, swing in hammocks, and their existence would be easy and large as their silk gowns, warm and star-spangled as the nights they would contemplate. However, in the immensity of this future that she conjured up, nothing special stood forth; the days, all magnificent, resembled each other like waves; and it swayed in the horizon, infinite, harmonised, azure, and bathed in sunshine. But the child began to cough in her cot or Bovary snored more loudly, and Emma did not fall asleep till morning, when the dawn whitened the windows, and when little Justin was already in the square taking down the shutters of the chemist's shop. She had sent for Monsieur Lheureux, and had said to him-- "I want a cloak--a large lined cloak with a deep collar." "You are going on a journey?" he asked. "No; but--never mind. I may count on you, may I not, and quickly?" He bowed. "Besides, I shall want," she went on, "a trunk--not too heavy--handy." "Yes, yes, I understand. About three feet by a foot and a half, as they are being made just now." "And a travelling bag." "Decidedly," thought Lheureux, "there's a row on here." "And," said Madame Bovary, taking her watch from her belt, "take this; you can pay yourself out of it." But the tradesman cried out that she was wrong; they knew one another; did he doubt her? What childishness! She insisted, however, on his taking at least the chain, and Lheureux had already put it in his pocket and was going, when she called him back. "You will leave everything at your place. As to the cloak"--she seemed to be reflecting--"do not bring it either; you can give me the maker's address, and tell him to have it ready for me." It was the next month that they were to run away. She was to leave Yonville as if she was going on some business to Rouen. Rodolphe would have booked the seats, procured the passports, and even have written to Paris in order to have the whole mail-coach reserved for them as far as Marseilles, where they would buy a carriage, and go on thence without stopping to Genoa. She would take care to send her luggage to Lheureux whence it would be taken direct to the "Hirondelle," so that no one would have any suspicion. And in all this there never was any allusion to the child. Rodolphe avoided speaking of her; perhaps he no longer thought about it. He wished to have two more weeks before him to arrange some affairs; then at the end of a week he wanted two more; then he said he was ill; next he went on a journey. The month of August passed, and, after all these delays, they decided that it was to be irrevocably fixed for the 4th September--a Monday. At length the Saturday before arrived. Rodolphe came in the evening earlier than usual. "Everything is ready?" she asked him. "Yes." Then they walked round a garden-bed, and went to sit down near the terrace on the kerb-stone of the wall. "You are sad," said Emma. "No; why?" And yet he looked at her strangely in a tender fashion. "It is because you are going away?" she went on; "because you are leaving what is dear to you--your life? Ah! I understand. I have nothing in the world! you are all to me; so shall I be to you. I will be your people, your country; I will tend, I will love you!" "How sweet you are!" he said, seizing her in his arms. "Really!" she said with a voluptuous laugh. "Do you love me? Swear it then!" "Do I love you--love you? I adore you, my love." The moon, full and purple-coloured, was rising right out of the earth at the end of the meadow. She rose quickly between the branches of the poplars, that hid her here and there like a black curtain pierced with holes. Then she appeared dazzling with whiteness in the empty heavens that she lit up, and now sailing more slowly along, let fall upon the river a great stain that broke up into an infinity of stars; and the silver sheen seemed to writhe through the very depths like a heedless serpent covered with luminous scales; it also resembled some monster candelabra all along which sparkled drops of diamonds running together. The soft night was about them; masses of shadow filled the branches. Emma, her eyes half closed, breathed in with deep sighs the fresh wind that was blowing. They did not speak, lost as they were in the rush of their reverie. The tenderness of the old days came back to their hearts, full and silent as the flowing river, with the softness of the perfume of the syringas, and threw across their memories shadows more immense and more sombre 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 to-morrow. 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 to-morrow 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-- "To-morrow!" 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 12

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Emma continues her affair with Rodolphe, but she often complains to him of her boredom and her husband's behavior. In an impatient outburst, Rodolphe states his inability to solve her marital problems. Emma suggests that they run away together, but he dismisses her notion as madness and changes the subject. Instead, he continues to call on Emma at home. Whenever he is expected, she beautifies herself and her room "like a courtesan awaiting a prince" and makes her maid Felicite wash all the linen. Justin, Homais' helper, often helps Emma. He delivers letters for her to Rodolphe and cleans Emma's shoes, encrusted with mud acquired from the journey to and from her meetings with Rodolphe. Felicite wonders at the lad's devotion. Charles, who is financially in trouble, is constantly having to buy new shoes for his wife, who wears them out quickly, but he never complains. "In the same docile spirit," he pays for a wooden leg for Hippolyte at Emma's urging. Lheureux is the one who supplies the leg and also several other things of "feminine interest" to Emma. He presents her with a bill of over ten francs. Emma, already in debt, cannot pay Lheureux. Sensing this, Lheureux asks that the riding-whip, which she supposedly purchased for Charles, be returned to him, but she hesitates. Seeing that she is cornered, he leaves. Luckily, one of the patients pays his pending account, and Emma is able to repay Lheureux. Emma has given Rodolphe several expensive things, including the riding whip. Though hesitant, he accepts every gift. In spite of her generosity, Rodolphe does not declare his love for Emma. In response, Emma cries and declares her love for him. Rodolphe, however, has become quite indifferent to her passionate speeches. He shamelessly treats her as he pleases, aware that he has the upper hand in the relationship. Emma grows apathetic, a fact that is noticed by all of Yonville. Her mother-in-law makes life particularly miserable for her. Emma begs Rodolphe to take her away. He tries to get out of the suggestion by reminding Emma about Berthe; she simply declares that the little girl can accompany them. In the days following this incident, she dreams about leaving Yonville with Rodolphe. The thoughts of escape make her more agreeable. Charles finds her "as delicious, as utterly irresistible, as when they were first married." Even her mother-in-law wonders at the change in Emma. One day Emma sends for Lheureux and orders a cloak, a case, and a traveling-bag. She does not reply when he asks if she is going on a journey. She also requests that nothing be delivered to her at home, saying she will collect the items from the workman herself. The plan is to run away with Rodolphe the following month. The details are fairly elaborate, but Rodolphe does not mention Berthe. After a few delays on Rodolphe's side, they plan Monday, the fourth of September, as the day of their departure. Their final night together before they are to run away is a tender, blissful one for Emma and Rodolphe. He looks at Emma "strangely, with tenderness," but his feelings do not match those she is feeling. As Emma looks forward to their future together, Rodolphe merely replies in monosyllables. On his way home, Rodolphe makes the decision to harden his heart against Emma. He concludes that to run away with her "would have been too stupid!"

Notes This chapter presents Emma's plan for escape from Charles with Rodolphe, a plan that reveals her total spiritual and moral decay. She has become openly defiant towards a society that expects her to stand by a husband who is weak-willed and unambitious. Frustrated with her life, Emma pursues Rodolphe with an increased passion that is driven by her aversion to her husband; she is also careless about hiding her liaison with Rodolphe. She employs Justin to deliver her letters to Rodolphe. Justin's devotion to Emma is obvious, and Emma's disregard for him is equally obvious. The chapter is replete with indications of Emma's foolishness. It is obvious that she does not really love Rodolphe, she simply wants to escape from Charles, and "the more she gave herself to the one, the more she loathed the other." When she naively questions Rodolphe about his emotions and assumes he has never loved anyone but her, he openly laughs at Emma and says, "Did you think I was a virgin?" Emma is also foolish in her spending of money. She orders expensive gifts for Rodolphe from Lheureux even though she has no way to pay for them. The reader knows that this man is sure to take advantage of Emma when she cannot pay him. Emma's greatest foolishness, however, is her excessive romanticism. She dreams of an idealized future with Rodolphe, assuming he is really going to run away from Yonville with her. In this chapter, Flaubert treats Charles in a less satiric tone. He shows him to be generous and loving to Emma and Berthe. It is almost like the author has now developed a sympathy for this naive country doctor who can be so totally blind to the true nature of his wife. In total contrast to the naive Charles, Flaubert depicts Lheureux as a sharp predator looking for a suitable opportunity to capture his prey. It is obvious that he senses that something improper is going on in Emma's life, and the shrewd and unprincipled man is sure to use the knowledge to his own advantage. Finally, mention must be made of the imagery etched within the chapter. Emma's "indefinable beauty" is wonderfully described; in her eagerness to start a new life, she has blossomed physically, and Flaubert's words seem to capture the "subtle, pervasive essence" that flows from her. He also presents a masterful contrast between the first sexual union between Emma and Rodolphe and their last night together. The first time happened in the light of noonday; the last time in the darkness of night. The contrast suggests that their love has faded from brightness to darkness. The first time was filled with wild passion; the last time is filled with melancholic tenderness, "soothing sweet as the perfume the white, aromatic flowers wafted, casting larger and more melancholy shadows on their memory than those the unmoving willows laid upon the grass." Flaubert, through describing Rodolphe's emotions on this night, prepares the reader for his final decision. On the way home, he hardens his heart against Emma and decides he will not take her away. No one is surprised by his change of plans.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/22.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_21_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 13

chapter 13

{"name": "Chapter 13", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary37.asp", "summary": "At home, Rodolphe tries to compose a farewell note to Emma. He finally writes that they have no future together, tells her he plans to leave La Huchette the very next day by himself, and asks her to be brave. He lays the blame for his decision on society. He ends the note with a flourish, giving \"a final adieu -- separated into two words, A Dieu! -- which he thought in excellent taste.\" To pretend that he had cried during the composition of the letter, he lets a big drop of water smudge the ink. Having finished the letter, he seals it, smokes three pipes, and goes to bed. The next day he has a basket of apricots delivered to Emma with the letter at the bottom. The basket of apricots from Rodolphe makes Emma sense that all is not well. She finds the letter and, in a state of panic, rushes to the attic to read it without being seen. Sitting by the window, she reads Rodolphe's words and becomes \"hysterical with rage. \" She thinks about hurling herself out of the window. When she hears Charles and Felicite call her to lunch, she is shocked into facing reality. In a confused state, she forgets where she has placed the letter. As she sits at the table, she tries to behave as if nothing is the matter, but, when Charles mentions Rodolphe and then passes the basket of apricots, she becomes very tense. When she sees Rodolphe's carriage, she shrieks and faints. Homais rushes in as she writhes convulsively. Emma is carried up to her bed where she lies motionless with her mouth hanging open and her eyes closed. Charles and Homais discuss the possibility of an apricot allergy but are interrupted by a delirious Emma shouting, \"The letter! The letter!\" By midnight, brain fever sets in and she grows much worse. For the next forty- three days, Charles is constantly by her side. By mid-October Emma is on her way to recovery, but a visit to the arbor in the terrace brings on another attack of dizziness. Meanwhile, Charles grows greatly disturbed over financial worries.", "analysis": "Notes This chapter brings Emma's romanticism to a halt when Rodolphe terminates his relationship with her. He is not even kind enough to explain his departure in person; instead, he writes her a letter, which he sends to Emma with a basket of apricots. Flaubert harshly, but masterfully, describes the callousness of this shallow man whose \"pleasures had so trampled over his heart, like schoolboys in a playground, that no green thing grew there, and whatever passed that way, being more frivolous than children, left not so much as its name carved on the wall. \" Not surprisingly, Emma reacts very strongly to Rodolphe's desertion. No words can express the grief she feels at his betrayal. Her dreams are shattered, and there is nobody for her to turn to. She is left to live with a husband that she now finds abhorrent. Her first impulse is to commit suicide by jumping out the attic window. The sounds of the voices of Charles and Felicite bring her back to reality; then the sight of Rodolphe's carriage makes her cry out and faint. During the night her conditions worsen, and for the next forty-three days, she remains very ill. Throughout her sickness, Charles rarely leaves the side of the woman who has thoroughly betrayed him. It is obvious that he still loves Emma very much; he becomes a symbol of true and undying devotion."}

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 pell-mell 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 we might have gone, it would have persecuted us. You would have had to put up with indiscreet questions, calumny, contempt, insult perhaps. Insult to you! Oh! And I, who would place you on a throne! I who bear with me your memory as a talisman! For I am going to punish myself by exile for all the ill I have done you. I am going away. Whither I know not. I am mad. Adieu! Be good always. Preserve the memory of the unfortunate who has lost you. Teach my name to your child; let her repeat it in her prayers." The wicks of the candles flickered. Rodolphe got up to, shut the window, and when he had sat down again-- "I think it's all right. Ah! and this for fear she should come and hunt me up." "I shall be far away when you read these sad lines, for I have wished to flee as quickly as possible to shun the temptation of seeing you again. No weakness! I shall return, and perhaps later on we shall talk together very coldly of our old love. Adieu!" And there was a last "adieu" divided into two words! "A Dieu!" which he thought in very excellent taste. "Now how am I to sign?" he said to himself. "'Yours devotedly?' No! 'Your friend?' Yes, that's it." "Your friend." He re-read his letter. He considered it very good. "Poor little woman!" he thought with emotion. "She'll think me harder than a rock. There ought to have been some tears on this; but I can't cry; it isn't my fault." Then, having emptied some water into a glass, Rodolphe dipped his finger into it, and let a big drop fall on the paper, that made a pale stain on the ink. Then looking for a seal, he came upon the one "Amor nel cor." "That doesn't at all fit in with the circumstances. Pshaw! never mind!" After which he smoked three pipes and went to bed. The next day when he was up (at about two o'clock--he had slept late), Rodolphe had a basket of apricots picked. He put his letter at the bottom under some vine leaves, and at once ordered Girard, his ploughman, to take it with care to Madame Bovary. He made use of this means for corresponding with her, sending according to the season fruits or game. "If she asks after me," he said, "you will tell her that I have gone on a journey. You must give the basket to her herself, into her own hands. Get along and take care!" Girard put on his new blouse, knotted his handkerchief round the apricots, and walking with great heavy steps in his thick iron-bound galoshes, made his way to Yonville. Madame Bovary, when he got to her house, was arranging a bundle of linen on the kitchen-table with Felicite. "Here," said the ploughboy, "is something for you--from the master." She was seized with apprehension, and as she sought in her pocket for some coppers, she looked at the peasant with haggard eyes, while he himself looked at her with amazement, not understanding how such a present could so move anyone. At last he went out. Felicite remained. She could bear it no longer; she ran into the sitting room as if to take the apricots there, overturned the basket, tore away the leaves, found the letter, opened it, and, as if some fearful fire were behind her, Emma flew to her room terrified. Charles was there; she saw him; he spoke to her; she heard nothing, and she went on quickly up the stairs, breathless, distraught, dumb, and ever holding this horrible piece of paper, that crackled between her fingers like a plate of sheet-iron. On the second floor she stopped before the attic door, which was closed. Then she tried to calm herself; she recalled the letter; she must finish it; she did not dare to. And where? How? She would be seen! "Ah, no! here," she thought, "I shall be all right." Emma pushed open the door and went in. The slates threw straight down a heavy heat that gripped her temples, stifled her; she dragged herself to the closed garret-window. She drew back the bolt, and the dazzling light burst in with a leap. Opposite, beyond the roofs, stretched the open country till it was lost to sight. Down below, underneath her, the village square was empty; the stones of the pavement glittered, the weathercocks on the houses were motionless. At the corner of the street, from a lower storey, rose a kind of humming with strident modulations. It was Binet turning. She leant against the embrasure of the window, and reread the letter with angry sneers. But the more she fixed her attention upon it, the more confused were her ideas. She saw him again, heard him, encircled him with her arms, and throbs of her heart, that beat against her breast like blows of a sledge-hammer, grew faster and faster, with uneven intervals. She looked about her with the wish that the earth might crumble into pieces. Why not end it all? What restrained her? She was free. She advanced, looking at the paving-stones, saying to herself, "Come! come!" The luminous ray that came straight up from below drew the weight of her body towards the abyss. It seemed to her that the ground of the oscillating square went up the walls and that the floor dipped on end like a tossing boat. She was right at the edge, almost hanging, surrounded by vast space. The blue of the heavens suffused her, the air was whirling in her hollow head; she had but to yield, to let herself be taken; and the humming of the lathe never ceased, like an angry voice calling her. "Emma! Emma!" cried Charles. She stopped. "Wherever are you? Come!" The thought that she had just escaped from death almost made her faint with terror. She closed her eyes; then she shivered at the touch of a hand on her sleeve; it was Felicite. "Master is waiting for you, madame; the soup is on the table." And she had to go down to sit at table. She tried to eat. The food choked her. Then she unfolded her napkin as if to examine the darns, and she really thought of applying herself to this work, counting the threads in the linen. Suddenly the remembrance of the letter returned to her. How had she lost it? Where could she find it? But she felt such weariness of spirit that she could not even invent a pretext for leaving the table. Then she became a coward; she was afraid of Charles; he knew all, that was certain! Indeed he pronounced these words in a strange manner: "We are not likely to see Monsieur Rodolphe soon again, it seems." "Who told you?" she said, shuddering. "Who told me!" he replied, rather astonished at her abrupt tone. "Why, Girard, whom I met just now at the door of the Cafe Francais. He has gone on a journey, or is to go." She gave a sob. "What surprises you in that? He absents himself like that from time to time for a change, and, ma foi, I think he's right, when one has a fortune and is a bachelor. Besides, he has jolly times, has our friend. He's a bit of a rake. Monsieur Langlois told me--" He stopped for propriety's sake because the servant came in. She put back into the basket the apricots scattered on the sideboard. Charles, without noticing his wife's colour, had them brought to him, took one, and bit into it. "Ah! perfect!" said he; "just taste!" And he handed her the basket, which she put away from her gently. "Do just smell! What an odour!" he remarked, passing it under her nose several times. "I am choking," she cried, leaping up. But by an effort of will the spasm passed; then-- "It is nothing," she said, "it is nothing! It is nervousness. Sit down and go on eating." For she dreaded lest he should begin questioning her, attending to her, that she should not be left alone. Charles, to obey her, sat down again, and he spat the stones of the apricots into his hands, afterwards putting them on his plate. Suddenly a blue tilbury passed across the square at a rapid trot. Emma uttered a cry and fell back rigid to the ground. In fact, Rodolphe, after many reflections, had decided to set out for Rouen. Now, as from La Huchette to Buchy there is no other way than by Yonville, he had to go through the village, and Emma had recognised him by the rays of the lanterns, which like lightning flashed through the twilight. The chemist, at the tumult which broke out in the house ran thither. The table with all the plates was upset; sauce, meat, knives, the salt, and cruet-stand were strewn over the room; Charles was calling for help; Berthe, scared, was crying; and Felicite, whose hands trembled, was unlacing her mistress, whose whole body shivered convulsively. "I'll run to my laboratory for some aromatic vinegar," said the druggist. Then as she opened her eyes on smelling the bottle-- "I was sure of it," he remarked; "that would wake any dead person for you!" "Speak to us," said Charles; "collect yourself; it is your Charles, who loves you. Do you know me? See! here is your little girl! Oh, kiss her!" The child stretched out her arms to her mother to cling to her neck. But turning away her head, Emma said in a broken voice "No, no! no one!" She fainted again. They carried her to her bed. She lay there stretched at full length, her lips apart, her eyelids closed, her hands open, motionless, and white as a waxen image. Two streams of tears flowed from her eyes and fell slowly upon the pillow. Charles, standing up, was at the back of the alcove, and the chemist, near him, maintained that meditative silence that is becoming on the serious occasions of life. "Do not be uneasy," he said, touching his elbow; "I think the paroxysm is past." "Yes, she is resting a little now," answered Charles, watching her sleep. "Poor girl! poor girl! She had gone off now!" Then Homais asked how the accident had come about. Charles answered that she had been taken ill suddenly while she was eating some apricots. "Extraordinary!" continued the chemist. "But it might be that the apricots had brought on the syncope. Some natures are so sensitive to certain smells; and it would even be a very fine question to study both in its pathological and physiological relation. The priests know the importance of it, they who have introduced aromatics into all their ceremonies. It is to stupefy the senses and to bring on ecstasies--a thing, moreover, very easy in persons of the weaker sex, who are more delicate than the other. Some are cited who faint at the smell of burnt hartshorn, of new bread--" "Take care; you'll wake her!" said Bovary in a low voice. "And not only," the druggist went on, "are human beings subject to such anomalies, but animals also. Thus you are not ignorant of the singularly aphrodisiac effect produced by the Nepeta cataria, vulgarly called catmint, on the feline race; and, on the other hand, to quote an example whose authenticity I can answer for. Bridaux (one of my old comrades, at present established in the Rue Malpalu) possesses a dog that falls into convulsions as soon as you hold out a snuff-box to him. He often even makes the experiment before his friends at his summer-house at Guillaume Wood. Would anyone believe that a simple sternutation could produce such ravages on a quadrupedal organism? It is extremely curious, is it not?" "Yes," said Charles, who was not listening to him. "This shows us," went on the other, smiling with benign self-sufficiency, "the innumerable irregularities of the nervous system. With regard to madame, she has always seemed to me, I confess, very susceptible. And so I should by no means recommend to you, my dear friend, any of those so-called remedies that, under the pretence of attacking the symptoms, attack the constitution. No; no useless physicking! Diet, that is all; sedatives, emollients, dulcification. Then, don't you think that perhaps her imagination should be worked upon?" "In what way? How?" said Bovary. "Ah! that is it. Such is indeed the question. 'That is the question,' as I lately read in a newspaper." But Emma, awaking, cried out-- "The letter! the letter!" They thought she was delirious; and she was by midnight. Brain-fever had set in. For forty-three days Charles did not leave her. He gave up all his patients; he no longer went to bed; he was constantly feeling her pulse, putting on sinapisms and cold-water compresses. He sent Justin as far as Neufchatel for ice; the ice melted on the way; he sent him back again. He called Monsieur Canivet into consultation; he sent for Dr. Lariviere, his old master, from Rouen; he was in despair. What alarmed him most was Emma's prostration, for she did not speak, did not listen, did not even seem to suffer, as if her body and soul were both resting together after all their troubles. About the middle of October she could sit up in bed supported by pillows. Charles wept when he saw her eat her first bread-and-jelly. Her strength returned to her; she got up for a few hours of an afternoon, and one day, when she felt better, he tried to take her, leaning on his arm, for a walk round the garden. The sand of the paths was disappearing beneath the dead leaves; she walked slowly, dragging along her slippers, and leaning against Charles's shoulder. She smiled all the time. They went thus to the bottom of the garden near the terrace. She drew herself up slowly, shading her eyes with her hand to look. She looked far off, as far as she could, but on the horizon were only great bonfires of grass smoking on the hills. "You will tire yourself, my darling!" said Bovary. And, pushing her gently to make her go into the arbour, "Sit down on this seat; you'll be comfortable." "Oh! no; not there!" she said in a faltering voice. She was seized with giddiness, and from that evening her illness recommenced, with a more uncertain character, it is true, and more complex symptoms. Now she suffered in her heart, then in the chest, the head, the limbs; she had vomitings, in which Charles thought he saw the first signs of cancer. And besides this, the poor fellow was worried about money matters.

Chapter 13

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary37.asp

At home, Rodolphe tries to compose a farewell note to Emma. He finally writes that they have no future together, tells her he plans to leave La Huchette the very next day by himself, and asks her to be brave. He lays the blame for his decision on society. He ends the note with a flourish, giving "a final adieu -- separated into two words, A Dieu! -- which he thought in excellent taste." To pretend that he had cried during the composition of the letter, he lets a big drop of water smudge the ink. Having finished the letter, he seals it, smokes three pipes, and goes to bed. The next day he has a basket of apricots delivered to Emma with the letter at the bottom. The basket of apricots from Rodolphe makes Emma sense that all is not well. She finds the letter and, in a state of panic, rushes to the attic to read it without being seen. Sitting by the window, she reads Rodolphe's words and becomes "hysterical with rage. " She thinks about hurling herself out of the window. When she hears Charles and Felicite call her to lunch, she is shocked into facing reality. In a confused state, she forgets where she has placed the letter. As she sits at the table, she tries to behave as if nothing is the matter, but, when Charles mentions Rodolphe and then passes the basket of apricots, she becomes very tense. When she sees Rodolphe's carriage, she shrieks and faints. Homais rushes in as she writhes convulsively. Emma is carried up to her bed where she lies motionless with her mouth hanging open and her eyes closed. Charles and Homais discuss the possibility of an apricot allergy but are interrupted by a delirious Emma shouting, "The letter! The letter!" By midnight, brain fever sets in and she grows much worse. For the next forty- three days, Charles is constantly by her side. By mid-October Emma is on her way to recovery, but a visit to the arbor in the terrace brings on another attack of dizziness. Meanwhile, Charles grows greatly disturbed over financial worries.

Notes This chapter brings Emma's romanticism to a halt when Rodolphe terminates his relationship with her. He is not even kind enough to explain his departure in person; instead, he writes her a letter, which he sends to Emma with a basket of apricots. Flaubert harshly, but masterfully, describes the callousness of this shallow man whose "pleasures had so trampled over his heart, like schoolboys in a playground, that no green thing grew there, and whatever passed that way, being more frivolous than children, left not so much as its name carved on the wall. " Not surprisingly, Emma reacts very strongly to Rodolphe's desertion. No words can express the grief she feels at his betrayal. Her dreams are shattered, and there is nobody for her to turn to. She is left to live with a husband that she now finds abhorrent. Her first impulse is to commit suicide by jumping out the attic window. The sounds of the voices of Charles and Felicite bring her back to reality; then the sight of Rodolphe's carriage makes her cry out and faint. During the night her conditions worsen, and for the next forty-three days, she remains very ill. Throughout her sickness, Charles rarely leaves the side of the woman who has thoroughly betrayed him. It is obvious that he still loves Emma very much; he becomes a symbol of true and undying devotion.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/23.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_22_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 14

chapter 14

{"name": "Chapter 14", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary38.asp", "summary": "Charles is troubled about the medical bills incurred during Emma's illness. In addition, Lheureux has delivered the bill for the goods Emma ordered for her planned departure with Rodolphe. Since Charles obviously cannot pay such a large amount, Lheureux maneuvers him into borrowing more money at a high interest rate. Charles borrows forty francs from the moneylender and signs another bill due on the first of September of the following year. In all, he will have to pay fifty francs. The scheming Lheureux hopes that Charles will renew the bill so that the interest will continue to grow. Emma's recovery is slow. During her illness, when she had felt sure of death overcoming her, she had asked for the sacrament of extreme unction, known as the last rites in the Catholic religion. Afterwards, she had seen a heavenly vision and had felt immense peace. As a result, Emma buried her memories of Rodolphe and transfers her affections to the Lord. She begins to indulge in charity and is gentle and patient with her daughter Berthe. She welcomes the visits of the priest, Bournisien, and aspires to be a saint. Bournisien marvels at Emma's transformation, but he is skeptical about her new religious fervor lasting for long. Emma finds herself surrounded with company. Her mother-in-law visits often, finding Emma to be pleasant. Almost all the busybodies of the neighborhood are her daily companions. Justin escorts the Homais children to Emma's room and stands \"stiffly silent by the door.\" On several occasions, Emma, unaware of his presence, combs her hair before him. Her attractiveness is not lost on Justin, and he begins to love her. Emma does not notice his attraction to her, for she is beyond earthly love for now. With the advent of spring, Emma is recovered. Homais suggests that Charles take Emma to the theater because the excursion will do her good. Charles manages to coax a reluctant Emma, and they set off for Rouen.", "analysis": "Notes Charles, who is terribly worried over finances, feels a sense of guilt at not devoting enough time to Emma. He may be naive and incompetent, but he is essentially a good man. In contrast, Lheureux is again depicted as a calculating and insensitive businessman. He shrewdly foresees the profit he can make during the troubled period the Bovarys are facing and has no qualms about doing do it. Emma's reaction to the Rodolphe episode is typical of her neurosis. She refuses to face the past squarely or truthfully. Neither does she evaluate her mistakes, but buries them. This tendency will have serious repercussions later in the novel. Feeling that she is dying, Emma calls the priest to administer her last rites, which cause her to become religious again, as she was in her youth.\" Her soul, deformed by pride, found rest at last in Christian humility. Relinquishing the pleasures of weakness, Emma contemplated the destruction of her will within her, which was to leave the way wide open to the flowing tide of grace. . .Amid the illusions that her wishes prompted, she glimpsed a realm of purity, floating above the earth, melting into the sky, where she aspired to be. She wanted to become a saint.\" As a result of her new religious fervor, Emma becomes a very pleasant and charitable person. The neighbors and her mother-in-law enjoy their visits with the recovering Emma. Not surprisingly, as her health improves, Emma's religious fervor wanes. At the end of the chapter, an innocent suggestion by Homais sends the devoted Charles scurrying to Rouen to take Emma to the theater. It is ironic that her husband's devotion should prove to be a fatal mistake, since Emma is re-introduced to Leon at the Opera House."}

To begin with, he did not know how he could pay Monsieur Homais for all the physic supplied by him, and though, as a medical man, he was not obliged to pay for it, he nevertheless blushed a little at such an obligation. Then the expenses of the household, now that the servant was mistress, became terrible. Bills rained in upon the house; the tradesmen grumbled; Monsieur Lheureux especially harassed him. In fact, at the height of Emma's illness, the latter, taking advantage of the circumstances to make his bill larger, had hurriedly brought the cloak, the travelling-bag, two trunks instead of one, and a number of other things. It was very well for Charles to say he did not want them. The tradesman answered arrogantly that these articles had been ordered, and that he would not take them back; besides, it would vex madame in her convalescence; the doctor had better think it over; in short, he was resolved to sue him rather than give up his rights and take back his goods. Charles subsequently ordered them to be sent back to the shop. Felicite forgot; he had other things to attend to; then thought no more about them. Monsieur Lheureux returned to the charge, and, by turns threatening and whining, so managed that Bovary ended by signing a bill at six months. But hardly had he signed this bill than a bold idea occurred to him: it was to borrow a thousand francs from Lheureux. So, with an embarrassed air, he asked if it were possible to get them, adding that it would be for a year, at any interest he wished. Lheureux ran off to his shop, brought back the money, and dictated another bill, by which Bovary undertook to pay to his order on the 1st of September next the sum of one thousand and seventy francs, which, with the hundred and eighty already agreed to, made just twelve hundred and fifty, thus lending at six per cent in addition to one-fourth for commission: and the things bringing him in a good third at the least, this ought in twelve months to give him a profit of a hundred and thirty francs. He hoped that the business would not stop there; that the bills would not be paid; that they would be renewed; and that his poor little money, having thriven at the doctor's as at a hospital, would come back to him one day considerably more plump, and fat enough to burst his bag. Everything, moreover, succeeded with him. He was adjudicator for a supply of cider to the hospital at Neufchatel; Monsieur Guillaumin promised him some shares in the turf-pits of Gaumesnil, and he dreamt of establishing a new diligence service between Arcueil and Rouen, which no doubt would not be long in ruining the ramshackle van of the "Lion d'Or," and that, travelling faster, at a cheaper rate, and carrying more luggage, would thus put into his hands the whole commerce of Yonville. Charles several times asked himself by what means he should next year be able to pay back so much money. He reflected, imagined expedients, such as applying to his father or selling something. But his father would be deaf, and he--he had nothing to sell. Then he foresaw such worries that he quickly dismissed so disagreeable a subject of meditation from his mind. He reproached himself with forgetting Emma, as if, all his thoughts belonging to this woman, it was robbing her of something not to be constantly thinking of her. The winter was severe, Madame Bovary's convalescence slow. When it was fine they wheeled her arm-chair to the window that overlooked the square, for she now had an antipathy to the garden, and the blinds on that side were always down. She wished the horse to be sold; what she formerly liked now displeased her. All her ideas seemed to be limited to the care of herself. She stayed in bed taking little meals, rang for the servant to inquire about her gruel or to chat with her. The snow on the market-roof threw a white, still light into the room; then the rain began to fall; and Emma waited daily with a mind full of eagerness for the inevitable return of some trifling events which nevertheless had no relation to her. The most important was the arrival of the "Hirondelle" in the evening. Then the landlady shouted out, and other voices answered, while Hippolyte's lantern, as he fetched the boxes from the boot, was like a star in the darkness. At mid-day Charles came in; then he went out again; next she took some beef-tea, and towards five o'clock, as the day drew in, the children coming back from school, dragging their wooden shoes along the pavement, knocked the clapper of the shutters with their rulers one after the other. It was at this hour that Monsieur Bournisien came to see her. He inquired after her health, gave her news, exhorted her to religion, in a coaxing little prattle that was not without its charm. The mere thought of his cassock comforted her. One day, when at the height of her illness, she had thought herself dying, and had asked for the communion; and, while they were making the preparations in her room for the sacrament, while they were turning the night table covered with syrups into an altar, and while Felicite was strewing dahlia flowers on the floor, Emma felt some power passing over her that freed her from her pains, from all perception, from all feeling. Her body, relieved, no longer thought; another life was beginning; it seemed to her that her being, mounting toward God, would be annihilated in that love like a burning incense that melts into vapour. The bed-clothes were sprinkled with holy water, the priest drew from the holy pyx the white wafer; and it was fainting with a celestial joy that she put out her lips to accept the body of the Saviour presented to her. The curtains of the alcove floated gently round her like clouds, and the rays of the two tapers burning on the night-table seemed to shine like dazzling halos. Then she let her head fall back, fancying she heard in space the music of seraphic harps, and perceived in an azure sky, on a golden throne in the midst of saints holding green palms, God the Father, resplendent with majesty, who with a sign sent to earth angels with wings of fire to carry her away in their arms. This splendid vision dwelt in her memory as the most beautiful thing that it was possible to dream, so that now she strove to recall her sensation. That still lasted, however, but in a less exclusive fashion and with a deeper sweetness. Her soul, tortured by pride, at length found rest in Christian humility, and, tasting the joy of weakness, she saw within herself the destruction of her will, that must have left a wide entrance for the inroads of heavenly grace. There existed, then, in the place of happiness, still greater joys--another love beyond all loves, without pause and without end, one that would grow eternally! She saw amid the illusions of her hope a state of purity floating above the earth mingling with heaven, to which she aspired. She wanted to become a saint. She bought chaplets and wore amulets; she wished to have in her room, by the side of her bed, a reliquary set in emeralds that she might kiss it every evening. The cure marvelled at this humour, although Emma's religion, he thought, might, from its fervour, end by touching on heresy, extravagance. But not being much versed in these matters, as soon as they went beyond a certain limit he wrote to Monsieur Boulard, bookseller to Monsignor, to send him "something good for a lady who was very clever." The bookseller, with as much indifference as if he had been sending off hardware to niggers, packed up, pellmell, everything that was then the fashion in the pious book trade. There were little manuals in questions and answers, pamphlets of aggressive tone after the manner of Monsieur de Maistre, and certain novels in rose-coloured bindings and with a honied style, manufactured by troubadour seminarists or penitent blue-stockings. There were the "Think of it; the Man of the World at Mary's Feet, by Monsieur de ***, decorated with many Orders"; "The Errors of Voltaire, for the Use of the Young," etc. Madame Bovary's mind was not yet sufficiently clear to apply herself seriously to anything; moreover, she began this reading in too much hurry. She grew provoked at the doctrines of religion; the arrogance of the polemic writings displeased her by their inveteracy in attacking people she did not know; and the secular stories, relieved with religion, seemed to her written in such ignorance of the world, that they insensibly estranged her from the truths for whose proof she was looking. Nevertheless, she persevered; and when the volume slipped from her hands, she fancied herself seized with the finest Catholic melancholy that an ethereal soul could conceive. As for the memory of Rodolphe, she had thrust it back to the bottom of her heart, and it remained there more solemn and more motionless than a king's mummy in a catacomb. An exhalation escaped from this embalmed love, that, penetrating through everything, perfumed with tenderness the immaculate atmosphere in which she longed to live. When she knelt on her Gothic prie-Dieu, she addressed to the Lord the same suave words that she had murmured formerly to her lover in the outpourings of adultery. It was to make faith come; but no delights descended from the heavens, and she arose with tired limbs and with a vague feeling of a gigantic dupery. This searching after faith, she thought, was only one merit the more, and in the pride of her devoutness Emma compared herself to those grand ladies of long ago whose glory she had dreamed of over a portrait of La Valliere, and who, trailing with so much majesty the lace-trimmed trains of their long gowns, retired into solitudes to shed at the feet of Christ all the tears of hearts that life had wounded. Then she gave herself up to excessive charity. She sewed clothes for the poor, she sent wood to women in childbed; and Charles one day, on coming home, found three good-for-nothings in the kitchen seated at the table eating soup. She had her little girl, whom during her illness her husband had sent back to the nurse, brought home. She wanted to teach her to read; even when Berthe cried, she was not vexed. She had made up her mind to resignation, to universal indulgence. Her language about everything was full of ideal expressions. She said to her child, "Is your stomach-ache better, my angel?" Madame Bovary senior found nothing to censure except perhaps this mania of knitting jackets for orphans instead of mending her own house-linen; but, harassed with domestic quarrels, the good woman took pleasure in this quiet house, and she even stayed there till after Easter, to escape the sarcasms of old Bovary, who never failed on Good Friday to order chitterlings. Besides the companionship of her mother-in-law, who strengthened her a little by the rectitude of her judgment and her grave ways, Emma almost every day had other visitors. These were Madame Langlois, Madame Caron, Madame Dubreuil, Madame Tuvache, and regularly from two to five o'clock the excellent Madame Homais, who, for her part, had never believed any of the tittle-tattle about her neighbour. The little Homais also came to see her; Justin accompanied them. He went up with them to her bedroom, and remained standing near the door, motionless and mute. Often even Madame Bovary; taking no heed of him, began her toilette. She began by taking out her comb, shaking her head with a quick movement, and when he for the first time saw all this mass of hair that fell to her knees unrolling in black ringlets, it was to him, poor child! like a sudden entrance into something new and strange, whose splendour terrified him. Emma, no doubt, did not notice his silent attentions or his timidity. She had no suspicion that the love vanished from her life was there, palpitating by her side, beneath that coarse holland shirt, in that youthful heart open to the emanations of her beauty. Besides, she now enveloped all things with such indifference, she had words so affectionate with looks so haughty, such contradictory ways, that one could no longer distinguish egotism from charity, or corruption from virtue. One evening, for example, she was angry with the servant, who had asked to go out, and stammered as she tried to find some pretext. Then suddenly-- "So you love him?" she said. And without waiting for any answer from Felicite, who was blushing, she added, "There! run along; enjoy yourself!" In the beginning of spring she had the garden turned up from end to end, despite Bovary's remonstrances. However, he was glad to see her at last manifest a wish of any kind. As she grew stronger she displayed more wilfulness. First, she found occasion to expel Mere Rollet, the nurse, who during her convalescence had contracted the habit of coming too often to the kitchen with her two nurslings and her boarder, better off for teeth than a cannibal. Then she got rid of the Homais family, successively dismissed all the other visitors, and even frequented church less assiduously, to the great approval of the druggist, who said to her in a friendly way-- "You were going in a bit for the cassock!" As formerly, Monsieur Bournisien dropped in every day when he came out after catechism class. He preferred staying out of doors to taking the air "in the grove," as he called the arbour. This was the time when Charles came home. They were hot; some sweet cider was brought out, and they drank together to madame's complete restoration. Binet was there; that is to say, a little lower down against the terrace wall, fishing for crayfish. Bovary invited him to have a drink, and he thoroughly understood the uncorking of the stone bottles. "You must," he said, throwing a satisfied glance all round him, even to the very extremity of the landscape, "hold the bottle perpendicularly on the table, and after the strings are cut, press up the cork with little thrusts, gently, gently, as indeed they do seltzer-water at restaurants." But during his demonstration the cider often spurted right into their faces, and then the ecclesiastic, with a thick laugh, never missed this joke-- "Its goodness strikes the eye!" He was, in fact, a good fellow and one day he was not even scandalised at the chemist, who advised Charles to give madame some distraction by taking her to the theatre at Rouen to hear the illustrious tenor, Lagardy. Homais, surprised at this silence, wanted to know his opinion, and the priest declared that he considered music less dangerous for morals than literature. But the chemist took up the defence of letters. The theatre, he contended, served for railing at prejudices, and, beneath a mask of pleasure, taught virtue. "'Castigat ridendo mores,'* Monsieur Bournisien! Thus consider the greater part of Voltaire's tragedies; they are cleverly strewn with philosophical reflections, that made them a vast school of morals and diplomacy for the people." *It corrects customs through laughter. "I," said Binet, "once saw a piece called the 'Gamin de Paris,' in which there was the character of an old general that is really hit off to a T. He sets down a young swell who had seduced a working girl, who at the ending--" "Certainly," continued Homais, "there is bad literature as there is bad pharmacy, but to condemn in a lump the most important of the fine arts seems to me a stupidity, a Gothic idea, worthy of the abominable times that imprisoned Galileo." "I know very well," objected the cure, "that there are good works, good authors. However, if it were only those persons of different sexes united in a bewitching apartment, decorated rouge, those lights, those effeminate voices, all this must, in the long-run, engender a certain mental libertinage, give rise to immodest thoughts and impure temptations. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of all the Fathers. Finally," he added, suddenly assuming a mystic tone of voice while he rolled a pinch of snuff between his fingers, "if the Church has condemned the theatre, she must be right; we must submit to her decrees." "Why," asked the druggist, "should she excommunicate actors? For formerly they openly took part in religious ceremonies. Yes, in the middle of the chancel they acted; they performed a kind of farce called 'Mysteries,' which often offended against the laws of decency." The ecclesiastic contented himself with uttering a groan, and the chemist went on-- "It's like it is in the Bible; there there are, you know, more than one piquant detail, matters really libidinous!" And on a gesture of irritation from Monsieur Bournisien-- "Ah! you'll admit that it is not a book to place in the hands of a young girl, and I should be sorry if Athalie--" "But it is the Protestants, and not we," cried the other impatiently, "who recommend the Bible." "No matter," said Homais. "I am surprised that in our days, in this century of enlightenment, anyone should still persist in proscribing an intellectual relaxation that is inoffensive, moralising, and sometimes even hygienic; is it not, doctor?" "No doubt," replied the doctor carelessly, either because, sharing the same ideas, he wished to offend no one, or else because he had not any ideas. The conversation seemed at an end when the chemist thought fit to shoot a Parthian arrow. "I've known priests who put on ordinary clothes to go and see dancers kicking about." "Come, come!" said the cure. "Ah! I've known some!" And separating the words of his sentence, Homais repeated, "I--have--known--some!" "Well, they were wrong," said Bournisien, resigned to anything. "By Jove! they go in for more than that," exclaimed the druggist. "Sir!" replied the ecclesiastic, with such angry eyes that the druggist was intimidated by them. "I only mean to say," he replied in less brutal a tone, "that toleration is the surest way to draw people to religion." "That is true! that is true!" agreed the good fellow, sitting down again on his chair. But he stayed only a few moments. Then, as soon as he had gone, Monsieur Homais said to the doctor-- "That's what I call a cock-fight. I beat him, did you see, in a way!--Now take my advice. Take madame to the theatre, if it were only for once in your life, to enrage one of these ravens, hang it! If anyone could take my place, I would accompany you myself. Be quick about it. Lagardy is only going to give one performance; he's engaged to go to England at a high salary. From what I hear, he's a regular dog; he's rolling in money; he's taking three mistresses and a cook along with him. All these great artists burn the candle at both ends; they require a dissolute life, that suits the imagination to some extent. But they die at the hospital, because they haven't the sense when young to lay by. Well, a pleasant dinner! Goodbye till to-morrow." The idea of the theatre quickly germinated in Bovary's head, for he at once communicated it to his wife, who at first refused, alleging the fatigue, the worry, the expense; but, for a wonder, Charles did not give in, so sure was he that this recreation would be good for her. He saw nothing to prevent it: his mother had sent them three hundred francs which he had no longer expected; the current debts were not very large, and the falling in of Lheureux's bills was still so far off that there was no need to think about them. Besides, imagining that she was refusing from delicacy, he insisted the more; so that by dint of worrying her she at last made up her mind, and the next day at eight o'clock they set out in the "Hirondelle." The druggist, whom nothing whatever kept at Yonville, but who thought himself bound not to budge from it, sighed as he saw them go. "Well, a pleasant journey!" he said to them; "happy mortals that you are!" Then addressing himself to Emma, who was wearing a blue silk gown with four flounces-- "You are as lovely as a Venus. You'll cut a figure at Rouen." The diligence stopped at the "Croix-Rouge" in the Place Beauvoisine. It was the inn that is in every provincial faubourg, with large stables and small bedrooms, where one sees in the middle of the court chickens pilfering the oats under the muddy gigs of the commercial travellers--a good old house, with worm-eaten balconies that creak in the wind on winter nights, always full of people, noise, and feeding, whose black tables are sticky with coffee and brandy, the thick windows made yellow by the flies, the damp napkins stained with cheap wine, and that always smells of the village, like ploughboys dressed in Sundayclothes, has a cafe on the street, and towards the countryside a kitchen-garden. Charles at once set out. He muddled up the stage-boxes with the gallery, the pit with the boxes; asked for explanations, did not understand them; was sent from the box-office to the acting-manager; came back to the inn, returned to the theatre, and thus several times traversed the whole length of the town from the theatre to the boulevard. Madame Bovary bought a bonnet, gloves, and a bouquet. The doctor was much afraid of missing the beginning, and, without having had time to swallow a plate of soup, they presented themselves at the doors of the theatre, which were still closed.

Chapter 14

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary38.asp

Charles is troubled about the medical bills incurred during Emma's illness. In addition, Lheureux has delivered the bill for the goods Emma ordered for her planned departure with Rodolphe. Since Charles obviously cannot pay such a large amount, Lheureux maneuvers him into borrowing more money at a high interest rate. Charles borrows forty francs from the moneylender and signs another bill due on the first of September of the following year. In all, he will have to pay fifty francs. The scheming Lheureux hopes that Charles will renew the bill so that the interest will continue to grow. Emma's recovery is slow. During her illness, when she had felt sure of death overcoming her, she had asked for the sacrament of extreme unction, known as the last rites in the Catholic religion. Afterwards, she had seen a heavenly vision and had felt immense peace. As a result, Emma buried her memories of Rodolphe and transfers her affections to the Lord. She begins to indulge in charity and is gentle and patient with her daughter Berthe. She welcomes the visits of the priest, Bournisien, and aspires to be a saint. Bournisien marvels at Emma's transformation, but he is skeptical about her new religious fervor lasting for long. Emma finds herself surrounded with company. Her mother-in-law visits often, finding Emma to be pleasant. Almost all the busybodies of the neighborhood are her daily companions. Justin escorts the Homais children to Emma's room and stands "stiffly silent by the door." On several occasions, Emma, unaware of his presence, combs her hair before him. Her attractiveness is not lost on Justin, and he begins to love her. Emma does not notice his attraction to her, for she is beyond earthly love for now. With the advent of spring, Emma is recovered. Homais suggests that Charles take Emma to the theater because the excursion will do her good. Charles manages to coax a reluctant Emma, and they set off for Rouen.

Notes Charles, who is terribly worried over finances, feels a sense of guilt at not devoting enough time to Emma. He may be naive and incompetent, but he is essentially a good man. In contrast, Lheureux is again depicted as a calculating and insensitive businessman. He shrewdly foresees the profit he can make during the troubled period the Bovarys are facing and has no qualms about doing do it. Emma's reaction to the Rodolphe episode is typical of her neurosis. She refuses to face the past squarely or truthfully. Neither does she evaluate her mistakes, but buries them. This tendency will have serious repercussions later in the novel. Feeling that she is dying, Emma calls the priest to administer her last rites, which cause her to become religious again, as she was in her youth." Her soul, deformed by pride, found rest at last in Christian humility. Relinquishing the pleasures of weakness, Emma contemplated the destruction of her will within her, which was to leave the way wide open to the flowing tide of grace. . .Amid the illusions that her wishes prompted, she glimpsed a realm of purity, floating above the earth, melting into the sky, where she aspired to be. She wanted to become a saint." As a result of her new religious fervor, Emma becomes a very pleasant and charitable person. The neighbors and her mother-in-law enjoy their visits with the recovering Emma. Not surprisingly, as her health improves, Emma's religious fervor wanes. At the end of the chapter, an innocent suggestion by Homais sends the devoted Charles scurrying to Rouen to take Emma to the theater. It is ironic that her husband's devotion should prove to be a fatal mistake, since Emma is re-introduced to Leon at the Opera House.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/24.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_23_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 15

chapter 15

{"name": "Chapter 15", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary39.asp", "summary": "While Charles and Emma are at the theater, he is his usual unsophisticated self. Emma is able to ignore him because she is caught up in the plot of the opera, which she sees as portraying her own life. She constantly compares the male lead to Rodolphe and pictures him as her lover. During intermission, Charles sees Leon at the refreshment counter and brings him to their box to greet Emma. Leon stays with them, and Emma pays scant attention to the opera. The three leave the theater and relive old memories. Charles invites Leon to Yonville. He also urges Emma to spend the next evening at the theater with Leon, for it is not possible for him to stay any longer. They separate on very cordial terms.", "analysis": "Notes Emma's romanticism is unleashed during the opera, Lucie di Lammermoor. She is attracted to Edgar Lagardy, the male lead singer, and she wishes that \"they might have met and loved.\" She sees in his character the side of Rodolphe that she had desired but had not experienced. There is no end to Emma's illusions, as she confuses art with reality. She also reveals that she has still not understood the reality of her relationship with Rodolphe. Just before the intermission, Emma reaches the height of fantasy and wants to run into the arms of Edgar Lagardy, whom she imagines to be looking at her. Flaubert inserts a brief, but telling, sentence at this juncture: \"The curtain fell. \" The implication is that, ultimately, the curtain must fall on Emma's illusions. Leon's reintroduction into Emma's life is timely. She again has the desire to be loved, as demonstrated by her vivid, rambling imaginings during the opera. This last chapter in the second section of the book offers her both a lover and the opportunity to err again"}

The crowd was waiting against the wall, symmetrically enclosed between the balustrades. At the corner of the neighbouring streets huge bills repeated in quaint letters "Lucie de Lammermoor-Lagardy-Opera-etc." The weather was fine, the people were hot, perspiration trickled amid the curls, and handkerchiefs taken from pockets were mopping red foreheads; and now and then a warm wind that blew from the river gently stirred the border of the tick awnings hanging from the doors of the public-houses. A little lower down, however, one was refreshed by a current of icy air that smelt of tallow, leather, and oil. This was an exhalation from the Rue des Charrettes, full of large black warehouses where they made casks. For fear of seeming ridiculous, Emma before going in wished to have a little stroll in the harbour, and Bovary prudently kept his tickets in his hand, in the pocket of his trousers, which he pressed against his stomach. Her heart began to beat as soon as she reached the vestibule. She involuntarily smiled with vanity on seeing the crowd rushing to the right by the other corridor while she went up the staircase to the reserved seats. She was as pleased as a child to push with her finger the large tapestried door. She breathed in with all her might the dusty smell of the lobbies, and when she was seated in her box she bent forward with the air of a duchess. The theatre was beginning to fill; opera-glasses were taken from their cases, and the subscribers, catching sight of one another, were bowing. They came to seek relaxation in the fine arts after the anxieties of business; but "business" was not forgotten; they still talked cottons, spirits of wine, or indigo. The heads of old men were to be seen, inexpressive and peaceful, with their hair and complexions looking like silver medals tarnished by steam of lead. The young beaux were strutting about in the pit, showing in the opening of their waistcoats their pink or applegreen cravats, and Madame Bovary from above admired them leaning on their canes with golden knobs in the open palm of their yellow gloves. Now the lights of the orchestra were lit, the lustre, let down from the ceiling, throwing by the glimmering of its facets a sudden gaiety over the theatre; then the musicians came in one after the other; and first there was the protracted hubbub of the basses grumbling, violins squeaking, cornets trumpeting, flutes and flageolets fifing. But three knocks were heard on the stage, a rolling of drums began, the brass instruments played some chords, and the curtain rising, discovered a country-scene. It was the cross-roads of a wood, with a fountain shaded by an oak to the left. Peasants and lords with plaids on their shoulders were singing a hunting-song together; then a captain suddenly came on, who evoked the spirit of evil by lifting both his arms to heaven. Another appeared; they went away, and the hunters started afresh. She felt herself transported to the reading of her youth, into the midst of Walter Scott. She seemed to hear through the mist the sound of the Scotch bagpipes re-echoing over the heather. Then her remembrance of the novel helping her to understand the libretto, she followed the story phrase by phrase, while vague thoughts that came back to her dispersed at once again with the bursts of music. She gave herself up to the lullaby of the melodies, and felt all her being vibrate as if the violin bows were drawn over her nerves. She had not eyes enough to look at the costumes, the scenery, the actors, the painted trees that shook when anyone walked, and the velvet caps, cloaks, swords--all those imaginary things that floated amid the harmony as in the atmosphere of another world. But a young woman stepped forward, throwing a purse to a squire in green. She was left alone, and the flute was heard like the murmur of a fountain or the warbling of birds. Lucie attacked her cavatina in G major bravely. She plained of love; she longed for wings. Emma, too, fleeing from life, would have liked to fly away in an embrace. Suddenly Edgar-Lagardy appeared. He had that splendid pallor that gives something of the majesty of marble to the ardent races of the South. His vigorous form was tightly clad in a brown-coloured doublet; a small chiselled poniard hung against his left thigh, and he cast round laughing looks showing his white teeth. They said that a Polish princess having heard him sing one night on the beach at Biarritz, where he mended boats, had fallen in love with him. She had ruined herself for him. He had deserted her for other women, and this sentimental celebrity did not fail to enhance his artistic reputation. The diplomatic mummer took care always to slip into his advertisements some poetic phrase on the fascination of his person and the susceptibility of his soul. A fine organ, imperturbable coolness, more temperament than intelligence, more power of emphasis than of real singing, made up the charm of this admirable charlatan nature, in which there was something of the hairdresser and the toreador. From the first scene he evoked enthusiasm. He pressed Lucy in his arms, he left her, he came back, he seemed desperate; he had outbursts of rage, then elegiac gurglings of infinite sweetness, and the notes escaped from his bare neck full of sobs and kisses. Emma leant forward to see him, clutching the velvet of the box with her nails. She was filling her heart with these melodious lamentations that were drawn out to the accompaniment of the double-basses, like the cries of the drowning in the tumult of a tempest. She recognised all the intoxication and the anguish that had almost killed her. The voice of a prima donna seemed to her to be but echoes of her conscience, and this illusion that charmed her as some very thing of her own life. But no one on earth had loved her with such love. He had not wept like Edgar that last moonlit night when they said, "To-morrow! to-morrow!" The theatre rang with cheers; they recommenced the entire movement; the lovers spoke of the flowers on their tomb, of vows, exile, fate, hopes; and when they uttered the final adieu, Emma gave a sharp cry that mingled with the vibrations of the last chords. "But why," asked Bovary, "does that gentleman persecute her?" "No, no!" she answered; "he is her lover!" "Yet he vows vengeance on her family, while the other one who came on before said, 'I love Lucie and she loves me!' Besides, he went off with her father arm in arm. For he certainly is her father, isn't he--the ugly little man with a cock's feather in his hat?" Despite Emma's explanations, as soon as the recitative duet began in which Gilbert lays bare his abominable machinations to his master Ashton, Charles, seeing the false troth-ring that is to deceive Lucie, thought it was a love-gift sent by Edgar. He confessed, moreover, that he did not understand the story because of the music, which interfered very much with the words. "What does it matter?" said Emma. "Do be quiet!" "Yes, but you know," he went on, leaning against her shoulder, "I like to understand things." "Be quiet! be quiet!" she cried impatiently. Lucie advanced, half supported by her women, a wreath of orange blossoms in her hair, and paler than the white satin of her gown. Emma dreamed of her marriage day; she saw herself at home again amid the corn in the little path as they walked to the church. Oh, why had not she, like this woman, resisted, implored? She, on the contrary, had been joyous, without seeing the abyss into which she was throwing herself. Ah! if in the freshness of her beauty, before the soiling of marriage and the disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon some great, strong heart, then virtue, tenderness, voluptuousness, and duty blending, she would never have fallen from so high a happiness. But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire. She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated. So, striving to divert her thoughts, Emma determined now to see in this reproduction of her sorrows only a plastic fantasy, well enough to please the eye, and she even smiled internally with disdainful pity when at the back of the stage under the velvet hangings a man appeared in a black cloak. His large Spanish hat fell at a gesture he made, and immediately the instruments and the singers began the sextet. Edgar, flashing with fury, dominated all the others with his clearer voice; Ashton hurled homicidal provocations at him in deep notes; Lucie uttered her shrill plaint, Arthur at one side, his modulated tones in the middle register, and the bass of the minister pealed forth like an organ, while the voices of the women repeating his words took them up in chorus delightfully. They were all in a row gesticulating, and anger, vengeance, jealousy, terror, and stupefaction breathed forth at once from their half-opened mouths. The outraged lover brandished his naked sword; his guipure ruffle rose with jerks to the movements of his chest, and he walked from right to left with long strides, clanking against the boards the silver-gilt spurs of his soft boots, widening out at the ankles. He, she thought must have an inexhaustible love to lavish it upon the crowd with such effusion. All her small fault-findings faded before the poetry of the part that absorbed her; and, drawn towards this man by the illusion of the character, she tried to imagine to herself his life--that life resonant, extraordinary, splendid, and that might have been hers if fate had willed it. They would have known one another, loved one another. With him, through all the kingdoms of Europe she would have travelled from capital to capital, sharing his fatigues and his pride, picking up the flowers thrown to him, herself embroidering his costumes. Then each evening, at the back of a box, behind the golden trellis-work she would have drunk in eagerly the expansions of this soul that would have sung for her alone; from the stage, even as he acted, he would have looked at her. But the mad idea seized her that he was looking at her; it was certain. She longed to run to his arms, to take refuge in his strength, as in the incarnation of love itself, and to say to him, to cry out, "Take me away! carry me with you! let us go! Thine, thine! all my ardour and all my dreams!" The curtain fell. The smell of the gas mingled with that of the breaths, the waving of the fans, made the air more suffocating. Emma wanted to go out; the crowd filled the corridors, and she fell back in her arm-chair with palpitations that choked her. Charles, fearing that she would faint, ran to the refreshment-room to get a glass of barley-water. He had great difficulty in getting back to his seat, for his elbows were jerked at every step because of the glass he held in his hands, and he even spilt three-fourths on the shoulders of a Rouen lady in short sleeves, who feeling the cold liquid running down to her loins, uttered cries like a peacock, as if she were being assassinated. Her husband, who was a millowner, railed at the clumsy fellow, and while she was with her handkerchief wiping up the stains from her handsome cherry-coloured taffeta gown, he angrily muttered about indemnity, costs, reimbursement. At last Charles reached his wife, saying to her, quite out of breath-- "Ma foi! I thought I should have had to stay there. There is such a crowd--SUCH a crowd!" He added-- "Just guess whom I met up there! Monsieur Leon!" "Leon?" "Himself! He's coming along to pay his respects." And as he finished these words the ex-clerk of Yonville entered the box. He held out his hand with the ease of a gentleman; and Madame Bovary extended hers, without doubt obeying the attraction of a stronger will. She had not felt it since that spring evening when the rain fell upon the green leaves, and they had said good-bye standing at the window. But soon recalling herself to the necessities of the situation, with an effort she shook off the torpor of her memories, and began stammering a few hurried words. "Ah, good-day! What! you here?" "Silence!" cried a voice from the pit, for the third act was beginning. "So you are at Rouen?" "Yes." "And since when?" "Turn them out! turn them out!" People were looking at them. They were silent. But from that moment she listened no more; and the chorus of the guests, the scene between Ashton and his servant, the grand duet in D major, all were for her as far off as if the instruments had grown less sonorous and the characters more remote. She remembered the games at cards at the druggist's, and the walk to the nurse's, the reading in the arbour, the tete-a-tete by the fireside--all that poor love, so calm and so protracted, so discreet, so tender, and that she had nevertheless forgotten. And why had he come back? What combination of circumstances had brought him back into her life? He was standing behind her, leaning with his shoulder against the wall of the box; now and again she felt herself shuddering beneath the hot breath from his nostrils falling upon her hair. "Does this amuse you?" said he, bending over her so closely that the end of his moustache brushed her cheek. She replied carelessly-- "Oh, dear me, no, not much." Then he proposed that they should leave the theatre and go and take an ice somewhere. "Oh, not yet; let us stay," said Bovary. "Her hair's undone; this is going to be tragic." But the mad scene did not at all interest Emma, and the acting of the singer seemed to her exaggerated. "She screams too loud," said she, turning to Charles, who was listening. "Yes--a little," he replied, undecided between the frankness of his pleasure and his respect for his wife's opinion. Then with a sigh Leon said-- "The heat is--" "Unbearable! Yes!" "Do you feel unwell?" asked Bovary. "Yes, I am stifling; let us go." Monsieur Leon put her long lace shawl carefully about her shoulders, and all three went off to sit down in the harbour, in the open air, outside the windows of a cafe. First they spoke of her illness, although Emma interrupted Charles from time to time, for fear, she said, of boring Monsieur Leon; and the latter told them that he had come to spend two years at Rouen in a large office, in order to get practice in his profession, which was different in Normandy and Paris. Then he inquired after Berthe, the Homais, Mere Lefrancois, and as they had, in the husband's presence, nothing more to say to one another, the conversation soon came to an end. People coming out of the theatre passed along the pavement, humming or shouting at the top of their voices, "O bel ange, ma Lucie!*" Then Leon, playing the dilettante, began to talk music. He had seen Tambourini, Rubini, Persiani, Grisi, and, compared with them, Lagardy, despite his grand outbursts, was nowhere. *Oh beautiful angel, my Lucie. "Yet," interrupted Charles, who was slowly sipping his rum-sherbet, "they say that he is quite admirable in the last act. I regret leaving before the end, because it was beginning to amuse me." "Why," said the clerk, "he will soon give another performance." But Charles replied that they were going back next day. "Unless," he added, turning to his wife, "you would like to stay alone, kitten?" And changing his tactics at this unexpected opportunity that presented itself to his hopes, the young man sang the praises of Lagardy in the last number. It was really superb, sublime. Then Charles insisted-- "You would get back on Sunday. Come, make up your mind. You are wrong if you feel that this is doing you the least good." The tables round them, however, were emptying; a waiter came and stood discreetly near them. Charles, who understood, took out his purse; the clerk held back his arm, and did not forget to leave two more pieces of silver that he made chink on the marble. "I am really sorry," said Bovary, "about the money which you are--" The other made a careless gesture full of cordiality, and taking his hat said-- "It is settled, isn't it? To-morrow at six o'clock?" Charles explained once more that he could not absent himself longer, but that nothing prevented Emma-- "But," she stammered, with a strange smile, "I am not sure--" "Well, you must think it over. We'll see. Night brings counsel." Then to Leon, who was walking along with them, "Now that you are in our part of the world, I hope you'll come and ask us for some dinner now and then." The clerk declared he would not fail to do so, being obliged, moreover, to go to Yonville on some business for his office. And they parted before the Saint-Herbland Passage just as the clock in the cathedral struck half-past eleven. Part III

Chapter 15

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary39.asp

While Charles and Emma are at the theater, he is his usual unsophisticated self. Emma is able to ignore him because she is caught up in the plot of the opera, which she sees as portraying her own life. She constantly compares the male lead to Rodolphe and pictures him as her lover. During intermission, Charles sees Leon at the refreshment counter and brings him to their box to greet Emma. Leon stays with them, and Emma pays scant attention to the opera. The three leave the theater and relive old memories. Charles invites Leon to Yonville. He also urges Emma to spend the next evening at the theater with Leon, for it is not possible for him to stay any longer. They separate on very cordial terms.

Notes Emma's romanticism is unleashed during the opera, Lucie di Lammermoor. She is attracted to Edgar Lagardy, the male lead singer, and she wishes that "they might have met and loved." She sees in his character the side of Rodolphe that she had desired but had not experienced. There is no end to Emma's illusions, as she confuses art with reality. She also reveals that she has still not understood the reality of her relationship with Rodolphe. Just before the intermission, Emma reaches the height of fantasy and wants to run into the arms of Edgar Lagardy, whom she imagines to be looking at her. Flaubert inserts a brief, but telling, sentence at this juncture: "The curtain fell. " The implication is that, ultimately, the curtain must fall on Emma's illusions. Leon's reintroduction into Emma's life is timely. She again has the desire to be loved, as demonstrated by her vivid, rambling imaginings during the opera. This last chapter in the second section of the book offers her both a lover and the opportunity to err again

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/25.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_24_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 1

chapter 1

{"name": "Chapter 1", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary40.asp", "summary": "During his days at law school in Paris, Leon had allowed his memories of Emma to dim; upon seeing her again, his passion is immediately rekindled, even though it has been almost three years. When he addresses Emma, Leon, no longer shy, reveals a new confidence. He is even bold enough to pay a visit to the Bovarys at their hotel. Charles is not in, and Leon and Emma converse \"on the subject of their sorrows, each growing somewhat excited as they went further in confidence.\" Finally Leon blurts, \"I loved you!\" Emma becomes radiant on hearing his words. They talk until very late and arrange to meet in the Cathedral at eleven the next morning. Before leaving, Leon kisses her on the nape of her neck; Emma tries hard not to respond. The next day, Emma arrives late at the Cathedral. Leon has been waiting for a while and is eager to spend some time alone with her. She is, however, aware of her \"tottering virtue\" and accepts a guided tour of the cathedral. Leon is clearly uncomfortable and whisks her away as soon as the opportunity presents itself. They enter a carriage, and Leon orders the driver to wander about randomly. The night before, Emma had written Leon a letter explaining that they could not have a relationship. This note is torn into bits, which are tossed out the window of the carriage. At about six o'clock, the cab drops Emma off near her hotel. She walks away \"with her veil lowered, and without a backward glance.\"", "analysis": "Notes Leon's shy, modest nature is a thing of the past. During his time in Paris, he has acquired self-confidence and now talks openly with Emma. In their conversation, they speak of their past sorrows in such a lofty way that their words ring false. \"They were both constructing an ideal of themselves and adapting their past lives to it.\" These two naive characters in many ways are both still wrapped up in romantic illusions regarding themselves; the three years that have separated them have not brought forth much emotional maturity in either. When Emma meets Leon again, she is at a prime stage to embark on a second adulterous affair, for she is hungry for emotional fulfillment. She earnestly tries to curb her passion and resist Leon. She writes him a letter explaining that she will not have a relationship with him, but she rips it to bits when she is with him. She also comes late to meet Leon at the Cathedral, probably wrestling with herself about whether she should go at all; once inside, she lingers in the Cathedral, \"trying to pray, in the hope that Heaven would suddenly fill her with resolution. \" She makes Leon go on a guided tour, so she will not face her mounting passion with him alone. The cathedral tour is written as serio-comic irony, for both Emma and Leon are full of passionate longings for the other, while the guide drones on about the famous dead buried on the Cathedral grounds. It is also important to notice that Flaubert describes the church, from Emma's perspective. She sees it as \"a gigantic boudoir. \" It should also be noted that the Cathedral, with its spires and its vastness, is a stock romantic symbol, indicating transcendence and mystery. Contrasted to this is the carriage, in which the lovers consummate their relationship. It is \"sealed tighter than a tomb and ... buffeted about like a ship at sea.\" This image conjures a vision of death and foreshadows Emma's state in the last few chapters of the book. The \"scraps of paper\" land \"like white butterflies in a field of red clover in full bloom.\" The image has two opposing symbols: white, denoting purity, and red, denoting passion and lust. The butterfly image also depicts fragility: here it is Emma's relationship with Leon that is fragile and doomed."}

Monsieur Leon, while studying law, had gone pretty often to the dancing-rooms, where he was even a great success amongst the grisettes, who thought he had a distinguished air. He was the best-mannered of the students; he wore his hair neither too long nor too short, didn't spend all his quarter's money on the first day of the month, and kept on good terms with his professors. As for excesses, he had always abstained from them, as much from cowardice as from refinement. Often when he stayed in his room to read, or else when sitting of an evening under the lime-trees of the Luxembourg, he let his Code fall to the ground, and the memory of Emma came back to him. But gradually this feeling grew weaker, and other desires gathered over it, although it still persisted through them all. For Leon did not lose all hope; there was for him, as it were, a vague promise floating in the future, like a golden fruit suspended from some fantastic tree. Then, seeing her again after three years of absence his passion reawakened. He must, he thought, at last make up his mind to possess her. Moreover, his timidity had worn off by contact with his gay companions, and he returned to the provinces despising everyone who had not with varnished shoes trodden the asphalt of the boulevards. By the side of a Parisienne in her laces, in the drawing-room of some illustrious physician, a person driving his carriage and wearing many orders, the poor clerk would no doubt have trembled like a child; but here, at Rouen, on the harbour, with the wife of this small doctor he felt at his ease, sure beforehand he would shine. Self-possession depends on its environment. We don't speak on the first floor as on the fourth; and the wealthy woman seems to have, about her, to guard her virtue, all her banknotes, like a cuirass in the lining of her corset. On leaving the Bovarys the night before, Leon had followed them through the streets at a distance; then having seen them stop at the "Croix-Rouge," he turned on his heel, and spent the night meditating a plan. So the next day about five o'clock he walked into the kitchen of the inn, with a choking sensation in his throat, pale cheeks, and that resolution of cowards that stops at nothing. "The gentleman isn't in," answered a servant. This seemed to him a good omen. He went upstairs. She was not disturbed at his approach; on the contrary, she apologised for having neglected to tell him where they were staying. "Oh, I divined it!" said Leon. He pretended he had been guided towards her by chance, by, instinct. She began to smile; and at once, to repair his folly, Leon told her that he had spent his morning in looking for her in all the hotels in the town one after the other. "So you have made up your mind to stay?" he added. "Yes," she said, "and I am wrong. One ought not to accustom oneself to impossible pleasures when there are a thousand demands upon one." "Oh, I can imagine!" "Ah! no; for you, you are a man!" But men too had had their trials, and the conversation went off into certain philosophical reflections. Emma expatiated much on the misery of earthly affections, and the eternal isolation in which the heart remains entombed. To show off, or from a naive imitation of this melancholy which called forth his, the young man declared that he had been awfully bored during the whole course of his studies. The law irritated him, other vocations attracted him, and his mother never ceased worrying him in every one of her letters. As they talked they explained more and more fully the motives of their sadness, working themselves up in their progressive confidence. But they sometimes stopped short of the complete exposition of their thought, and then sought to invent a phrase that might express it all the same. She did not confess her passion for another; he did not say that he had forgotten her. Perhaps he no longer remembered his suppers with girls after masked balls; and no doubt she did not recollect the rendezvous of old when she ran across the fields in the morning to her lover's house. The noises of the town hardly reached them, and the room seemed small, as if on purpose to hem in their solitude more closely. Emma, in a dimity dressing-gown, leant her head against the back of the old arm-chair; the yellow wall-paper formed, as it were, a golden background behind her, and her bare head was mirrored in the glass with the white parting in the middle, and the tip of her ears peeping out from the folds of her hair. "But pardon me!" she said. "It is wrong of me. I weary you with my eternal complaints." "No, never, never!" "If you knew," she went on, raising to the ceiling her beautiful eyes, in which a tear was trembling, "all that I had dreamed!" "And I! Oh, I too have suffered! Often I went out; I went away. I dragged myself along the quays, seeking distraction amid the din of the crowd without being able to banish the heaviness that weighed upon me. In an engraver's shop on the boulevard there is an Italian print of one of the Muses. She is draped in a tunic, and she is looking at the moon, with forget-me-nots in her flowing hair. Something drove me there continually; I stayed there hours together." Then in a trembling voice, "She resembled you a little." Madame Bovary turned away her head that he might not see the irrepressible smile she felt rising to her lips. "Often," he went on, "I wrote you letters that I tore up." She did not answer. He continued-- "I sometimes fancied that some chance would bring you. I thought I recognised you at street-corners, and I ran after all the carriages through whose windows I saw a shawl fluttering, a veil like yours." She seemed resolved to let him go on speaking without interruption. Crossing her arms and bending down her face, she looked at the rosettes on her slippers, and at intervals made little movements inside the satin of them with her toes. At last she sighed. "But the most wretched thing, is it not--is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice." He started off in praise of virtue, duty, and silent immolation, having himself an incredible longing for self-sacrifice that he could not satisfy. "I should much like," she said, "to be a nurse at a hospital." "Alas! men have none of these holy missions, and I see nowhere any calling--unless perhaps that of a doctor." With a slight shrug of her shoulders, Emma interrupted him to speak of her illness, which had almost killed her. What a pity! She should not be suffering now! Leon at once envied the calm of the tomb, and one evening he had even made his will, asking to be buried in that beautiful rug with velvet stripes he had received from her. For this was how they would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal to which they were now adapting their past life. Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment. But at this invention of the rug she asked, "But why?" "Why?" He hesitated. "Because I loved you so!" And congratulating himself at having surmounted the difficulty, Leon watched her face out of the corner of his eyes. It was like the sky when a gust of wind drives the clouds across. The mass of sad thoughts that darkened them seemed to be lifted from her blue eyes; her whole face shone. He waited. At last she replied-- "I always suspected it." Then they went over all the trifling events of that far-off existence, whose joys and sorrows they had just summed up in one word. They recalled the arbour with clematis, the dresses she had worn, the furniture of her room, the whole of her house. "And our poor cactuses, where are they?" "The cold killed them this winter." "Ah! how I have thought of them, do you know? I often saw them again as of yore, when on the summer mornings the sun beat down upon your blinds, and I saw your two bare arms passing out amongst the flowers." "Poor friend!" she said, holding out her hand to him. Leon swiftly pressed his lips to it. Then, when he had taken a deep breath-- "At that time you were to me I know not what incomprehensible force that took captive my life. Once, for instance, I went to see you; but you, no doubt, do not remember it." "I do," she said; "go on." "You were downstairs in the ante-room, ready to go out, standing on the last stair; you were wearing a bonnet with small blue flowers; and without any invitation from you, in spite of myself, I went with you. Every moment, however, I grew more and more conscious of my folly, and I went on walking by you, not daring to follow you completely, and unwilling to leave you. When you went into a shop, I waited in the street, and I watched you through the window taking off your gloves and counting the change on the counter. Then you rang at Madame Tuvache's; you were let in, and I stood like an idiot in front of the great heavy door that had closed after you." Madame Bovary, as she listened to him, wondered that she was so old. All these things reappearing before her seemed to widen out her life; it was like some sentimental immensity to which she returned; and from time to time she said in a low voice, her eyes half closed-- "Yes, it is true--true--true!" They heard eight strike on the different clocks of the Beauvoisine quarter, which is full of schools, churches, and large empty hotels. They no longer spoke, but they felt as they looked upon each other a buzzing in their heads, as if something sonorous had escaped from the fixed eyes of each of them. They were hand in hand now, and the past, the future, reminiscences and dreams, all were confounded in the sweetness of this ecstasy. Night was darkening over the walls, on which still shone, half hidden in the shade, the coarse colours of four bills representing four scenes from the "Tour de Nesle," with a motto in Spanish and French at the bottom. Through the sash-window a patch of dark sky was seen between the pointed roofs. She rose to light two wax-candles on the drawers, then she sat down again. "Well!" said Leon. "Well!" she replied. He was thinking how to resume the interrupted conversation, when she said to him-- "How is it that no one until now has ever expressed such sentiments to me?" The clerk said that ideal natures were difficult to understand. He from the first moment had loved her, and he despaired when he thought of the happiness that would have been theirs, if thanks to fortune, meeting her earlier, they had been indissolubly bound to one another. "I have sometimes thought of it," she went on. "What a dream!" murmured Leon. And fingering gently the blue binding of her long white sash, he added, "And who prevents us from beginning now?" "No, my friend," she replied; "I am too old; you are too young. Forget me! Others will love you; you will love them." "Not as you!" he cried. "What a child you are! Come, let us be sensible. I wish it." She showed him the impossibility of their love, and that they must remain, as formerly, on the simple terms of a fraternal friendship. Was she speaking thus seriously? No doubt Emma did not herself know, quite absorbed as she was by the charm of the seduction, and the necessity of defending herself from it; and contemplating the young man with a moved look, she gently repulsed the timid caresses that his trembling hands attempted. "Ah! forgive me!" he cried, drawing back. Emma was seized with a vague fear at this shyness, more dangerous to her than the boldness of Rodolphe when he advanced to her open-armed. No man had ever seemed to her so beautiful. An exquisite candour emanated from his being. He lowered his long fine eyelashes, that curled upwards. His cheek, with the soft skin reddened, she thought, with desire of her person, and Emma felt an invincible longing to press her lips to it. Then, leaning towards the clock as if to see the time-- "Ah! how late it is!" she said; "how we do chatter!" He understood the hint and took up his hat. "It has even made me forget the theatre. And poor Bovary has left me here especially for that. Monsieur Lormeaux, of the Rue Grand-Pont, was to take me and his wife." And the opportunity was lost, as she was to leave the next day. "Really!" said Leon. "Yes." "But I must see you again," he went on. "I wanted to tell you--" "What?" "Something--important--serious. Oh, no! Besides, you will not go; it is impossible. If you should--listen to me. Then you have not understood me; you have not guessed--" "Yet you speak plainly," said Emma. "Ah! you can jest. Enough! enough! Oh, for pity's sake, let me see you once--only once!" "Well--" She stopped; then, as if thinking better of it, "Oh, not here!" "Where you will." "Will you--" She seemed to reflect; then abruptly, "To-morrow at eleven o'clock in the cathedral." "I shall be there," he cried, seizing her hands, which she disengaged. And as they were both standing up, he behind her, and Emma with her head bent, he stooped over her and pressed long kisses on her neck. "You are mad! Ah! you are mad!" she said, with sounding little laughs, while the kisses multiplied. Then bending his head over her shoulder, he seemed to beg the consent of her eyes. They fell upon him full of an icy dignity. Leon stepped back to go out. He stopped on the threshold; then he whispered with a trembling voice, "Tomorrow!" She answered with a nod, and disappeared like a bird into the next room. In the evening Emma wrote the clerk an interminable letter, in which she cancelled the rendezvous; all was over; they must not, for the sake of their happiness, meet again. But when the letter was finished, as she did not know Leon's address, she was puzzled. "I'll give it to him myself," she said; "he will come." The next morning, at the open window, and humming on his balcony, Leon himself varnished his pumps with several coatings. He put on white trousers, fine socks, a green coat, emptied all the scent he had into his handkerchief, then having had his hair curled, he uncurled it again, in order to give it a more natural elegance. "It is still too early," he thought, looking at the hairdresser's cuckoo-clock, that pointed to the hour of nine. He read an old fashion journal, went out, smoked a cigar, walked up three streets, thought it was time, and went slowly towards the porch of Notre Dame. It was a beautiful summer morning. Silver plate sparkled in the jeweller's windows, and the light falling obliquely on the cathedral made mirrors of the corners of the grey stones; a flock of birds fluttered in the grey sky round the trefoil bell-turrets; the square, resounding with cries, was fragrant with the flowers that bordered its pavement, roses, jasmines, pinks, narcissi, and tube-roses, unevenly spaced out between moist grasses, catmint, and chickweed for the birds; the fountains gurgled in the centre, and under large umbrellas, amidst melons, piled up in heaps, flower-women, bare-headed, were twisting paper round bunches of violets. The young man took one. It was the first time that he had bought flowers for a woman, and his breast, as he smelt them, swelled with pride, as if this homage that he meant for another had recoiled upon himself. But he was afraid of being seen; he resolutely entered the church. The beadle, who was just then standing on the threshold in the middle of the left doorway, under the "Dancing Marianne," with feather cap, and rapier dangling against his calves, came in, more majestic than a cardinal, and as shining as a saint on a holy pyx. He came towards Leon, and, with that smile of wheedling benignity assumed by ecclesiastics when they question children-- "The gentleman, no doubt, does not belong to these parts? The gentleman would like to see the curiosities of the church?" "No!" said the other. And he first went round the lower aisles. Then he went out to look at the Place. Emma was not coming yet. He went up again to the choir. The nave was reflected in the full fonts with the beginning of the arches and some portions of the glass windows. But the reflections of the paintings, broken by the marble rim, were continued farther on upon the flag-stones, like a many-coloured carpet. The broad daylight from without streamed into the church in three enormous rays from the three opened portals. From time to time at the upper end a sacristan passed, making the oblique genuflexion of devout persons in a hurry. The crystal lustres hung motionless. In the choir a silver lamp was burning, and from the side chapels and dark places of the church sometimes rose sounds like sighs, with the clang of a closing grating, its echo reverberating under the lofty vault. Leon with solemn steps walked along by the walls. Life had never seemed so good to him. She would come directly, charming, agitated, looking back at the glances that followed her, and with her flounced dress, her gold eyeglass, her thin shoes, with all sorts of elegant trifles that he had never enjoyed, and with the ineffable seduction of yielding virtue. The church like a huge boudoir spread around her; the arches bent down to gather in the shade the confession of her love; the windows shone resplendent to illumine her face, and the censers would burn that she might appear like an angel amid the fumes of the sweet-smelling odours. But she did not come. He sat down on a chair, and his eyes fell upon a blue stained window representing boatmen carrying baskets. He looked at it long, attentively, and he counted the scales of the fishes and the button-holes of the doublets, while his thoughts wandered off towards Emma. The beadle, standing aloof, was inwardly angry at this individual who took the liberty of admiring the cathedral by himself. He seemed to him to be conducting himself in a monstrous fashion, to be robbing him in a sort, and almost committing sacrilege. But a rustle of silk on the flags, the tip of a bonnet, a lined cloak--it was she! Leon rose and ran to meet her. Emma was pale. She walked fast. "Read!" she said, holding out a paper to him. "Oh, no!" And she abruptly withdrew her hand to enter the chapel of the Virgin, where, kneeling on a chair, she began to pray. The young man was irritated at this bigot fancy; then he nevertheless experienced a certain charm in seeing her, in the middle of a rendezvous, thus lost in her devotions, like an Andalusian marchioness; then he grew bored, for she seemed never coming to an end. Emma prayed, or rather strove to pray, hoping that some sudden resolution might descend to her from heaven; and to draw down divine aid she filled full her eyes with the splendours of the tabernacle. She breathed in the perfumes of the full-blown flowers in the large vases, and listened to the stillness of the church, that only heightened the tumult of her heart. She rose, and they were about to leave, when the beadle came forward, hurriedly saying-- "Madame, no doubt, does not belong to these parts? Madame would like to see the curiosities of the church?" "Oh, no!" cried the clerk. "Why not?" said she. For she clung with her expiring virtue to the Virgin, the sculptures, the tombs--anything. Then, in order to proceed "by rule," the beadle conducted them right to the entrance near the square, where, pointing out with his cane a large circle of block-stones without inscription or carving-- "This," he said majestically, "is the circumference of the beautiful bell of Ambroise. It weighed forty thousand pounds. There was not its equal in all Europe. The workman who cast it died of the joy--" "Let us go on," said Leon. The old fellow started off again; then, having got back to the chapel of the Virgin, he stretched forth his arm with an all-embracing gesture of demonstration, and, prouder than a country squire showing you his espaliers, went on-- "This simple stone covers Pierre de Breze, lord of Varenne and of Brissac, grand marshal of Poitou, and governor of Normandy, who died at the battle of Montlhery on the 16th of July, 1465." Leon bit his lips, fuming. "And on the right, this gentleman all encased in iron, on the prancing horse, is his grandson, Louis de Breze, lord of Breval and of Montchauvet, Count de Maulevrier, Baron de Mauny, chamberlain to the king, Knight of the Order, and also governor of Normandy; died on the 23rd of July, 1531--a Sunday, as the inscription specifies; and below, this figure, about to descend into the tomb, portrays the same person. It is not possible, is it, to see a more perfect representation of annihilation?" Madame Bovary put up her eyeglasses. Leon, motionless, looked at her, no longer even attempting to speak a single word, to make a gesture, so discouraged was he at this two-fold obstinacy of gossip and indifference. The everlasting guide went on-- "Near him, this kneeling woman who weeps is his spouse, Diane de Poitiers, Countess de Breze, Duchess de Valentinois, born in 1499, died in 1566, and to the left, the one with the child is the Holy Virgin. Now turn to this side; here are the tombs of the Ambroise. They were both cardinals and archbishops of Rouen. That one was minister under Louis thousand gold crowns for the poor." And without stopping, still talking, he pushed them into a chapel full of balustrades, some put away, and disclosed a kind of block that certainly might once have been an ill-made statue. "Truly," he said with a groan, "it adorned the tomb of Richard Coeur de Lion, King of England and Duke of Normandy. It was the Calvinists, sir, who reduced it to this condition. They had buried it for spite in the earth, under the episcopal seat of Monsignor. See! this is the door by which Monsignor passes to his house. Let us pass on quickly to see the gargoyle windows." But Leon hastily took some silver from his pocket and seized Emma's arm. The beadle stood dumfounded, not able to understand this untimely munificence when there were still so many things for the stranger to see. So calling him back, he cried-- "Sir! sir! The steeple! the steeple!" "No, thank you!" said Leon. "You are wrong, sir! It is four hundred and forty feet high, nine less than the great pyramid of Egypt. It is all cast; it--" Leon was fleeing, for it seemed to him that his love, that for nearly two hours now had become petrified in the church like the stones, would vanish like a vapour through that sort of truncated funnel, of oblong cage, of open chimney that rises so grotesquely from the cathedral like the extravagant attempt of some fantastic brazier. "But where are we going?" she said. Making no answer, he walked on with a rapid step; and Madame Bovary was already, dipping her finger in the holy water when behind them they heard a panting breath interrupted by the regular sound of a cane. Leon turned back. "Sir!" "What is it?" And he recognised the beadle, holding under his arms and balancing against his stomach some twenty large sewn volumes. They were works "which treated of the cathedral." "Idiot!" growled Leon, rushing out of the church. A lad was playing about the close. "Go and get me a cab!" The child bounded off like a ball by the Rue Quatre-Vents; then they were alone a few minutes, face to face, and a little embarrassed. "Ah! Leon! Really--I don't know--if I ought," she whispered. Then with a more serious air, "Do you know, it is very improper--" "How so?" replied the clerk. "It is done at Paris." And that, as an irresistible argument, decided her. Still the cab did not come. Leon was afraid she might go back into the church. At last the cab appeared. "At all events, go out by the north porch," cried the beadle, who was left alone on the threshold, "so as to see the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, Paradise, King David, and the Condemned in Hell-flames." "Where to, sir?" asked the coachman. "Where you like," said Leon, forcing Emma into the cab. And the lumbering machine set out. It went down the Rue Grand-Pont, crossed the Place des Arts, the Quai Napoleon, the Pont Neuf, and stopped short before the statue of Pierre Corneille. "Go on," cried a voice that came from within. The cab went on again, and as soon as it reached the Carrefour Lafayette, set off down-hill, and entered the station at a gallop. "No, straight on!" cried the same voice. The cab came out by the gate, and soon having reached the Cours, trotted quietly beneath the elm-trees. The coachman wiped his brow, put his leather hat between his knees, and drove his carriage beyond the side alley by the meadow to the margin of the waters. It went along by the river, along the towing-path paved with sharp pebbles, and for a long while in the direction of Oyssel, beyond the isles. But suddenly it turned with a dash across Quatremares, Sotteville, La Grande-Chaussee, the Rue d'Elbeuf, and made its third halt in front of the Jardin des Plantes. "Get on, will you?" cried the voice more furiously. And at once resuming its course, it passed by Saint-Sever, by the Quai'des Curandiers, the Quai aux Meules, once more over the bridge, by the Place du Champ de Mars, and behind the hospital gardens, where old men in black coats were walking in the sun along the terrace all green with ivy. It went up the Boulevard Bouvreuil, along the Boulevard Cauchoise, then the whole of Mont-Riboudet to the Deville hills. It came back; and then, without any fixed plan or direction, wandered about at hazard. The cab was seen at Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont Gargan, at La Rougue-Marc and Place du Gaillardbois; in the Rue Maladrerie, Rue Dinanderie, before Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien, Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise--in front of the Customs, at the "Vieille Tour," the "Trois Pipes," and the Monumental Cemetery. From time to time the coachman, on his box cast despairing eyes at the public-houses. He could not understand what furious desire for locomotion urged these individuals never to wish to stop. He tried to now and then, and at once exclamations of anger burst forth behind him. Then he lashed his perspiring jades afresh, but indifferent to their jolting, running up against things here and there, not caring if he did, demoralised, and almost weeping with thirst, fatigue, and depression. And on the harbour, in the midst of the drays and casks, and in the streets, at the corners, the good folk opened large wonder-stricken eyes at this sight, so extraordinary in the provinces, a cab with blinds drawn, and which appeared thus constantly shut more closely than a tomb, and tossing about like a vessel. Once in the middle of the day, in the open country, just as the sun beat most fiercely against the old plated lanterns, a bared hand passed beneath the small blinds of yellow canvas, and threw out some scraps of paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off lighted like white butterflies on a field of red clover all in bloom. At about six o'clock the carriage stopped in a back street of the Beauvoisine Quarter, and a woman got out, who walked with her veil down, and without turning her head.

Chapter 1

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary40.asp

During his days at law school in Paris, Leon had allowed his memories of Emma to dim; upon seeing her again, his passion is immediately rekindled, even though it has been almost three years. When he addresses Emma, Leon, no longer shy, reveals a new confidence. He is even bold enough to pay a visit to the Bovarys at their hotel. Charles is not in, and Leon and Emma converse "on the subject of their sorrows, each growing somewhat excited as they went further in confidence." Finally Leon blurts, "I loved you!" Emma becomes radiant on hearing his words. They talk until very late and arrange to meet in the Cathedral at eleven the next morning. Before leaving, Leon kisses her on the nape of her neck; Emma tries hard not to respond. The next day, Emma arrives late at the Cathedral. Leon has been waiting for a while and is eager to spend some time alone with her. She is, however, aware of her "tottering virtue" and accepts a guided tour of the cathedral. Leon is clearly uncomfortable and whisks her away as soon as the opportunity presents itself. They enter a carriage, and Leon orders the driver to wander about randomly. The night before, Emma had written Leon a letter explaining that they could not have a relationship. This note is torn into bits, which are tossed out the window of the carriage. At about six o'clock, the cab drops Emma off near her hotel. She walks away "with her veil lowered, and without a backward glance."

Notes Leon's shy, modest nature is a thing of the past. During his time in Paris, he has acquired self-confidence and now talks openly with Emma. In their conversation, they speak of their past sorrows in such a lofty way that their words ring false. "They were both constructing an ideal of themselves and adapting their past lives to it." These two naive characters in many ways are both still wrapped up in romantic illusions regarding themselves; the three years that have separated them have not brought forth much emotional maturity in either. When Emma meets Leon again, she is at a prime stage to embark on a second adulterous affair, for she is hungry for emotional fulfillment. She earnestly tries to curb her passion and resist Leon. She writes him a letter explaining that she will not have a relationship with him, but she rips it to bits when she is with him. She also comes late to meet Leon at the Cathedral, probably wrestling with herself about whether she should go at all; once inside, she lingers in the Cathedral, "trying to pray, in the hope that Heaven would suddenly fill her with resolution. " She makes Leon go on a guided tour, so she will not face her mounting passion with him alone. The cathedral tour is written as serio-comic irony, for both Emma and Leon are full of passionate longings for the other, while the guide drones on about the famous dead buried on the Cathedral grounds. It is also important to notice that Flaubert describes the church, from Emma's perspective. She sees it as "a gigantic boudoir. " It should also be noted that the Cathedral, with its spires and its vastness, is a stock romantic symbol, indicating transcendence and mystery. Contrasted to this is the carriage, in which the lovers consummate their relationship. It is "sealed tighter than a tomb and ... buffeted about like a ship at sea." This image conjures a vision of death and foreshadows Emma's state in the last few chapters of the book. The "scraps of paper" land "like white butterflies in a field of red clover in full bloom." The image has two opposing symbols: white, denoting purity, and red, denoting passion and lust. The butterfly image also depicts fragility: here it is Emma's relationship with Leon that is fragile and doomed.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/part_3_chapters_2_to_4.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_25_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapters 2-4

chapter 2 - 4

{"name": "Chapter 2 - 4", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary41.asp", "summary": "Emma reaches the inn late after her rendezvous and misses the Hirondelle that had been specially sent for her. She hires a trap and overtakes the Hirondelle in a neighboring town en route to Yonville. Back home, Felicite urges her to see Homais, at whose place Emma witnesses a curious spectacle. Homais scolds Justin for using a pan that was stored next to the bottle of arsenic in his professional supplies cupboard. In the heat of anger, Homais forgets all about a condolence speech he had prepared for Emma. He blurts out the news that her father-in-law died two days ago. At home, Emma is indifferent to Charles' bereavement. She looks upon him as a spineless individual and yearns to get rid of him. Charles' mother arrives the next day, and mother and son grieve together. Lheureux visits Emma during this period and urges her to attain a power of attorney from Charles in order to expedite payments. After her mother-in-law leaves, Emma makes inquiries about the legal implications of the deed, and Charles urges her to go to Rouen to consult with Leon before having Monsieur Guillaumin attend to the documents. As a result, Emma is able to spend three exquisite days with Leon. They stay at the Hotel de Boulogne. During one of their boat rides, the boatman mentions the name of a person who had been part of a group that he had ferried some time back, saying, \"Adolphe. . .Dodolphe, I think it was.\" Emma thinks about Rodolphe and shivers. At the end of her stay, Emma and Leon part with the agreement that Leon will send her letters through Madame Rollet, the nurse. He wonders at Emma's shrewdness as she instructs him to use a double envelope for his letters. He is also curious about her need for the power of attorney. After Emma' visit, Leon totally immerses himself in the relationship. He ignores his official duties and his friends. He writes to Emma and waits for her letters. They meet one night, and Emma promises to devise a way that they might meet more often. She cleverly gets Charles' permission for weekly music lessons at Rouen. Meanwhile, Lheureux becomes indispensable to Emma, as does Madame Rollet.", "analysis": "Notes The seemingly innocuous episode in which Homais reprimands Justin has great significance. It is through Homais' ramblings here that Emma becomes aware of the arsenic in his possession and where it is kept. The reader realizes that this entire scene would have not occurred if it had not been for Homais' compulsive need to be overly dramatic. Homais, therefore, unwittingly becomes an ally in Emma's later suicide. After again taking up with Leon, Emma keeps her distance from Charles, much as she did during the affair with Rodolphe. Now, despite his grief over the loss of his father, she fails to sympathize with her husband. She remembers the Hippolyte incident and finds more reasons to dislike Charles. She also depends on the crooked Lheureux and accepts his suggestion that she attain power of attorney from her husband. Under the pretext of the power of attorney and at Charles' suggestion, she spends three romantic days with Leon in Rouen. The only thing that interrupts her joy is when the boatman describes a passenger who seems to have been Rodolphe. Emma shivers at the thought of him and her past indiscretion. Emma's influence over Leon is clearly harmful. After their \"honeymoon,\" Leon is thoroughly enmeshed in the affair, forgetting his friends and job. The entanglement will later harm Leon's job prospects. He, however, seems powerless to do anything about his attraction at this point even though he observes that Emma is a \"wonderfully astute intriguer. \" Flaubert does, in deed, depict Emma as growing more and more calculating in order to have her way. Emma's schemes to meet Leon regularly also indicate the extent of her deceptiveness. She is clearly a woman who knows what she wants and how to get it. This section of the novel is particularly unsympathetic in Flaubert's portrayal of Emma as he portrays the total deterioration of her moral character. Lheureux's villainy also increases in this section."}

On reaching the inn, Madame Bovary was surprised not to see the diligence. Hivert, who had waited for her fifty-three minutes, had at last started. Yet nothing forced her to go; but she had given her word that she would return that same evening. Moreover, Charles expected her, and in her heart she felt already that cowardly docility that is for some women at once the chastisement and atonement of adultery. She packed her box quickly, paid her bill, took a cab in the yard, hurrying on the driver, urging him on, every moment inquiring about the time and the miles traversed. He succeeded in catching up the "Hirondelle" as it neared the first houses of Quincampoix. Hardly was she seated in her corner than she closed her eyes, and opened them at the foot of the hill, when from afar she recognised Felicite, who was on the lookout in front of the farrier's shop. Hivert pulled in his horses and, the servant, climbing up to the window, said mysteriously-- "Madame, you must go at once to Monsieur Homais. It's for something important." The village was silent as usual. At the corner of the streets were small pink heaps that smoked in the air, for this was the time for jam-making, and everyone at Yonville prepared his supply on the same day. But in front of the chemist's shop one might admire a far larger heap, and that surpassed the others with the superiority that a laboratory must have over ordinary stores, a general need over individual fancy. She went in. The large arm-chair was upset, and even the "Fanal de Rouen" lay on the ground, outspread between two pestles. She pushed open the lobby door, and in the middle of the kitchen, amid brown jars full of picked currants, of powdered sugar and lump sugar, of the scales on the table, and of the pans on the fire, she saw all the Homais, small and large, with aprons reaching to their chins, and with forks in their hands. Justin was standing up with bowed head, and the chemist was screaming-- "Who told you to go and fetch it in the Capharnaum." "What is it? What is the matter?" "What is it?" replied the druggist. "We are making preserves; they are simmering; but they were about to boil over, because there is too much juice, and I ordered another pan. Then he, from indolence, from laziness, went and took, hanging on its nail in my laboratory, the key of the Capharnaum." It was thus the druggist called a small room under the leads, full of the utensils and the goods of his trade. He often spent long hours there alone, labelling, decanting, and doing up again; and he looked upon it not as a simple store, but as a veritable sanctuary, whence there afterwards issued, elaborated by his hands, all sorts of pills, boluses, infusions, lotions, and potions, that would bear far and wide his celebrity. No one in the world set foot there, and he respected it so, that he swept it himself. Finally, if the pharmacy, open to all comers, was the spot where he displayed his pride, the Capharnaum was the refuge where, egoistically concentrating himself, Homais delighted in the exercise of his predilections, so that Justin's thoughtlessness seemed to him a monstrous piece of irreverence, and, redder than the currants, he repeated-- "Yes, from the Capharnaum! The key that locks up the acids and caustic alkalies! To go and get a spare pan! a pan with a lid! and that I shall perhaps never use! Everything is of importance in the delicate operations of our art! But, devil take it! one must make distinctions, and not employ for almost domestic purposes that which is meant for pharmaceutical! It is as if one were to carve a fowl with a scalpel; as if a magistrate--" "Now be calm," said Madame Homais. And Athalie, pulling at his coat, cried "Papa! papa!" "No, let me alone," went on the druggist "let me alone, hang it! My word! One might as well set up for a grocer. That's it! go it! respect nothing! break, smash, let loose the leeches, burn the mallow-paste, pickle the gherkins in the window jars, tear up the bandages!" "I thought you had--" said Emma. "Presently! Do you know to what you exposed yourself? Didn't you see anything in the corner, on the left, on the third shelf? Speak, answer, articulate something." "I--don't--know," stammered the young fellow. "Ah! you don't know! Well, then, I do know! You saw a bottle of blue glass, sealed with yellow wax, that contains a white powder, on which I have even written 'Dangerous!' And do you know what is in it? Arsenic! And you go and touch it! You take a pan that was next to it!" "Next to it!" cried Madame Homais, clasping her hands. "Arsenic! You might have poisoned us all." And the children began howling as if they already had frightful pains in their entrails. "Or poison a patient!" continued the druggist. "Do you want to see me in the prisoner's dock with criminals, in a court of justice? To see me dragged to the scaffold? Don't you know what care I take in managing things, although I am so thoroughly used to it? Often I am horrified myself when I think of my responsibility; for the Government persecutes us, and the absurd legislation that rules us is a veritable Damocles' sword over our heads." Emma no longer dreamed of asking what they wanted her for, and the druggist went on in breathless phrases-- "That is your return for all the kindness we have shown you! That is how you recompense me for the really paternal care that I lavish on you! For without me where would you be? What would you be doing? Who provides you with food, education, clothes, and all the means of figuring one day with honour in the ranks of society? But you must pull hard at the oar if you're to do that, and get, as, people say, callosities upon your hands. Fabricando fit faber, age quod agis.*" * The worker lives by working, do what he will. He was so exasperated he quoted Latin. He would have quoted Chinese or Greenlandish had he known those two languages, for he was in one of those crises in which the whole soul shows indistinctly what it contains, like the ocean, which, in the storm, opens itself from the seaweeds on its shores down to the sands of its abysses. And he went on-- "I am beginning to repent terribly of having taken you up! I should certainly have done better to have left you to rot in your poverty and the dirt in which you were born. Oh, you'll never be fit for anything but to herd animals with horns! You have no aptitude for science! You hardly know how to stick on a label! And there you are, dwelling with me snug as a parson, living in clover, taking your ease!" But Emma, turning to Madame Homais, "I was told to come here--" "Oh, dear me!" interrupted the good woman, with a sad air, "how am I to tell you? It is a misfortune!" She could not finish, the druggist was thundering--"Empty it! Clean it! Take it back! Be quick!" And seizing Justin by the collar of his blouse, he shook a book out of his pocket. The lad stooped, but Homais was the quicker, and, having picked up the volume, contemplated it with staring eyes and open mouth. "CONJUGAL--LOVE!" he said, slowly separating the two words. "Ah! very good! very good! very pretty! And illustrations! Oh, this is too much!" Madame Homais came forward. "No, do not touch it!" The children wanted to look at the pictures. "Leave the room," he said imperiously; and they went out. First he walked up and down with the open volume in his hand, rolling his eyes, choking, tumid, apoplectic. Then he came straight to his pupil, and, planting himself in front of him with crossed arms-- "Have you every vice, then, little wretch? Take care! you are on a downward path. Did not you reflect that this infamous book might fall in the hands of my children, kindle a spark in their minds, tarnish the purity of Athalie, corrupt Napoleon. He is already formed like a man. Are you quite sure, anyhow, that they have not read it? Can you certify to me--" "But really, sir," said Emma, "you wished to tell me--" "Ah, yes! madame. Your father-in-law is dead." In fact, Monsieur Bovary senior had expired the evening before suddenly from an attack of apoplexy as he got up from table, and by way of greater precaution, on account of Emma's sensibility, Charles had begged Homais to break the horrible news to her gradually. Homais had thought over his speech; he had rounded, polished it, made it rhythmical; it was a masterpiece of prudence and transitions, of subtle turns and delicacy; but anger had got the better of rhetoric. Emma, giving up all chance of hearing any details, left the pharmacy; for Monsieur Homais had taken up the thread of his vituperations. However, he was growing calmer, and was now grumbling in a paternal tone whilst he fanned himself with his skull-cap. "It is not that I entirely disapprove of the work. Its author was a doctor! There are certain scientific points in it that it is not ill a man should know, and I would even venture to say that a man must know. But later--later! At any rate, not till you are man yourself and your temperament is formed." When Emma knocked at the door. Charles, who was waiting for her, came forward with open arms and said to her with tears in his voice-- "Ah! my dear!" And he bent over her gently to kiss her. But at the contact of his lips the memory of the other seized her, and she passed her hand over her face shuddering. But she made answer, "Yes, I know, I know!" He showed her the letter in which his mother told the event without any sentimental hypocrisy. She only regretted her husband had not received the consolations of religion, as he had died at Daudeville, in the street, at the door of a cafe after a patriotic dinner with some ex-officers. Emma gave him back the letter; then at dinner, for appearance's sake, she affected a certain repugnance. But as he urged her to try, she resolutely began eating, while Charles opposite her sat motionless in a dejected attitude. Now and then he raised his head and gave her a long look full of distress. Once he sighed, "I should have liked to see him again!" She was silent. At last, understanding that she must say something, "How old was your father?" she asked. "Fifty-eight." "Ah!" And that was all. A quarter of an hour after he added, "My poor mother! what will become of her now?" She made a gesture that signified she did not know. Seeing her so taciturn, Charles imagined her much affected, and forced himself to say nothing, not to reawaken this sorrow which moved him. And, shaking off his own-- "Did you enjoy yourself yesterday?" he asked. "Yes." When the cloth was removed, Bovary did not rise, nor did Emma; and as she looked at him, the monotony of the spectacle drove little by little all pity from her heart. He seemed to her paltry, weak, a cipher--in a word, a poor thing in every way. How to get rid of him? What an interminable evening! Something stupefying like the fumes of opium seized her. They heard in the passage the sharp noise of a wooden leg on the boards. It was Hippolyte bringing back Emma's luggage. In order to put it down he described painfully a quarter of a circle with his stump. "He doesn't even remember any more about it," she thought, looking at the poor devil, whose coarse red hair was wet with perspiration. Bovary was searching at the bottom of his purse for a centime, and without appearing to understand all there was of humiliation for him in the mere presence of this man, who stood there like a personified reproach to his incurable incapacity. "Hallo! you've a pretty bouquet," he said, noticing Leon's violets on the chimney. "Yes," she replied indifferently; "it's a bouquet I bought just now from a beggar." Charles picked up the flowers, and freshening his eyes, red with tears, against them, smelt them delicately. She took them quickly from his hand and put them in a glass of water. The next day Madame Bovary senior arrived. She and her son wept much. Emma, on the pretext of giving orders, disappeared. The following day they had a talk over the mourning. They went and sat down with their workboxes by the waterside under the arbour. Charles was thinking of his father, and was surprised to feel so much affection for this man, whom till then he had thought he cared little about. Madame Bovary senior was thinking of her husband. The worst days of the past seemed enviable to her. All was forgotten beneath the instinctive regret of such a long habit, and from time to time whilst she sewed, a big tear rolled along her nose and hung suspended there a moment. Emma was thinking that it was scarcely forty-eight hours since they had been together, far from the world, all in a frenzy of joy, and not having eyes enough to gaze upon each other. She tried to recall the slightest details of that past day. But the presence of her husband and mother-in-law worried her. She would have liked to hear nothing, to see nothing, so as not to disturb the meditation on her love, that, do what she would, became lost in external sensations. She was unpicking the lining of a dress, and the strips were scattered around her. Madame Bovary senior was plying her scissor without looking up, and Charles, in his list slippers and his old brown surtout that he used as a dressing-gown, sat with both hands in his pockets, and did not speak either; near them Berthe, in a little white pinafore, was raking sand in the walks with her spade. Suddenly she saw Monsieur Lheureux, the linendraper, come in through the gate. He came to offer his services "under the sad circumstances." Emma answered that she thought she could do without. The shopkeeper was not to be beaten. "I beg your pardon," he said, "but I should like to have a private talk with you." Then in a low voice, "It's about that affair--you know." Charles crimsoned to his ears. "Oh, yes! certainly." And in his confusion, turning to his wife, "Couldn't you, my darling?" She seemed to understand him, for she rose; and Charles said to his mother, "It is nothing particular. No doubt, some household trifle." He did not want her to know the story of the bill, fearing her reproaches. As soon as they were alone, Monsieur Lheureux in sufficiently clear terms began to congratulate Emma on the inheritance, then to talk of indifferent matters, of the espaliers, of the harvest, and of his own health, which was always so-so, always having ups and downs. In fact, he had to work devilish hard, although he didn't make enough, in spite of all people said, to find butter for his bread. Emma let him talk on. She had bored herself so prodigiously the last two days. "And so you're quite well again?" he went on. "Ma foi! I saw your husband in a sad state. He's a good fellow, though we did have a little misunderstanding." She asked what misunderstanding, for Charles had said nothing of the dispute about the goods supplied to her. "Why, you know well enough," cried Lheureux. "It was about your little fancies--the travelling trunks." He had drawn his hat over his eyes, and, with his hands behind his back, smiling and whistling, he looked straight at her in an unbearable manner. Did he suspect anything? She was lost in all kinds of apprehensions. At last, however, he went on-- "We made it up, all the same, and I've come again to propose another arrangement." This was to renew the bill Bovary had signed. The doctor, of course, would do as he pleased; he was not to trouble himself, especially just now, when he would have a lot of worry. "And he would do better to give it over to someone else--to you, for example. With a power of attorney it could be easily managed, and then we (you and I) would have our little business transactions together." She did not understand. He was silent. Then, passing to his trade, Lheureux declared that madame must require something. He would send her a black barege, twelve yards, just enough to make a gown. "The one you've on is good enough for the house, but you want another for calls. I saw that the very moment that I came in. I've the eye of an American!" He did not send the stuff; he brought it. Then he came again to measure it; he came again on other pretexts, always trying to make himself agreeable, useful, "enfeoffing himself," as Homais would have said, and always dropping some hint to Emma about the power of attorney. He never mentioned the bill; she did not think of it. Charles, at the beginning of her convalescence, had certainly said something about it to her, but so many emotions had passed through her head that she no longer remembered it. Besides, she took care not to talk of any money questions. Madame Bovary seemed surprised at this, and attributed the change in her ways to the religious sentiments she had contracted during her illness. But as soon as she was gone, Emma greatly astounded Bovary by her practical good sense. It would be necessary to make inquiries, to look into mortgages, and see if there were any occasion for a sale by auction or a liquidation. She quoted technical terms casually, pronounced the grand words of order, the future, foresight, and constantly exaggerated the difficulties of settling his father's affairs so much, that at last one day she showed him the rough draft of a power of attorney to manage and administer his business, arrange all loans, sign and endorse all bills, pay all sums, etc. She had profited by Lheureux's lessons. Charles naively asked her where this paper came from. "Monsieur Guillaumin"; and with the utmost coolness she added, "I don't trust him overmuch. Notaries have such a bad reputation. Perhaps we ought to consult--we only know--no one." "Unless Leon--" replied Charles, who was reflecting. But it was difficult to explain matters by letter. Then she offered to make the journey, but he thanked her. She insisted. It was quite a contest of mutual consideration. At last she cried with affected waywardness-- "No, I will go!" "How good you are!" he said, kissing her forehead. The next morning she set out in the "Hirondelle" to go to Rouen to consult Monsieur Leon, and she stayed there three days. They were three full, exquisite days--a true honeymoon. They were at the Hotel-de-Boulogne, on the harbour; and they lived there, with drawn blinds and closed doors, with flowers on the floor, and iced syrups were brought them early in the morning. Towards evening they took a covered boat and went to dine on one of the islands. It was the time when one hears by the side of the dockyard the caulking-mallets sounding against the hull of vessels. The smoke of the tar rose up between the trees; there were large fatty drops on the water, undulating in the purple colour of the sun, like floating plaques of Florentine bronze. They rowed down in the midst of moored boats, whose long oblique cables grazed lightly against the bottom of the boat. The din of the town gradually grew distant; the rolling of carriages, the tumult of voices, the yelping of dogs on the decks of vessels. She took off her bonnet, and they landed on their island. They sat down in the low-ceilinged room of a tavern, at whose door hung black nets. They ate fried smelts, cream and cherries. They lay down upon the grass; they kissed behind the poplars; and they would fain, like two Robinsons, have lived for ever in this little place, which seemed to them in their beatitude the most magnificent on earth. It was not the first time that they had seen trees, a blue sky, meadows; that they had heard the water flowing and the wind blowing in the leaves; but, no doubt, they had never admired all this, as if Nature had not existed before, or had only begun to be beautiful since the gratification of their desires. At night they returned. The boat glided along the shores of the islands. They sat at the bottom, both hidden by the shade, in silence. The square oars rang in the iron thwarts, and, in the stillness, seemed to mark time, like the beating of a metronome, while at the stern the rudder that trailed behind never ceased its gentle splash against the water. Once the moon rose; they did not fail to make fine phrases, finding the orb melancholy and full of poetry. She even began to sing-- "One night, do you remember, we were sailing," etc. Her musical but weak voice died away along the waves, and the winds carried off the trills that Leon heard pass like the flapping of wings about him. She was opposite him, leaning against the partition of the shallop, through one of whose raised blinds the moon streamed in. Her black dress, whose drapery spread out like a fan, made her seem more slender, taller. Her head was raised, her hands clasped, her eyes turned towards heaven. At times the shadow of the willows hid her completely; then she reappeared suddenly, like a vision in the moonlight. Leon, on the floor by her side, found under his hand a ribbon of scarlet silk. The boatman looked at it, and at last said-- "Perhaps it belongs to the party I took out the other day. A lot of jolly folk, gentlemen and ladies, with cakes, champagne, cornets--everything in style! There was one especially, a tall handsome man with small moustaches, who was that funny! And they all kept saying, 'Now tell us something, Adolphe--Dolpe,' I think." She shivered. "You are in pain?" asked Leon, coming closer to her. "Oh, it's nothing! No doubt, it is only the night air." "And who doesn't want for women, either," softly added the sailor, thinking he was paying the stranger a compliment. Then, spitting on his hands, he took the oars again. Yet they had to part. The adieux were sad. He was to send his letters to Mere Rollet, and she gave him such precise instructions about a double envelope that he admired greatly her amorous astuteness. "So you can assure me it is all right?" she said with her last kiss. "Yes, certainly." "But why," he thought afterwards as he came back through the streets alone, "is she so very anxious to get this power of attorney?" Leon soon put on an air of superiority before his comrades, avoided their company, and completely neglected his work. He waited for her letters; he re-read them; he wrote to her. He called her to mind with all the strength of his desires and of his memories. Instead of lessening with absence, this longing to see her again grew, so that at last on Saturday morning he escaped from his office. When, from the summit of the hill, he saw in the valley below the church-spire with its tin flag swinging in the wind, he felt that delight mingled with triumphant vanity and egoistic tenderness that millionaires must experience when they come back to their native village. He went rambling round her house. A light was burning in the kitchen. He watched for her shadow behind the curtains, but nothing appeared. Mere Lefrancois, when she saw him, uttered many exclamations. She thought he "had grown and was thinner," while Artemise, on the contrary, thought him stouter and darker. He dined in the little room as of yore, but alone, without the tax-gatherer; for Binet, tired of waiting for the "Hirondelle," had definitely put forward his meal one hour, and now he dined punctually at five, and yet he declared usually the rickety old concern "was late." Leon, however, made up his mind, and knocked at the doctor's door. Madame was in her room, and did not come down for a quarter of an hour. The doctor seemed delighted to see him, but he never stirred out that evening, nor all the next day. He saw her alone in the evening, very late, behind the garden in the lane; in the lane, as she had the other one! It was a stormy night, and they talked under an umbrella by lightning flashes. Their separation was becoming intolerable. "I would rather die!" said Emma. She was writhing in his arms, weeping. "Adieu! adieu! When shall I see you again?" They came back again to embrace once more, and it was then that she promised him to find soon, by no matter what means, a regular opportunity for seeing one another in freedom at least once a week. Emma never doubted she should be able to do this. Besides, she was full of hope. Some money was coming to her. On the strength of it she bought a pair of yellow curtains with large stripes for her room, whose cheapness Monsieur Lheureux had commended; she dreamed of getting a carpet, and Lheureux, declaring that it wasn't "drinking the sea," politely undertook to supply her with one. She could no longer do without his services. Twenty times a day she sent for him, and he at once put by his business without a murmur. People could not understand either why Mere Rollet breakfasted with her every day, and even paid her private visits. It was about this time, that is to say, the beginning of winter, that she seemed seized with great musical fervour. One evening when Charles was listening to her, she began the same piece four times over, each time with much vexation, while he, not noticing any difference, cried-- "Bravo! very goodl You are wrong to stop. Go on!" "Oh, no; it is execrable! My fingers are quite rusty." The next day he begged her to play him something again. "Very well; to please you!" And Charles confessed she had gone off a little. She played wrong notes and blundered; then, stopping short-- "Ah! it is no use. I ought to take some lessons; but--" She bit her lips and added, "Twenty francs a lesson, that's too dear!" "Yes, so it is--rather," said Charles, giggling stupidly. "But it seems to me that one might be able to do it for less; for there are artists of no reputation, and who are often better than the celebrities." "Find them!" said Emma. The next day when he came home he looked at her shyly, and at last could no longer keep back the words. "How obstinate you are sometimes! I went to Barfucheres to-day. Well, Madame Liegard assured me that her three young ladies who are at La Misericorde have lessons at fifty sous apiece, and that from an excellent mistress!" She shrugged her shoulders and did not open her piano again. But when she passed by it (if Bovary were there), she sighed-- "Ah! my poor piano!" And when anyone came to see her, she did not fail to inform them she had given up music, and could not begin again now for important reasons. Then people commiserated her-- "What a pity! she had so much talent!" They even spoke to Bovary about it. They put him to shame, and especially the chemist. "You are wrong. One should never let any of the faculties of nature lie fallow. Besides, just think, my good friend, that by inducing madame to study; you are economising on the subsequent musical education of your child. For my own part, I think that mothers ought themselves to instruct their children. That is an idea of Rousseau's, still rather new perhaps, but that will end by triumphing, I am certain of it, like mothers nursing their own children and vaccination." So Charles returned once more to this question of the piano. Emma replied bitterly that it would be better to sell it. This poor piano, that had given her vanity so much satisfaction--to see it go was to Bovary like the indefinable suicide of a part of herself. "If you liked," he said, "a lesson from time to time, that wouldn't after all be very ruinous." "But lessons," she replied, "are only of use when followed up." And thus it was she set about obtaining her husband's permission to go to town once a week to see her lover. At the end of a month she was even considered to have made considerable progress.

Chapter 2 - 4

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary41.asp

Emma reaches the inn late after her rendezvous and misses the Hirondelle that had been specially sent for her. She hires a trap and overtakes the Hirondelle in a neighboring town en route to Yonville. Back home, Felicite urges her to see Homais, at whose place Emma witnesses a curious spectacle. Homais scolds Justin for using a pan that was stored next to the bottle of arsenic in his professional supplies cupboard. In the heat of anger, Homais forgets all about a condolence speech he had prepared for Emma. He blurts out the news that her father-in-law died two days ago. At home, Emma is indifferent to Charles' bereavement. She looks upon him as a spineless individual and yearns to get rid of him. Charles' mother arrives the next day, and mother and son grieve together. Lheureux visits Emma during this period and urges her to attain a power of attorney from Charles in order to expedite payments. After her mother-in-law leaves, Emma makes inquiries about the legal implications of the deed, and Charles urges her to go to Rouen to consult with Leon before having Monsieur Guillaumin attend to the documents. As a result, Emma is able to spend three exquisite days with Leon. They stay at the Hotel de Boulogne. During one of their boat rides, the boatman mentions the name of a person who had been part of a group that he had ferried some time back, saying, "Adolphe. . .Dodolphe, I think it was." Emma thinks about Rodolphe and shivers. At the end of her stay, Emma and Leon part with the agreement that Leon will send her letters through Madame Rollet, the nurse. He wonders at Emma's shrewdness as she instructs him to use a double envelope for his letters. He is also curious about her need for the power of attorney. After Emma' visit, Leon totally immerses himself in the relationship. He ignores his official duties and his friends. He writes to Emma and waits for her letters. They meet one night, and Emma promises to devise a way that they might meet more often. She cleverly gets Charles' permission for weekly music lessons at Rouen. Meanwhile, Lheureux becomes indispensable to Emma, as does Madame Rollet.

Notes The seemingly innocuous episode in which Homais reprimands Justin has great significance. It is through Homais' ramblings here that Emma becomes aware of the arsenic in his possession and where it is kept. The reader realizes that this entire scene would have not occurred if it had not been for Homais' compulsive need to be overly dramatic. Homais, therefore, unwittingly becomes an ally in Emma's later suicide. After again taking up with Leon, Emma keeps her distance from Charles, much as she did during the affair with Rodolphe. Now, despite his grief over the loss of his father, she fails to sympathize with her husband. She remembers the Hippolyte incident and finds more reasons to dislike Charles. She also depends on the crooked Lheureux and accepts his suggestion that she attain power of attorney from her husband. Under the pretext of the power of attorney and at Charles' suggestion, she spends three romantic days with Leon in Rouen. The only thing that interrupts her joy is when the boatman describes a passenger who seems to have been Rodolphe. Emma shivers at the thought of him and her past indiscretion. Emma's influence over Leon is clearly harmful. After their "honeymoon," Leon is thoroughly enmeshed in the affair, forgetting his friends and job. The entanglement will later harm Leon's job prospects. He, however, seems powerless to do anything about his attraction at this point even though he observes that Emma is a "wonderfully astute intriguer. " Flaubert does, in deed, depict Emma as growing more and more calculating in order to have her way. Emma's schemes to meet Leon regularly also indicate the extent of her deceptiveness. She is clearly a woman who knows what she wants and how to get it. This section of the novel is particularly unsympathetic in Flaubert's portrayal of Emma as he portrays the total deterioration of her moral character. Lheureux's villainy also increases in this section.

pinkmonkey

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finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_26_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 5

chapter 5

{"name": "Chapter 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary42.asp", "summary": "Every time Emma goes to Rouen for her 'music lessons', she has a passionate meeting with Leon. Their usual place of rendezvous is a hotel situated in a district of \"theaters, bars and brothels.\" The lovers feel comfortable in their usual room and often imagine that it is their own home. Leon is happy that his mistress is an elegant married woman while Emma addresses Leon as \"child.\" Taking leave of the other is difficult for both. On her way home, Emma sobs in the privacy of the Hirondelle. Her regular journey acquaints her with an old tramp that loiters in the region along her route. He is a hideous creature. His voice permeates Emma's psyche and makes her melancholy. At home, Justin makes himself \"more resourceful in her service than a first-class chambermaid,\" but Emma hardly notices him. She spends the remainder of the week yearning for Leon. Her conversations with Leon are presented here. During a philosophical discussion of \"earthly disillusionment,\" Emma confesses that she had loved someone before him. She also tells him that her ex-lover had been a \"ship's captain. \" This revelation makes Leon feel lowly. He is thoroughly convinced of Emma's sophistication, which she displays through her expensive tastes. All the while, Emma plays the role of the doting wife at home in order not to raise Charles' suspicion. One day, Charles mentions that he has met the lady from whom Emma is supposedly taking music lessons. The music teacher has apparently not heard of Emma. This revelation shocks Emma, but she covers up her lie with more lies. She even duplicates a receipt of sixty-five francs 'issued' by the music teacher in order to reassure Charles. Another time, Charles sends a shawl through Bournisien, the priest, to Emma. The priest does not find Emma at the music teacher's establishment, but he remains discreet about the matter. Once Lheureux sees Emma in Leon's arms at the hotel entrance. He sizes up the 'affair' and cleverly tricks Emma into signing more notes of credit without Charles' knowledge. When her mother-in-law comes to visit, she reprimands Emma for her expensive tastes. There is a dispute regarding the power of attorney, and the elderly lady leaves in a huff. One night Emma is late in returning home from Rouen. A distraught Charles goes to look for her. When they meet, Emma lies her way out of any trouble, telling Charles that she has not been well. She apologizes for having inconvenienced him and does not change her ways. Her affair with Leon continues despite all the problems.", "analysis": "Notes This chapter depicts Emma's deceptive nature at its best. Under the pretext of attending music lessons, she spends time with her lover in Rouen. They both live under a cloud of romantic illusion, pretending that the hotel room is their home. It is ironic that they pretend to relate to each other as man and wife, and yet their place of rendezvous is in a district of \"bars and brothels.\" Once home, Emma tries to be a charming wife and loving mother. While she finds her husband unbearable and her married life miserable, she does not really have the financial means to break away from Charles. Her ex-lover, Rodolphe, could have helped in this regard, but Leon does not have a similar source of income. As a result, Emma must lead her double life. Emma's first note of disquietude appears with the introduction of the tramp, whom she often encounters on her way home from Rouen. His plaintive voice \"had a suggestion of remoteness that upset . It penetrated to the very depths of her being like a whirlwind in an abyss. It swept her away into the vast spaces of a limitless melancholy.\" He serves to foreshadow that all will not go well with this relationship with Leon. Charles' questioning of Emma about her music lessons is also upsetting. It seems that he is growing less naive as he challenges Emma and sends Bournisien, the priest, to check on the music teacher. It is also ironic that the priest hides the truth from Charles. An interesting feature of the Emma-Leon relationship is the way she mothers him, even addressing him as \"child.\" She demands a report from Leon of what he does when she is away, and he submits. She dominates him in the way that she had been dominated by Rodolphe. In fact, Leon \"had become her mistress rather than she his.\" This telling statement presents Emma as one accomplished in the art of dissembling. Just as she lies to Charles, she does not hesitate to lie to Leon and tells him that her ex-lover was a ship's captain, so that Leon, who is a mere clerk, might feel 'elevated' by associating with someone like her. It seems that Emma's morality has sunk to the same level of Lheureux's; both are totally deceptive and lie easily in order to get what they want. It is ironic that it is the vicious and scheming Leurheux who sees Emma in Leon's arms and uses his knowledge of the affair to his financial advantage. Images of unhappiness and squalor pervade this chapter. First, the lovers meet in a seedy area; later, a hideous, blind tramp upsets Emma. Then there are misunderstandings with Charles and her mother-in-law. Finally, the despicable Leurheux is seen forcing Emma into greater indebtedness. These images underscore the ugliness of life in general and the banality of the Emma-Leon relationship in particular."}

She went on Thursdays. She got up and dressed silently, in order not to awaken Charles, who would have made remarks about her getting ready too early. Next she walked up and down, went to the windows, and looked out at the Place. The early dawn was broadening between the pillars of the market, and the chemist's shop, with the shutters still up, showed in the pale light of the dawn the large letters of his signboard. When the clock pointed to a quarter past seven, she went off to the "Lion d'Or," whose door Artemise opened yawning. The girl then made up the coals covered by the cinders, and Emma remained alone in the kitchen. Now and again she went out. Hivert was leisurely harnessing his horses, listening, moreover, to Mere Lefrancois, who, passing her head and nightcap through a grating, was charging him with commissions and giving him explanations that would have confused anyone else. Emma kept beating the soles of her boots against the pavement of the yard. At last, when he had eaten his soup, put on his cloak, lighted his pipe, and grasped his whip, he calmly installed himself on his seat. The "Hirondelle" started at a slow trot, and for about a mile stopped here and there to pick up passengers who waited for it, standing at the border of the road, in front of their yard gates. Those who had secured seats the evening before kept it waiting; some even were still in bed in their houses. Hivert called, shouted, swore; then he got down from his seat and went and knocked loudly at the doors. The wind blew through the cracked windows. The four seats, however, filled up. The carriage rolled off; rows of apple-trees followed one upon another, and the road between its two long ditches, full of yellow water, rose, constantly narrowing towards the horizon. Emma knew it from end to end; she knew that after a meadow there was a sign-post, next an elm, a barn, or the hut of a lime-kiln tender. Sometimes even, in the hope of getting some surprise, she shut her eyes, but she never lost the clear perception of the distance to be traversed. At last the brick houses began to follow one another more closely, the earth resounded beneath the wheels, the "Hirondelle" glided between the gardens, where through an opening one saw statues, a periwinkle plant, clipped yews, and a swing. Then on a sudden the town appeared. Sloping down like an amphitheatre, and drowned in the fog, it widened out beyond the bridges confusedly. Then the open country spread away with a monotonous movement till it touched in the distance the vague line of the pale sky. Seen thus from above, the whole landscape looked immovable as a picture; the anchored ships were massed in one corner, the river curved round the foot of the green hills, and the isles, oblique in shape, lay on the water, like large, motionless, black fishes. The factory chimneys belched forth immense brown fumes that were blown away at the top. One heard the rumbling of the foundries, together with the clear chimes of the churches that stood out in the mist. The leafless trees on the boulevards made violet thickets in the midst of the houses, and the roofs, all shining with the rain, threw back unequal reflections, according to the height of the quarters in which they were. Sometimes a gust of wind drove the clouds towards the Saint Catherine hills, like aerial waves that broke silently against a cliff. A giddiness seemed to her to detach itself from this mass of existence, and her heart swelled as if the hundred and twenty thousand souls that palpitated there had all at once sent into it the vapour of the passions she fancied theirs. Her love grew in the presence of this vastness, and expanded with tumult to the vague murmurings that rose towards her. She poured it out upon the square, on the walks, on the streets, and the old Norman city outspread before her eyes as an enormous capital, as a Babylon into which she was entering. She leant with both hands against the window, drinking in the breeze; the three horses galloped, the stones grated in the mud, the diligence rocked, and Hivert, from afar, hailed the carts on the road, while the bourgeois who had spent the night at the Guillaume woods came quietly down the hill in their little family carriages. They stopped at the barrier; Emma undid her overshoes, put on other gloves, rearranged her shawl, and some twenty paces farther she got down from the "Hirondelle." The town was then awakening. Shop-boys in caps were cleaning up the shop-fronts, and women with baskets against their hips, at intervals uttered sonorous cries at the corners of streets. She walked with downcast eyes, close to the walls, and smiling with pleasure under her lowered black veil. For fear of being seen, she did not usually take the most direct road. She plunged into dark alleys, and, all perspiring, reached the bottom of the Rue Nationale, near the fountain that stands there. It is the quarter for theatres, public-houses, and whores. Often a cart would pass near her, bearing some shaking scenery. Waiters in aprons were sprinkling sand on the flagstones between green shrubs. It all smelt of absinthe, cigars, and oysters. She turned down a street; she recognised him by his curling hair that escaped from beneath his hat. Leon walked along the pavement. She followed him to the hotel. He went up, opened the door, entered--What an embrace! Then, after the kisses, the words gushed forth. They told each other the sorrows of the week, the presentiments, the anxiety for the letters; but now everything was forgotten; they gazed into each other's faces with voluptuous laughs, and tender names. The bed was large, of mahogany, in the shape of a boat. The curtains were in red levantine, that hung from the ceiling and bulged out too much towards the bell-shaped bedside; and nothing in the world was so lovely as her brown head and white skin standing out against this purple colour, when, with a movement of shame, she crossed her bare arms, hiding her face in her hands. The warm room, with its discreet carpet, its gay ornaments, and its calm light, seemed made for the intimacies of passion. The curtain-rods, ending in arrows, their brass pegs, and the great balls of the fire-dogs shone suddenly when the sun came in. On the chimney between the candelabra there were two of those pink shells in which one hears the murmur of the sea if one holds them to the ear. How they loved that dear room, so full of gaiety, despite its rather faded splendour! They always found the furniture in the same place, and sometimes hairpins, that she had forgotten the Thursday before, under the pedestal of the clock. They lunched by the fireside on a little round table, inlaid with rosewood. Emma carved, put bits on his plate with all sorts of coquettish ways, and she laughed with a sonorous and libertine laugh when the froth of the champagne ran over from the glass to the rings on her fingers. They were so completely lost in the possession of each other that they thought themselves in their own house, and that they would live there till death, like two spouses eternally young. They said "our room," "our carpet," she even said "my slippers," a gift of Leon's, a whim she had had. They were pink satin, bordered with swansdown. When she sat on his knees, her leg, then too short, hung in the air, and the dainty shoe, that had no back to it, was held only by the toes to her bare foot. He for the first time enjoyed the inexpressible delicacy of feminine refinements. He had never met this grace of language, this reserve of clothing, these poses of the weary dove. He admired the exaltation of her soul and the lace on her petticoat. Besides, was she not "a lady" and a married woman--a real mistress, in fine? By the diversity of her humour, in turn mystical or mirthful, talkative, taciturn, passionate, careless, she awakened in him a thousand desires, called up instincts or memories. She was the mistress of all the novels, the heroine of all the dramas, the vague "she" of all the volumes of verse. He found again on her shoulder the amber colouring of the "Odalisque Bathing"; she had the long waist of feudal chatelaines, and she resembled the "Pale Woman of Barcelona." But above all she was the Angel! Often looking at her, it seemed to him that his soul, escaping towards her, spread like a wave about the outline of her head, and descended drawn down into the whiteness of her breast. He knelt on the ground before her, and with both elbows on her knees looked at her with a smile, his face upturned. She bent over him, and murmured, as if choking with intoxication-- "Oh, do not move! do not speak! look at me! Something so sweet comes from your eyes that helps me so much!" She called him "child." "Child, do you love me?" And she did not listen for his answer in the haste of her lips that fastened to his mouth. On the clock there was a bronze cupid, who smirked as he bent his arm beneath a golden garland. They had laughed at it many a time, but when they had to part everything seemed serious to them. Motionless in front of each other, they kept repeating, "Till Thursday, till Thursday." Suddenly she seized his head between her hands, kissed him hurriedly on the forehead, crying, "Adieu!" and rushed down the stairs. She went to a hairdresser's in the Rue de la Comedie to have her hair arranged. Night fell; the gas was lighted in the shop. She heard the bell at the theatre calling the mummers to the performance, and she saw, passing opposite, men with white faces and women in faded gowns going in at the stage-door. It was hot in the room, small, and too low where the stove was hissing in the midst of wigs and pomades. The smell of the tongs, together with the greasy hands that handled her head, soon stunned her, and she dozed a little in her wrapper. Often, as he did her hair, the man offered her tickets for a masked ball. Then she went away. She went up the streets; reached the Croix-Rouge, put on her overshoes, that she had hidden in the morning under the seat, and sank into her place among the impatient passengers. Some got out at the foot of the hill. She remained alone in the carriage. At every turning all the lights of the town were seen more and more completely, making a great luminous vapour about the dim houses. Emma knelt on the cushions and her eyes wandered over the dazzling light. She sobbed; called on Leon, sent him tender words and kisses lost in the wind. On the hillside a poor devil wandered about with his stick in the midst of the diligences. A mass of rags covered his shoulders, and an old staved-in beaver, turned out like a basin, hid his face; but when he took it off he discovered in the place of eyelids empty and bloody orbits. The flesh hung in red shreds, and there flowed from it liquids that congealed into green scale down to the nose, whose black nostrils sniffed convulsively. To speak to you he threw back his head with an idiotic laugh; then his bluish eyeballs, rolling constantly, at the temples beat against the edge of the open wound. He sang a little song as he followed the carriages-- "Maids an the warmth of a summer day Dream of love, and of love always" And all the rest was about birds and sunshine and green leaves. Sometimes he appeared suddenly behind Emma, bareheaded, and she drew back with a cry. Hivert made fun of him. He would advise him to get a booth at the Saint Romain fair, or else ask him, laughing, how his young woman was. Often they had started when, with a sudden movement, his hat entered the diligence through the small window, while he clung with his other arm to the footboard, between the wheels splashing mud. His voice, feeble at first and quavering, grew sharp; it resounded in the night like the indistinct moan of a vague distress; and through the ringing of the bells, the murmur of the trees, and the rumbling of the empty vehicle, it had a far-off sound that disturbed Emma. It went to the bottom of her soul, like a whirlwind in an abyss, and carried her away into the distances of a boundless melancholy. But Hivert, noticing a weight behind, gave the blind man sharp cuts with his whip. The thong lashed his wounds, and he fell back into the mud with a yell. Then the passengers in the "Hirondelle" ended by falling asleep, some with open mouths, others with lowered chins, leaning against their neighbour's shoulder, or with their arm passed through the strap, oscillating regularly with the jolting of the carriage; and the reflection of the lantern swinging without, on the crupper of the wheeler; penetrating into the interior through the chocolate calico curtains, threw sanguineous shadows over all these motionless people. Emma, drunk with grief, shivered in her clothes, feeling her feet grow colder and colder, and death in her soul. Charles at home was waiting for her; the "Hirondelle" was always late on Thursdays. Madame arrived at last, and scarcely kissed the child. The dinner was not ready. No matter! She excused the servant. This girl now seemed allowed to do just as she liked. Often her husband, noting her pallor, asked if she were unwell. "No," said Emma. "But," he replied, "you seem so strange this evening." "Oh, it's nothing! nothing!" There were even days when she had no sooner come in than she went up to her room; and Justin, happening to be there, moved about noiselessly, quicker at helping her than the best of maids. He put the matches ready, the candlestick, a book, arranged her nightgown, turned back the bedclothes. "Come!" said she, "that will do. Now you can go." For he stood there, his hands hanging down and his eyes wide open, as if enmeshed in the innumerable threads of a sudden reverie. The following day was frightful, and those that came after still more unbearable, because of her impatience to once again seize her happiness; an ardent lust, inflamed by the images of past experience, and that burst forth freely on the seventh day beneath Leon's caresses. His ardours were hidden beneath outbursts of wonder and gratitude. Emma tasted this love in a discreet, absorbed fashion, maintained it by all the artifices of her tenderness, and trembled a little lest it should be lost later on. She often said to him, with her sweet, melancholy voice-- "Ah! you too, you will leave me! You will marry! You will be like all the others." He asked, "What others?" "Why, like all men," she replied. Then added, repulsing him with a languid movement-- "You are all evil!" One day, as they were talking philosophically of earthly disillusions, to experiment on his jealousy, or yielding, perhaps, to an over-strong need to pour out her heart, she told him that formerly, before him, she had loved someone. "Not like you," she went on quickly, protesting by the head of her child that "nothing had passed between them." The young man believed her, but none the less questioned her to find out what he was. "He was a ship's captain, my dear." Was this not preventing any inquiry, and, at the same time, assuming a higher ground through this pretended fascination exercised over a man who must have been of warlike nature and accustomed to receive homage? The clerk then felt the lowliness of his position; he longed for epaulettes, crosses, titles. All that would please her--he gathered that from her spendthrift habits. Emma nevertheless concealed many of these extravagant fancies, such as her wish to have a blue tilbury to drive into Rouen, drawn by an English horse and driven by a groom in top-boots. It was Justin who had inspired her with this whim, by begging her to take him into her service as valet-de-chambre*, and if the privation of it did not lessen the pleasure of her arrival at each rendezvous, it certainly augmented the bitterness of the return. * Manservant. Often, when they talked together of Paris, she ended by murmuring, "Ah! how happy we should be there!" "Are we not happy?" gently answered the young man passing his hands over her hair. "Yes, that is true," she said. "I am mad. Kiss me!" To her husband she was more charming than ever. She made him pistachio-creams, and played him waltzes after dinner. So he thought himself the most fortunate of men and Emma was without uneasiness, when, one evening suddenly he said-- "It is Mademoiselle Lempereur, isn't it, who gives you lessons?" "Yes." "Well, I saw her just now," Charles went on, "at Madame Liegeard's. I spoke to her about you, and she doesn't know you." This was like a thunderclap. However, she replied quite naturally-- "Ah! no doubt she forgot my name." "But perhaps," said the doctor, "there are several Demoiselles Lempereur at Rouen who are music-mistresses." "Possibly!" Then quickly--"But I have my receipts here. See!" And she went to the writing-table, ransacked all the drawers, rummaged the papers, and at last lost her head so completely that Charles earnestly begged her not to take so much trouble about those wretched receipts. "Oh, I will find them," she said. And, in fact, on the following Friday, as Charles was putting on one of his boots in the dark cabinet where his clothes were kept, he felt a piece of paper between the leather and his sock. He took it out and read-- "Received, for three months' lessons and several pieces of music, the sum of sixty-three francs.--Felicie Lempereur, professor of music." "How the devil did it get into my boots?" "It must," she replied, "have fallen from the old box of bills that is on the edge of the shelf." From that moment her existence was but one long tissue of lies, in which she enveloped her love as in veils to hide it. It was a want, a mania, a pleasure carried to such an extent that if she said she had the day before walked on the right side of a road, one might know she had taken the left. One morning, when she had gone, as usual, rather lightly clothed, it suddenly began to snow, and as Charles was watching the weather from the window, he caught sight of Monsieur Bournisien in the chaise of Monsieur Tuvache, who was driving him to Rouen. Then he went down to give the priest a thick shawl that he was to hand over to Emma as soon as he reached the "Croix-Rouge." When he got to the inn, Monsieur Bournisien asked for the wife of the Yonville doctor. The landlady replied that she very rarely came to her establishment. So that evening, when he recognised Madame Bovary in the "Hirondelle," the cure told her his dilemma, without, however, appearing to attach much importance to it, for he began praising a preacher who was doing wonders at the Cathedral, and whom all the ladies were rushing to hear. Still, if he did not ask for any explanation, others, later on, might prove less discreet. So she thought well to get down each time at the "Croix-Rouge," so that the good folk of her village who saw her on the stairs should suspect nothing. One day, however, Monsieur Lheureux met her coming out of the Hotel de Boulogne on Leon's arm; and she was frightened, thinking he would gossip. He was not such a fool. But three days after he came to her room, shut the door, and said, "I must have some money." She declared she could not give him any. Lheureux burst into lamentations and reminded her of all the kindnesses he had shown her. In fact, of the two bills signed by Charles, Emma up to the present had paid only one. As to the second, the shopkeeper, at her request, had consented to replace it by another, which again had been renewed for a long date. Then he drew from his pocket a list of goods not paid for; to wit, the curtains, the carpet, the material for the armchairs, several dresses, and divers articles of dress, the bills for which amounted to about two thousand francs. She bowed her head. He went on-- "But if you haven't any ready money, you have an estate." And he reminded her of a miserable little hovel situated at Barneville, near Aumale, that brought in almost nothing. It had formerly been part of a small farm sold by Monsieur Bovary senior; for Lheureux knew everything, even to the number of acres and the names of the neighbours. "If I were in your place," he said, "I should clear myself of my debts, and have money left over." She pointed out the difficulty of getting a purchaser. He held out the hope of finding one; but she asked him how she should manage to sell it. "Haven't you your power of attorney?" he replied. The phrase came to her like a breath of fresh air. "Leave me the bill," said Emma. "Oh, it isn't worth while," answered Lheureux. He came back the following week and boasted of having, after much trouble, at last discovered a certain Langlois, who, for a long time, had had an eye on the property, but without mentioning his price. "Never mind the price!" she cried. But they would, on the contrary, have to wait, to sound the fellow. The thing was worth a journey, and, as she could not undertake it, he offered to go to the place to have an interview with Langlois. On his return he announced that the purchaser proposed four thousand francs. Emma was radiant at this news. "Frankly," he added, "that's a good price." She drew half the sum at once, and when she was about to pay her account the shopkeeper said-- "It really grieves me, on my word! to see you depriving yourself all at once of such a big sum as that." Then she looked at the bank-notes, and dreaming of the unlimited number of rendezvous represented by those two thousand francs, she stammered-- "What! what!" "Oh!" he went on, laughing good-naturedly, "one puts anything one likes on receipts. Don't you think I know what household affairs are?" And he looked at her fixedly, while in his hand he held two long papers that he slid between his nails. At last, opening his pocket-book, he spread out on the table four bills to order, each for a thousand francs. "Sign these," he said, "and keep it all!" She cried out, scandalised. "But if I give you the surplus," replied Monsieur Lheureux impudently, "is that not helping you?" And taking a pen he wrote at the bottom of the account, "Received of Madame Bovary four thousand francs." "Now who can trouble you, since in six months you'll draw the arrears for your cottage, and I don't make the last bill due till after you've been paid?" Emma grew rather confused in her calculations, and her ears tingled as if gold pieces, bursting from their bags, rang all round her on the floor. At last Lheureux explained that he had a very good friend, Vincart, a broker at Rouen, who would discount these four bills. Then he himself would hand over to madame the remainder after the actual debt was paid. But instead of two thousand francs he brought only eighteen hundred, for the friend Vincart (which was only fair) had deducted two hundred francs for commission and discount. Then he carelessly asked for a receipt. "You understand--in business--sometimes. And with the date, if you please, with the date." A horizon of realisable whims opened out before Emma. She was prudent enough to lay by a thousand crowns, with which the first three bills were paid when they fell due; but the fourth, by chance, came to the house on a Thursday, and Charles, quite upset, patiently awaited his wife's return for an explanation. If she had not told him about this bill, it was only to spare him such domestic worries; she sat on his knees, caressed him, cooed to him, gave him a long enumeration of all the indispensable things that had been got on credit. "Really, you must confess, considering the quantity, it isn't too dear." Charles, at his wit's end, soon had recourse to the eternal Lheureux, who swore he would arrange matters if the doctor would sign him two bills, one of which was for seven hundred francs, payable in three months. In order to arrange for this he wrote his mother a pathetic letter. Instead of sending a reply she came herself; and when Emma wanted to know whether he had got anything out of her, "Yes," he replied; "but she wants to see the account." The next morning at daybreak Emma ran to Lheureux to beg him to make out another account for not more than a thousand francs, for to show the one for four thousand it would be necessary to say that she had paid two-thirds, and confess, consequently, the sale of the estate--a negotiation admirably carried out by the shopkeeper, and which, in fact, was only actually known later on. Despite the low price of each article, Madame Bovary senior, of course, thought the expenditure extravagant. "Couldn't you do without a carpet? Why have recovered the arm-chairs? In my time there was a single arm-chair in a house, for elderly persons--at any rate it was so at my mother's, who was a good woman, I can tell you. Everybody can't be rich! No fortune can hold out against waste! I should be ashamed to coddle myself as you do! And yet I am old. I need looking after. And there! there! fitting up gowns! fallals! What! silk for lining at two francs, when you can get jaconet for ten sous, or even for eight, that would do well enough!" Emma, lying on a lounge, replied as quietly as possible--"Ah! Madame, enough! enough!" The other went on lecturing her, predicting they would end in the workhouse. But it was Bovary's fault. Luckily he had promised to destroy that power of attorney. "What?" "Ah! he swore he would," went on the good woman. Emma opened the window, called Charles, and the poor fellow was obliged to confess the promise torn from him by his mother. Emma disappeared, then came back quickly, and majestically handed her a thick piece of paper. "Thank you," said the old woman. And she threw the power of attorney into the fire. Emma began to laugh, a strident, piercing, continuous laugh; she had an attack of hysterics. "Oh, my God!" cried Charles. "Ah! you really are wrong! You come here and make scenes with her!" His mother, shrugging her shoulders, declared it was "all put on." But Charles, rebelling for the first time, took his wife's part, so that Madame Bovary, senior, said she would leave. She went the very next day, and on the threshold, as he was trying to detain her, she replied-- "No, no! You love her better than me, and you are right. It is natural. For the rest, so much the worse! You will see. Good day--for I am not likely to come soon again, as you say, to make scenes." Charles nevertheless was very crestfallen before Emma, who did not hide the resentment she still felt at his want of confidence, and it needed many prayers before she would consent to have another power of attorney. He even accompanied her to Monsieur Guillaumin to have a second one, just like the other, drawn up. "I understand," said the notary; "a man of science can't be worried with the practical details of life." And Charles felt relieved by this comfortable reflection, which gave his weakness the flattering appearance of higher pre-occupation. And what an outburst the next Thursday at the hotel in their room with Leon! She laughed, cried, sang, sent for sherbets, wanted to smoke cigarettes, seemed to him wild and extravagant, but adorable, superb. He did not know what recreation of her whole being drove her more and more to plunge into the pleasures of life. She was becoming irritable, greedy, voluptuous; and she walked about the streets with him carrying her head high, without fear, so she said, of compromising herself. At times, however, Emma shuddered at the sudden thought of meeting Rodolphe, for it seemed to her that, although they were separated forever, she was not completely free from her subjugation to him. One night she did not return to Yonville at all. Charles lost his head with anxiety, and little Berthe would not go to bed without her mamma, and sobbed enough to break her heart. Justin had gone out searching the road at random. Monsieur Homais even had left his pharmacy. At last, at eleven o'clock, able to bear it no longer, Charles harnessed his chaise, jumped in, whipped up his horse, and reached the "Croix-Rouge" about two o'clock in the morning. No one there! He thought that the clerk had perhaps seen her; but where did he live? Happily, Charles remembered his employer's address, and rushed off there. Day was breaking, and he could distinguish the escutcheons over the door, and knocked. Someone, without opening the door, shouted out the required information, adding a few insults to those who disturb people in the middle of the night. The house inhabited by the clerk had neither bell, knocker, nor porter. Charles knocked loudly at the shutters with his hands. A policeman happened to pass by. Then he was frightened, and went away. "I am mad," he said; "no doubt they kept her to dinner at Monsieur Lormeaux'." But the Lormeaux no longer lived at Rouen. "She probably stayed to look after Madame Dubreuil. Why, Madame Dubreuil has been dead these ten months! Where can she be?" An idea occurred to him. At a cafe he asked for a Directory, and hurriedly looked for the name of Mademoiselle Lempereur, who lived at No. 74 Rue de la Renelle-des-Maroquiniers. As he was turning into the street, Emma herself appeared at the other end of it. He threw himself upon her rather than embraced her, crying-- "What kept you yesterday?" "I was not well." "What was it? Where? How?" She passed her hand over her forehead and answered, "At Mademoiselle Lempereur's." "I was sure of it! I was going there." "Oh, it isn't worth while," said Emma. "She went out just now; but for the future don't worry. I do not feel free, you see, if I know that the least delay upsets you like this." This was a sort of permission that she gave herself, so as to get perfect freedom in her escapades. And she profited by it freely, fully. When she was seized with the desire to see Leon, she set out upon any pretext; and as he was not expecting her on that day, she went to fetch him at his office. It was a great delight at first, but soon he no longer concealed the truth, which was, that his master complained very much about these interruptions. "Pshaw! come along," she said. And he slipped out. She wanted him to dress all in black, and grow a pointed beard, to look like the portraits of Louis XIII. She wanted to see his lodgings; thought them poor. He blushed at them, but she did not notice this, then advised him to buy some curtains like hers, and as he objected to the expense-- "Ah! ah! you care for your money," she said laughing. Each time Leon had to tell her everything that he had done since their last meeting. She asked him for some verses--some verses "for herself," a "love poem" in honour of her. But he never succeeded in getting a rhyme for the second verse; and at last ended by copying a sonnet in a "Keepsake." This was less from vanity than from the one desire of pleasing her. He did not question her ideas; he accepted all her tastes; he was rather becoming her mistress than she his. She had tender words and kisses that thrilled his soul. Where could she have learnt this corruption almost incorporeal in the strength of its profanity and dissimulation?

Chapter 5

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Every time Emma goes to Rouen for her 'music lessons', she has a passionate meeting with Leon. Their usual place of rendezvous is a hotel situated in a district of "theaters, bars and brothels." The lovers feel comfortable in their usual room and often imagine that it is their own home. Leon is happy that his mistress is an elegant married woman while Emma addresses Leon as "child." Taking leave of the other is difficult for both. On her way home, Emma sobs in the privacy of the Hirondelle. Her regular journey acquaints her with an old tramp that loiters in the region along her route. He is a hideous creature. His voice permeates Emma's psyche and makes her melancholy. At home, Justin makes himself "more resourceful in her service than a first-class chambermaid," but Emma hardly notices him. She spends the remainder of the week yearning for Leon. Her conversations with Leon are presented here. During a philosophical discussion of "earthly disillusionment," Emma confesses that she had loved someone before him. She also tells him that her ex-lover had been a "ship's captain. " This revelation makes Leon feel lowly. He is thoroughly convinced of Emma's sophistication, which she displays through her expensive tastes. All the while, Emma plays the role of the doting wife at home in order not to raise Charles' suspicion. One day, Charles mentions that he has met the lady from whom Emma is supposedly taking music lessons. The music teacher has apparently not heard of Emma. This revelation shocks Emma, but she covers up her lie with more lies. She even duplicates a receipt of sixty-five francs 'issued' by the music teacher in order to reassure Charles. Another time, Charles sends a shawl through Bournisien, the priest, to Emma. The priest does not find Emma at the music teacher's establishment, but he remains discreet about the matter. Once Lheureux sees Emma in Leon's arms at the hotel entrance. He sizes up the 'affair' and cleverly tricks Emma into signing more notes of credit without Charles' knowledge. When her mother-in-law comes to visit, she reprimands Emma for her expensive tastes. There is a dispute regarding the power of attorney, and the elderly lady leaves in a huff. One night Emma is late in returning home from Rouen. A distraught Charles goes to look for her. When they meet, Emma lies her way out of any trouble, telling Charles that she has not been well. She apologizes for having inconvenienced him and does not change her ways. Her affair with Leon continues despite all the problems.

Notes This chapter depicts Emma's deceptive nature at its best. Under the pretext of attending music lessons, she spends time with her lover in Rouen. They both live under a cloud of romantic illusion, pretending that the hotel room is their home. It is ironic that they pretend to relate to each other as man and wife, and yet their place of rendezvous is in a district of "bars and brothels." Once home, Emma tries to be a charming wife and loving mother. While she finds her husband unbearable and her married life miserable, she does not really have the financial means to break away from Charles. Her ex-lover, Rodolphe, could have helped in this regard, but Leon does not have a similar source of income. As a result, Emma must lead her double life. Emma's first note of disquietude appears with the introduction of the tramp, whom she often encounters on her way home from Rouen. His plaintive voice "had a suggestion of remoteness that upset . It penetrated to the very depths of her being like a whirlwind in an abyss. It swept her away into the vast spaces of a limitless melancholy." He serves to foreshadow that all will not go well with this relationship with Leon. Charles' questioning of Emma about her music lessons is also upsetting. It seems that he is growing less naive as he challenges Emma and sends Bournisien, the priest, to check on the music teacher. It is also ironic that the priest hides the truth from Charles. An interesting feature of the Emma-Leon relationship is the way she mothers him, even addressing him as "child." She demands a report from Leon of what he does when she is away, and he submits. She dominates him in the way that she had been dominated by Rodolphe. In fact, Leon "had become her mistress rather than she his." This telling statement presents Emma as one accomplished in the art of dissembling. Just as she lies to Charles, she does not hesitate to lie to Leon and tells him that her ex-lover was a ship's captain, so that Leon, who is a mere clerk, might feel 'elevated' by associating with someone like her. It seems that Emma's morality has sunk to the same level of Lheureux's; both are totally deceptive and lie easily in order to get what they want. It is ironic that it is the vicious and scheming Leurheux who sees Emma in Leon's arms and uses his knowledge of the affair to his financial advantage. Images of unhappiness and squalor pervade this chapter. First, the lovers meet in a seedy area; later, a hideous, blind tramp upsets Emma. Then there are misunderstandings with Charles and her mother-in-law. Finally, the despicable Leurheux is seen forcing Emma into greater indebtedness. These images underscore the ugliness of life in general and the banality of the Emma-Leon relationship in particular.

pinkmonkey

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Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 6

chapter 6

{"name": "Chapter 6", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary44.asp", "summary": "One Thursday, Emma arrives in Rouen for her usual rendezvous. Leon, however, does not appear, for he is detained in a meeting with Homais. Leon cannot leave the chemist without arousing his suspicion. When he does manage to get rid of him and reach the hotel, Leon does not find Emma. She has already left. After this incident, their relationship is not the same, for Emma is convinced that Leon has a weak nature for standing her up. Emma tries to be her usual romantic self, but Leon senses \"something extreme, mysterious, mournful\" coming between them. He begins to resent her while she goes out of her way \"to bind him more closely to her.\" Gradually, Emma realizes the inadequacy of this relationship. Emma's financial troubles take a turn for the worse when a certain Monsieur Vincart demands payment for a twenty-franc bill. She tries to postpone the payment by one week but receives a bailiff's notice the next day. Lheureux reluctantly helps her, but not before forcing her further into debt. After this experience, she writes to her husband's clients without his knowledge and asks them to settle their accounts. She borrows from Madame Lefrancois and even from Felicite. She sells some of the things in the house. Despite these efforts, she falls deeper into debt and neglects the household entirely. Charles longs to comfort her but is hesitant. He spends time with Berthe instead. By the time it is autumn, Emma has further degenerated. She has Leon pawn six silver spoons, which were her father's wedding present to her. Leon tries to make Emma see that a cheaper hotel would be equally comfortable for their affair, but she will have none of it. She continues to spend recklessly during the days that they are together. Leon is growing tired of Emma. His mother and his employer have sternly advised him to break off this relationship, and Leon is beginning to agree with them. Emma is equally tired of Leon, but cannot stand the thought of giving up the affair. Her life is in shambles. She continues to receive innumerable financial notices to which she pays little attention. After spending a whole night at a party in Rouen with Leon's friends, she returns home on Friday and is confronted with a royal order demanding payment of three- hundred and twenty francs within twenty-four hours. She rushes to Lheureux, hoping to resolve the issue, but he will not help her.", "analysis": "Notes Homais' trait of imposing himself on another person is well developed in this chapter in his meeting with Leon. The meeting also serves a second purpose. Flaubert is able to trace the beginnings of the breakdown of the Emma-Leon relationship to the time of Homais' visit. After being stood up, Emma sees Leon in a new light. She judges him as \"incapable of heroism, weak, commonplace, effeminate,\" yet she continues to pursue him. There is a total dependence on him on her part. Leon, however, is growing frightened by her show of passion. He also resents \"her progressive absorption of his personality\" and feels \"unmanned\" at the sight of her. Eventually, Emma accepts the fact that the relationship with Leon has gone stale. She yearns for somebody who will fulfill all her desires. What she really yearns for is \"love sentiments she read about in books,\" revealing that Emma is just as romantic as ever, refusing to accept reality. In her financial matters, Emma also refuses to accept reality. She continues to spend lavishly, although she is deeply in debt. She also fails to see through the scheming Lheureux, who has her sign four more credit bills. Weighed down by money matters, Emma displays her stormy side. Emma is headed for a tragic end. Despite her financial woes and her realization about the affair, Emma continues to see Leon, for she is powerless to end the relationship. She secretly hopes that some \"catastrophe... would bring about their separation, since she couldn't make up her mind to it herself.\" Her indecisiveness over Leon is irresponsible, immature, and pathetic. At the same time, she continues to act the devoted wife at home, even acting romantic to her husband, for she knows that she needs Charles' financial assistance. The weal Charles is more devoted to Emma than ever. After Emma is served with the notice demanding payment, the very tone with which Emma addresses Lheureux reveals that her sanity is questionable. She naively over simplifies the matter, believing that the demand will come to nothing. When Lheureux refuses to help Emma this time, it is obvious that the young woman is on her way to financial self-destruction."}

During the journeys he made to see her, Leon had often dined at the chemist's, and he felt obliged from politeness to invite him in turn. "With pleasure!" Monsieur Homais replied; "besides, I must invigorate my mind, for I am getting rusty here. We'll go to the theatre, to the restaurant; we'll make a night of it." "Oh, my dear!" tenderly murmured Madame Homais, alarmed at the vague perils he was preparing to brave. "Well, what? Do you think I'm not sufficiently ruining my health living here amid the continual emanations of the pharmacy? But there! that is the way with women! They are jealous of science, and then are opposed to our taking the most legitimate distractions. No matter! Count upon me. One of these days I shall turn up at Rouen, and we'll go the pace together." The druggist would formerly have taken good care not to use such an expression, but he was cultivating a gay Parisian style, which he thought in the best taste; and, like his neighbour, Madame Bovary, he questioned the clerk curiously about the customs of the capital; he even talked slang to dazzle the bourgeois, saying bender, crummy, dandy, macaroni, the cheese, cut my stick and "I'll hook it," for "I am going." So one Thursday Emma was surprised to meet Monsieur Homais in the kitchen of the "Lion d'Or," wearing a traveller's costume, that is to say, wrapped in an old cloak which no one knew he had, while he carried a valise in one hand and the foot-warmer of his establishment in the other. He had confided his intentions to no one, for fear of causing the public anxiety by his absence. The idea of seeing again the place where his youth had been spent no doubt excited him, for during the whole journey he never ceased talking, and as soon as he had arrived, he jumped quickly out of the diligence to go in search of Leon. In vain the clerk tried to get rid of him. Monsieur Homais dragged him off to the large Cafe de la Normandie, which he entered majestically, not raising his hat, thinking it very provincial to uncover in any public place. Emma waited for Leon three quarters of an hour. At last she ran to his office; and, lost in all sorts of conjectures, accusing him of indifference, and reproaching herself for her weakness, she spent the afternoon, her face pressed against the window-panes. At two o'clock they were still at a table opposite each other. The large room was emptying; the stove-pipe, in the shape of a palm-tree, spread its gilt leaves over the white ceiling, and near them, outside the window, in the bright sunshine, a little fountain gurgled in a white basin, where; in the midst of watercress and asparagus, three torpid lobsters stretched across to some quails that lay heaped up in a pile on their sides. Homais was enjoying himself. Although he was even more intoxicated with the luxury than the rich fare, the Pommard wine all the same rather excited his faculties; and when the omelette au rhum* appeared, he began propounding immoral theories about women. What seduced him above all else was chic. He admired an elegant toilette in a well-furnished apartment, and as to bodily qualities, he didn't dislike a young girl. * In rum. Leon watched the clock in despair. The druggist went on drinking, eating, and talking. "You must be very lonely," he said suddenly, "here at Rouen. To be sure your lady-love doesn't live far away." And the other blushed-- "Come now, be frank. Can you deny that at Yonville--" The young man stammered something. "At Madame Bovary's, you're not making love to--" "To whom?" "The servant!" He was not joking; but vanity getting the better of all prudence, Leon, in spite of himself protested. Besides, he only liked dark women. "I approve of that," said the chemist; "they have more passion." And whispering into his friend's ear, he pointed out the symptoms by which one could find out if a woman had passion. He even launched into an ethnographic digression: the German was vapourish, the French woman licentious, the Italian passionate. "And negresses?" asked the clerk. "They are an artistic taste!" said Homais. "Waiter! two cups of coffee!" "Are we going?" at last asked Leon impatiently. "Ja!" But before leaving he wanted to see the proprietor of the establishment and made him a few compliments. Then the young man, to be alone, alleged he had some business engagement. "Ah! I will escort you," said Homais. And all the while he was walking through the streets with him he talked of his wife, his children; of their future, and of his business; told him in what a decayed condition it had formerly been, and to what a degree of perfection he had raised it. Arrived in front of the Hotel de Boulogne, Leon left him abruptly, ran up the stairs, and found his mistress in great excitement. At mention of the chemist she flew into a passion. He, however, piled up good reasons; it wasn't his fault; didn't she know Homais--did she believe that he would prefer his company? But she turned away; he drew her back, and, sinking on his knees, clasped her waist with his arms in a languorous pose, full of concupiscence and supplication. She was standing up, her large flashing eyes looked at him seriously, almost terribly. Then tears obscured them, her red eyelids were lowered, she gave him her hands, and Leon was pressing them to his lips when a servant appeared to tell the gentleman that he was wanted. "You will come back?" she said. "Yes." "But when?" "Immediately." "It's a trick," said the chemist, when he saw Leon. "I wanted to interrupt this visit, that seemed to me to annoy you. Let's go and have a glass of garus at Bridoux'." Leon vowed that he must get back to his office. Then the druggist joked him about quill-drivers and the law. "Leave Cujas and Barthole alone a bit. Who the devil prevents you? Be a man! Let's go to Bridoux'. You'll see his dog. It's very interesting." And as the clerk still insisted-- "I'll go with you. I'll read a paper while I wait for you, or turn over the leaves of a 'Code.'" Leon, bewildered by Emma's anger, Monsieur Homais' chatter, and, perhaps, by the heaviness of the luncheon, was undecided, and, as it were, fascinated by the chemist, who kept repeating-- "Let's go to Bridoux'. It's just by here, in the Rue Malpalu." Then, through cowardice, through stupidity, through that indefinable feeling that drags us into the most distasteful acts, he allowed himself to be led off to Bridoux', whom they found in his small yard, superintending three workmen, who panted as they turned the large wheel of a machine for making seltzer-water. Homais gave them some good advice. He embraced Bridoux; they took some garus. Twenty times Leon tried to escape, but the other seized him by the arm saying-- "Presently! I'm coming! We'll go to the 'Fanal de Rouen' to see the fellows there. I'll introduce you to Thornassin." At last he managed to get rid of him, and rushed straight to the hotel. Emma was no longer there. She had just gone in a fit of anger. She detested him now. This failing to keep their rendezvous seemed to her an insult, and she tried to rake up other reasons to separate herself from him. He was incapable of heroism, weak, banal, more spiritless than a woman, avaricious too, and cowardly. Then, growing calmer, she at length discovered that she had, no doubt, calumniated him. But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt sticks to our fingers. They gradually came to talking more frequently of matters outside their love, and in the letters that Emma wrote him she spoke of flowers, verses, the moon and the stars, naive resources of a waning passion striving to keep itself alive by all external aids. She was constantly promising herself a profound felicity on her next journey. Then she confessed to herself that she felt nothing extraordinary. This disappointment quickly gave way to a new hope, and Emma returned to him more inflamed, more eager than ever. She undressed brutally, tearing off the thin laces of her corset that nestled around her hips like a gliding snake. She went on tiptoe, barefooted, to see once more that the door was closed, then, pale, serious, and, without speaking, with one movement, she threw herself upon his breast with a long shudder. Yet there was upon that brow covered with cold drops, on those quivering lips, in those wild eyes, in the strain of those arms, something vague and dreary that seemed to Leon to glide between them subtly as if to separate them. He did not dare to question her; but, seeing her so skilled, she must have passed, he thought, through every experience of suffering and of pleasure. What had once charmed now frightened him a little. Besides, he rebelled against his absorption, daily more marked, by her personality. He begrudged Emma this constant victory. He even strove not to love her; then, when he heard the creaking of her boots, he turned coward, like drunkards at the sight of strong drinks. She did not fail, in truth, to lavish all sorts of attentions upon him, from the delicacies of food to the coquettries of dress and languishing looks. She brought roses to her breast from Yonville, which she threw into his face; was anxious about his health, gave him advice as to his conduct; and, in order the more surely to keep her hold on him, hoping perhaps that heaven would take her part, she tied a medal of the Virgin round his neck. She inquired like a virtuous mother about his companions. She said to him-- "Don't see them; don't go out; think only of ourselves; love me!" She would have liked to be able to watch over his life; and the idea occurred to her of having him followed in the streets. Near the hotel there was always a kind of loafer who accosted travellers, and who would not refuse. But her pride revolted at this. "Bah! so much the worse. Let him deceive me! What does it matter to me? As If I cared for him!" One day, when they had parted early and she was returning alone along the boulevard, she saw the walls of her convent; then she sat down on a form in the shade of the elm-trees. How calm that time had been! How she longed for the ineffable sentiments of love that she had tried to figure to herself out of books! The first month of her marriage, her rides in the wood, the viscount that waltzed, and Lagardy singing, all repassed before her eyes. And Leon suddenly appeared to her as far off as the others. "Yet I love him," she said to herself. No matter! She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leant? But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet's heart in an angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! how impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight. A metallic clang droned through the air, and four strokes were heard from the convent-clock. Four o'clock! And it seemed to her that she had been there on that form an eternity. But an infinity of passions may be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a small space. Emma lived all absorbed in hers, and troubled no more about money matters than an archduchess. Once, however, a wretched-looking man, rubicund and bald, came to her house, saying he had been sent by Monsieur Vincart of Rouen. He took out the pins that held together the side-pockets of his long green overcoat, stuck them into his sleeve, and politely handed her a paper. It was a bill for seven hundred francs, signed by her, and which Lheureux, in spite of all his professions, had paid away to Vincart. She sent her servant for him. He could not come. Then the stranger, who had remained standing, casting right and left curious glances, that his thick, fair eyebrows hid, asked with a naive air-- "What answer am I to take Monsieur Vincart?" "Oh," said Emma, "tell him that I haven't it. I will send next week; he must wait; yes, till next week." And the fellow went without another word. But the next day at twelve o'clock she received a summons, and the sight of the stamped paper, on which appeared several times in large letters, "Maitre Hareng, bailiff at Buchy," so frightened her that she rushed in hot haste to the linendraper's. She found him in his shop, doing up a parcel. "Your obedient!" he said; "I am at your service." But Lheureux, all the same, went on with his work, helped by a young girl of about thirteen, somewhat hunch-backed, who was at once his clerk and his servant. Then, his clogs clattering on the shop-boards, he went up in front of Madame Bovary to the first door, and introduced her into a narrow closet, where, in a large bureau in sapon-wood, lay some ledgers, protected by a horizontal padlocked iron bar. Against the wall, under some remnants of calico, one glimpsed a safe, but of such dimensions that it must contain something besides bills and money. Monsieur Lheureux, in fact, went in for pawnbroking, and it was there that he had put Madame Bovary's gold chain, together with the earrings of poor old Tellier, who, at last forced to sell out, had bought a meagre store of grocery at Quincampoix, where he was dying of catarrh amongst his candles, that were less yellow than his face. Lheureux sat down in a large cane arm-chair, saying: "What news?" "See!" And she showed him the paper. "Well how can I help it?" Then she grew angry, reminding him of the promise he had given not to pay away her bills. He acknowledged it. "But I was pressed myself; the knife was at my own throat." "And what will happen now?" she went on. "Oh, it's very simple; a judgment and then a distraint--that's about it!" Emma kept down a desire to strike him, and asked gently if there was no way of quieting Monsieur Vincart. "I dare say! Quiet Vincart! You don't know him; he's more ferocious than an Arab!" Still Monsieur Lheureux must interfere. "Well, listen. It seems to me so far I've been very good to you." And opening one of his ledgers, "See," he said. Then running up the page with his finger, "Let's see! let's see! August 3d, two hundred francs; June 17th, a hundred and fifty; March 23d, forty-six. In April--" He stopped, as if afraid of making some mistake. "Not to speak of the bills signed by Monsieur Bovary, one for seven hundred francs, and another for three hundred. As to your little installments, with the interest, why, there's no end to 'em; one gets quite muddled over 'em. I'll have nothing more to do with it." She wept; she even called him "her good Monsieur Lheureux." But he always fell back upon "that rascal Vincart." Besides, he hadn't a brass farthing; no one was paying him now-a-days; they were eating his coat off his back; a poor shopkeeper like him couldn't advance money. Emma was silent, and Monsieur Lheureux, who was biting the feathers of a quill, no doubt became uneasy at her silence, for he went on-- "Unless one of these days I have something coming in, I might--" "Besides," said she, "as soon as the balance of Barneville--" "What!" And on hearing that Langlois had not yet paid he seemed much surprised. Then in a honied voice-- "And we agree, you say?" "Oh! to anything you like." On this he closed his eyes to reflect, wrote down a few figures, and declaring it would be very difficult for him, that the affair was shady, and that he was being bled, he wrote out four bills for two hundred and fifty francs each, to fall due month by month. "Provided that Vincart will listen to me! However, it's settled. I don't play the fool; I'm straight enough." Next he carelessly showed her several new goods, not one of which, however, was in his opinion worthy of madame. "When I think that there's a dress at threepence-halfpenny a yard, and warranted fast colours! And yet they actually swallow it! Of course you understand one doesn't tell them what it really is!" He hoped by this confession of dishonesty to others to quite convince her of his probity to her. Then he called her back to show her three yards of guipure that he had lately picked up "at a sale." "Isn't it lovely?" said Lheureux. "It is very much used now for the backs of arm-chairs. It's quite the rage." And, more ready than a juggler, he wrapped up the guipure in some blue paper and put it in Emma's hands. "But at least let me know--" "Yes, another time," he replied, turning on his heel. That same evening she urged Bovary to write to his mother, to ask her to send as quickly as possible the whole of the balance due from the father's estate. The mother-in-law replied that she had nothing more, the winding up was over, and there was due to them besides Barneville an income of six hundred francs, that she would pay them punctually. Then Madame Bovary sent in accounts to two or three patients, and she made large use of this method, which was very successful. She was always careful to add a postscript: "Do not mention this to my husband; you know how proud he is. Excuse me. Yours obediently." There were some complaints; she intercepted them. To get money she began selling her old gloves, her old hats, the old odds and ends, and she bargained rapaciously, her peasant blood standing her in good stead. Then on her journey to town she picked up nick-nacks secondhand, that, in default of anyone else, Monsieur Lheureux would certainly take off her hands. She bought ostrich feathers, Chinese porcelain, and trunks; she borrowed from Felicite, from Madame Lefrancois, from the landlady at the Croix-Rouge, from everybody, no matter where. With the money she at last received from Barneville she paid two bills; the other fifteen hundred francs fell due. She renewed the bills, and thus it was continually. Sometimes, it is true, she tried to make a calculation, but she discovered things so exorbitant that she could not believe them possible. Then she recommenced, soon got confused, gave it all up, and thought no more about it. The house was very dreary now. Tradesmen were seen leaving it with angry faces. Handkerchiefs were lying about on the stoves, and little Berthe, to the great scandal of Madame Homais, wore stockings with holes in them. If Charles timidly ventured a remark, she answered roughly that it wasn't her fault. What was the meaning of all these fits of temper? He explained everything through her old nervous illness, and reproaching himself with having taken her infirmities for faults, accused himself of egotism, and longed to go and take her in his arms. "Ah, no!" he said to himself; "I should worry her." And he did not stir. After dinner he walked about alone in the garden; he took little Berthe on his knees, and unfolding his medical journal, tried to teach her to read. But the child, who never had any lessons, soon looked up with large, sad eyes and began to cry. Then he comforted her; went to fetch water in her can to make rivers on the sand path, or broke off branches from the privet hedges to plant trees in the beds. This did not spoil the garden much, all choked now with long weeds. They owed Lestiboudois for so many days. Then the child grew cold and asked for her mother. "Call the servant," said Charles. "You know, dearie, that mamma does not like to be disturbed." Autumn was setting in, and the leaves were already falling, as they did two years ago when she was ill. Where would it all end? And he walked up and down, his hands behind his back. Madame was in her room, which no one entered. She stayed there all day long, torpid, half dressed, and from time to time burning Turkish pastilles which she had bought at Rouen in an Algerian's shop. In order not to have at night this sleeping man stretched at her side, by dint of manoeuvring, she at last succeeded in banishing him to the second floor, while she read till morning extravagant books, full of pictures of orgies and thrilling situations. Often, seized with fear, she cried out, and Charles hurried to her. "Oh, go away!" she would say. Or at other times, consumed more ardently than ever by that inner flame to which adultery added fuel, panting, tremulous, all desire, she threw open her window, breathed in the cold air, shook loose in the wind her masses of hair, too heavy, and, gazing upon the stars, longed for some princely love. She thought of him, of Leon. She would then have given anything for a single one of those meetings that surfeited her. These were her gala days. She wanted them to be sumptuous, and when he alone could not pay the expenses, she made up the deficit liberally, which happened pretty well every time. He tried to make her understand that they would be quite as comfortable somewhere else, in a smaller hotel, but she always found some objection. One day she drew six small silver-gilt spoons from her bag (they were old Roualt's wedding present), begging him to pawn them at once for her, and Leon obeyed, though the proceeding annoyed him. He was afraid of compromising himself. Then, on, reflection, he began to think his mistress's ways were growing odd, and that they were perhaps not wrong in wishing to separate him from her. In fact someone had sent his mother a long anonymous letter to warn her that he was "ruining himself with a married woman," and the good lady at once conjuring up the eternal bugbear of families, the vague pernicious creature, the siren, the monster, who dwells fantastically in depths of love, wrote to Lawyer Dubocage, his employer, who behaved perfectly in the affair. He kept him for three quarters of an hour trying to open his eyes, to warn him of the abyss into which he was falling. Such an intrigue would damage him later on, when he set up for himself. He implored him to break with her, and, if he would not make this sacrifice in his own interest, to do it at least for his, Dubocage's sake. At last Leon swore he would not see Emma again, and he reproached himself with not having kept his word, considering all the worry and lectures this woman might still draw down upon him, without reckoning the jokes made by his companions as they sat round the stove in the morning. Besides, he was soon to be head clerk; it was time to settle down. So he gave up his flute, exalted sentiments, and poetry; for every bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were it but for a day, a moment, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of lofty enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet. He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast, and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, dozed to the sound of a love whose delicacies he no longer noted. They knew one another too well for any of those surprises of possession that increase its joys a hundred-fold. She was as sick of him as he was weary of her. Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage. But how to get rid of him? Then, though she might feel humiliated at the baseness of such enjoyment, she clung to it from habit or from corruption, and each day she hungered after them the more, exhausting all felicity in wishing for too much of it. She accused Leon of her baffled hopes, as if he had betrayed her; and she even longed for some catastrophe that would bring about their separation, since she had not the courage to make up her mind to it herself. She none the less went on writing him love letters, in virtue of the notion that a woman must write to her lover. But whilst she wrote it was another man she saw, a phantom fashioned out of her most ardent memories, of her finest reading, her strongest lusts, and at last he became so real, so tangible, that she palpitated wondering, without, however, the power to imagine him clearly, so lost was he, like a god, beneath the abundance of his attributes. He dwelt in that azure land where silk ladders hang from balconies under the breath of flowers, in the light of the moon. She felt him near her; he was coming, and would carry her right away in a kiss. Then she fell back exhausted, for these transports of vague love wearied her more than great debauchery. She now felt constant ache all over her. Often she even received summonses, stamped paper that she barely looked at. She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep. On Mid-Lent she did not return to Yonville, but in the evening went to a masked ball. She wore velvet breeches, red stockings, a club wig, and three-cornered hat cocked on one side. She danced all night to the wild tones of the trombones; people gathered round her, and in the morning she found herself on the steps of the theatre together with five or six masks, debardeuses* and sailors, Leon's comrades, who were talking about having supper. * People dressed as longshoremen. The neighbouring cafes were full. They caught sight of one on the harbour, a very indifferent restaurant, whose proprietor showed them to a little room on the fourth floor. The men were whispering in a corner, no doubt consorting about expenses. There were a clerk, two medical students, and a shopman--what company for her! As to the women, Emma soon perceived from the tone of their voices that they must almost belong to the lowest class. Then she was frightened, pushed back her chair, and cast down her eyes. The others began to eat; she ate nothing. Her head was on fire, her eyes smarted, and her skin was ice-cold. In her head she seemed to feel the floor of the ball-room rebounding again beneath the rhythmical pulsation of the thousands of dancing feet. And now the smell of the punch, the smoke of the cigars, made her giddy. She fainted, and they carried her to the window. Day was breaking, and a great stain of purple colour broadened out in the pale horizon over the St. Catherine hills. The livid river was shivering in the wind; there was no one on the bridges; the street lamps were going out. She revived, and began thinking of Berthe asleep yonder in the servant's room. Then a cart filled with long strips of iron passed by, and made a deafening metallic vibration against the walls of the houses. She slipped away suddenly, threw off her costume, told Leon she must get back, and at last was alone at the Hotel de Boulogne. Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again. She went out, crossed the Boulevard, the Place Cauchoise, and the Faubourg, as far as an open street that overlooked some gardens. She walked rapidly; the fresh air calming her; and, little by little, the faces of the crowd, the masks, the quadrilles, the lights, the supper, those women, all disappeared like mists fading away. Then, reaching the "Croix-Rouge," she threw herself on the bed in her little room on the second floor, where there were pictures of the "Tour de Nesle." At four o'clock Hivert awoke her. When she got home, Felicite showed her behind the clock a grey paper. She read-- "In virtue of the seizure in execution of a judgment." What judgment? As a matter of fact, the evening before another paper had been brought that she had not yet seen, and she was stunned by these words-- "By order of the king, law, and justice, to Madame Bovary." Then, skipping several lines, she read, "Within twenty-four hours, without fail--" But what? "To pay the sum of eight thousand francs." And there was even at the bottom, "She will be constrained thereto by every form of law, and notably by a writ of distraint on her furniture and effects." What was to be done? In twenty-four hours--tomorrow. Lheureux, she thought, wanted to frighten her again; for she saw through all his devices, the object of his kindnesses. What reassured her was the very magnitude of the sum. However, by dint of buying and not paying, of borrowing, signing bills, and renewing these bills that grew at each new falling-in, she had ended by preparing a capital for Monsieur Lheureux which he was impatiently awaiting for his speculations. She presented herself at his place with an offhand air. "You know what has happened to me? No doubt it's a joke!" "How so?" He turned away slowly, and, folding his arms, said to her-- "My good lady, did you think I should go on to all eternity being your purveyor and banker, for the love of God? Now be just. I must get back what I've laid out. Now be just." She cried out against the debt. "Ah! so much the worse. The court has admitted it. There's a judgment. It's been notified to you. Besides, it isn't my fault. It's Vincart's." "Could you not--?" "Oh, nothing whatever." "But still, now talk it over." And she began beating about the bush; she had known nothing about it; it was a surprise. "Whose fault is that?" said Lheureux, bowing ironically. "While I'm slaving like a nigger, you go gallivanting about." "Ah! no lecturing." "It never does any harm," he replied. She turned coward; she implored him; she even pressed her pretty white and slender hand against the shopkeeper's knee. "There, that'll do! Anyone'd think you wanted to seduce me!" "You are a wretch!" she cried. "Oh, oh! go it! go it!" "I will show you up. I shall tell my husband." "All right! I too. I'll show your husband something." And Lheureux drew from his strong box the receipt for eighteen hundred francs that she had given him when Vincart had discounted the bills. "Do you think," he added, "that he'll not understand your little theft, the poor dear man?" She collapsed, more overcome than if felled by the blow of a pole-axe. He was walking up and down from the window to the bureau, repeating all the while-- "Ah! I'll show him! I'll show him!" Then he approached her, and in a soft voice said-- "It isn't pleasant, I know; but, after all, no bones are broken, and, since that is the only way that is left for you paying back my money--" "But where am I to get any?" said Emma, wringing her hands. "Bah! when one has friends like you!" And he looked at her in so keen, so terrible a fashion, that she shuddered to her very heart. "I promise you," she said, "to sign--" "I've enough of your signatures." "I will sell something." "Get along!" he said, shrugging his shoulders; "you've not got anything." And he called through the peep-hole that looked down into the shop-- "Annette, don't forget the three coupons of No. 14." The servant appeared. Emma understood, and asked how much money would be wanted to put a stop to the proceedings. "It is too late." "But if I brought you several thousand francs--a quarter of the sum--a third--perhaps the whole?" "No; it's no use!" And he pushed her gently towards the staircase. "I implore you, Monsieur Lheureux, just a few days more!" She was sobbing. "There! tears now!" "You are driving me to despair!" "What do I care?" said he, shutting the door.

Chapter 6

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary44.asp

One Thursday, Emma arrives in Rouen for her usual rendezvous. Leon, however, does not appear, for he is detained in a meeting with Homais. Leon cannot leave the chemist without arousing his suspicion. When he does manage to get rid of him and reach the hotel, Leon does not find Emma. She has already left. After this incident, their relationship is not the same, for Emma is convinced that Leon has a weak nature for standing her up. Emma tries to be her usual romantic self, but Leon senses "something extreme, mysterious, mournful" coming between them. He begins to resent her while she goes out of her way "to bind him more closely to her." Gradually, Emma realizes the inadequacy of this relationship. Emma's financial troubles take a turn for the worse when a certain Monsieur Vincart demands payment for a twenty-franc bill. She tries to postpone the payment by one week but receives a bailiff's notice the next day. Lheureux reluctantly helps her, but not before forcing her further into debt. After this experience, she writes to her husband's clients without his knowledge and asks them to settle their accounts. She borrows from Madame Lefrancois and even from Felicite. She sells some of the things in the house. Despite these efforts, she falls deeper into debt and neglects the household entirely. Charles longs to comfort her but is hesitant. He spends time with Berthe instead. By the time it is autumn, Emma has further degenerated. She has Leon pawn six silver spoons, which were her father's wedding present to her. Leon tries to make Emma see that a cheaper hotel would be equally comfortable for their affair, but she will have none of it. She continues to spend recklessly during the days that they are together. Leon is growing tired of Emma. His mother and his employer have sternly advised him to break off this relationship, and Leon is beginning to agree with them. Emma is equally tired of Leon, but cannot stand the thought of giving up the affair. Her life is in shambles. She continues to receive innumerable financial notices to which she pays little attention. After spending a whole night at a party in Rouen with Leon's friends, she returns home on Friday and is confronted with a royal order demanding payment of three- hundred and twenty francs within twenty-four hours. She rushes to Lheureux, hoping to resolve the issue, but he will not help her.

Notes Homais' trait of imposing himself on another person is well developed in this chapter in his meeting with Leon. The meeting also serves a second purpose. Flaubert is able to trace the beginnings of the breakdown of the Emma-Leon relationship to the time of Homais' visit. After being stood up, Emma sees Leon in a new light. She judges him as "incapable of heroism, weak, commonplace, effeminate," yet she continues to pursue him. There is a total dependence on him on her part. Leon, however, is growing frightened by her show of passion. He also resents "her progressive absorption of his personality" and feels "unmanned" at the sight of her. Eventually, Emma accepts the fact that the relationship with Leon has gone stale. She yearns for somebody who will fulfill all her desires. What she really yearns for is "love sentiments she read about in books," revealing that Emma is just as romantic as ever, refusing to accept reality. In her financial matters, Emma also refuses to accept reality. She continues to spend lavishly, although she is deeply in debt. She also fails to see through the scheming Lheureux, who has her sign four more credit bills. Weighed down by money matters, Emma displays her stormy side. Emma is headed for a tragic end. Despite her financial woes and her realization about the affair, Emma continues to see Leon, for she is powerless to end the relationship. She secretly hopes that some "catastrophe... would bring about their separation, since she couldn't make up her mind to it herself." Her indecisiveness over Leon is irresponsible, immature, and pathetic. At the same time, she continues to act the devoted wife at home, even acting romantic to her husband, for she knows that she needs Charles' financial assistance. The weal Charles is more devoted to Emma than ever. After Emma is served with the notice demanding payment, the very tone with which Emma addresses Lheureux reveals that her sanity is questionable. She naively over simplifies the matter, believing that the demand will come to nothing. When Lheureux refuses to help Emma this time, it is obvious that the young woman is on her way to financial self-destruction.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/31.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_28_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 7

chapter 7

{"name": "Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary45.asp", "summary": "The next day the bailiff arrives to make an inventory of the Bovary possessions. The bailiff's man is \"installed\" in the attic so that Charles is kept unaware of what is happening in his own home. But Charles seems preoccupied, and Emma wonders if he knows of her misdeeds. The following day, a Sunday, she meets with various bankers in Rouen in the hope of raising the needed money; however, each refuses to help her. She visits Leon, tells him of her predicament, and even suggests that he embezzle the money from his office. Leon lies that he can get the money from a friend and bids her farewell. He also tells her not to wait if he is not in Yonville by three o'clock. She travels back to Yonville in the Hirondelle with Homais, who had completed some purchases in Rouen. The blind tramp appropriately walks up to the carriage as it nears the foot of a hill. Homais offers to cure him and gives him a half penny; Emma ironically tosses him a half-crown piece. It is all the money she has left. The next morning a notice is put up in the town-square. The contents of the notice are not revealed, but they generate a great deal of excitement. Justin tries to tear it from the pillars but is reprimanded by the village policeman. At Felicite's behest, Emma visits the notary, Monsieur Guillaumin. She relates her woes to him. He makes it clear that he wants sexual favors in return for any help he would extend. Emma finds the proposition revolting and storms away in a rage. At home, thoughts of Charles' forgiving nature torture her. When Charles returns home, she runs off to see Binet. The mayor's wife and another neighbor observe the meeting with interest. They conclude from Binet's reactions that Emma must have proposed something scandalous. From Binet's place, Emma runs off to Madame Rollet's house, where she tries to collect her thoughts. She still expects Leon to bring the money to Yonville and sends Madame Rollet to fetch him, but the errand is futile. In utter desperation, she thinks of Rodolphe and sets out for La Huchette.", "analysis": "Notes Emma's financial situation is desperate, but she refuses to turn to Charles for help or comfort. Sitting with him, \"she stricken with remorse, or rather with an immense regret which, far from extinguishing her passion, only to awaken it. \" Every chance she has to right her wrongs, Emma wastes; instead of confiding in Charles, she maintains secrecy and draws closer to her ruin. She goes to Rouen in an unsuccessful attempt to secure a loan. She meets with Leon and recklessly suggests that he steal money from his office. To rid himself of her, he promises to borrow the money. The reader senses his lack of intention, but Emma naively believes he will save her. The future seems dark, and Emma feels \"lost, forsaken by everything within and around her, whirling through a bottomless chaos. \" The image is one of confusion and fear. Emma has truly hit rock bottom. Appropriately, on the way from Rouen to Yonville, Emma sees the blind beggar again. He fills her with dread and revulsion. Ironically, his infirmities are skin-deep, while hers are deep and moral in nature. To appease her fears, she tosses him a half-crown piece, the last of her money. This act gives her the temporary reassurance that she is in control of her financial affairs. By the time she is home, however, she has resigned herself to fate and says, \"What will be, will be.\" Emma no longer has a real will to fight. She does approach Monsieur Guillaumin, but refuses to give in to his sexual demands; she also visits Binet, who refuses to give in to her demands. In a last desperate measure, she heads to La Huchette to find Rodolphe. Within a span of three days, Emma's world has fallen apart. She received the ultimatum of the royal order for payment on Thursday night. On Saturday, the bailiff arrives at her home. On Sunday, she makes vain attempts to raise the money. All her efforts come to naught, and her financial ruin is certain. Ironically, Charles still does not know what is happening to his world."}

She was stoical the next day when Maitre Hareng, the bailiff, with two assistants, presented himself at her house to draw up the inventory for the distraint. They began with Bovary's consulting-room, and did not write down the phrenological head, which was considered an "instrument of his profession"; but in the kitchen they counted the plates; the saucepans, the chairs, the candlesticks, and in the bedroom all the nick-nacks on the whatnot. They examined her dresses, the linen, the dressing-room; and her whole existence to its most intimate details, was, like a corpse on whom a post-mortem is made, outspread before the eyes of these three men. Maitre Hareng, buttoned up in his thin black coat, wearing a white choker and very tight foot-straps, repeated from time to time--"Allow me, madame. You allow me?" Often he uttered exclamations. "Charming! very pretty." Then he began writing again, dipping his pen into the horn inkstand in his left hand. When they had done with the rooms they went up to the attic. She kept a desk there in which Rodolphe's letters were locked. It had to be opened. "Ah! a correspondence," said Maitre Hareng, with a discreet smile. "But allow me, for I must make sure the box contains nothing else." And he tipped up the papers lightly, as if to shake out napoleons. Then she grew angered to see this coarse hand, with fingers red and pulpy like slugs, touching these pages against which her heart had beaten. They went at last. Felicite came back. Emma had sent her out to watch for Bovary in order to keep him off, and they hurriedly installed the man in possession under the roof, where he swore he would remain. During the evening Charles seemed to her careworn. Emma watched him with a look of anguish, fancying she saw an accusation in every line of his face. Then, when her eyes wandered over the chimney-piece ornamented with Chinese screens, over the large curtains, the armchairs, all those things, in a word, that had, softened the bitterness of her life, remorse seized her or rather an immense regret, that, far from crushing, irritated her passion. Charles placidly poked the fire, both his feet on the fire-dogs. Once the man, no doubt bored in his hiding-place, made a slight noise. "Is anyone walking upstairs?" said Charles. "No," she replied; "it is a window that has been left open, and is rattling in the wind." The next day, Sunday, she went to Rouen to call on all the brokers whose names she knew. They were at their country-places or on journeys. She was not discouraged; and those whom she did manage to see she asked for money, declaring she must have some, and that she would pay it back. Some laughed in her face; all refused. At two o'clock she hurried to Leon, and knocked at the door. No one answered. At length he appeared. "What brings you here?" "Do I disturb you?" "No; but--" And he admitted that his landlord didn't like his having "women" there. "I must speak to you," she went on. Then he took down the key, but she stopped him. "No, no! Down there, in our home!" And they went to their room at the Hotel de Boulogne. On arriving she drank off a large glass of water. She was very pale. She said to him-- "Leon, you will do me a service?" And, shaking him by both hands that she grasped tightly, she added-- "Listen, I want eight thousand francs." "But you are mad!" "Not yet." And thereupon, telling him the story of the distraint, she explained her distress to him; for Charles knew nothing of it; her mother-in-law detested her; old Rouault could do nothing; but he, Leon, he would set about finding this indispensable sum. "How on earth can I?" "What a coward you are!" she cried. Then he said stupidly, "You are exaggerating the difficulty. Perhaps, with a thousand crowns or so the fellow could be stopped." All the greater reason to try and do something; it was impossible that they could not find three thousand francs. Besides, Leon, could be security instead of her. "Go, try, try! I will love you so!" He went out, and came back at the end of an hour, saying, with solemn face-- "I have been to three people with no success." Then they remained sitting face to face at the two chimney corners, motionless, in silence. Emma shrugged her shoulders as she stamped her feet. He heard her murmuring-- "If I were in your place _I_ should soon get some." "But where?" "At your office." And she looked at him. An infernal boldness looked out from her burning eyes, and their lids drew close together with a lascivious and encouraging look, so that the young man felt himself growing weak beneath the mute will of this woman who was urging him to a crime. Then he was afraid, and to avoid any explanation he smote his forehead, crying-- "Morel is to come back to-night; he will not refuse me, I hope" (this was one of his friends, the son of a very rich merchant); "and I will bring it you to-morrow," he added. Emma did not seem to welcome this hope with all the joy he had expected. Did she suspect the lie? He went on, blushing-- "However, if you don't see me by three o'clock do not wait for me, my darling. I must be off now; forgive me! Goodbye!" He pressed her hand, but it felt quite lifeless. Emma had no strength left for any sentiment. Four o'clock struck, and she rose to return to Yonville, mechanically obeying the force of old habits. The weather was fine. It was one of those March days, clear and sharp, when the sun shines in a perfectly white sky. The Rouen folk, in Sunday-clothes, were walking about with happy looks. She reached the Place du Parvis. People were coming out after vespers; the crowd flowed out through the three doors like a stream through the three arches of a bridge, and in the middle one, more motionless than a rock, stood the beadle. Then she remembered the day when, all anxious and full of hope, she had entered beneath this large nave, that had opened out before her, less profound than her love; and she walked on weeping beneath her veil, giddy, staggering, almost fainting. "Take care!" cried a voice issuing from the gate of a courtyard that was thrown open. She stopped to let pass a black horse, pawing the ground between the shafts of a tilbury, driven by a gentleman in sable furs. Who was it? She knew him. The carriage darted by and disappeared. Why, it was he--the Viscount. She turned away; the street was empty. She was so overwhelmed, so sad, that she had to lean against a wall to keep herself from falling. Then she thought she had been mistaken. Anyhow, she did not know. All within her and around her was abandoning her. She felt lost, sinking at random into indefinable abysses, and it was almost with joy that, on reaching the "Croix-Rouge," she saw the good Homais, who was watching a large box full of pharmaceutical stores being hoisted on to the "Hirondelle." In his hand he held tied in a silk handkerchief six cheminots for his wife. Madame Homais was very fond of these small, heavy turban-shaped loaves, that are eaten in Lent with salt butter; a last vestige of Gothic food that goes back, perhaps, to the time of the Crusades, and with which the robust Normans gorged themselves of yore, fancying they saw on the table, in the light of the yellow torches, between tankards of hippocras and huge boars' heads, the heads of Saracens to be devoured. The druggist's wife crunched them up as they had done--heroically, despite her wretched teeth. And so whenever Homais journeyed to town, he never failed to bring her home some that he bought at the great baker's in the Rue Massacre. "Charmed to see you," he said, offering Emma a hand to help her into the "Hirondelle." Then he hung up his cheminots to the cords of the netting, and remained bare-headed in an attitude pensive and Napoleonic. But when the blind man appeared as usual at the foot of the hill he exclaimed-- "I can't understand why the authorities tolerate such culpable industries. Such unfortunates should be locked up and forced to work. Progress, my word! creeps at a snail's pace. We are floundering about in mere barbarism." The blind man held out his hat, that flapped about at the door, as if it were a bag in the lining that had come unnailed. "This," said the chemist, "is a scrofulous affection." And though he knew the poor devil, he pretended to see him for the first time, murmured something about "cornea," "opaque cornea," "sclerotic," "facies," then asked him in a paternal tone-- "My friend, have you long had this terrible infirmity? Instead of getting drunk at the public, you'd do better to die yourself." He advised him to take good wine, good beer, and good joints. The blind man went on with his song; he seemed, moreover, almost idiotic. At last Monsieur Homais opened his purse-- "Now there's a sou; give me back two lairds, and don't forget my advice: you'll be the better for it." Hivert openly cast some doubt on the efficacy of it. But the druggist said that he would cure himself with an antiphlogistic pomade of his own composition, and he gave his address--"Monsieur Homais, near the market, pretty well known." "Now," said Hivert, "for all this trouble you'll give us your performance." The blind man sank down on his haunches, with his head thrown back, whilst he rolled his greenish eyes, lolled out his tongue, and rubbed his stomach with both hands as he uttered a kind of hollow yell like a famished dog. Emma, filled with disgust, threw him over her shoulder a five-franc piece. It was all her fortune. It seemed to her very fine thus to throw it away. The coach had gone on again when suddenly Monsieur Homais leant out through the window, crying-- "No farinaceous or milk food, wear wool next the skin, and expose the diseased parts to the smoke of juniper berries." The sight of the well-known objects that defiled before her eyes gradually diverted Emma from her present trouble. An intolerable fatigue overwhelmed her, and she reached her home stupefied, discouraged, almost asleep. "Come what may come!" she said to herself. "And then, who knows? Why, at any moment could not some extraordinary event occur? Lheureux even might die!" At nine o'clock in the morning she was awakened by the sound of voices in the Place. There was a crowd round the market reading a large bill fixed to one of the posts, and she saw Justin, who was climbing on to a stone and tearing down the bill. But at this moment the rural guard seized him by the collar. Monsieur Homais came out of his shop, and Mere Lefrangois, in the midst of the crowd, seemed to be perorating. "Madame! madame!" cried Felicite, running in, "it's abominable!" And the poor girl, deeply moved, handed her a yellow paper that she had just torn off the door. Emma read with a glance that all her furniture was for sale. Then they looked at one another silently. The servant and mistress had no secret one from the other. At last Felicite sighed-- "If I were you, madame, I should go to Monsieur Guillaumin." "Do you think--" And this question meant to say-- "You who know the house through the servant, has the master spoken sometimes of me?" "Yes, you'd do well to go there." She dressed, put on her black gown, and her hood with jet beads, and that she might not be seen (there was still a crowd on the Place), she took the path by the river, outside the village. She reached the notary's gate quite breathless. The sky was sombre, and a little snow was falling. At the sound of the bell, Theodore in a red waistcoat appeared on the steps; he came to open the door almost familiarly, as to an acquaintance, and showed her into the dining-room. A large porcelain stove crackled beneath a cactus that filled up the niche in the wall, and in black wood frames against the oak-stained paper hung Steuben's "Esmeralda" and Schopin's "Potiphar." The ready-laid table, the two silver chafing-dishes, the crystal door-knobs, the parquet and the furniture, all shone with a scrupulous, English cleanliness; the windows were ornamented at each corner with stained glass. "Now this," thought Emma, "is the dining-room I ought to have." The notary came in pressing his palm-leaf dressing-gown to his breast with his left arm, while with the other hand he raised and quickly put on again his brown velvet cap, pretentiously cocked on the right side, whence looked out the ends of three fair curls drawn from the back of the head, following the line of his bald skull. After he had offered her a seat he sat down to breakfast, apologising profusely for his rudeness. "I have come," she said, "to beg you, sir--" "What, madame? I am listening." And she began explaining her position to him. Monsieur Guillaumin knew it, being secretly associated with the linendraper, from whom he always got capital for the loans on mortgages that he was asked to make. So he knew (and better than she herself) the long story of the bills, small at first, bearing different names as endorsers, made out at long dates, and constantly renewed up to the day, when, gathering together all the protested bills, the shopkeeper had bidden his friend Vincart take in his own name all the necessary proceedings, not wishing to pass for a tiger with his fellow-citizens. She mingled her story with recriminations against Lheureux, to which the notary replied from time to time with some insignificant word. Eating his cutlet and drinking his tea, he buried his chin in his sky-blue cravat, into which were thrust two diamond pins, held together by a small gold chain; and he smiled a singular smile, in a sugary, ambiguous fashion. But noticing that her feet were damp, he said-- "Do get closer to the stove; put your feet up against the porcelain." She was afraid of dirtying it. The notary replied in a gallant tone-- "Beautiful things spoil nothing." Then she tried to move him, and, growing moved herself, she began telling him about the poorness of her home, her worries, her wants. He could understand that; an elegant woman! and, without leaving off eating, he had turned completely round towards her, so that his knee brushed against her boot, whose sole curled round as it smoked against the stove. But when she asked for a thousand sous, he closed his lips, and declared he was very sorry he had not had the management of her fortune before, for there were hundreds of ways very convenient, even for a lady, of turning her money to account. They might, either in the turf-peats of Grumesnil or building-ground at Havre, almost without risk, have ventured on some excellent speculations; and he let her consume herself with rage at the thought of the fabulous sums that she would certainly have made. "How was it," he went on, "that you didn't come to me?" "I hardly know," she said. "Why, hey? Did I frighten you so much? It is I, on the contrary, who ought to complain. We hardly know one another; yet I am very devoted to you. You do not doubt that, I hope?" He held out his hand, took hers, covered it with a greedy kiss, then held it on his knee; and he played delicately with her fingers whilst he murmured a thousand blandishments. His insipid voice murmured like a running brook; a light shone in his eyes through the glimmering of his spectacles, and his hand was advancing up Emma's sleeve to press her arm. She felt against her cheek his panting breath. This man oppressed her horribly. She sprang up and said to him-- "Sir, I am waiting." "For what?" said the notary, who suddenly became very pale. "This money." "But--" Then, yielding to the outburst of too powerful a desire, "Well, yes!" He dragged himself towards her on his knees, regardless of his dressing-gown. "For pity's sake, stay. I love you!" He seized her by her waist. Madame Bovary's face flushed purple. She recoiled with a terrible look, crying-- "You are taking a shameless advantage of my distress, sir! I am to be pitied--not to be sold." And she went out. The notary remained quite stupefied, his eyes fixed on his fine embroidered slippers. They were a love gift, and the sight of them at last consoled him. Besides, he reflected that such an adventure might have carried him too far. "What a wretch! what a scoundrel! what an infamy!" she said to herself, as she fled with nervous steps beneath the aspens of the path. The disappointment of her failure increased the indignation of her outraged modesty; it seemed to her that Providence pursued her implacably, and, strengthening herself in her pride, she had never felt so much esteem for herself nor so much contempt for others. A spirit of warfare transformed her. She would have liked to strike all men, to spit in their faces, to crush them, and she walked rapidly straight on, pale, quivering, maddened, searching the empty horizon with tear-dimmed eyes, and as it were rejoicing in the hate that was choking her. When she saw her house a numbness came over her. She could not go on; and yet she must. Besides, whither could she flee? Felicite was waiting for her at the door. "Well?" "No!" said Emma. And for a quarter of an hour the two of them went over the various persons in Yonville who might perhaps be inclined to help her. But each time that Felicite named someone Emma replied-- "Impossible! they will not!" "And the master'll soon be in." "I know that well enough. Leave me alone." She had tried everything; there was nothing more to be done now; and when Charles came in she would have to say to him-- "Go away! This carpet on which you are walking is no longer ours. In your own house you do not possess a chair, a pin, a straw, and it is I, poor man, who have ruined you." Then there would be a great sob; next he would weep abundantly, and at last, the surprise past, he would forgive her. "Yes," she murmured, grinding her teeth, "he will forgive me, he who would give a million if I would forgive him for having known me! Never! never!" This thought of Bovary's superiority to her exasperated her. Then, whether she confessed or did not confess, presently, immediately, to-morrow, he would know the catastrophe all the same; so she must wait for this horrible scene, and bear the weight of his magnanimity. The desire to return to Lheureux's seized her--what would be the use? To write to her father--it was too late; and perhaps, she began to repent now that she had not yielded to that other, when she heard the trot of a horse in the alley. It was he; he was opening the gate; he was whiter than the plaster wall. Rushing to the stairs, she ran out quickly to the square; and the wife of the mayor, who was talking to Lestiboudois in front of the church, saw her go in to the tax-collector's. She hurried off to tell Madame Caron, and the two ladies went up to the attic, and, hidden by some linen spread across props, stationed themselves comfortably for overlooking the whole of Binet's room. He was alone in his garret, busy imitating in wood one of those indescribable bits of ivory, composed of crescents, of spheres hollowed out one within the other, the whole as straight as an obelisk, and of no use whatever; and he was beginning on the last piece--he was nearing his goal. In the twilight of the workshop the white dust was flying from his tools like a shower of sparks under the hoofs of a galloping horse; the two wheels were turning, droning; Binet smiled, his chin lowered, his nostrils distended, and, in a word, seemed lost in one of those complete happinesses that, no doubt, belong only to commonplace occupations, which amuse the mind with facile difficulties, and satisfy by a realisation of that beyond which such minds have not a dream. "Ah! there she is!" exclaimed Madame Tuvache. But it was impossible because of the lathe to hear what she was saying. At last these ladies thought they made out the word "francs," and Madame Tuvache whispered in a low voice-- "She is begging him to give her time for paying her taxes." "Apparently!" replied the other. They saw her walking up and down, examining the napkin-rings, the candlesticks, the banister rails against the walls, while Binet stroked his beard with satisfaction. "Do you think she wants to order something of him?" said Madame Tuvache. "Why, he doesn't sell anything," objected her neighbour. The tax-collector seemed to be listening with wide-open eyes, as if he did not understand. She went on in a tender, suppliant manner. She came nearer to him, her breast heaving; they no longer spoke. "Is she making him advances?" said Madame Tuvache. Binet was scarlet to his very ears. She took hold of his hands. "Oh, it's too much!" And no doubt she was suggesting something abominable to him; for the tax-collector--yet he was brave, had fought at Bautzen and at Lutzen, had been through the French campaign, and had even been recommended for the cross--suddenly, as at the sight of a serpent, recoiled as far as he could from her, crying-- "Madame! what do you mean?" "Women like that ought to be whipped," said Madame Tuvache. "But where is she?" continued Madame Caron, for she had disappeared whilst they spoke; then catching sight of her going up the Grande Rue, and turning to the right as if making for the cemetery, they were lost in conjectures. "Nurse Rollet," she said on reaching the nurse's, "I am choking; unlace me!" She fell on the bed sobbing. Nurse Rollet covered her with a petticoat and remained standing by her side. Then, as she did not answer, the good woman withdrew, took her wheel and began spinning flax. "Oh, leave off!" she murmured, fancying she heard Binet's lathe. "What's bothering her?" said the nurse to herself. "Why has she come here?" She had rushed thither; impelled by a kind of horror that drove her from her home. Lying on her back, motionless, and with staring eyes, she saw things but vaguely, although she tried to with idiotic persistence. She looked at the scales on the walls, two brands smoking end to end, and a long spider crawling over her head in a rent in the beam. At last she began to collect her thoughts. She remembered--one day--Leon--Oh! how long ago that was--the sun was shining on the river, and the clematis were perfuming the air. Then, carried away as by a rushing torrent, she soon began to recall the day before. "What time is it?" she asked. Mere Rollet went out, raised the fingers of her right hand to that side of the sky that was brightest, and came back slowly, saying-- "Nearly three." "Ah! thanks, thanks!" For he would come; he would have found some money. But he would, perhaps, go down yonder, not guessing she was here, and she told the nurse to run to her house to fetch him. "Be quick!" "But, my dear lady, I'm going, I'm going!" She wondered now that she had not thought of him from the first. Yesterday he had given his word; he would not break it. And she already saw herself at Lheureux's spreading out her three bank-notes on his bureau. Then she would have to invent some story to explain matters to Bovary. What should it be? The nurse, however, was a long while gone. But, as there was no clock in the cot, Emma feared she was perhaps exaggerating the length of time. She began walking round the garden, step by step; she went into the path by the hedge, and returned quickly, hoping that the woman would have come back by another road. At last, weary of waiting, assailed by fears that she thrust from her, no longer conscious whether she had been here a century or a moment, she sat down in a corner, closed her eyes, and stopped her ears. The gate grated; she sprang up. Before she had spoken Mere Rollet said to her-- "There is no one at your house!" "What?" "Oh, no one! And the doctor is crying. He is calling for you; they're looking for you." Emma answered nothing. She gasped as she turned her eyes about her, while the peasant woman, frightened at her face, drew back instinctively, thinking her mad. Suddenly she struck her brow and uttered a cry; for the thought of Rodolphe, like a flash of lightning in a dark night, had passed into her soul. He was so good, so delicate, so generous! And besides, should he hesitate to do her this service, she would know well enough how to constrain him to it by re-waking, in a single moment, their lost love. So she set out towards La Huchette, not seeing that she was hastening to offer herself to that which but a while ago had so angered her, not in the least conscious of her prostitution.

Chapter 7

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary45.asp

The next day the bailiff arrives to make an inventory of the Bovary possessions. The bailiff's man is "installed" in the attic so that Charles is kept unaware of what is happening in his own home. But Charles seems preoccupied, and Emma wonders if he knows of her misdeeds. The following day, a Sunday, she meets with various bankers in Rouen in the hope of raising the needed money; however, each refuses to help her. She visits Leon, tells him of her predicament, and even suggests that he embezzle the money from his office. Leon lies that he can get the money from a friend and bids her farewell. He also tells her not to wait if he is not in Yonville by three o'clock. She travels back to Yonville in the Hirondelle with Homais, who had completed some purchases in Rouen. The blind tramp appropriately walks up to the carriage as it nears the foot of a hill. Homais offers to cure him and gives him a half penny; Emma ironically tosses him a half-crown piece. It is all the money she has left. The next morning a notice is put up in the town-square. The contents of the notice are not revealed, but they generate a great deal of excitement. Justin tries to tear it from the pillars but is reprimanded by the village policeman. At Felicite's behest, Emma visits the notary, Monsieur Guillaumin. She relates her woes to him. He makes it clear that he wants sexual favors in return for any help he would extend. Emma finds the proposition revolting and storms away in a rage. At home, thoughts of Charles' forgiving nature torture her. When Charles returns home, she runs off to see Binet. The mayor's wife and another neighbor observe the meeting with interest. They conclude from Binet's reactions that Emma must have proposed something scandalous. From Binet's place, Emma runs off to Madame Rollet's house, where she tries to collect her thoughts. She still expects Leon to bring the money to Yonville and sends Madame Rollet to fetch him, but the errand is futile. In utter desperation, she thinks of Rodolphe and sets out for La Huchette.

Notes Emma's financial situation is desperate, but she refuses to turn to Charles for help or comfort. Sitting with him, "she stricken with remorse, or rather with an immense regret which, far from extinguishing her passion, only to awaken it. " Every chance she has to right her wrongs, Emma wastes; instead of confiding in Charles, she maintains secrecy and draws closer to her ruin. She goes to Rouen in an unsuccessful attempt to secure a loan. She meets with Leon and recklessly suggests that he steal money from his office. To rid himself of her, he promises to borrow the money. The reader senses his lack of intention, but Emma naively believes he will save her. The future seems dark, and Emma feels "lost, forsaken by everything within and around her, whirling through a bottomless chaos. " The image is one of confusion and fear. Emma has truly hit rock bottom. Appropriately, on the way from Rouen to Yonville, Emma sees the blind beggar again. He fills her with dread and revulsion. Ironically, his infirmities are skin-deep, while hers are deep and moral in nature. To appease her fears, she tosses him a half-crown piece, the last of her money. This act gives her the temporary reassurance that she is in control of her financial affairs. By the time she is home, however, she has resigned herself to fate and says, "What will be, will be." Emma no longer has a real will to fight. She does approach Monsieur Guillaumin, but refuses to give in to his sexual demands; she also visits Binet, who refuses to give in to her demands. In a last desperate measure, she heads to La Huchette to find Rodolphe. Within a span of three days, Emma's world has fallen apart. She received the ultimatum of the royal order for payment on Thursday night. On Saturday, the bailiff arrives at her home. On Sunday, she makes vain attempts to raise the money. All her efforts come to naught, and her financial ruin is certain. Ironically, Charles still does not know what is happening to his world.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/32.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_29_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 8

chapter 8

{"name": "Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary46.asp", "summary": "As Emma draws closer to La Huchette, she is reminded of the \"sensations of her first love.\" The melting snow is described as she makes her way to Rodolphe's room. He is surprised at her sudden appearance. Emma reproaches Rodolphe for deserting her and urges him to renew their relationship. Rodolphe is taken in with Emma's show of 'undying' love and attempts to find out the cause of her sorrow. Her answer leaves him stunned, for she has explained that she is urgently in need of a large sum of money to clear up a debt. Rodolphe calmly states his inability to help her. Angered and humiliated, Emma gives Rodolphe a piece of her mind before leaving. She runs from La Huchette in a dazed state. Night is falling as Emma becomes fully conscious of \"the deep hopelessness of her plight. \" She hurries to the chemist's shop, where she persuades Justin to lead her to the storeroom. All the while, the young boy has a \"presentiment of something terrible.\" Once in the storeroom, Emma goes directly to a blue jar of arsenic and uncorks it. She plunges her hand into the jar and crams the white powder into her mouth. Justin tries to stop her. She calmly tells him that his master will be blamed for her act. Then she walks off. At home, she writes a letter, seals it, and solemnly tells Charles to read it the next day. She stretches herself on the bed, expecting to die in her sleep. Instead, she soon displays violent symptoms of illness. Charles notices a white sediment at the base of the basin in which she has just vomited. When her body is wracked with convulsions, he becomes desperate. He tears open her letter and learns that she has poisoned herself. Homais is called. He, in turn, sends for Monsieur Canivet and Dr Lariviere, but their presence makes no difference. Emma has clearly taken a turn for the worse, and no treatment is possible. Bournisien is summoned and administers the last sacrament to Emma. A sudden joy is glimpsed in her eyes and her face grows serene. She is clearly breathing her last breath when a sudden commotion disturbs the solemn moment. The blind beggar's hoarse voice is heard singing his usual song: 'When the sun shines warm above, It turns a maiden's thoughts to love. All across the furrows brown See Nanette go bending down, Gathering up with careful hand The golden harvest from the land. The wind it blew so hard one day, Her little petticoat flew away.' These words have a dramatic effect on Emma. She sits up like a \"galvanized corpse\" and laughs \"a ghastly, frantic, desperate laugh\" before another convulsion ends her life.", "analysis": "Notes As Emma heads towards La Huchette, she is clearly trying her last resource. She knows the kind of affect she has on Rodolphe and hopes she can charm him into giving her the money needed to pay off her debt. Rodolphe's passion is aroused on seeing her, as reflected in the melting snow that hints of his awakening emotions. He is shocked, however, at her request for money and states his inability to help her. Emma is horrified as she listens to his excuses. Realizing that she has offered herself to him for nothing, she is furious and berates Rodolphe for accepting the gifts she had given him. She tells him of how his parting letter had torn her heart. In truth, his original betrayal had triggered her long illness and the start of her self-destruction. Emma is in agony, realizing that she is totally unable to raise the money and that Rodolphe has never loved her. Flaubert wonderfully captures her emotions: \"Only in her love did she suffer; through the thought of that she felt her soul escape from her as a wounded man in his last agony feels life flow out through his bleeding gashes. \" The image of death is etched in these lines, foreshadowing Emma's tortuous end. In desperation, Emma coerces Justin to let her into Homais' storeroom. She knows where the arsenic is stored and quickly eats a handful of the white powder. It is ironic that Justin, who loves Emma patiently through all her indiscretions, is the one who enables her to commit suicide, becoming the agent of her death. Because of his devotion to her, he cannot deny Emma; ironically, Emma feels nothing for Justin. Throughout the book, she has yearned for absolute love but fails to recognize it in Justin. Emma remains a romantic until the very end. The manner in which she expects death to embrace her contrasts strongly with the way in which she actually dies. She imagines herself dying 'peacefully' in her sleep, but what really happens is ugly and grim as she grows violently ill. The only peaceful thing she experiences is taking the last sacrament from the priest. Her final kissing of the cross is passionate and reflective of her life: \"Reaching forward like one in thirst, she glued her lips to the body of the Man-God and laid upon it with all her failing strength the most mighty kiss of love she had ever given.\" For Emma, love, even spiritual devotion, can only be expressed as earthly and sensual. As she clings to her faith in the end, the reader is reminded of the two previous religious phases of her life -- during her adolescence and after her recovery from Rodolphe's betrayal. It is sad to realize that at two key points in her life, she has sought spiritual love and deserted it for sensual passion. Ironically, the naive and faithful Charles has stood by her throughout her indiscretions and now blindly hopes for her recovery. In the throes of a mighty convulsion as she nears her end, Emma hears the song of the blind beggar. The mischievous irony of the words being sung is not lost on Emma. She has apparently heard the tune innumerable times on her way to and from Rouen; now it has a terrifying affect on her. The hideous image of the beggar reminds her of \"eternal darkness\" as she dies and symbolizes the ugliness of Emma's life."}

She asked herself as she walked along, "What am I going to say? How shall I begin?" And as she went on she recognised the thickets, the trees, the sea-rushes on the hill, the chateau yonder. All the sensations of her first tenderness came back to her, and her poor aching heart opened out amorously. A warm wind blew in her face; the melting snow fell drop by drop from the buds to the grass. She entered, as she used to, through the small park-gate. She reached the avenue bordered by a double row of dense lime-trees. They were swaying their long whispering branches to and fro. The dogs in their kennels all barked, and the noise of their voices resounded, but brought out no one. She went up the large straight staircase with wooden balusters that led to the corridor paved with dusty flags, into which several doors in a row opened, as in a monastery or an inn. His was at the top, right at the end, on the left. When she placed her fingers on the lock her strength suddenly deserted her. She was afraid, almost wished he would not be there, though this was her only hope, her last chance of salvation. She collected her thoughts for one moment, and, strengthening herself by the feeling of present necessity, went in. He was in front of the fire, both his feet on the mantelpiece, smoking a pipe. "What! it is you!" he said, getting up hurriedly. "Yes, it is I, Rodolphe. I should like to ask your advice." And, despite all her efforts, it was impossible for her to open her lips. "You have not changed; you are charming as ever!" "Oh," she replied bitterly, "they are poor charms since you disdained them." Then he began a long explanation of his conduct, excusing himself in vague terms, in default of being able to invent better. She yielded to his words, still more to his voice and the sight of him, so that, she pretended to believe, or perhaps believed; in the pretext he gave for their rupture; this was a secret on which depended the honour, the very life of a third person. "No matter!" she said, looking at him sadly. "I have suffered much." He replied philosophically-- "Such is life!" "Has life," Emma went on, "been good to you at least, since our separation?" "Oh, neither good nor bad." "Perhaps it would have been better never to have parted." "Yes, perhaps." "You think so?" she said, drawing nearer, and she sighed. "Oh, Rodolphe! if you but knew! I loved you so!" It was then that she took his hand, and they remained some time, their fingers intertwined, like that first day at the Show. With a gesture of pride he struggled against this emotion. But sinking upon his breast she said to him-- "How did you think I could live without you? One cannot lose the habit of happiness. I was desolate. I thought I should die. I will tell you about all that and you will see. And you--you fled from me!" For, all the three years, he had carefully avoided her in consequence of that natural cowardice that characterises the stronger sex. Emma went on, with dainty little nods, more coaxing than an amorous kitten-- "You love others, confess it! Oh, I understand them, dear! I excuse them. You probably seduced them as you seduced me. You are indeed a man; you have everything to make one love you. But we'll begin again, won't we? We will love one another. See! I am laughing; I am happy! Oh, speak!" And she was charming to see, with her eyes, in which trembled a tear, like the rain of a storm in a blue corolla. He had drawn her upon his knees, and with the back of his hand was caressing her smooth hair, where in the twilight was mirrored like a golden arrow one last ray of the sun. She bent down her brow; at last he kissed her on the eyelids quite gently with the tips of his lips. "Why, you have been crying! What for?" She burst into tears. Rodolphe thought this was an outburst of her love. As she did not speak, he took this silence for a last remnant of resistance, and then he cried out-- "Oh, forgive me! You are the only one who pleases me. I was imbecile and cruel. I love you. I will love you always. What is it. Tell me!" He was kneeling by her. "Well, I am ruined, Rodolphe! You must lend me three thousand francs." "But--but--" said he, getting up slowly, while his face assumed a grave expression. "You know," she went on quickly, "that my husband had placed his whole fortune at a notary's. He ran away. So we borrowed; the patients don't pay us. Moreover, the settling of the estate is not yet done; we shall have the money later on. But to-day, for want of three thousand francs, we are to be sold up. It is to be at once, this very moment, and, counting upon your friendship, I have come to you." "Ah!" thought Rodolphe, turning very pale, "that was what she came for." At last he said with a calm air-- "Dear madame, I have not got them." He did not lie. If he had had them, he would, no doubt, have given them, although it is generally disagreeable to do such fine things: a demand for money being, of all the winds that blow upon love, the coldest and most destructive. First she looked at him for some moments. "You have not got them!" she repeated several times. "You have not got them! I ought to have spared myself this last shame. You never loved me. You are no better than the others." She was betraying, ruining herself. Rodolphe interrupted her, declaring he was "hard up" himself. "Ah! I pity you," said Emma. "Yes--very much." And fixing her eyes upon an embossed carabine, that shone against its panoply, "But when one is so poor one doesn't have silver on the butt of one's gun. One doesn't buy a clock inlaid with tortoise shell," she went on, pointing to a buhl timepiece, "nor silver-gilt whistles for one's whips," and she touched them, "nor charms for one's watch. Oh, he wants for nothing! even to a liqueur-stand in his room! For you love yourself; you live well. You have a chateau, farms, woods; you go hunting; you travel to Paris. Why, if it were but that," she cried, taking up two studs from the mantelpiece, "but the least of these trifles, one can get money for them. Oh, I do not want them, keep them!" And she threw the two links away from her, their gold chain breaking as it struck against the wall. "But I! I would have given you everything. I would have sold all, worked for you with my hands, I would have begged on the highroads for a smile, for a look, to hear you say 'Thanks!' And you sit there quietly in your arm-chair, as if you had not made me suffer enough already! But for you, and you know it, I might have lived happily. What made you do it? Was it a bet? Yet you loved me--you said so. And but a moment since--Ah! it would have been better to have driven me away. My hands are hot with your kisses, and there is the spot on the carpet where at my knees you swore an eternity of love! You made me believe you; for two years you held me in the most magnificent, the sweetest dream! Eh! Our plans for the journey, do you remember? Oh, your letter! your letter! it tore my heart! And then when I come back to him--to him, rich, happy, free--to implore the help the first stranger would give, a suppliant, and bringing back to him all my tenderness, he repulses me because it would cost him three thousand francs!" "I haven't got them," replied Rodolphe, with that perfect calm with which resigned rage covers itself as with a shield. She went out. The walls trembled, the ceiling was crushing her, and she passed back through the long alley, stumbling against the heaps of dead leaves scattered by the wind. At last she reached the ha-ha hedge in front of the gate; she broke her nails against the lock in her haste to open it. Then a hundred steps farther on, breathless, almost falling, she stopped. And now turning round, she once more saw the impassive chateau, with the park, the gardens, the three courts, and all the windows of the facade. She remained lost in stupor, and having no more consciousness of herself than through the beating of her arteries, that she seemed to hear bursting forth like a deafening music filling all the fields. The earth beneath her feet was more yielding than the sea, and the furrows seemed to her immense brown waves breaking into foam. Everything in her head, of memories, ideas, went off at once like a thousand pieces of fireworks. She saw her father, Lheureux's closet, their room at home, another landscape. Madness was coming upon her; she grew afraid, and managed to recover herself, in a confused way, it is true, for she did not in the least remember the cause of the terrible condition she was in, that is to say, the question of money. She suffered only in her love, and felt her soul passing from her in this memory; as wounded men, dying, feel their life ebb from their bleeding wounds. Night was falling, crows were flying about. Suddenly it seemed to her that fiery spheres were exploding in the air like fulminating balls when they strike, and were whirling, whirling, to melt at last upon the snow between the branches of the trees. In the midst of each of them appeared the face of Rodolphe. They multiplied and drew near her, penetrating, her. It all disappeared; she recognised the lights of the houses that shone through the fog. Now her situation, like an abyss, rose up before her. She was panting as if her heart would burst. Then in an ecstasy of heroism, that made her almost joyous, she ran down the hill, crossed the cow-plank, the foot-path, the alley, the market, and reached the chemist's shop. She was about to enter, but at the sound of the bell someone might come, and slipping in by the gate, holding her breath, feeling her way along the walls, she went as far as the door of the kitchen, where a candle stuck on the stove was burning. Justin in his shirt-sleeves was carrying out a dish. "Ah! they are dining; I will wait." He returned; she tapped at the window. He went out. "The key! the one for upstairs where he keeps the--" "What?" And he looked at her, astonished at the pallor of her face, that stood out white against the black background of the night. She seemed to him extraordinarily beautiful and majestic as a phantom. Without understanding what she wanted, he had the presentiment of something terrible. But she went on quickly in a love voice; in a sweet, melting voice, "I want it; give it to me." As the partition wall was thin, they could hear the clatter of the forks on the plates in the dining-room. She pretended that she wanted to kill the rats that kept her from sleeping. "I must tell master." "No, stay!" Then with an indifferent air, "Oh, it's not worth while; I'll tell him presently. Come, light me upstairs." She entered the corridor into which the laboratory door opened. Against the wall was a key labelled Capharnaum. "Justin!" called the druggist impatiently. "Let us go up." And he followed her. The key turned in the lock, and she went straight to the third shelf, so well did her memory guide her, seized the blue jar, tore out the cork, plunged in her hand, and withdrawing it full of a white powder, she began eating it. "Stop!" he cried, rushing at her. "Hush! someone will come." He was in despair, was calling out. "Say nothing, or all the blame will fall on your master." Then she went home, suddenly calmed, and with something of the serenity of one that had performed a duty. When Charles, distracted by the news of the distraint, returned home, Emma had just gone out. He cried aloud, wept, fainted, but she did not return. Where could she be? He sent Felicite to Homais, to Monsieur Tuvache, to Lheureux, to the "Lion d'Or," everywhere, and in the intervals of his agony he saw his reputation destroyed, their fortune lost, Berthe's future ruined. By what?--Not a word! He waited till six in the evening. At last, unable to bear it any longer, and fancying she had gone to Rouen, he set out along the highroad, walked a mile, met no one, again waited, and returned home. She had come back. "What was the matter? Why? Explain to me." She sat down at her writing-table and wrote a letter, which she sealed slowly, adding the date and the hour. Then she said in a solemn tone: "You are to read it to-morrow; till then, I pray you, do not ask me a single question. No, not one!" "But--" "Oh, leave me!" She lay down full length on her bed. A bitter taste that she felt in her mouth awakened her. She saw Charles, and again closed her eyes. She was studying herself curiously, to see if she were not suffering. But no! nothing as yet. She heard the ticking of the clock, the crackling of the fire, and Charles breathing as he stood upright by her bed. "Ah! it is but a little thing, death!" she thought. "I shall fall asleep and all will be over." She drank a mouthful of water and turned to the wall. The frightful taste of ink continued. "I am thirsty; oh! so thirsty," she sighed. "What is it?" said Charles, who was handing her a glass. "It is nothing! Open the window; I am choking." She was seized with a sickness so sudden that she had hardly time to draw out her handkerchief from under the pillow. "Take it away," she said quickly; "throw it away." He spoke to her; she did not answer. She lay motionless, afraid that the slightest movement might make her vomit. But she felt an icy cold creeping from her feet to her heart. "Ah! it is beginning," she murmured. "What did you say?" She turned her head from side to side with a gentle movement full of agony, while constantly opening her mouth as if something very heavy were weighing upon her tongue. At eight o'clock the vomiting began again. Charles noticed that at the bottom of the basin there was a sort of white sediment sticking to the sides of the porcelain. "This is extraordinary--very singular," he repeated. But she said in a firm voice, "No, you are mistaken." Then gently, and almost as caressing her, he passed his hand over her stomach. She uttered a sharp cry. He fell back terror-stricken. Then she began to groan, faintly at first. Her shoulders were shaken by a strong shuddering, and she was growing paler than the sheets in which her clenched fingers buried themselves. Her unequal pulse was now almost imperceptible. Drops of sweat oozed from her bluish face, that seemed as if rigid in the exhalations of a metallic vapour. Her teeth chattered, her dilated eyes looked vaguely about her, and to all questions she replied only with a shake of the head; she even smiled once or twice. Gradually, her moaning grew louder; a hollow shriek burst from her; she pretended she was better and that she would get up presently. But she was seized with convulsions and cried out-- "Ah! my God! It is horrible!" He threw himself on his knees by her bed. "Tell me! what have you eaten? Answer, for heaven's sake!" And he looked at her with a tenderness in his eyes such as she had never seen. "Well, there--there!" she said in a faint voice. He flew to the writing-table, tore open the seal, and read aloud: "Accuse no one." He stopped, passed his hands across his eyes, and read it over again. "What! help--help!" He could only keep repeating the word: "Poisoned! poisoned!" Felicite ran to Homais, who proclaimed it in the market-place; Madame Lefrancois heard it at the "Lion d'Or"; some got up to go and tell their neighbours, and all night the village was on the alert. Distraught, faltering, reeling, Charles wandered about the room. He knocked against the furniture, tore his hair, and the chemist had never believed that there could be so terrible a sight. He went home to write to Monsieur Canivet and to Doctor Lariviere. He lost his head, and made more than fifteen rough copies. Hippolyte went to Neufchatel, and Justin so spurred Bovary's horse that he left it foundered and three parts dead by the hill at Bois-Guillaume. Charles tried to look up his medical dictionary, but could not read it; the lines were dancing. "Be calm," said the druggist; "we have only to administer a powerful antidote. What is the poison?" Charles showed him the letter. It was arsenic. "Very well," said Homais, "we must make an analysis." For he knew that in cases of poisoning an analysis must be made; and the other, who did not understand, answered-- "Oh, do anything! save her!" Then going back to her, he sank upon the carpet, and lay there with his head leaning against the edge of her bed, sobbing. "Don't cry," she said to him. "Soon I shall not trouble you any more." "Why was it? Who drove you to it?" She replied. "It had to be, my dear!" "Weren't you happy? Is it my fault? I did all I could!" "Yes, that is true--you are good--you." And she passed her hand slowly over his hair. The sweetness of this sensation deepened his sadness; he felt his whole being dissolving in despair at the thought that he must lose her, just when she was confessing more love for him than ever. And he could think of nothing; he did not know, he did not dare; the urgent need for some immediate resolution gave the finishing stroke to the turmoil of his mind. So she had done, she thought, with all the treachery; and meanness, and numberless desires that had tortured her. She hated no one now; a twilight dimness was settling upon her thoughts, and, of all earthly noises, Emma heard none but the intermittent lamentations of this poor heart, sweet and indistinct like the echo of a symphony dying away. "Bring me the child," she said, raising herself on her elbow. "You are not worse, are you?" asked Charles. "No, no!" The child, serious, and still half-asleep, was carried in on the servant's arm in her long white nightgown, from which her bare feet peeped out. She looked wonderingly at the disordered room, and half-closed her eyes, dazzled by the candles burning on the table. They reminded her, no doubt, of the morning of New Year's day and Mid-Lent, when thus awakened early by candle-light she came to her mother's bed to fetch her presents, for she began saying-- "But where is it, mamma?" And as everybody was silent, "But I can't see my little stocking." Felicite held her over the bed while she still kept looking towards the mantelpiece. "Has nurse taken it?" she asked. And at this name, that carried her back to the memory of her adulteries and her calamities, Madame Bovary turned away her head, as at the loathing of another bitterer poison that rose to her mouth. But Berthe remained perched on the bed. "Oh, how big your eyes are, mamma! How pale you are! how hot you are!" Her mother looked at her. "I am frightened!" cried the child, recoiling. Emma took her hand to kiss it; the child struggled. "That will do. Take her away," cried Charles, who was sobbing in the alcove. Then the symptoms ceased for a moment; she seemed less agitated; and at every insignificant word, at every respiration a little more easy, he regained hope. At last, when Canivet came in, he threw himself into his arms. "Ah! it is you. Thanks! You are good! But she is better. See! look at her." His colleague was by no means of this opinion, and, as he said of himself, "never beating about the bush," he prescribed, an emetic in order to empty the stomach completely. She soon began vomiting blood. Her lips became drawn. Her limbs were convulsed, her whole body covered with brown spots, and her pulse slipped beneath the fingers like a stretched thread, like a harp-string nearly breaking. After this she began to scream horribly. She cursed the poison, railed at it, and implored it to be quick, and thrust away with her stiffened arms everything that Charles, in more agony than herself, tried to make her drink. He stood up, his handkerchief to his lips, with a rattling sound in his throat, weeping, and choked by sobs that shook his whole body. Felicite was running hither and thither in the room. Homais, motionless, uttered great sighs; and Monsieur Canivet, always retaining his self-command, nevertheless began to feel uneasy. "The devil! yet she has been purged, and from the moment that the cause ceases--" "The effect must cease," said Homais, "that is evident." "Oh, save her!" cried Bovary. And, without listening to the chemist, who was still venturing the hypothesis, "It is perhaps a salutary paroxysm," Canivet was about to administer some theriac, when they heard the cracking of a whip; all the windows rattled, and a post-chaise drawn by three horses abreast, up to their ears in mud, drove at a gallop round the corner of the market. It was Doctor Lariviere. The apparition of a god would not have caused more commotion. Bovary raised his hands; Canivet stopped short; and Homais pulled off his skull-cap long before the doctor had come in. He belonged to that great school of surgery begotten of Bichat, to that generation, now extinct, of philosophical practitioners, who, loving their art with a fanatical love, exercised it with enthusiasm and wisdom. Everyone in his hospital trembled when he was angry; and his students so revered him that they tried, as soon as they were themselves in practice, to imitate him as much as possible. So that in all the towns about they were found wearing his long wadded merino overcoat and black frock-coat, whose buttoned cuffs slightly covered his brawny hands--very beautiful hands, and that never knew gloves, as though to be more ready to plunge into suffering. Disdainful of honours, of titles, and of academies, like one of the old Knight-Hospitallers, generous, fatherly to the poor, and practising virtue without believing in it, he would almost have passed for a saint if the keenness of his intellect had not caused him to be feared as a demon. His glance, more penetrating than his bistouries, looked straight into your soul, and dissected every lie athwart all assertions and all reticences. And thus he went along, full of that debonair majesty that is given by the consciousness of great talent, of fortune, and of forty years of a labourious and irreproachable life. He frowned as soon as he had passed the door when he saw the cadaverous face of Emma stretched out on her back with her mouth open. Then, while apparently listening to Canivet, he rubbed his fingers up and down beneath his nostrils, and repeated-- "Good! good!" But he made a slow gesture with his shoulders. Bovary watched him; they looked at one another; and this man, accustomed as he was to the sight of pain, could not keep back a tear that fell on his shirt-frill. He tried to take Canivet into the next room. Charles followed him. "She is very ill, isn't she? If we put on sinapisms? Anything! Oh, think of something, you who have saved so many!" Charles caught him in both his arms, and gazed at him wildly, imploringly, half-fainting against his breast. "Come, my poor fellow, courage! There is nothing more to be done." And Doctor Lariviere turned away. "You are going?" "I will come back." He went out only to give an order to the coachman, with Monsieur Canivet, who did not care either to have Emma die under his hands. The chemist rejoined them on the Place. He could not by temperament keep away from celebrities, so he begged Monsieur Lariviere to do him the signal honour of accepting some breakfast. He sent quickly to the "Lion d'Or" for some pigeons; to the butcher's for all the cutlets that were to be had; to Tuvache for cream; and to Lestiboudois for eggs; and the druggist himself aided in the preparations, while Madame Homais was saying as she pulled together the strings of her jacket-- "You must excuse us, sir, for in this poor place, when one hasn't been told the night before--" "Wine glasses!" whispered Homais. "If only we were in town, we could fall back upon stuffed trotters." "Be quiet! Sit down, doctor!" He thought fit, after the first few mouthfuls, to give some details as to the catastrophe. "We first had a feeling of siccity in the pharynx, then intolerable pains at the epigastrium, super purgation, coma." "But how did she poison herself?" "I don't know, doctor, and I don't even know where she can have procured the arsenious acid." Justin, who was just bringing in a pile of plates, began to tremble. "What's the matter?" said the chemist. At this question the young man dropped the whole lot on the ground with a crash. "Imbecile!" cried Homais, "awkward lout! block-head! confounded ass!" But suddenly controlling himself-- "I wished, doctor, to make an analysis, and primo I delicately introduced a tube--" "You would have done better," said the physician, "to introduce your fingers into her throat." His colleague was silent, having just before privately received a severe lecture about his emetic, so that this good Canivet, so arrogant and so verbose at the time of the clubfoot, was to-day very modest. He smiled without ceasing in an approving manner. Homais dilated in Amphytrionic pride, and the affecting thought of Bovary vaguely contributed to his pleasure by a kind of egotistic reflex upon himself. Then the presence of the doctor transported him. He displayed his erudition, cited pell-mell cantharides, upas, the manchineel, vipers. "I have even read that various persons have found themselves under toxicological symptoms, and, as it were, thunderstricken by black-pudding that had been subjected to a too vehement fumigation. At least, this was stated in a very fine report drawn up by one of our pharmaceutical chiefs, one of our masters, the illustrious Cadet de Gassicourt!" Madame Homais reappeared, carrying one of those shaky machines that are heated with spirits of wine; for Homais liked to make his coffee at table, having, moreover, torrefied it, pulverised it, and mixed it himself. "Saccharum, doctor?" said he, offering the sugar. Then he had all his children brought down, anxious to have the physician's opinion on their constitutions. At last Monsieur Lariviere was about to leave, when Madame Homais asked for a consultation about her husband. He was making his blood too thick by going to sleep every evening after dinner. "Oh, it isn't his blood that's too thick," said the physician. And, smiling a little at his unnoticed joke, the doctor opened the door. But the chemist's shop was full of people; he had the greatest difficulty in getting rid of Monsieur Tuvache, who feared his spouse would get inflammation of the lungs, because she was in the habit of spitting on the ashes; then of Monsieur Binet, who sometimes experienced sudden attacks of great hunger; and of Madame Caron, who suffered from tinglings; of Lheureux, who had vertigo; of Lestiboudois, who had rheumatism; and of Madame Lefrancois, who had heartburn. At last the three horses started; and it was the general opinion that he had not shown himself at all obliging. Public attention was distracted by the appearance of Monsieur Bournisien, who was going across the market with the holy oil. Homais, as was due to his principles, compared priests to ravens attracted by the odour of death. The sight of an ecclesiastic was personally disagreeable to him, for the cassock made him think of the shroud, and he detested the one from some fear of the other. Nevertheless, not shrinking from what he called his mission, he returned to Bovary's in company with Canivet whom Monsieur Lariviere, before leaving, had strongly urged to make this visit; and he would, but for his wife's objections, have taken his two sons with him, in order to accustom them to great occasions; that this might be a lesson, an example, a solemn picture, that should remain in their heads later on. The room when they went in was full of mournful solemnity. On the work-table, covered over with a white cloth, there were five or six small balls of cotton in a silver dish, near a large crucifix between two lighted candles. Emma, her chin sunken upon her breast, had her eyes inordinately wide open, and her poor hands wandered over the sheets with that hideous and soft movement of the dying, that seems as if they wanted already to cover themselves with the shroud. Pale as a statue and with eyes red as fire, Charles, not weeping, stood opposite her at the foot of the bed, while the priest, bending one knee, was muttering words in a low voice. She turned her face slowly, and seemed filled with joy on seeing suddenly the violet stole, no doubt finding again, in the midst of a temporary lull in her pain, the lost voluptuousness of her first mystical transports, with the visions of eternal beatitude that were beginning. The priest rose to take the crucifix; then she stretched forward her neck as one who is athirst, and glueing her lips to the body of the Man-God, she pressed upon it with all her expiring strength the fullest kiss of love that she had ever given. Then he recited the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began to give extreme unction. First upon the eyes, that had so coveted all worldly pomp; then upon the nostrils, that had been greedy of the warm breeze and amorous odours; then upon the mouth, that had uttered lies, that had curled with pride and cried out in lewdness; then upon the hands that had delighted in sensual touches; and finally upon the soles of the feet, so swift of yore, when she was running to satisfy her desires, and that would now walk no more. The cure wiped his fingers, threw the bit of cotton dipped in oil into the fire, and came and sat down by the dying woman, to tell her that she must now blend her sufferings with those of Jesus Christ and abandon herself to the divine mercy. Finishing his exhortations, he tried to place in her hand a blessed candle, symbol of the celestial glory with which she was soon to be surrounded. Emma, too weak, could not close her fingers, and the taper, but for Monsieur Bournisien would have fallen to the ground. However, she was not quite so pale, and her face had an expression of serenity as if the sacrament had cured her. The priest did not fail to point this out; he even explained to Bovary that the Lord sometimes prolonged the life of persons when he thought it meet for their salvation; and Charles remembered the day when, so near death, she had received the communion. Perhaps there was no need to despair, he thought. In fact, she looked around her slowly, as one awakening from a dream; then in a distinct voice she asked for her looking-glass, and remained some time bending over it, until the big tears fell from her eyes. Then she turned away her head with a sigh and fell back upon the pillows. Her chest soon began panting rapidly; the whole of her tongue protruded from her mouth; her eyes, as they rolled, grew paler, like the two globes of a lamp that is going out, so that one might have thought her already dead but for the fearful labouring of her ribs, shaken by violent breathing, as if the soul were struggling to free itself. Felicite knelt down before the crucifix, and the druggist himself slightly bent his knees, while Monsieur Canivet looked out vaguely at the Place. Bournisien had again begun to pray, his face bowed against the edge of the bed, his long black cassock trailing behind him in the room. Charles was on the other side, on his knees, his arms outstretched towards Emma. He had taken her hands and pressed them, shuddering at every beat of her heart, as at the shaking of a falling ruin. As the death-rattle became stronger the priest prayed faster; his prayers mingled with the stifled sobs of Bovary, and sometimes all seemed lost in the muffled murmur of the Latin syllables that tolled like a passing bell. Suddenly on the pavement was heard a loud noise of clogs and the clattering of a stick; and a voice rose--a raucous voice--that sang-- "Maids in the warmth of a summer day Dream of love and of love always" Emma raised herself like a galvanised corpse, her hair undone, her eyes fixed, staring. "Where the sickle blades have been, Nannette, gathering ears of corn, Passes bending down, my queen, To the earth where they were born." "The blind man!" she cried. And Emma began to laugh, an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh, thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor wretch that stood out against the eternal night like a menace. "The wind is strong this summer day, Her petticoat has flown away." She fell back upon the mattress in a convulsion. They all drew near. She was dead.

Chapter 8

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary46.asp

As Emma draws closer to La Huchette, she is reminded of the "sensations of her first love." The melting snow is described as she makes her way to Rodolphe's room. He is surprised at her sudden appearance. Emma reproaches Rodolphe for deserting her and urges him to renew their relationship. Rodolphe is taken in with Emma's show of 'undying' love and attempts to find out the cause of her sorrow. Her answer leaves him stunned, for she has explained that she is urgently in need of a large sum of money to clear up a debt. Rodolphe calmly states his inability to help her. Angered and humiliated, Emma gives Rodolphe a piece of her mind before leaving. She runs from La Huchette in a dazed state. Night is falling as Emma becomes fully conscious of "the deep hopelessness of her plight. " She hurries to the chemist's shop, where she persuades Justin to lead her to the storeroom. All the while, the young boy has a "presentiment of something terrible." Once in the storeroom, Emma goes directly to a blue jar of arsenic and uncorks it. She plunges her hand into the jar and crams the white powder into her mouth. Justin tries to stop her. She calmly tells him that his master will be blamed for her act. Then she walks off. At home, she writes a letter, seals it, and solemnly tells Charles to read it the next day. She stretches herself on the bed, expecting to die in her sleep. Instead, she soon displays violent symptoms of illness. Charles notices a white sediment at the base of the basin in which she has just vomited. When her body is wracked with convulsions, he becomes desperate. He tears open her letter and learns that she has poisoned herself. Homais is called. He, in turn, sends for Monsieur Canivet and Dr Lariviere, but their presence makes no difference. Emma has clearly taken a turn for the worse, and no treatment is possible. Bournisien is summoned and administers the last sacrament to Emma. A sudden joy is glimpsed in her eyes and her face grows serene. She is clearly breathing her last breath when a sudden commotion disturbs the solemn moment. The blind beggar's hoarse voice is heard singing his usual song: 'When the sun shines warm above, It turns a maiden's thoughts to love. All across the furrows brown See Nanette go bending down, Gathering up with careful hand The golden harvest from the land. The wind it blew so hard one day, Her little petticoat flew away.' These words have a dramatic effect on Emma. She sits up like a "galvanized corpse" and laughs "a ghastly, frantic, desperate laugh" before another convulsion ends her life.

Notes As Emma heads towards La Huchette, she is clearly trying her last resource. She knows the kind of affect she has on Rodolphe and hopes she can charm him into giving her the money needed to pay off her debt. Rodolphe's passion is aroused on seeing her, as reflected in the melting snow that hints of his awakening emotions. He is shocked, however, at her request for money and states his inability to help her. Emma is horrified as she listens to his excuses. Realizing that she has offered herself to him for nothing, she is furious and berates Rodolphe for accepting the gifts she had given him. She tells him of how his parting letter had torn her heart. In truth, his original betrayal had triggered her long illness and the start of her self-destruction. Emma is in agony, realizing that she is totally unable to raise the money and that Rodolphe has never loved her. Flaubert wonderfully captures her emotions: "Only in her love did she suffer; through the thought of that she felt her soul escape from her as a wounded man in his last agony feels life flow out through his bleeding gashes. " The image of death is etched in these lines, foreshadowing Emma's tortuous end. In desperation, Emma coerces Justin to let her into Homais' storeroom. She knows where the arsenic is stored and quickly eats a handful of the white powder. It is ironic that Justin, who loves Emma patiently through all her indiscretions, is the one who enables her to commit suicide, becoming the agent of her death. Because of his devotion to her, he cannot deny Emma; ironically, Emma feels nothing for Justin. Throughout the book, she has yearned for absolute love but fails to recognize it in Justin. Emma remains a romantic until the very end. The manner in which she expects death to embrace her contrasts strongly with the way in which she actually dies. She imagines herself dying 'peacefully' in her sleep, but what really happens is ugly and grim as she grows violently ill. The only peaceful thing she experiences is taking the last sacrament from the priest. Her final kissing of the cross is passionate and reflective of her life: "Reaching forward like one in thirst, she glued her lips to the body of the Man-God and laid upon it with all her failing strength the most mighty kiss of love she had ever given." For Emma, love, even spiritual devotion, can only be expressed as earthly and sensual. As she clings to her faith in the end, the reader is reminded of the two previous religious phases of her life -- during her adolescence and after her recovery from Rodolphe's betrayal. It is sad to realize that at two key points in her life, she has sought spiritual love and deserted it for sensual passion. Ironically, the naive and faithful Charles has stood by her throughout her indiscretions and now blindly hopes for her recovery. In the throes of a mighty convulsion as she nears her end, Emma hears the song of the blind beggar. The mischievous irony of the words being sung is not lost on Emma. She has apparently heard the tune innumerable times on her way to and from Rouen; now it has a terrifying affect on her. The hideous image of the beggar reminds her of "eternal darkness" as she dies and symbolizes the ugliness of Emma's life.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/part_3_chapters_9_to_11.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_30_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapters 9-11

chapter 9 - 11

{"name": "Chapter 9 - 11", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary48.asp", "summary": "Charles is numbed by grief over the loss of his wife and keeps constant watch over her body as arrangements are made. The sight of her lifeless form makes him wonder if \"there were infinite masses, of enormous weight, pressing down upon her.\" As he makes lavish plans for Emma's funeral, Bournisien and Homais unsuccessfully try to dissuade him from spending so much money. When his mother arrives, she tries to talk him out of spending so freely, but Charles is adamant. Rouault, Emma's father, is summoned and faints on hearing of his daughter's death. The funeral is a solemn affair. Charles and his mother talk about old times before retiring to bed. Charles, of course, thinks of Emma and cannot sleep. Justin is also away, weeping on Emma's grave, stricken with \"the burden of a measureless sorrow that was tenderer than the moon and deeper than night.\" By contrast, Rodolphe and Leon sleep peacefully through the night. Charles does not find it easy to cope. Berthe has been sent to the nurse during Emma's funeral. When she returns home, Charles finds her gaiety difficult to tolerate. He also cannot bear to sell Emma's possessions in spite of the fact that the debts keep mounting. There are other troubles, too. Felicite, Emma's maid, runs away with her lover and takes along a sizable portion of Emma's wardrobe. Charles still has no idea about Emma's unfaithfulness. When he learns that Leon is engaged, Charles sends a letter of congratulations and states how happy Emma would have been for him. He also finds Rodolphe's farewell letter to Emma and suspects nothing more than an innocent relationship between the two. He tells himself that Emma had a powerful effect on men, and that \"no one... could have helped adoring her.\" To keep Emma's image alive, Charles adopts her \"preferences and ideas\" and leaves Emma's room exactly the way it had always been. He and Berthe lead a lonely existence amongst her presence. Charles continues to struggle. He tries to put religion in his life and visits the church regularly for a week, but then stops. He does not maintain good relations with his mother. His debts continue to increase. He is cut off from relationships in town, for Justin has run off to Rouen, and Homais no longer wishes to associate with him. The only attachment Charles maintains is with his daughter, Berthe. One day, Charles opens a secret drawer in Emma's desk and discovers Leon's and Rodolphe's love letters to Emma, which leaves him distraught and frantic. As a result, he feels more dejected than ever and withdraws further into himself. When he meets Rodolphe at the market, Charles goes to the tavern with him for a drink. He tells Rodolphe that he knows of his affair with Emma and is not angry with him, saying that everything happened because of \"fate.\" Rodolphe finds Charles' attitude both \"comic\" and \"abject.\" The following day, Berthe finds Charles dead in the garden. His possessions are sold off, and Berthe is sent to live with her grandmother. The old lady soon dies, and the little girl is taken in by an aunt. Eventually, the child has to work in a cotton mill to earn her living. Amidst all this squalor and sorrow, Homais' success story stands out. He is respected by the public and officially recognized by the Legion of Honor.", "analysis": "Notes \" The coming of death always induces a sort of stupefaction, so hard is it to realize this advent of nothingness and to bring oneself to believe in it.\" This statement fully captures Charles' reaction to Emma's death. He goes into a state of shock and prepares an elaborate funeral. His mother comes to console her son and hopes to re-establish her former relations with him now that Emma is gone. Mr. Roualt, Emma's father, also comes and makes a pathetic appearance. So great is his grief that he cannot bring himself to look at his granddaughter. The reader is drawn to sympathize with this old man. For her burial, Emma is dressed in her white satin wedding gown, a symbol of purity. This is supremely ironic, for it is in sharp contrast to her corrupt and degenerate life-style. Another example of irony is the camaraderie between Homais and Bournisien. This is observed during the vigil they maintain by Emma's bedside. Neither is really concerned about her death or her family's fate. Both indulge in their own petty differences, \"neither listening to the other.\" Also ironic is the mention of Emma's ex-lovers: they sleep while those who really loved her grieve. Justin's youthful sorrow also captures the reader's attention. But while Justin is giving vent to his private sorrow at Emma's grave, the gravedigger, Lestiboudois, thinks of him as a petty thief. The faithful Charles suffers greatly after Emma's death. Financially, he is in ruins. Mentally, too, he is a broken man, especially after finding Rodolphe's and Leon's love letters to Emma. He withdraws from social contact because of his profound dejection. His daughter, Berthe, is his only companion. It is interesting to note how people shun these two after Emma's death; Homais' absence is particularly noticeable. Charles' chance meeting with Rodolphe demonstrates the resignation with which he faces life. He is filled with a \"somber fury\" against Rodolphe, but this lasts only a moment. His look of \"dismal lifelessness\" soon returns. Rodolphe finds his fatalistic attitude \"comic\" and \"a bit abject.\" He is in no way affected by the Bovarys' tragedy. The meeting with Charles confirms the callous indifference of this arrogant, young bachelor. With Charles' death, the property is quickly sold off by the creditors. The image one gets is of vultures feasting on carrion. Berthe, now orphaned, is finally placed with an aunt who \"sends her to earn her living in a cotton-mill.\" Flaubert simply presents the reader with a report of her circumtances, but does not take sides. This is realism at its best. Despite the ironic undertones throughout the book, Flaubert's descriptions of small town happenings are as fresh as life. It is no wonder that Madame Bovary is considered one of the best examples of the realistic literature ever to be written."}

There is always after the death of anyone a kind of stupefaction; so difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign ourselves to believe in it. But still, when he saw that she did not move, Charles threw himself upon her, crying-- "Farewell! farewell!" Homais and Canivet dragged him from the room. "Restrain yourself!" "Yes." said he, struggling, "I'll be quiet. I'll not do anything. But leave me alone. I want to see her. She is my wife!" And he wept. "Cry," said the chemist; "let nature take her course; that will solace you." Weaker than a child, Charles let himself be led downstairs into the sitting-room, and Monsieur Homais soon went home. On the Place he was accosted by the blind man, who, having dragged himself as far as Yonville, in the hope of getting the antiphlogistic pomade, was asking every passer-by where the druggist lived. "There now! as if I hadn't got other fish to fry. Well, so much the worse; you must come later on." And he entered the shop hurriedly. He had to write two letters, to prepare a soothing potion for Bovary, to invent some lie that would conceal the poisoning, and work it up into an article for the "Fanal," without counting the people who were waiting to get the news from him; and when the Yonvillers had all heard his story of the arsenic that she had mistaken for sugar in making a vanilla cream. Homais once more returned to Bovary's. He found him alone (Monsieur Canivet had left), sitting in an arm-chair near the window, staring with an idiotic look at the flags of the floor. "Now," said the chemist, "you ought yourself to fix the hour for the ceremony." "Why? What ceremony?" Then, in a stammering, frightened voice, "Oh, no! not that. No! I want to see her here." Homais, to keep himself in countenance, took up a water-bottle on the whatnot to water the geraniums. "Ah! thanks," said Charles; "you are good." But he did not finish, choking beneath the crowd of memories that this action of the druggist recalled to him. Then to distract him, Homais thought fit to talk a little horticulture: plants wanted humidity. Charles bowed his head in sign of approbation. "Besides, the fine days will soon be here again." "Ah!" said Bovary. The druggist, at his wit's end, began softly to draw aside the small window-curtain. "Hallo! there's Monsieur Tuvache passing." Charles repeated like a machine--- "Monsieur Tuvache passing!" Homais did not dare to speak to him again about the funeral arrangements; it was the priest who succeeded in reconciling him to them. He shut himself up in his consulting-room, took a pen, and after sobbing for some time, wrote-- "I wish her to be buried in her wedding-dress, with white shoes, and a wreath. Her hair is to be spread out over her shoulders. Three coffins, one of oak, one of mahogany, one of lead. Let no one say anything to me. I shall have strength. Over all there is to be placed a large piece of green velvet. This is my wish; see that it is done." The two men were much surprised at Bovary's romantic ideas. The chemist at once went to him and said-- "This velvet seems to me a superfetation. Besides, the expense--" "What's that to you?" cried Charles. "Leave me! You did not love her. Go!" The priest took him by the arm for a turn in the garden. He discoursed on the vanity of earthly things. God was very great, was very good: one must submit to his decrees without a murmur; nay, must even thank him. Charles burst out into blasphemies: "I hate your God!" "The spirit of rebellion is still upon you," sighed the ecclesiastic. Bovary was far away. He was walking with great strides along by the wall, near the espalier, and he ground his teeth; he raised to heaven looks of malediction, but not so much as a leaf stirred. A fine rain was falling: Charles, whose chest was bare, at last began to shiver; he went in and sat down in the kitchen. At six o'clock a noise like a clatter of old iron was heard on the Place; it was the "Hirondelle" coming in, and he remained with his forehead against the windowpane, watching all the passengers get out, one after the other. Felicite put down a mattress for him in the drawing-room. He threw himself upon it and fell asleep. Although a philosopher, Monsieur Homais respected the dead. So bearing no grudge to poor Charles, he came back again in the evening to sit up with the body; bringing with him three volumes and a pocket-book for taking notes. Monsieur Bournisien was there, and two large candles were burning at the head of the bed, that had been taken out of the alcove. The druggist, on whom the silence weighed, was not long before he began formulating some regrets about this "unfortunate young woman." and the priest replied that there was nothing to do now but pray for her. "Yet," Homais went on, "one of two things; either she died in a state of grace (as the Church has it), and then she has no need of our prayers; or else she departed impertinent (that is, I believe, the ecclesiastical expression), and then--" Bournisien interrupted him, replying testily that it was none the less necessary to pray. "But," objected the chemist, "since God knows all our needs, what can be the good of prayer?" "What!" cried the ecclesiastic, "prayer! Why, aren't you a Christian?" "Excuse me," said Homais; "I admire Christianity. To begin with, it enfranchised the slaves, introduced into the world a morality--" "That isn't the question. All the texts-" "Oh! oh! As to texts, look at history; it, is known that all the texts have been falsified by the Jesuits." Charles came in, and advancing towards the bed, slowly drew the curtains. Emma's head was turned towards her right shoulder, the corner of her mouth, which was open, seemed like a black hole at the lower part of her face; her two thumbs were bent into the palms of her hands; a kind of white dust besprinkled her lashes, and her eyes were beginning to disappear in that viscous pallor that looks like a thin web, as if spiders had spun it over. The sheet sunk in from her breast to her knees, and then rose at the tips of her toes, and it seemed to Charles that infinite masses, an enormous load, were weighing upon her. The church clock struck two. They could hear the loud murmur of the river flowing in the darkness at the foot of the terrace. Monsieur Bournisien from time to time blew his nose noisily, and Homais' pen was scratching over the paper. "Come, my good friend," he said, "withdraw; this spectacle is tearing you to pieces." Charles once gone, the chemist and the cure recommenced their discussions. "Read Voltaire," said the one, "read D'Holbach, read the 'Encyclopaedia'!" "Read the 'Letters of some Portuguese Jews,'" said the other; "read 'The Meaning of Christianity,' by Nicolas, formerly a magistrate." They grew warm, they grew red, they both talked at once without listening to each other. Bournisien was scandalized at such audacity; Homais marvelled at such stupidity; and they were on the point of insulting one another when Charles suddenly reappeared. A fascination drew him. He was continually coming upstairs. He stood opposite her, the better to see her, and he lost himself in a contemplation so deep that it was no longer painful. He recalled stories of catalepsy, the marvels of magnetism, and he said to himself that by willing it with all his force he might perhaps succeed in reviving her. Once he even bent towards he, and cried in a low voice, "Emma! Emma!" His strong breathing made the flames of the candles tremble against the wall. At daybreak Madame Bovary senior arrived. Charles as he embraced her burst into another flood of tears. She tried, as the chemist had done, to make some remarks to him on the expenses of the funeral. He became so angry that she was silent, and he even commissioned her to go to town at once and buy what was necessary. Charles remained alone the whole afternoon; they had taken Berthe to Madame Homais'; Felicite was in the room upstairs with Madame Lefrancois. In the evening he had some visitors. He rose, pressed their hands, unable to speak. Then they sat down near one another, and formed a large semicircle in front of the fire. With lowered faces, and swinging one leg crossed over the other knee, they uttered deep sighs at intervals; each one was inordinately bored, and yet none would be the first to go. Homais, when he returned at nine o'clock (for the last two days only Homais seemed to have been on the Place), was laden with a stock of camphor, of benzine, and aromatic herbs. He also carried a large jar full of chlorine water, to keep off all miasmata. Just then the servant, Madame Lefrancois, and Madame Bovary senior were busy about Emma, finishing dressing her, and they were drawing down the long stiff veil that covered her to her satin shoes. Felicite was sobbing--"Ah! my poor mistress! my poor mistress!" "Look at her," said the landlady, sighing; "how pretty she still is! Now, couldn't you swear she was going to get up in a minute?" Then they bent over her to put on her wreath. They had to raise the head a little, and a rush of black liquid issued, as if she were vomiting, from her mouth. "Oh, goodness! The dress; take care!" cried Madame Lefrancois. "Now, just come and help," she said to the chemist. "Perhaps you're afraid?" "I afraid?" replied he, shrugging his shoulders. "I dare say! I've seen all sorts of things at the hospital when I was studying pharmacy. We used to make punch in the dissecting room! Nothingness does not terrify a philosopher; and, as I often say, I even intend to leave my body to the hospitals, in order, later on, to serve science." The cure on his arrival inquired how Monsieur Bovary was, and, on the reply of the druggist, went on--"The blow, you see, is still too recent." Then Homais congratulated him on not being exposed, like other people, to the loss of a beloved companion; whence there followed a discussion on the celibacy of priests. "For," said the chemist, "it is unnatural that a man should do without women! There have been crimes--" "But, good heaven!" cried the ecclesiastic, "how do you expect an individual who is married to keep the secrets of the confessional, for example?" Homais fell foul of the confessional. Bournisien defended it; he enlarged on the acts of restitution that it brought about. He cited various anecdotes about thieves who had suddenly become honest. Military men on approaching the tribunal of penitence had felt the scales fall from their eyes. At Fribourg there was a minister-- His companion was asleep. Then he felt somewhat stifled by the over-heavy atmosphere of the room; he opened the window; this awoke the chemist. "Come, take a pinch of snuff," he said to him. "Take it; it'll relieve you." A continual barking was heard in the distance. "Do you hear that dog howling?" said the chemist. "They smell the dead," replied the priest. "It's like bees; they leave their hives on the decease of any person." Homais made no remark upon these prejudices, for he had again dropped asleep. Monsieur Bournisien, stronger than he, went on moving his lips gently for some time, then insensibly his chin sank down, he let fall his big black boot, and began to snore. They sat opposite one another, with protruding stomachs, puffed-up faces, and frowning looks, after so much disagreement uniting at last in the same human weakness, and they moved no more than the corpse by their side, that seemed to be sleeping. Charles coming in did not wake them. It was the last time; he came to bid her farewell. The aromatic herbs were still smoking, and spirals of bluish vapour blended at the window-sash with the fog that was coming in. There were few stars, and the night was warm. The wax of the candles fell in great drops upon the sheets of the bed. Charles watched them burn, tiring his eyes against the glare of their yellow flame. The watering on the satin gown shimmered white as moonlight. Emma was lost beneath it; and it seemed to him that, spreading beyond her own self, she blended confusedly with everything around her--the silence, the night, the passing wind, the damp odours rising from the ground. Then suddenly he saw her in the garden at Tostes, on a bench against the thorn hedge, or else at Rouen in the streets, on the threshold of their house, in the yard at Bertaux. He again heard the laughter of the happy boys beneath the apple-trees: the room was filled with the perfume of her hair; and her dress rustled in his arms with a noise like electricity. The dress was still the same. For a long while he thus recalled all his lost joys, her attitudes, her movements, the sound of her voice. Upon one fit of despair followed another, and even others, inexhaustible as the waves of an overflowing sea. A terrible curiosity seized him. Slowly, with the tips of his fingers, palpitating, he lifted her veil. But he uttered a cry of horror that awoke the other two. They dragged him down into the sitting-room. Then Felicite came up to say that he wanted some of her hair. "Cut some off," replied the druggist. And as she did not dare to, he himself stepped forward, scissors in hand. He trembled so that he pierced the skin of the temple in several places. At last, stiffening himself against emotion, Homais gave two or three great cuts at random that left white patches amongst that beautiful black hair. The chemist and the cure plunged anew into their occupations, not without sleeping from time to time, of which they accused each other reciprocally at each fresh awakening. Then Monsieur Bournisien sprinkled the room with holy water and Homais threw a little chlorine water on the floor. Felicite had taken care to put on the chest of drawers, for each of them, a bottle of brandy, some cheese, and a large roll. And the druggist, who could not hold out any longer, about four in the morning sighed-- "My word! I should like to take some sustenance." The priest did not need any persuading; he went out to go and say mass, came back, and then they ate and hobnobbed, giggling a little without knowing why, stimulated by that vague gaiety that comes upon us after times of sadness, and at the last glass the priest said to the druggist, as he clapped him on the shoulder-- "We shall end by understanding one another." In the passage downstairs they met the undertaker's men, who were coming in. Then Charles for two hours had to suffer the torture of hearing the hammer resound against the wood. Next day they lowered her into her oak coffin, that was fitted into the other two; but as the bier was too large, they had to fill up the gaps with the wool of a mattress. At last, when the three lids had been planed down, nailed, soldered, it was placed outside in front of the door; the house was thrown open, and the people of Yonville began to flock round. Old Rouault arrived, and fainted on the Place when he saw the black cloth! He had only received the chemist's letter thirty-six hours after the event; and, from consideration for his feelings, Homais had so worded it that it was impossible to make out what it was all about. First, the old fellow had fallen as if struck by apoplexy. Next, he understood that she was not dead, but she might be. At last, he had put on his blouse, taken his hat, fastened his spurs to his boots, and set out at full speed; and the whole of the way old Rouault, panting, was torn by anguish. Once even he was obliged to dismount. He was dizzy; he heard voices round about him; he felt himself going mad. Day broke. He saw three black hens asleep in a tree. He shuddered, horrified at this omen. Then he promised the Holy Virgin three chasubles for the church, and that he would go barefooted from the cemetery at Bertaux to the chapel of Vassonville. He entered Maromme shouting for the people of the inn, burst open the door with a thrust of his shoulder, made for a sack of oats, emptied a bottle of sweet cider into the manger, and again mounted his nag, whose feet struck fire as it dashed along. He said to himself that no doubt they would save her; the doctors would discover some remedy surely. He remembered all the miraculous cures he had been told about. Then she appeared to him dead. She was there; before his eyes, lying on her back in the middle of the road. He reined up, and the hallucination disappeared. At Quincampoix, to give himself heart, he drank three cups of coffee one after the other. He fancied they had made a mistake in the name in writing. He looked for the letter in his pocket, felt it there, but did not dare to open it. At last he began to think it was all a joke; someone's spite, the jest of some wag; and besides, if she were dead, one would have known it. But no! There was nothing extraordinary about the country; the sky was blue, the trees swayed; a flock of sheep passed. He saw the village; he was seen coming bending forward upon his horse, belabouring it with great blows, the girths dripping with blood. When he had recovered consciousness, he fell, weeping, into Bovary's arms: "My girl! Emma! my child! tell me--" The other replied, sobbing, "I don't know! I don't know! It's a curse!" The druggist separated them. "These horrible details are useless. I will tell this gentleman all about it. Here are the people coming. Dignity! Come now! Philosophy!" The poor fellow tried to show himself brave, and repeated several times. "Yes! courage!" "Oh," cried the old man, "so I will have, by God! I'll go along o' her to the end!" The bell began tolling. All was ready; they had to start. And seated in a stall of the choir, side by side, they saw pass and repass in front of them continually the three chanting choristers. The serpent-player was blowing with all his might. Monsieur Bournisien, in full vestments, was singing in a shrill voice. He bowed before the tabernacle, raising his hands, stretched out his arms. Lestiboudois went about the church with his whalebone stick. The bier stood near the lectern, between four rows of candles. Charles felt inclined to get up and put them out. Yet he tried to stir himself to a feeling of devotion, to throw himself into the hope of a future life in which he should see her again. He imagined to himself she had gone on a long journey, far away, for a long time. But when he thought of her lying there, and that all was over, that they would lay her in the earth, he was seized with a fierce, gloomy, despairful rage. At times he thought he felt nothing more, and he enjoyed this lull in his pain, whilst at the same time he reproached himself for being a wretch. The sharp noise of an iron-ferruled stick was heard on the stones, striking them at irregular intervals. It came from the end of the church, and stopped short at the lower aisles. A man in a coarse brown jacket knelt down painfully. It was Hippolyte, the stable-boy at the "Lion d'Or." He had put on his new leg. One of the choristers went round the nave making a collection, and the coppers chinked one after the other on the silver plate. "Oh, make haste! I am in pain!" cried Bovary, angrily throwing him a five-franc piece. The churchman thanked him with a deep bow. They sang, they knelt, they stood up; it was endless! He remembered that once, in the early times, they had been to mass together, and they had sat down on the other side, on the right, by the wall. The bell began again. There was a great moving of chairs; the bearers slipped their three staves under the coffin, and everyone left the church. Then Justin appeared at the door of the shop. He suddenly went in again, pale, staggering. People were at the windows to see the procession pass. Charles at the head walked erect. He affected a brave air, and saluted with a nod those who, coming out from the lanes or from their doors, stood amidst the crowd. The six men, three on either side, walked slowly, panting a little. The priests, the choristers, and the two choirboys recited the De profundis*, and their voices echoed over the fields, rising and falling with their undulations. Sometimes they disappeared in the windings of the path; but the great silver cross rose always before the trees. *Psalm CXXX. The women followed in black cloaks with turned-down hoods; each of them carried in her hands a large lighted candle, and Charles felt himself growing weaker at this continual repetition of prayers and torches, beneath this oppressive odour of wax and of cassocks. A fresh breeze was blowing; the rye and colza were sprouting, little dewdrops trembled at the roadsides and on the hawthorn hedges. All sorts of joyous sounds filled the air; the jolting of a cart rolling afar off in the ruts, the crowing of a cock, repeated again and again, or the gambling of a foal running away under the apple-trees: The pure sky was fretted with rosy clouds; a bluish haze rested upon the cots covered with iris. Charles as he passed recognised each courtyard. He remembered mornings like this, when, after visiting some patient, he came out from one and returned to her. The black cloth bestrewn with white beads blew up from time to time, laying bare the coffin. The tired bearers walked more slowly, and it advanced with constant jerks, like a boat that pitches with every wave. They reached the cemetery. The men went right down to a place in the grass where a grave was dug. They ranged themselves all round; and while the priest spoke, the red soil thrown up at the sides kept noiselessly slipping down at the corners. Then when the four ropes were arranged the coffin was placed upon them. He watched it descend; it seemed descending for ever. At last a thud was heard; the ropes creaked as they were drawn up. Then Bournisien took the spade handed to him by Lestiboudois; with his left hand all the time sprinkling water, with the right he vigorously threw in a large spadeful; and the wood of the coffin, struck by the pebbles, gave forth that dread sound that seems to us the reverberation of eternity. The ecclesiastic passed the holy water sprinkler to his neighbour. This was Homais. He swung it gravely, then handed it to Charles, who sank to his knees in the earth and threw in handfuls of it, crying, "Adieu!" He sent her kisses; he dragged himself towards the grave, to engulf himself with her. They led him away, and he soon grew calmer, feeling perhaps, like the others, a vague satisfaction that it was all over. Old Rouault on his way back began quietly smoking a pipe, which Homais in his innermost conscience thought not quite the thing. He also noticed that Monsieur Binet had not been present, and that Tuvache had "made off" after mass, and that Theodore, the notary's servant wore a blue coat, "as if one could not have got a black coat, since that is the custom, by Jove!" And to share his observations with others he went from group to group. They were deploring Emma's death, especially Lheureux, who had not failed to come to the funeral. "Poor little woman! What a trouble for her husband!" The druggist continued, "Do you know that but for me he would have committed some fatal attempt upon himself?" "Such a good woman! To think that I saw her only last Saturday in my shop." "I haven't had leisure," said Homais, "to prepare a few words that I would have cast upon her tomb." Charles on getting home undressed, and old Rouault put on his blue blouse. It was a new one, and as he had often during the journey wiped his eyes on the sleeves, the dye had stained his face, and the traces of tears made lines in the layer of dust that covered it. Madame Bovary senior was with them. All three were silent. At last the old fellow sighed-- "Do you remember, my friend, that I went to Tostes once when you had just lost your first deceased? I consoled you at that time. I thought of something to say then, but now--" Then, with a loud groan that shook his whole chest, "Ah! this is the end for me, do you see! I saw my wife go, then my son, and now to-day it's my daughter." He wanted to go back at once to Bertaux, saying that he could not sleep in this house. He even refused to see his granddaughter. "No, no! It would grieve me too much. Only you'll kiss her many times for me. Good-bye! you're a good fellow! And then I shall never forget that," he said, slapping his thigh. "Never fear, you shall always have your turkey." But when he reached the top of the hill he turned back, as he had turned once before on the road of Saint-Victor when he had parted from her. The windows of the village were all on fire beneath the slanting rays of the sun sinking behind the field. He put his hand over his eyes, and saw in the horizon an enclosure of walls, where trees here and there formed black clusters between white stones; then he went on his way at a gentle trot, for his nag had gone lame. Despite their fatigue, Charles and his mother stayed very long that evening talking together. They spoke of the days of the past and of the future. She would come to live at Yonville; she would keep house for him; they would never part again. She was ingenious and caressing, rejoicing in her heart at gaining once more an affection that had wandered from her for so many years. Midnight struck. The village as usual was silent, and Charles, awake, thought always of her. Rodolphe, who, to distract himself, had been rambling about the wood all day, was sleeping quietly in his chateau, and Leon, down yonder, always slept. There was another who at that hour was not asleep. On the grave between the pine-trees a child was on his knees weeping, and his heart, rent by sobs, was beating in the shadow beneath the load of an immense regret, sweeter than the moon and fathomless as the night. The gate suddenly grated. It was Lestiboudois; he came to fetch his spade, that he had forgotten. He recognised Justin climbing over the wall, and at last knew who was the culprit who stole his potatoes. The next day Charles had the child brought back. She asked for her mamma. They told her she was away; that she would bring her back some playthings. Berthe spoke of her again several times, then at last thought no more of her. The child's gaiety broke Bovary's heart, and he had to bear besides the intolerable consolations of the chemist. Money troubles soon began again, Monsieur Lheureux urging on anew his friend Vincart, and Charles pledged himself for exorbitant sums; for he would never consent to let the smallest of the things that had belonged to HER be sold. His mother was exasperated with him; he grew even more angry than she did. He had altogether changed. She left the house. Then everyone began "taking advantage" of him. Mademoiselle Lempereur presented a bill for six months' teaching, although Emma had never taken a lesson (despite the receipted bill she had shown Bovary); it was an arrangement between the two women. The man at the circulating library demanded three years' subscriptions; Mere Rollet claimed the postage due for some twenty letters, and when Charles asked for an explanation, she had the delicacy to reply-- "Oh, I don't know. It was for her business affairs." With every debt he paid Charles thought he had come to the end of them. But others followed ceaselessly. He sent in accounts for professional attendance. He was shown the letters his wife had written. Then he had to apologise. Felicite now wore Madame Bovary's gowns; not all, for he had kept some of them, and he went to look at them in her dressing-room, locking himself up there; she was about her height, and often Charles, seeing her from behind, was seized with an illusion, and cried out-- "Oh, stay, stay!" But at Whitsuntide she ran away from Yonville, carried off by Theodore, stealing all that was left of the wardrobe. It was about this time that the widow Dupuis had the honour to inform him of the "marriage of Monsieur Leon Dupuis her son, notary at Yvetot, to Mademoiselle Leocadie Leboeuf of Bondeville." Charles, among the other congratulations he sent him, wrote this sentence-- "How glad my poor wife would have been!" One day when, wandering aimlessly about the house, he had gone up to the attic, he felt a pellet of fine paper under his slipper. He opened it and read: "Courage, Emma, courage. I would not bring misery into your life." It was Rodolphe's letter, fallen to the ground between the boxes, where it had remained, and that the wind from the dormer window had just blown towards the door. And Charles stood, motionless and staring, in the very same place where, long ago, Emma, in despair, and paler even than he, had thought of dying. At last he discovered a small R at the bottom of the second page. What did this mean? He remembered Rodolphe's attentions, his sudden, disappearance, his constrained air when they had met two or three times since. But the respectful tone of the letter deceived him. "Perhaps they loved one another platonically," he said to himself. Besides, Charles was not of those who go to the bottom of things; he shrank from the proofs, and his vague jealousy was lost in the immensity of his woe. Everyone, he thought, must have adored her; all men assuredly must have coveted her. She seemed but the more beautiful to him for this; he was seized with a lasting, furious desire for her, that inflamed his despair, and that was boundless, because it was now unrealisable. To please her, as if she were still living, he adopted her predilections, her ideas; he bought patent leather boots and took to wearing white cravats. He put cosmetics on his moustache, and, like her, signed notes of hand. She corrupted him from beyond the grave. He was obliged to sell his silver piece by piece; next he sold the drawing-room furniture. All the rooms were stripped; but the bedroom, her own room, remained as before. After his dinner Charles went up there. He pushed the round table in front of the fire, and drew up her armchair. He sat down opposite it. A candle burnt in one of the gilt candlesticks. Berthe by his side was painting prints. He suffered, poor man, at seeing her so badly dressed, with laceless boots, and the arm-holes of her pinafore torn down to the hips; for the charwoman took no care of her. But she was so sweet, so pretty, and her little head bent forward so gracefully, letting the dear fair hair fall over her rosy cheeks, that an infinite joy came upon him, a happiness mingled with bitterness, like those ill-made wines that taste of resin. He mended her toys, made her puppets from cardboard, or sewed up half-torn dolls. Then, if his eyes fell upon the workbox, a ribbon lying about, or even a pin left in a crack of the table, he began to dream, and looked so sad that she became as sad as he. No one now came to see them, for Justin had run away to Rouen, where he was a grocer's assistant, and the druggist's children saw less and less of the child, Monsieur Homais not caring, seeing the difference of their social position, to continue the intimacy. The blind man, whom he had not been able to cure with the pomade, had gone back to the hill of Bois-Guillaume, where he told the travellers of the vain attempt of the druggist, to such an extent, that Homais when he went to town hid himself behind the curtains of the "Hirondelle" to avoid meeting him. He detested him, and wishing, in the interests of his own reputation, to get rid of him at all costs, he directed against him a secret battery, that betrayed the depth of his intellect and the baseness of his vanity. Thus, for six consecutive months, one could read in the "Fanal de Rouen" editorials such as these-- "All who bend their steps towards the fertile plains of Picardy have, no doubt, remarked, by the Bois-Guillaume hill, a wretch suffering from a horrible facial wound. He importunes, persecutes one, and levies a regular tax on all travellers. Are we still living in the monstrous times of the Middle Ages, when vagabonds were permitted to display in our public places leprosy and scrofulas they had brought back from the Crusades?" Or-- "In spite of the laws against vagabondage, the approaches to our great towns continue to be infected by bands of beggars. Some are seen going about alone, and these are not, perhaps, the least dangerous. What are our ediles about?" Then Homais invented anecdotes-- "Yesterday, by the Bois-Guillaume hill, a skittish horse--" And then followed the story of an accident caused by the presence of the blind man. He managed so well that the fellow was locked up. But he was released. He began again, and Homais began again. It was a struggle. Homais won it, for his foe was condemned to life-long confinement in an asylum. This success emboldened him, and henceforth there was no longer a dog run over, a barn burnt down, a woman beaten in the parish, of which he did not immediately inform the public, guided always by the love of progress and the hate of priests. He instituted comparisons between the elementary and clerical schools to the detriment of the latter; called to mind the massacre of St. Bartholomew a propos of a grant of one hundred francs to the church, and denounced abuses, aired new views. That was his phrase. Homais was digging and delving; he was becoming dangerous. However, he was stifling in the narrow limits of journalism, and soon a book, a work was necessary to him. Then he composed "General Statistics of the Canton of Yonville, followed by Climatological Remarks." The statistics drove him to philosophy. He busied himself with great questions: the social problem, moralisation of the poorer classes, pisciculture, caoutchouc, railways, etc. He even began to blush at being a bourgeois. He affected the artistic style, he smoked. He bought two chic Pompadour statuettes to adorn his drawing-room. He by no means gave up his shop. On the contrary, he kept well abreast of new discoveries. He followed the great movement of chocolates; he was the first to introduce "cocoa" and "revalenta" into the Seine-Inferieure. He was enthusiastic about the hydro-electric Pulvermacher chains; he wore one himself, and when at night he took off his flannel vest, Madame Homais stood quite dazzled before the golden spiral beneath which he was hidden, and felt her ardour redouble for this man more bandaged than a Scythian, and splendid as one of the Magi. He had fine ideas about Emma's tomb. First he proposed a broken column with some drapery, next a pyramid, then a Temple of Vesta, a sort of rotunda, or else a "mass of ruins." And in all his plans Homais always stuck to the weeping willow, which he looked upon as the indispensable symbol of sorrow. Charles and he made a journey to Rouen together to look at some tombs at a funeral furnisher's, accompanied by an artist, one Vaufrylard, a friend of Bridoux's, who made puns all the time. At last, after having examined some hundred designs, having ordered an estimate and made another journey to Rouen, Charles decided in favour of a mausoleum, which on the two principal sides was to have a "spirit bearing an extinguished torch." As to the inscription, Homais could think of nothing so fine as Sta viator*, and he got no further; he racked his brain, he constantly repeated Sta viator. At last he hit upon Amabilen conjugem calcas**, which was adopted. * Rest traveler. ** Tread upon a loving wife. A strange thing was that Bovary, while continually thinking of Emma, was forgetting her. He grew desperate as he felt this image fading from his memory in spite of all efforts to retain it. Yet every night he dreamt of her; it was always the same dream. He drew near her, but when he was about to clasp her she fell into decay in his arms. For a week he was seen going to church in the evening. Monsieur Bournisien even paid him two or three visits, then gave him up. Moreover, the old fellow was growing intolerant, fanatic, said Homais. He thundered against the spirit of the age, and never failed, every other week, in his sermon, to recount the death agony of Voltaire, who died devouring his excrements, as everyone knows. In spite of the economy with which Bovary lived, he was far from being able to pay off his old debts. Lheureux refused to renew any more bills. A distraint became imminent. Then he appealed to his mother, who consented to let him take a mortgage on her property, but with a great many recriminations against Emma; and in return for her sacrifice she asked for a shawl that had escaped the depredations of Felicite. Charles refused to give it her; they quarrelled. She made the first overtures of reconciliation by offering to have the little girl, who could help her in the house, to live with her. Charles consented to this, but when the time for parting came, all his courage failed him. Then there was a final, complete rupture. As his affections vanished, he clung more closely to the love of his child. She made him anxious, however, for she coughed sometimes, and had red spots on her cheeks. Opposite his house, flourishing and merry, was the family of the chemist, with whom everything was prospering. Napoleon helped him in the laboratory, Athalie embroidered him a skullcap, Irma cut out rounds of paper to cover the preserves, and Franklin recited Pythagoras' table in a breath. He was the happiest of fathers, the most fortunate of men. Not so! A secret ambition devoured him. Homais hankered after the cross of the Legion of Honour. He had plenty of claims to it. "First, having at the time of the cholera distinguished myself by a boundless devotion; second, by having published, at my expense, various works of public utility, such as" (and he recalled his pamphlet entitled, "Cider, its manufacture and effects," besides observation on the lanigerous plant-louse, sent to the Academy; his volume of statistics, and down to his pharmaceutical thesis); "without counting that I am a member of several learned societies" (he was member of a single one). "In short!" he cried, making a pirouette, "if it were only for distinguishing myself at fires!" Then Homais inclined towards the Government. He secretly did the prefect great service during the elections. He sold himself--in a word, prostituted himself. He even addressed a petition to the sovereign in which he implored him to "do him justice"; he called him "our good king," and compared him to Henri IV. And every morning the druggist rushed for the paper to see if his nomination were in it. It was never there. At last, unable to bear it any longer, he had a grass plot in his garden designed to represent the Star of the Cross of Honour with two little strips of grass running from the top to imitate the ribband. He walked round it with folded arms, meditating on the folly of the Government and the ingratitude of men. From respect, or from a sort of sensuality that made him carry on his investigations slowly, Charles had not yet opened the secret drawer of a rosewood desk which Emma had generally used. One day, however, he sat down before it, turned the key, and pressed the spring. All Leon's letters were there. There could be no doubt this time. He devoured them to the very last, ransacked every corner, all the furniture, all the drawers, behind the walls, sobbing, crying aloud, distraught, mad. He found a box and broke it open with a kick. Rodolphe's portrait flew full in his face in the midst of the overturned love-letters. People wondered at his despondency. He never went out, saw no one, refused even to visit his patients. Then they said "he shut himself up to drink." Sometimes, however, some curious person climbed on to the garden hedge, and saw with amazement this long-bearded, shabbily clothed, wild man, who wept aloud as he walked up and down. In the evening in summer he took his little girl with him and led her to the cemetery. They came back at nightfall, when the only light left in the Place was that in Binet's window. The voluptuousness of his grief was, however, incomplete, for he had no one near him to share it, and he paid visits to Madame Lefrancois to be able to speak of her. But the landlady only listened with half an ear, having troubles like himself. For Lheureux had at last established the "Favorites du Commerce," and Hivert, who enjoyed a great reputation for doing errands, insisted on a rise of wages, and was threatening to go over "to the opposition shop." One day when he had gone to the market at Argueil to sell his horse--his last resource--he met Rodolphe. They both turned pale when they caught sight of one another. Rodolphe, who had only sent his card, first stammered some apologies, then grew bolder, and even pushed his assurance (it was in the month of August and very hot) to the length of inviting him to have a bottle of beer at the public-house. Leaning on the table opposite him, he chewed his cigar as he talked, and Charles was lost in reverie at this face that she had loved. He seemed to see again something of her in it. It was a marvel to him. He would have liked to have been this man. The other went on talking agriculture, cattle, pasturage, filling out with banal phrases all the gaps where an allusion might slip in. Charles was not listening to him; Rodolphe noticed it, and he followed the succession of memories that crossed his face. This gradually grew redder; the nostrils throbbed fast, the lips quivered. There was at last a moment when Charles, full of a sombre fury, fixed his eyes on Rodolphe, who, in something of fear, stopped talking. But soon the same look of weary lassitude came back to his face. "I don't blame you," he said. Rodolphe was dumb. And Charles, his head in his hands, went on in a broken voice, and with the resigned accent of infinite sorrow-- "No, I don't blame you now." He even added a fine phrase, the only one he ever made-- "It is the fault of fatality!" Rodolphe, who had managed the fatality, thought the remark very offhand from a man in his position, comic even, and a little mean. The next day Charles went to sit down on the seat in the arbour. Rays of light were straying through the trellis, the vine leaves threw their shadows on the sand, the jasmines perfumed the air, the heavens were blue, Spanish flies buzzed round the lilies in bloom, and Charles was suffocating like a youth beneath the vague love influences that filled his aching heart. At seven o'clock little Berthe, who had not seen him all the afternoon, went to fetch him to dinner. His head was thrown back against the wall, his eyes closed, his mouth open, and in his hand was a long tress of black hair. "Come along, papa," she said. And thinking he wanted to play; she pushed him gently. He fell to the ground. He was dead. Thirty-six hours after, at the druggist's request, Monsieur Canivet came thither. He made a post-mortem and found nothing. When everything had been sold, twelve francs seventy-five centimes remained, that served to pay for Mademoiselle Bovary's going to her grandmother. The good woman died the same year; old Rouault was paralysed, and it was an aunt who took charge of her. She is poor, and sends her to a cotton-factory to earn a living. Since Bovary's death three doctors have followed one another at Yonville without any success, so severely did Homais attack them. He has an enormous practice; the authorities treat him with consideration, and public opinion protects him. He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.

Chapter 9 - 11

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Charles is numbed by grief over the loss of his wife and keeps constant watch over her body as arrangements are made. The sight of her lifeless form makes him wonder if "there were infinite masses, of enormous weight, pressing down upon her." As he makes lavish plans for Emma's funeral, Bournisien and Homais unsuccessfully try to dissuade him from spending so much money. When his mother arrives, she tries to talk him out of spending so freely, but Charles is adamant. Rouault, Emma's father, is summoned and faints on hearing of his daughter's death. The funeral is a solemn affair. Charles and his mother talk about old times before retiring to bed. Charles, of course, thinks of Emma and cannot sleep. Justin is also away, weeping on Emma's grave, stricken with "the burden of a measureless sorrow that was tenderer than the moon and deeper than night." By contrast, Rodolphe and Leon sleep peacefully through the night. Charles does not find it easy to cope. Berthe has been sent to the nurse during Emma's funeral. When she returns home, Charles finds her gaiety difficult to tolerate. He also cannot bear to sell Emma's possessions in spite of the fact that the debts keep mounting. There are other troubles, too. Felicite, Emma's maid, runs away with her lover and takes along a sizable portion of Emma's wardrobe. Charles still has no idea about Emma's unfaithfulness. When he learns that Leon is engaged, Charles sends a letter of congratulations and states how happy Emma would have been for him. He also finds Rodolphe's farewell letter to Emma and suspects nothing more than an innocent relationship between the two. He tells himself that Emma had a powerful effect on men, and that "no one... could have helped adoring her." To keep Emma's image alive, Charles adopts her "preferences and ideas" and leaves Emma's room exactly the way it had always been. He and Berthe lead a lonely existence amongst her presence. Charles continues to struggle. He tries to put religion in his life and visits the church regularly for a week, but then stops. He does not maintain good relations with his mother. His debts continue to increase. He is cut off from relationships in town, for Justin has run off to Rouen, and Homais no longer wishes to associate with him. The only attachment Charles maintains is with his daughter, Berthe. One day, Charles opens a secret drawer in Emma's desk and discovers Leon's and Rodolphe's love letters to Emma, which leaves him distraught and frantic. As a result, he feels more dejected than ever and withdraws further into himself. When he meets Rodolphe at the market, Charles goes to the tavern with him for a drink. He tells Rodolphe that he knows of his affair with Emma and is not angry with him, saying that everything happened because of "fate." Rodolphe finds Charles' attitude both "comic" and "abject." The following day, Berthe finds Charles dead in the garden. His possessions are sold off, and Berthe is sent to live with her grandmother. The old lady soon dies, and the little girl is taken in by an aunt. Eventually, the child has to work in a cotton mill to earn her living. Amidst all this squalor and sorrow, Homais' success story stands out. He is respected by the public and officially recognized by the Legion of Honor.

Notes " The coming of death always induces a sort of stupefaction, so hard is it to realize this advent of nothingness and to bring oneself to believe in it." This statement fully captures Charles' reaction to Emma's death. He goes into a state of shock and prepares an elaborate funeral. His mother comes to console her son and hopes to re-establish her former relations with him now that Emma is gone. Mr. Roualt, Emma's father, also comes and makes a pathetic appearance. So great is his grief that he cannot bring himself to look at his granddaughter. The reader is drawn to sympathize with this old man. For her burial, Emma is dressed in her white satin wedding gown, a symbol of purity. This is supremely ironic, for it is in sharp contrast to her corrupt and degenerate life-style. Another example of irony is the camaraderie between Homais and Bournisien. This is observed during the vigil they maintain by Emma's bedside. Neither is really concerned about her death or her family's fate. Both indulge in their own petty differences, "neither listening to the other." Also ironic is the mention of Emma's ex-lovers: they sleep while those who really loved her grieve. Justin's youthful sorrow also captures the reader's attention. But while Justin is giving vent to his private sorrow at Emma's grave, the gravedigger, Lestiboudois, thinks of him as a petty thief. The faithful Charles suffers greatly after Emma's death. Financially, he is in ruins. Mentally, too, he is a broken man, especially after finding Rodolphe's and Leon's love letters to Emma. He withdraws from social contact because of his profound dejection. His daughter, Berthe, is his only companion. It is interesting to note how people shun these two after Emma's death; Homais' absence is particularly noticeable. Charles' chance meeting with Rodolphe demonstrates the resignation with which he faces life. He is filled with a "somber fury" against Rodolphe, but this lasts only a moment. His look of "dismal lifelessness" soon returns. Rodolphe finds his fatalistic attitude "comic" and "a bit abject." He is in no way affected by the Bovarys' tragedy. The meeting with Charles confirms the callous indifference of this arrogant, young bachelor. With Charles' death, the property is quickly sold off by the creditors. The image one gets is of vultures feasting on carrion. Berthe, now orphaned, is finally placed with an aunt who "sends her to earn her living in a cotton-mill." Flaubert simply presents the reader with a report of her circumtances, but does not take sides. This is realism at its best. Despite the ironic undertones throughout the book, Flaubert's descriptions of small town happenings are as fresh as life. It is no wonder that Madame Bovary is considered one of the best examples of the realistic literature ever to be written.

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finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_0_part_1.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 1

part 1, chapter 1

{"name": "part 1, Chapter 1", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/novel-summary", "summary": "We first meet Charles Bovary at fifteen years of age when his thrifty parents send him to school. On his first day Charles' classmates mock his ill-fitting clothes and awkward hat. Charles, thoroughly confused by the social codes of the classroom, blunders when the teacher asks for his name. The teacher commands him to speak louder and after several attempts he cries out \"Charbovari. which causes the class to erupt in laughter. Charles' father, Monsieur Charles-Denis-Barholome Bovary, had been an army surgeon's aide but left the service following a conscription scandal. He then married a merchant's daughter who came with a dowry. He lived off his wife's income for several years during which time he developed a taste for the finer things in life. Charles' father tried several different careers but the years of easy living had made him lazy. At the age of 45, disgusted with mankind and resolved to bitterness, he took his wife to a village on the border of Normandy and Picardy where living was inexpensive and he could eschew work in general. His wife, tender and caring in her youth, grew to be a nervous and nagging woman who spoiled their only child despite the elder Bovary's insistence that the boy be subject to strict discipline. Charles' mother insisted that the boy be properly educated and when Charles was twelve the aged local priest was engaged to tutor him in Latin. Charles was a good learner and he went to the lycee in Rouen. Although he did not distinguish himself he worked hard and maintained an average standing. Before he finished the lycee, however, his parents sent him to medical school. The lessons were above his level but he went to class and took copious notes. Gradually he stopped attending and began passing time in the cafes playing dominoes. He learned to drink and even came to know love. He failed his first examination to become an officer de sante but passed on the second attempt. His mother secured a position for him in Tostes, a small village in the region and arranged for a 45 year-old widow with twelve hundred francs a year to be his wife. Charles' wife, formerly Madame Heloise Dubuc, was thin and unattractive. She suffered from numerous neurosis and insecurities and jealously ruled over her younger husband", "analysis": ""}

We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a "new fellow," not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every one rose as if just surprised at his work. The head-master made a sign to us to sit down. Then, turning to the class-master, he said to him in a low voice-- "Monsieur Roger, here is a pupil whom I recommend to your care; he'll be in the second. If his work and conduct are satisfactory, he will go into one of the upper classes, as becomes his age." The "new fellow," 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 square on his forehead like a village chorister's; he looked reliable, but very ill at ease. Although he was not broad-shouldered, his short school jacket of green cloth with black buttons must have been tight about the arm-holes, and showed at the opening of the cuffs red wrists accustomed to being bare. His legs, in blue stockings, looked out from beneath yellow trousers, drawn tight by braces, He wore stout, ill-cleaned, hob-nailed boots. We began repeating the lesson. He listened with all his ears, as attentive as if at a sermon, not daring even to cross his legs or lean on his elbow; and when at two o'clock the bell rang, the master was obliged to tell him to fall into line with the rest of us. When we came back to work, we were in the habit of throwing our caps on the ground so as to have our hands more free; we used from the door to toss them under the form, so that they hit against the wall and made a lot of dust: it was "the thing." But, whether he had not noticed the trick, or did not dare to attempt it, the "new fellow," was still holding his cap on his knees even after prayers were over. It was one of those head-gears of composite order, in which we can find traces of the bearskin, shako, billycock hat, sealskin cap, and cotton night-cap; one of those poor things, in fine, whose dumb ugliness has depths of expression, like an imbecile's face. Oval, stiffened with whalebone, it began with three round knobs; then came in succession lozenges of velvet and rabbit-skin separated by a red band; after that a sort of bag that ended in a cardboard polygon covered with complicated braiding, from which hung, at the end of a long thin cord, small twisted gold threads in the manner of a tassel. The cap was new; its peak shone. "Rise," said the master. He stood up; his cap fell. The whole class began to laugh. He stooped to pick it up. A neighbor knocked it down again with his elbow; he picked it up once more. "Get rid of your helmet," said the master, who was a bit of a wag. There was a burst of laughter from the boys, which so thoroughly put the poor lad out of countenance that he did not know whether to keep his cap in his hand, leave it on the ground, or put it on his head. He sat down again and placed it on his knee. "Rise," repeated the master, "and tell me your name." The new boy articulated in a stammering voice an unintelligible name. "Again!" The same sputtering of syllables was heard, drowned by the tittering of the class. "Louder!" cried the master; "louder!" The "new fellow" then took a supreme resolution, opened an inordinately large mouth, and shouted at the top of his voice as if calling someone in the word "Charbovari." A hubbub broke out, rose in crescendo with bursts of shrill voices (they yelled, barked, stamped, repeated "Charbovari! Charbovari"), then died away into single notes, growing quieter only with great difficulty, and now and again suddenly recommencing along the line of a form whence rose here and there, like a damp cracker going off, a stifled laugh. However, amid a rain of impositions, order was gradually re-established in the class; and the master having succeeded in catching the name of "Charles Bovary," having had it dictated to him, spelt out, and re-read, at once ordered the poor devil to go and sit down on the punishment form at the foot of the master's desk. He got up, but before going hesitated. "What are you looking for?" asked the master. "My c-a-p," timidly said the "new fellow," casting troubled looks round him. "Five hundred lines for all the class!" shouted in a furious voice stopped, like the Quos ego*, a fresh outburst. "Silence!" continued the master indignantly, wiping his brow with his handkerchief, which he had just taken from his cap. "As to you, 'new boy,' you will conjugate 'ridiculus sum'** twenty times." Then, in a gentler tone, "Come, you'll find your cap again; it hasn't been stolen." *A quotation from the Aeneid signifying a threat. **I am ridiculous. Quiet was restored. Heads bent over desks, and the "new fellow" remained for two hours in an exemplary attitude, although from time to time some paper pellet flipped from the tip of a pen came bang in his face. But he wiped his face with one hand and continued motionless, his eyes lowered. In the evening, at preparation, he pulled out his pens from his desk, arranged his small belongings, and carefully ruled his paper. We saw him working conscientiously, looking up every word in the dictionary, and taking the greatest pains. Thanks, no doubt, to the willingness he showed, he had not to go down to the class below. But though he knew his rules passably, he had little finish in composition. It was the cure of his village who had taught him his first Latin; his parents, from motives of economy, having sent him to school as late as possible. His father, Monsieur Charles Denis Bartolome Bovary, retired assistant-surgeon-major, compromised about 1812 in certain conscription scandals, and forced at this time to leave the service, had taken advantage of his fine figure to get hold of a dowry of sixty thousand francs that offered in the person of a hosier's daughter who had fallen in love with his good looks. A fine man, a great talker, making his spurs ring as he walked, wearing whiskers that ran into his moustache, his fingers always garnished with rings and dressed in loud colours, he had the dash of a military man with the easy go of a commercial traveller. Once married, he lived for three or four years on his wife's fortune, dining well, rising late, smoking long porcelain pipes, not coming in at night till after the theatre, and haunting cafes. The father-in-law died, leaving little; he was indignant at this, "went in for the business," lost some money in it, then retired to the country, where he thought he would make money. But, as he knew no more about farming than calico, as he rode his horses instead of sending them to plough, drank his cider in bottle instead of selling it in cask, ate the finest poultry in his farmyard, and greased his hunting-boots with the fat of his pigs, he was not long in finding out that he would do better to give up all speculation. For two hundred francs a year he managed to live on the border of the provinces of Caux and Picardy, in a kind of place half farm, half private house; and here, soured, eaten up with regrets, cursing his luck, jealous of everyone, he shut himself up at the age of forty-five, sick of men, he said, and determined to live at peace. His wife had adored him once on a time; she had bored him with a thousand servilities that had only estranged him the more. Lively once, expansive and affectionate, in growing older she had become (after the fashion of wine that, exposed to air, turns to vinegar) ill-tempered, grumbling, irritable. She had suffered so much without complaint at first, until she had seem him going after all the village drabs, and until a score of bad houses sent him back to her at night, weary, stinking drunk. Then her pride revolted. After that she was silent, burying her anger in a dumb stoicism that she maintained till her death. She was constantly going about looking after business matters. She called on the lawyers, the president, remembered when bills fell due, got them renewed, and at home ironed, sewed, washed, looked after the workmen, paid the accounts, while he, troubling himself about nothing, eternally besotted in sleepy sulkiness, whence he only roused himself to say disagreeable things to her, sat smoking by the fire and spitting into the cinders. When she had a child, it had to be sent out to nurse. When he came home, the lad was spoilt as if he were a prince. His mother stuffed him with jam; his father let him run about barefoot, and, playing the philosopher, even said he might as well go about quite naked like the young of animals. As opposed to the maternal ideas, he had a certain virile idea of childhood on which he sought to mould his son, wishing him to be brought up hardily, like a Spartan, to give him a strong constitution. He sent him to bed without any fire, taught him to drink off large draughts of rum and to jeer at religious processions. But, peaceable by nature, the lad answered only poorly to his notions. His mother always kept him near her; she cut out cardboard for him, told him tales, entertained him with endless monologues full of melancholy gaiety and charming nonsense. In her life's isolation she centered on the child's head all her shattered, broken little vanities. She dreamed of high station; she already saw him, tall, handsome, clever, settled as an engineer or in the law. She taught him to read, and even, on an old piano, she had taught him two or three little songs. But to all this Monsieur Bovary, caring little for letters, said, "It was not worth while. Would they ever have the means to send him to a public school, to buy him a practice, or start him in business? Besides, with cheek a man always gets on in the world." Madame Bovary bit her lips, and the child knocked about the village. He went after the labourers, drove away with clods of earth the ravens that were flying about. He ate blackberries along the hedges, minded the geese with a long switch, went haymaking during harvest, ran about in the woods, played hop-scotch under the church porch on rainy days, and at great fetes begged the beadle to let him toll the bells, that he might hang all his weight on the long rope and feel himself borne upward by it in its swing. Meanwhile he grew like an oak; he was strong on hand, fresh of colour. When he was twelve years old his mother had her own way; he began lessons. The cure took him in hand; but the lessons were so short and irregular that they could not be of much use. They were given at spare moments in the sacristy, standing up, hurriedly, between a baptism and a burial; or else the cure, if he had not to go out, sent for his pupil after the Angelus*. They went up to his room and settled down; the flies and moths fluttered round the candle. It was close, the child fell asleep, and the good man, beginning to doze with his hands on his stomach, was soon snoring with his mouth wide open. On other occasions, when Monsieur le Cure, on his way back after administering the viaticum to some sick person in the neighbourhood, caught sight of Charles playing about the fields, he called him, lectured him for a quarter of an hour and took advantage of the occasion to make him conjugate his verb at the foot of a tree. The rain interrupted them or an acquaintance passed. All the same he was always pleased with him, and even said the "young man" had a very good memory. *A devotion said at morning, noon, and evening, at the sound of a bell. Here, the evening prayer. Charles could not go on like this. Madame Bovary took strong steps. Ashamed, or rather tired out, Monsieur Bovary gave in without a struggle, and they waited one year longer, so that the lad should take his first communion. Six months more passed, and the year after Charles was finally sent to school at Rouen, where his father took him towards the end of October, at the time of the St. Romain fair. It would now be impossible for any of us to remember anything about him. He was a youth of even temperament, who played in playtime, worked in school-hours, was attentive in class, slept well in the dormitory, and ate well in the refectory. He had in loco parentis* a wholesale ironmonger in the Rue Ganterie, who took him out once a month on Sundays after his shop was shut, sent him for a walk on the quay to look at the boats, and then brought him back to college at seven o'clock before supper. Every Thursday evening he wrote a long letter to his mother with red ink and three wafers; then he went over his history note-books, or read an old volume of "Anarchasis" that was knocking about the study. When he went for walks he talked to the servant, who, like himself, came from the country. *In place of a parent. By dint of hard work he kept always about the middle of the class; once even he got a certificate in natural history. But at the end of his third year his parents withdrew him from the school to make him study medicine, convinced that he could even take his degree by himself. His mother chose a room for him on the fourth floor of a dyer's she knew, overlooking the Eau-de-Robec. She made arrangements for his board, got him furniture, table and two chairs, sent home for an old cherry-tree bedstead, and bought besides a small cast-iron stove with the supply of wood that was to warm the poor child. Then at the end of a week she departed, after a thousand injunctions to be good now that he was going to be left to himself. The syllabus that he read on the notice-board stunned him; lectures on anatomy, lectures on pathology, lectures on physiology, lectures on pharmacy, lectures on botany and clinical medicine, and therapeutics, without counting hygiene and materia medica--all names of whose etymologies he was ignorant, and that were to him as so many doors to sanctuaries filled with magnificent darkness. He understood nothing of it all; it was all very well to listen--he did not follow. Still he worked; he had bound note-books, he attended all the courses, never missed a single lecture. He did his little daily task like a mill-horse, who goes round and round with his eyes bandaged, not knowing what work he is doing. To spare him expense his mother sent him every week by the carrier a piece of veal baked in the oven, with which he lunched when he came back from the hospital, while he sat kicking his feet against the wall. After this he had to run off to lectures, to the operation-room, to the hospital, and return to his home at the other end of the town. In the evening, after the poor dinner of his landlord, he went back to his room and set to work again in his wet clothes, which smoked as he sat in front of the hot stove. On the fine summer evenings, at the time when the close streets are empty, when the servants are playing shuttle-cock at the doors, he opened his window and leaned out. The river, that makes of this quarter of Rouen a wretched little Venice, flowed beneath him, between the bridges and the railings, yellow, violet, or blue. Working men, kneeling on the banks, washed their bare arms in the water. On poles projecting from the attics, skeins of cotton were drying in the air. Opposite, beyond the roots spread the pure heaven with the red sun setting. How pleasant it must be at home! How fresh under the beech-tree! And he expanded his nostrils to breathe in the sweet odours of the country which did not reach him. He grew thin, his figure became taller, his face took a saddened look that made it nearly interesting. Naturally, through indifference, he abandoned all the resolutions he had made. Once he missed a lecture; the next day all the lectures; and, enjoying his idleness, little by little, he gave up work altogether. He got into the habit of going to the public-house, and had a passion for dominoes. To shut himself up every evening in the dirty public room, to push about on marble tables the small sheep bones with black dots, seemed to him a fine proof of his freedom, which raised him in his own esteem. It was beginning to see life, the sweetness of stolen pleasures; and when he entered, he put his hand on the door-handle with a joy almost sensual. Then many things hidden within him came out; he learnt couplets by heart and sang them to his boon companions, became enthusiastic about Beranger, learnt how to make punch, and, finally, how to make love. Thanks to these preparatory labours, he failed completely in his examination for an ordinary degree. He was expected home the same night to celebrate his success. He started on foot, stopped at the beginning of the village, sent for his mother, and told her all. She excused him, threw the blame of his failure on the injustice of the examiners, encouraged him a little, and took upon herself to set matters straight. It was only five years later that Monsieur Bovary knew the truth; it was old then, and he accepted it. Moreover, he could not believe that a man born of him could be a fool. So Charles set to work again and crammed for his examination, ceaselessly learning all the old questions by heart. He passed pretty well. What a happy day for his mother! They gave a grand dinner. Where should he go to practice? To Tostes, where there was only one old doctor. For a long time Madame Bovary had been on the look-out for his death, and the old fellow had barely been packed off when Charles was installed, opposite his place, as his successor. But it was not everything to have brought up a son, to have had him taught medicine, and discovered Tostes, where he could practice it; he must have a wife. She found him one--the widow of a bailiff at Dieppe--who was forty-five and had an income of twelve hundred francs. Though she was ugly, as dry as a bone, her face with as many pimples as the spring has buds, Madame Dubuc had no lack of suitors. To attain her ends Madame Bovary had to oust them all, and she even succeeded in very cleverly baffling the intrigues of a port-butcher backed up by the priests. Charles had seen in marriage the advent of an easier life, thinking he would be more free to do as he liked with himself and his money. But his wife was master; he had to say this and not say that in company, to fast every Friday, dress as she liked, harass at her bidding those patients who did not pay. She opened his letter, watched his comings and goings, and listened at the partition-wall when women came to consult him in his surgery. She must have her chocolate every morning, attentions without end. She constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to her; if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die. When Charles returned in the evening, she stretched forth two long thin arms from beneath the sheets, put them round his neck, and having made him sit down on the edge of the bed, began to talk to him of her troubles: he was neglecting her, he loved another. She had been warned she would be unhappy; and she ended by asking him for a dose of medicine and a little more love.

part 1, Chapter 1

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/novel-summary

We first meet Charles Bovary at fifteen years of age when his thrifty parents send him to school. On his first day Charles' classmates mock his ill-fitting clothes and awkward hat. Charles, thoroughly confused by the social codes of the classroom, blunders when the teacher asks for his name. The teacher commands him to speak louder and after several attempts he cries out "Charbovari. which causes the class to erupt in laughter. Charles' father, Monsieur Charles-Denis-Barholome Bovary, had been an army surgeon's aide but left the service following a conscription scandal. He then married a merchant's daughter who came with a dowry. He lived off his wife's income for several years during which time he developed a taste for the finer things in life. Charles' father tried several different careers but the years of easy living had made him lazy. At the age of 45, disgusted with mankind and resolved to bitterness, he took his wife to a village on the border of Normandy and Picardy where living was inexpensive and he could eschew work in general. His wife, tender and caring in her youth, grew to be a nervous and nagging woman who spoiled their only child despite the elder Bovary's insistence that the boy be subject to strict discipline. Charles' mother insisted that the boy be properly educated and when Charles was twelve the aged local priest was engaged to tutor him in Latin. Charles was a good learner and he went to the lycee in Rouen. Although he did not distinguish himself he worked hard and maintained an average standing. Before he finished the lycee, however, his parents sent him to medical school. The lessons were above his level but he went to class and took copious notes. Gradually he stopped attending and began passing time in the cafes playing dominoes. He learned to drink and even came to know love. He failed his first examination to become an officer de sante but passed on the second attempt. His mother secured a position for him in Tostes, a small village in the region and arranged for a 45 year-old widow with twelve hundred francs a year to be his wife. Charles' wife, formerly Madame Heloise Dubuc, was thin and unattractive. She suffered from numerous neurosis and insecurities and jealously ruled over her younger husband

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/02.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_0_part_2.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 2

part 1, chapter 2

{"name": "part 1, Chapter 2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/novel-summary", "summary": "Late one night Charles is called to treat a man with a broken leg. The man is the owner of a farm called Les Bertaux fifteen miles distant. After a long, cold ride Charles arrives at the farm which he observes to be clean and well equipped. He learns from his young guide that the owner, Monsieur Rouault, has broken his leg and though his wife has been dead for two years his unmarried daughter keeps house for him. This young woman, characterized by her blue dress, greets Monsieur Bovary and leads him through the kitchen to the upstairs where Monsieur Rouault, a man of about fifty years, lies moaning in his bed. The fracture is easily set and the man's daughter, Madamoiselle Emma, helps by sewing pads for the splints. Charles notices her perfectly shaped fingernails and her beautiful eyes that looked upon him with fearless candor. She fixes Charles a meal and they converse awhile before he leaves. Although he says he will return in three days, Charles returns the very next day to check on his patient and then regularly over the weeks as the bone heals. Without quite knowing why, Charles derives great pleasure from his visits to Les Bertaux and he becomes a familiar face at the farm. His wife, however, learns of the farmer's pretty, educated daughter. She accuses Charles of preferring this \"city girl\" and Charles discontinues his visits. His home life, particularly his wife and mother's nagging, seems drab and constricting by comparison. Early that Spring Heloise Bovary's notary flees the country with most of her money and a subsequent investigation reveals that her supposed fortune is a lie. The elder Bovary's are enraged but Charles dutifully defends his wife. Soon afterward, however, she takes ill and dies.", "analysis": "The novel begins with a narrator who, in the guise of one of Charles' fellow students, discusses Charles' first day at the lycee. This narrator disappears soon afterward, however, and is replaced by the omniscient narrator that will tell the rest of the story in free indirect discourse. This style of writing is one of Flaubert's great innovations in the novel and allows him to be the author of the story without being its narrator. The older Bovary is characterized as having an excess of character and self-reliance but little inclination for work whereas his son is characterized as hard working but lacking any distinguishing personality or confidence. This generational divide is representative of the French bourgeoisie culture of the mid-nineteenth century in which the practicality of the marketplace supplanted the attempt to unify the aspirations of the romantics and the society at large. It's important to understand that Charles, though he studies medicine, does not become a doctor but rather an officer de sante - a much less distinguished title. Thus, he is more of a technician than a scientist. He is, however, a capable technician and his successful treatment of Monsieur Roulaut's leg opens the door to his relationship with that family. Though the title suggests that she will be the focus of the story, we first meet Emma through Charles' oblique observations. Our knowledge of her is restricted to the simplest details. The first part of Charles' life is steered by women, first his mother and then his first wife. Though she is nagging and jealous Charles proves his loyalty when he sticks by her side following her financial disaster"}

One night towards eleven o'clock they were awakened by the noise of a horse pulling up outside their door. The servant opened the garret-window and parleyed for some time with a man in the street below. He came for the doctor, had a letter for him. Natasie came downstairs shivering and undid the bars and bolts one after the other. The man left his horse, and, following the servant, suddenly came in behind her. He pulled out from his wool cap with grey top-knots a letter wrapped up in a rag and presented it gingerly to Charles, who rested on his elbow on the pillow to read it. Natasie, standing near the bed, held the light. Madame in modesty had turned to the wall and showed only her back. This letter, sealed with a small seal in blue wax, begged Monsieur Bovary to come immediately to the farm of the Bertaux to set a broken leg. Now from Tostes to the Bertaux was a good eighteen miles across country by way of Longueville and Saint-Victor. It was a dark night; Madame Bovary junior was afraid of accidents for her husband. So it was decided the stable-boy should go on first; Charles would start three hours later when the moon rose. A boy was to be sent to meet him, and show him the way to the farm, and open the gates for him. Towards four o'clock in the morning, Charles, well wrapped up in his cloak, set out for the Bertaux. Still sleepy from the warmth of his bed, he let himself be lulled by the quiet trot of his horse. When it stopped of its own accord in front of those holes surrounded with thorns that are dug on the margin of furrows, Charles awoke with a start, suddenly remembered the broken leg, and tried to call to mind all the fractures he knew. The rain had stopped, day was breaking, and on the branches of the leafless trees birds roosted motionless, their little feathers bristling in the cold morning wind. The flat country stretched as far as eye could see, and the tufts of trees round the farms at long intervals seemed like dark violet stains on the cast grey surface, that on the horizon faded into the gloom of the sky. Charles from time to time opened his eyes, his mind grew weary, and, sleep coming upon him, he soon fell into a doze wherein, his recent sensations blending with memories, he became conscious of a double self, at once student and married man, lying in his bed as but now, and crossing the operation theatre as of old. The warm smell of poultices mingled in his brain with the fresh odour of dew; he heard the iron rings rattling along the curtain-rods of the bed and saw his wife sleeping. As he passed Vassonville he came upon a boy sitting on the grass at the edge of a ditch. "Are you the doctor?" asked the child. And on Charles's answer he took his wooden shoes in his hands and ran on in front of him. The general practitioner, riding along, gathered from his guide's talk that Monsieur Rouault must be one of the well-to-do farmers. He had broken his leg the evening before on his way home from a Twelfth-night feast at a neighbour's. His wife had been dead for two years. There was with him only his daughter, who helped him to keep house. The ruts were becoming deeper; they were approaching the Bertaux. The little lad, slipping through a hole in the hedge, disappeared; then he came back to the end of a courtyard to open the gate. The horse slipped on the wet grass; Charles had to stoop to pass under the branches. The watchdogs in their kennels barked, dragging at their chains. As he entered the Bertaux, the horse took fright and stumbled. It was a substantial-looking farm. In the stables, over the top of the open doors, one could see great cart-horses quietly feeding from new racks. Right along the outbuildings extended a large dunghill, from which manure liquid oozed, while amidst fowls and turkeys, five or six peacocks, a luxury in Chauchois farmyards, were foraging on the top of it. The sheepfold was long, the barn high, with walls smooth as your hand. Under the cart-shed were two large carts and four ploughs, with their whips, shafts and harnesses complete, whose fleeces of blue wool were getting soiled by the fine dust that fell from the granaries. The courtyard sloped upwards, planted with trees set out symmetrically, and the chattering noise of a flock of geese was heard near the pond. A young woman in a blue merino dress with three flounces came to the threshold of the door to receive Monsieur Bovary, whom she led to the kitchen, where a large fire was blazing. The servant's breakfast was boiling beside it in small pots of all sizes. Some damp clothes were drying inside the chimney-corner. The shovel, tongs, and the nozzle of the bellows, all of colossal size, shone like polished steel, while along the walls hung many pots and pans in which the clear flame of the hearth, mingling with the first rays of the sun coming in through the window, was mirrored fitfully. Charles went up the first floor to see the patient. He found him in his bed, sweating under his bed-clothes, having thrown his cotton nightcap right away from him. He was a fat little man of fifty, with white skin and blue eyes, the forepart of his head bald, and he wore earrings. By his side on a chair stood a large decanter of brandy, whence he poured himself a little from time to time to keep up his spirits; but as soon as he caught sight of the doctor his elation subsided, and instead of swearing, as he had been doing for the last twelve hours, began to groan freely. The fracture was a simple one, without any kind of complication. Charles could not have hoped for an easier case. Then calling to mind the devices of his masters at the bedsides of patients, he comforted the sufferer with all sorts of kindly remarks, those caresses of the surgeon that are like the oil they put on bistouries. In order to make some splints a bundle of laths was brought up from the cart-house. Charles selected one, cut it into two pieces and planed it with a fragment of windowpane, while the servant tore up sheets to make bandages, and Mademoiselle Emma tried to sew some pads. As she was a long time before she found her work-case, her father grew impatient; she did not answer, but as she sewed she pricked her fingers, which she then put to her mouth to suck them. Charles was surprised at the whiteness of her nails. They were shiny, delicate at the tips, more polished than the ivory of Dieppe, and almond-shaped. Yet her hand was not beautiful, perhaps not white enough, and a little hard at the knuckles; besides, it was too long, with no soft inflections in the outlines. Her real beauty was in her eyes. Although brown, they seemed black because of the lashes, and her look came at you frankly, with a candid boldness. The bandaging over, the doctor was invited by Monsieur Rouault himself to "pick a bit" before he left. Charles went down into the room on the ground floor. Knives and forks and silver goblets were laid for two on a little table at the foot of a huge bed that had a canopy of printed cotton with figures representing Turks. There was an odour of iris-root and damp sheets that escaped from a large oak chest opposite the window. On the floor in corners were sacks of flour stuck upright in rows. These were the overflow from the neighbouring granary, to which three stone steps led. By way of decoration for the apartment, hanging to a nail in the middle of the wall, whose green paint scaled off from the effects of the saltpetre, was a crayon head of Minerva in gold frame, underneath which was written in Gothic letters "To dear Papa." First they spoke of the patient, then of the weather, of the great cold, of the wolves that infested the fields at night. Mademoiselle Rouault did not at all like the country, especially now that she had to look after the farm almost alone. As the room was chilly, she shivered as she ate. This showed something of her full lips, that she had a habit of biting when silent. Her neck stood out from a white turned-down collar. Her hair, whose two black folds seemed each of a single piece, so smooth were they, was parted in the middle by a delicate line that curved slightly with the curve of the head; and, just showing the tip of the ear, it was joined behind in a thick chignon, with a wavy movement at the temples that the country doctor saw now for the first time in his life. The upper part of her cheek was rose-coloured. She had, like a man, thrust in between two buttons of her bodice a tortoise-shell eyeglass. When Charles, after bidding farewell to old Rouault, returned to the room before leaving, he found her standing, her forehead against the window, looking into the garden, where the bean props had been knocked down by the wind. She turned round. "Are you looking for anything?" she asked. "My whip, if you please," he answered. He began rummaging on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs. It had fallen to the floor, between the sacks and the wall. Mademoiselle Emma saw it, and bent over the flour sacks. Charles out of politeness made a dash also, and as he stretched out his arm, at the same moment felt his breast brush against the back of the young girl bending beneath him. She drew herself up, scarlet, and looked at him over her shoulder as she handed him his whip. Instead of returning to the Bertaux in three days as he had promised, he went back the very next day, then regularly twice a week, without counting the visits he paid now and then as if by accident. Everything, moreover, went well; the patient progressed favourably; and when, at the end of forty-six days, old Rouault was seen trying to walk alone in his "den," Monsieur Bovary began to be looked upon as a man of great capacity. Old Rouault said that he could not have been cured better by the first doctor of Yvetot, or even of Rouen. As to Charles, he did not stop to ask himself why it was a pleasure to him to go to the Bertaux. Had he done so, he would, no doubt, have attributed his zeal to the importance of the case, or perhaps to the money he hoped to make by it. Was it for this, however, that his visits to the farm formed a delightful exception to the meagre occupations of his life? On these days he rose early, set off at a gallop, urging on his horse, then got down to wipe his boots in the grass and put on black gloves before entering. He liked going into the courtyard, and noticing the gate turn against his shoulder, the cock crow on the wall, the lads run to meet him. He liked the granary and the stables; he liked old Rouault, who pressed his hand and called him his saviour; he liked the small wooden shoes of Mademoiselle Emma on the scoured flags of the kitchen--her high heels made her a little taller; and when she walked in front of him, the wooden soles springing up quickly struck with a sharp sound against the leather of her boots. She always accompanied him to the first step of the stairs. When his horse had not yet been brought round she stayed there. They had said "Good-bye"; there was no more talking. The open air wrapped her round, playing with the soft down on the back of her neck, or blew to and fro on her hips the apron-strings, that fluttered like streamers. Once, during a thaw the bark of the trees in the yard was oozing, the snow on the roofs of the outbuildings was melting; she stood on the threshold, and went to fetch her sunshade and opened it. The sunshade of silk of the colour of pigeons' breasts, through which the sun shone, lighted up with shifting hues the white skin of her face. She smiled under the tender warmth, and drops of water could be heard falling one by one on the stretched silk. During the first period of Charles's visits to the Bertaux, Madame Bovary junior never failed to inquire after the invalid, and she had even chosen in the book that she kept on a system of double entry a clean blank page for Monsieur Rouault. But when she heard he had a daughter, she began to make inquiries, and she learnt the Mademoiselle Rouault, brought up at the Ursuline Convent, had received what is called "a good education"; and so knew dancing, geography, drawing, how to embroider and play the piano. That was the last straw. "So it is for this," she said to herself, "that his face beams when he goes to see her, and that he puts on his new waistcoat at the risk of spoiling it with the rain. Ah! that woman! That woman!" And she detested her instinctively. At first she solaced herself by allusions that Charles did not understand, then by casual observations that he let pass for fear of a storm, finally by open apostrophes to which he knew not what to answer. "Why did he go back to the Bertaux now that Monsieur Rouault was cured and that these folks hadn't paid yet? Ah! it was because a young lady was there, some one who know how to talk, to embroider, to be witty. That was what he cared about; he wanted town misses." And she went on-- "The daughter of old Rouault a town miss! Get out! Their grandfather was a shepherd, and they have a cousin who was almost had up at the assizes for a nasty blow in a quarrel. It is not worth while making such a fuss, or showing herself at church on Sundays in a silk gown like a countess. Besides, the poor old chap, if it hadn't been for the colza last year, would have had much ado to pay up his arrears." For very weariness Charles left off going to the Bertaux. Heloise made him swear, his hand on the prayer-book, that he would go there no more after much sobbing and many kisses, in a great outburst of love. He obeyed then, but the strength of his desire protested against the servility of his conduct; and he thought, with a kind of naive hypocrisy, that his interdict to see her gave him a sort of right to love her. And then the widow was thin; she had long teeth; wore in all weathers a little black shawl, the edge of which hung down between her shoulder-blades; her bony figure was sheathed in her clothes as if they were a scabbard; they were too short, and displayed her ankles with the laces of her large boots crossed over grey stockings. Charles's mother came to see them from time to time, but after a few days the daughter-in-law seemed to put her own edge on her, and then, like two knives, they scarified him with their reflections and observations. It was wrong of him to eat so much. Why did he always offer a glass of something to everyone who came? What obstinacy not to wear flannels! In the spring it came about that a notary at Ingouville, the holder of the widow Dubuc's property, one fine day went off, taking with him all the money in his office. Heloise, it is true, still possessed, besides a share in a boat valued at six thousand francs, her house in the Rue St. Francois; and yet, with all this fortune that had been so trumpeted abroad, nothing, excepting perhaps a little furniture and a few clothes, had appeared in the household. The matter had to be gone into. The house at Dieppe was found to be eaten up with mortgages to its foundations; what she had placed with the notary God only knew, and her share in the boat did not exceed one thousand crowns. She had lied, the good lady! In his exasperation, Monsieur Bovary the elder, smashing a chair on the flags, accused his wife of having caused misfortune to the son by harnessing him to such a harridan, whose harness wasn't worth her hide. They came to Tostes. Explanations followed. There were scenes. Heloise in tears, throwing her arms about her husband, implored him to defend her from his parents. Charles tried to speak up for her. They grew angry and left the house. But "the blow had struck home." A week after, as she was hanging up some washing in her yard, she was seized with a spitting of blood, and the next day, while Charles had his back turned to her drawing the window-curtain, she said, "O God!" gave a sigh and fainted. She was dead! What a surprise! When all was over at the cemetery Charles went home. He found no one downstairs; he went up to the first floor to their room; saw her dress still hanging at the foot of the alcove; then, leaning against the writing-table, he stayed until the evening, buried in a sorrowful reverie. She had loved him after all!

part 1, Chapter 2

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/novel-summary

Late one night Charles is called to treat a man with a broken leg. The man is the owner of a farm called Les Bertaux fifteen miles distant. After a long, cold ride Charles arrives at the farm which he observes to be clean and well equipped. He learns from his young guide that the owner, Monsieur Rouault, has broken his leg and though his wife has been dead for two years his unmarried daughter keeps house for him. This young woman, characterized by her blue dress, greets Monsieur Bovary and leads him through the kitchen to the upstairs where Monsieur Rouault, a man of about fifty years, lies moaning in his bed. The fracture is easily set and the man's daughter, Madamoiselle Emma, helps by sewing pads for the splints. Charles notices her perfectly shaped fingernails and her beautiful eyes that looked upon him with fearless candor. She fixes Charles a meal and they converse awhile before he leaves. Although he says he will return in three days, Charles returns the very next day to check on his patient and then regularly over the weeks as the bone heals. Without quite knowing why, Charles derives great pleasure from his visits to Les Bertaux and he becomes a familiar face at the farm. His wife, however, learns of the farmer's pretty, educated daughter. She accuses Charles of preferring this "city girl" and Charles discontinues his visits. His home life, particularly his wife and mother's nagging, seems drab and constricting by comparison. Early that Spring Heloise Bovary's notary flees the country with most of her money and a subsequent investigation reveals that her supposed fortune is a lie. The elder Bovary's are enraged but Charles dutifully defends his wife. Soon afterward, however, she takes ill and dies.

The novel begins with a narrator who, in the guise of one of Charles' fellow students, discusses Charles' first day at the lycee. This narrator disappears soon afterward, however, and is replaced by the omniscient narrator that will tell the rest of the story in free indirect discourse. This style of writing is one of Flaubert's great innovations in the novel and allows him to be the author of the story without being its narrator. The older Bovary is characterized as having an excess of character and self-reliance but little inclination for work whereas his son is characterized as hard working but lacking any distinguishing personality or confidence. This generational divide is representative of the French bourgeoisie culture of the mid-nineteenth century in which the practicality of the marketplace supplanted the attempt to unify the aspirations of the romantics and the society at large. It's important to understand that Charles, though he studies medicine, does not become a doctor but rather an officer de sante - a much less distinguished title. Thus, he is more of a technician than a scientist. He is, however, a capable technician and his successful treatment of Monsieur Roulaut's leg opens the door to his relationship with that family. Though the title suggests that she will be the focus of the story, we first meet Emma through Charles' oblique observations. Our knowledge of her is restricted to the simplest details. The first part of Charles' life is steered by women, first his mother and then his first wife. Though she is nagging and jealous Charles proves his loyalty when he sticks by her side following her financial disaster

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/03.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_1_part_1.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 3

part 1, chapter 3

{"name": "part 1, Chapter 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/parti-chapter3-5", "summary": "When Monsieur Rouault visits Charles to pay his bill he consoles the young man for his recent loss and invites him to the farm. Charles resumes his visits to the farm and realizes that the bachelor life suits him. He finds that he is increasingly attracted to Emma whom he learns is bored of life on the farm and desires to live in a city. He asks her father for permission to marry her and Monsieur Rouault, who has anticipated the proposal, puts the question to his daughter. She accepts and Monsieur signals to Bovary waiting behind a hedge outside by slamming the shutters. Though Emma would have preferred a torch-lit midnight ceremony they arrange for a traditional ceremony and reception at the farm", "analysis": ""}

One morning old Rouault brought Charles the money for setting his leg--seventy-five francs in forty-sou pieces, and a turkey. He had heard of his loss, and consoled him as well as he could. "I know what it is," said he, clapping him on the shoulder; "I've been through it. When I lost my dear departed, I went into the fields to be quite alone. I fell at the foot of a tree; I cried; I called on God; I talked nonsense to Him. I wanted to be like the moles that I saw on the branches, their insides swarming with worms, dead, and an end of it. And when I thought that there were others at that very moment with their nice little wives holding them in their embrace, I struck great blows on the earth with my stick. I was pretty well mad with not eating; the very idea of going to a cafe disgusted me--you wouldn't believe it. Well, quite softly, one day following another, a spring on a winter, and an autumn after a summer, this wore away, piece by piece, crumb by crumb; it passed away, it is gone, I should say it has sunk; for something always remains at the bottom as one would say--a weight here, at one's heart. But since it is the lot of all of us, one must not give way altogether, and, because others have died, want to die too. You must pull yourself together, Monsieur Bovary. It will pass away. Come to see us; my daughter thinks of you now and again, d'ye know, and she says you are forgetting her. Spring will soon be here. We'll have some rabbit-shooting in the warrens to amuse you a bit." Charles followed his advice. He went back to the Bertaux. He found all as he had left it, that is to say, as it was five months ago. The pear trees were already in blossom, and Farmer Rouault, on his legs again, came and went, making the farm more full of life. Thinking it his duty to heap the greatest attention upon the doctor because of his sad position, he begged him not to take his hat off, spoke to him in an undertone as if he had been ill, and even pretended to be angry because nothing rather lighter had been prepared for him than for the others, such as a little clotted cream or stewed pears. He told stories. Charles found himself laughing, but the remembrance of his wife suddenly coming back to him depressed him. Coffee was brought in; he thought no more about her. He thought less of her as he grew accustomed to living alone. The new delight of independence soon made his loneliness bearable. He could now change his meal-times, go in or out without explanation, and when he was very tired stretch himself at full length on his bed. So he nursed and coddled himself and accepted the consolations that were offered him. On the other hand, the death of his wife had not served him ill in his business, since for a month people had been saying, "The poor young man! what a loss!" His name had been talked about, his practice had increased; and moreover, he could go to the Bertaux just as he liked. He had an aimless hope, and was vaguely happy; he thought himself better looking as he brushed his whiskers before the looking-glass. One day he got there about three o'clock. Everybody was in the fields. He went into the kitchen, but did not at once catch sight of Emma; the outside shutters were closed. Through the chinks of the wood the sun sent across the flooring long fine rays that were broken at the corners of the furniture and trembled along the ceiling. Some flies on the table were crawling up the glasses that had been used, and buzzing as they drowned themselves in the dregs of the cider. The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace, and touched with blue the cold cinders. Between the window and the hearth Emma was sewing; she wore no fichu; he could see small drops of perspiration on her bare shoulders. After the fashion of country folks she asked him to have something to drink. He said no; she insisted, and at last laughingly offered to have a glass of liqueur with him. So she went to fetch a bottle of curacao from the cupboard, reached down two small glasses, filled one to the brim, poured scarcely anything into the other, and, after having clinked glasses, carried hers to her mouth. As it was almost empty she bent back to drink, her head thrown back, her lips pouting, her neck on the strain. She laughed at getting none of it, while with the tip of her tongue passing between her small teeth she licked drop by drop the bottom of her glass. She sat down again and took up her work, a white cotton stocking she was darning. She worked with her head bent down; she did not speak, nor did Charles. The air coming in under the door blew a little dust over the flags; he watched it drift along, and heard nothing but the throbbing in his head and the faint clucking of a hen that had laid an egg in the yard. Emma from time to time cooled her cheeks with the palms of her hands, and cooled these again on the knobs of the huge fire-dogs. She complained of suffering since the beginning of the season from giddiness; she asked if sea-baths would do her any good; she began talking of her convent, Charles of his school; words came to them. They went up into her bedroom. She showed him her old music-books, the little prizes she had won, and the oak-leaf crowns, left at the bottom of a cupboard. She spoke to him, too, of her mother, of the country, and even showed him the bed in the garden where, on the first Friday of every month, she gathered flowers to put on her mother's tomb. But the gardener they had never knew anything about it; servants are so stupid! She would have dearly liked, if only for the winter, to live in town, although the length of the fine days made the country perhaps even more wearisome in the summer. And, according to what she was saying, her voice was clear, sharp, or, on a sudden all languor, drawn out in modulations that ended almost in murmurs as she spoke to herself, now joyous, opening big naive eyes, then with her eyelids half closed, her look full of boredom, her thoughts wandering. Going home at night, Charles went over her words one by one, trying to recall them, to fill out their sense, that he might piece out the life she had lived before he knew her. But he never saw her in his thoughts other than he had seen her the first time, or as he had just left her. Then he asked himself what would become of her--if she would be married, and to whom! Alas! Old Rouault was rich, and she!--so beautiful! But Emma's face always rose before his eyes, and a monotone, like the humming of a top, sounded in his ears, "If you should marry after all! If you should marry!" At night he could not sleep; his throat was parched; he was athirst. He got up to drink from the water-bottle and opened the window. The night was covered with stars, a warm wind blowing in the distance; the dogs were barking. He turned his head towards the Bertaux. Thinking that, after all, he should lose nothing, Charles promised himself to ask her in marriage as soon as occasion offered, but each time such occasion did offer the fear of not finding the right words sealed his lips. Old Rouault would not have been sorry to be rid of his daughter, who was of no use to him in the house. In his heart he excused her, thinking her too clever for farming, a calling under the ban of Heaven, since one never saw a millionaire in it. Far from having made a fortune by it, the good man was losing every year; for if he was good in bargaining, in which he enjoyed the dodges of the trade, on the other hand, agriculture properly so called, and the internal management of the farm, suited him less than most people. He did not willingly take his hands out of his pockets, and did not spare expense in all that concerned himself, liking to eat well, to have good fires, and to sleep well. He liked old cider, underdone legs of mutton, glorias* well beaten up. He took his meals in the kitchen alone, opposite the fire, on a little table brought to him all ready laid as on the stage. *A mixture of coffee and spirits. When, therefore, he perceived that Charles's cheeks grew red if near his daughter, which meant that he would propose for her one of these days, he chewed the cud of the matter beforehand. He certainly thought him a little meagre, and not quite the son-in-law he would have liked, but he was said to be well brought-up, economical, very learned, and no doubt would not make too many difficulties about the dowry. Now, as old Rouault would soon be forced to sell twenty-two acres of "his property," as he owed a good deal to the mason, to the harness-maker, and as the shaft of the cider-press wanted renewing, "If he asks for her," he said to himself, "I'll give her to him." At Michaelmas Charles went to spend three days at the Bertaux. The last had passed like the others in procrastinating from hour to hour. Old Rouault was seeing him off; they were walking along the road full of ruts; they were about to part. This was the time. Charles gave himself as far as to the corner of the hedge, and at last, when past it-- "Monsieur Rouault," he murmured, "I should like to say something to you." They stopped. Charles was silent. "Well, tell me your story. Don't I know all about it?" said old Rouault, laughing softly. "Monsieur Rouault--Monsieur Rouault," stammered Charles. "I ask nothing better", the farmer went on. "Although, no doubt, the little one is of my mind, still we must ask her opinion. So you get off--I'll go back home. If it is 'yes', you needn't return because of all the people about, and besides it would upset her too much. But so that you mayn't be eating your heart, I'll open wide the outer shutter of the window against the wall; you can see it from the back by leaning over the hedge." And he went off. Charles fastened his horse to a tree; he ran into the road and waited. Half an hour passed, then he counted nineteen minutes by his watch. Suddenly a noise was heard against the wall; the shutter had been thrown back; the hook was still swinging. The next day by nine o'clock he was at the farm. Emma blushed as he entered, and she gave a little forced laugh to keep herself in countenance. Old Rouault embraced his future son-in-law. The discussion of money matters was put off; moreover, there was plenty of time before them, as the marriage could not decently take place till Charles was out of mourning, that is to say, about the spring of the next year. The winter passed waiting for this. Mademoiselle Rouault was busy with her trousseau. Part of it was ordered at Rouen, and she made herself chemises and nightcaps after fashion-plates that she borrowed. When Charles visited the farmer, the preparations for the wedding were talked over; they wondered in what room they should have dinner; they dreamed of the number of dishes that would be wanted, and what should be entrees. Emma would, on the contrary, have preferred to have a midnight wedding with torches, but old Rouault could not understand such an idea. So there was a wedding at which forty-three persons were present, at which they remained sixteen hours at table, began again the next day, and to some extent on the days following.

part 1, Chapter 3

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/parti-chapter3-5

When Monsieur Rouault visits Charles to pay his bill he consoles the young man for his recent loss and invites him to the farm. Charles resumes his visits to the farm and realizes that the bachelor life suits him. He finds that he is increasingly attracted to Emma whom he learns is bored of life on the farm and desires to live in a city. He asks her father for permission to marry her and Monsieur Rouault, who has anticipated the proposal, puts the question to his daughter. She accepts and Monsieur signals to Bovary waiting behind a hedge outside by slamming the shutters. Though Emma would have preferred a torch-lit midnight ceremony they arrange for a traditional ceremony and reception at the farm

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/04.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_1_part_2.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 4

part 1, chapter 4

{"name": "part 1, Chapter 4", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/parti-chapter3-5", "summary": "All the relations from both families are invited to the wedding and Flaubert describes the country fashions that ranged from the First Communion dresses of the adolescent girls to the coats of varying lengths worn by the men. The wedding party and all the guests walk to the Mayor's office for the civil ceremony and then to the church and afterward they follow a hired violinist back to the farm. Monsieur Roulaut escorts the elder Madame Bovary while the elder Monsieur Bovary flirts with a country girl. The dining table is in the carriage shed and amply supplied with hearty country food, cider and wine. The wedding cake is an extravagant three tiered affair topped by real rosebuds. The banquet lasts past nightfall, full of music, dancing and displays of strength. Eventually many of the guests drunkenly made their way home while others stay up all night drinking in the kitchen. At his daughter's request Monsieur Roulaut manages to prevent some of his coarser relatives from engaging in the traditional wedding night pranks though one cousin nearly succeeds in spitting a mouthful of water through the keyhole of the bridal chamber. The following day Emma seems unaffected by her lost virginity while Charles is obviously smitten with the girl. Two days later Emma and Charles travel to Tostes where the elderly maid greets them and offers Madame a tour of her new home", "analysis": ""}

The guests arrived early in carriages, in one-horse chaises, two-wheeled cars, old open gigs, waggonettes with leather hoods, and the young people from the nearer villages in carts, in which they stood up in rows, holding on to the sides so as not to fall, going at a trot and well shaken up. Some came from a distance of thirty miles, from Goderville, from Normanville, and from Cany. All the relatives of both families had been invited, quarrels between friends arranged, acquaintances long since lost sight of written to. From time to time one heard the crack of a whip behind the hedge; then the gates opened, a chaise entered. Galloping up to the foot of the steps, it stopped short and emptied its load. They got down from all sides, rubbing knees and stretching arms. The ladies, wearing bonnets, had on dresses in the town fashion, gold watch chains, pelerines with the ends tucked into belts, or little coloured fichus fastened down behind with a pin, and that left the back of the neck bare. The lads, dressed like their papas, seemed uncomfortable in their new clothes (many that day hand-sewed their first pair of boots), and by their sides, speaking never a work, wearing the white dress of their first communion lengthened for the occasion were some big girls of fourteen or sixteen, cousins or elder sisters no doubt, rubicund, bewildered, their hair greasy with rose pomade, and very much afraid of dirtying their gloves. As there were not enough stable-boys to unharness all the carriages, the gentlemen turned up their sleeves and set about it themselves. According to their different social positions they wore tail-coats, overcoats, shooting jackets, cutaway-coats; fine tail-coats, redolent of family respectability, that only came out of the wardrobe on state occasions; overcoats with long tails flapping in the wind and round capes and pockets like sacks; shooting jackets of coarse cloth, generally worn with a cap with a brass-bound peak; very short cutaway-coats with two small buttons in the back, close together like a pair of eyes, and the tails of which seemed cut out of one piece by a carpenter's hatchet. Some, too (but these, you may be sure, would sit at the bottom of the table), wore their best blouses--that is to say, with collars turned down to the shoulders, the back gathered into small plaits and the waist fastened very low down with a worked belt. And the shirts stood out from the chests like cuirasses! Everyone had just had his hair cut; ears stood out from the heads; they had been close-shaved; a few, even, who had had to get up before daybreak, and not been able to see to shave, had diagonal gashes under their noses or cuts the size of a three-franc piece along the jaws, which the fresh air en route had enflamed, so that the great white beaming faces were mottled here and there with red dabs. The mairie was a mile and a half from the farm, and they went thither on foot, returning in the same way after the ceremony in the church. The procession, first united like one long coloured scarf that undulated across the fields, along the narrow path winding amid the green corn, soon lengthened out, and broke up into different groups that loitered to talk. The fiddler walked in front with his violin, gay with ribbons at its pegs. Then came the married pair, the relations, the friends, all following pell-mell; the children stayed behind amusing themselves plucking the bell-flowers from oat-ears, or playing amongst themselves unseen. Emma's dress, too long, trailed a little on the ground; from time to time she stopped to pull it up, and then delicately, with her gloved hands, she picked off the coarse grass and the thistledowns, while Charles, empty handed, waited till she had finished. Old Rouault, with a new silk hat and the cuffs of his black coat covering his hands up to the nails, gave his arm to Madame Bovary senior. As to Monsieur Bovary senior, who, heartily despising all these folk, had come simply in a frock-coat of military cut with one row of buttons--he was passing compliments of the bar to a fair young peasant. She bowed, blushed, and did not know what to say. The other wedding guests talked of their business or played tricks behind each other's backs, egging one another on in advance to be jolly. Those who listened could always catch the squeaking of the fiddler, who went on playing across the fields. When he saw that the rest were far behind he stopped to take breath, slowly rosined his bow, so that the strings should sound more shrilly, then set off again, by turns lowering and raising his neck, the better to mark time for himself. The noise of the instrument drove away the little birds from afar. The table was laid under the cart-shed. On it were four sirloins, six chicken fricassees, stewed veal, three legs of mutton, and in the middle a fine roast suckling pig, flanked by four chitterlings with sorrel. At the corners were decanters of brandy. Sweet bottled-cider frothed round the corks, and all the glasses had been filled to the brim with wine beforehand. Large dishes of yellow cream, that trembled with the least shake of the table, had designed on their smooth surface the initials of the newly wedded pair in nonpareil arabesques. A confectioner of Yvetot had been intrusted with the tarts and sweets. As he had only just set up on the place, he had taken a lot of trouble, and at dessert he himself brought in a set dish that evoked loud cries of wonderment. To begin with, at its base there was a square of blue cardboard, representing a temple with porticoes, colonnades, and stucco statuettes all round, and in the niches constellations of gilt paper stars; then on the second stage was a dungeon of Savoy cake, surrounded by many fortifications in candied angelica, almonds, raisins, and quarters of oranges; and finally, on the upper platform a green field with rocks set in lakes of jam, nutshell boats, and a small Cupid balancing himself in a chocolate swing whose two uprights ended in real roses for balls at the top. Until night they ate. When any of them were too tired of sitting, they went out for a stroll in the yard, or for a game with corks in the granary, and then returned to table. Some towards the finish went to sleep and snored. But with the coffee everyone woke up. Then they began songs, showed off tricks, raised heavy weights, performed feats with their fingers, then tried lifting carts on their shoulders, made broad jokes, kissed the women. At night when they left, the horses, stuffed up to the nostrils with oats, could hardly be got into the shafts; they kicked, reared, the harness broke, their masters laughed or swore; and all night in the light of the moon along country roads there were runaway carts at full gallop plunging into the ditches, jumping over yard after yard of stones, clambering up the hills, with women leaning out from the tilt to catch hold of the reins. Those who stayed at the Bertaux spent the night drinking in the kitchen. The children had fallen asleep under the seats. The bride had begged her father to be spared the usual marriage pleasantries. However, a fishmonger, one of their cousins (who had even brought a pair of soles for his wedding present), began to squirt water from his mouth through the keyhole, when old Rouault came up just in time to stop him, and explain to him that the distinguished position of his son-in-law would not allow of such liberties. The cousin all the same did not give in to these reasons readily. In his heart he accused old Rouault of being proud, and he joined four or five other guests in a corner, who having, through mere chance, been several times running served with the worst helps of meat, also were of opinion they had been badly used, and were whispering about their host, and with covered hints hoping he would ruin himself. Madame Bovary, senior, had not opened her mouth all day. She had been consulted neither as to the dress of her daughter-in-law nor as to the arrangement of the feast; she went to bed early. Her husband, instead of following her, sent to Saint-Victor for some cigars, and smoked till daybreak, drinking kirsch-punch, a mixture unknown to the company. This added greatly to the consideration in which he was held. Charles, who was not of a facetious turn, did not shine at the wedding. He answered feebly to the puns, doubles entendres*, compliments, and chaff that it was felt a duty to let off at him as soon as the soup appeared. *Double meanings. The next day, on the other hand, he seemed another man. It was he who might rather have been taken for the virgin of the evening before, whilst the bride gave no sign that revealed anything. The shrewdest did not know what to make of it, and they looked at her when she passed near them with an unbounded concentration of mind. But Charles concealed nothing. He called her "my wife", tutoyed* her, asked for her of everyone, looked for her everywhere, and often he dragged her into the yards, where he could be seen from far between the trees, putting his arm around her waist, and walking half-bending over her, ruffling the chemisette of her bodice with his head. *Used the familiar form of address. Two days after the wedding the married pair left. Charles, on account of his patients, could not be away longer. Old Rouault had them driven back in his cart, and himself accompanied them as far as Vassonville. Here he embraced his daughter for the last time, got down, and went his way. When he had gone about a hundred paces he stopped, and as he saw the cart disappearing, its wheels turning in the dust, he gave a deep sigh. Then he remembered his wedding, the old times, the first pregnancy of his wife; he, too, had been very happy the day when he had taken her from her father to his home, and had carried her off on a pillion, trotting through the snow, for it was near Christmas-time, and the country was all white. She held him by one arm, her basket hanging from the other; the wind blew the long lace of her Cauchois headdress so that it sometimes flapped across his mouth, and when he turned his head he saw near him, on his shoulder, her little rosy face, smiling silently under the gold bands of her cap. To warm her hands she put them from time to time in his breast. How long ago it all was! Their son would have been thirty by now. Then he looked back and saw nothing on the road. He felt dreary as an empty house; and tender memories mingling with the sad thoughts in his brain, addled by the fumes of the feast, he felt inclined for a moment to take a turn towards the church. As he was afraid, however, that this sight would make him yet more sad, he went right away home. Monsieur and Madame Charles arrived at Tostes about six o'clock. The neighbors came to the windows to see their doctor's new wife. The old servant presented herself, curtsied to her, apologised for not having dinner ready, and suggested that madame, in the meantime, should look over her house.

part 1, Chapter 4

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/parti-chapter3-5

All the relations from both families are invited to the wedding and Flaubert describes the country fashions that ranged from the First Communion dresses of the adolescent girls to the coats of varying lengths worn by the men. The wedding party and all the guests walk to the Mayor's office for the civil ceremony and then to the church and afterward they follow a hired violinist back to the farm. Monsieur Roulaut escorts the elder Madame Bovary while the elder Monsieur Bovary flirts with a country girl. The dining table is in the carriage shed and amply supplied with hearty country food, cider and wine. The wedding cake is an extravagant three tiered affair topped by real rosebuds. The banquet lasts past nightfall, full of music, dancing and displays of strength. Eventually many of the guests drunkenly made their way home while others stay up all night drinking in the kitchen. At his daughter's request Monsieur Roulaut manages to prevent some of his coarser relatives from engaging in the traditional wedding night pranks though one cousin nearly succeeds in spitting a mouthful of water through the keyhole of the bridal chamber. The following day Emma seems unaffected by her lost virginity while Charles is obviously smitten with the girl. Two days later Emma and Charles travel to Tostes where the elderly maid greets them and offers Madame a tour of her new home

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/05.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_1_part_3.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 5

part 1, chapter 5

{"name": "part 1, Chapter 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/parti-chapter3-5", "summary": "The small house in Tostes is comfortable and modestly furnished. The front of the house is flush with the street and a narrow garden extends to the rear. Upstairs Emma discovers the previous Madame Bovary's wedding bouquet sitting in the master bedroom. Charles carries the bouquet to the attic and Emma wonders what will become of her own bouquet if she dies. In the following days Emma makes small changes to the house's decor and Charles purchases a second-hand buggy. Charles is perfectly happy now that Emma has come to live with him and he takes pleasure in the smallest routines of daily life. Emma wonders why she hasn't yet experienced true happiness. Words like \"bliss\", \"passion\", and \"rapture\" that hold so much meaning in novels seem impossibly distant in her life with Charles.", "analysis": "Heoise Bovary's death clears the way for Charles to court Emma which he does in a very stilted and indirect fashion. We have no knowledge of her initial reaction to the proposal and only know as much as Charles who sees the shutters flapping against the house to signal acceptance. Small hints during these chapters indicate the difference in sentiment between Charles and Emma that will eventually lead to disaster for both. Emma would like a torch-lit ceremony but settles for a standard wedding. We can surmise that the wedding itself, full of drinking and carousing and country sensibilities, is not to her complete satisfaction because she requests that none of the traditional pranks be permitted. The true indication of the couple's incapability is Emma's apathy on the morning after and Charles' obviously augmented affection. This is typical of the gender reversals that will come to characterize Emma's relationships with men. Though she longed for a life in the city the village of Tostes is Emma's new home and she is already pondering thoughts of death in the fate of her bouquet. Though she tries to make the best of the situation it is obvious that she is not satisfied. The end of this chapter begins the process of winnowing in on Emma's interior world - a process that will continue over the course of the novel"}

The brick front was just in a line with the street, or rather the road. Behind the door hung a cloak with a small collar, a bridle, and a black leather cap, and on the floor, in a corner, were a pair of leggings, still covered with dry mud. On the right was the one apartment, that was both dining and sitting room. A canary yellow paper, relieved at the top by a garland of pale flowers, was puckered everywhere over the badly stretched canvas; white calico curtains with a red border hung crossways at the length of the window; and on the narrow mantelpiece a clock with a head of Hippocrates shone resplendent between two plate candlesticks under oval shades. On the other side of the passage was Charles's consulting room, a little room about six paces wide, with a table, three chairs, and an office chair. Volumes of the "Dictionary of Medical Science," uncut, but the binding rather the worse for the successive sales through which they had gone, occupied almost along the six shelves of a deal bookcase. The smell of melted butter penetrated through the walls when he saw patients, just as in the kitchen one could hear the people coughing in the consulting room and recounting their histories. Then, opening on the yard, where the stable was, came a large dilapidated room with a stove, now used as a wood-house, cellar, and pantry, full of old rubbish, of empty casks, agricultural implements past service, and a mass of dusty things whose use it was impossible to guess. The garden, longer than wide, ran between two mud walls with espaliered apricots, to a hawthorn hedge that separated it from the field. In the middle was a slate sundial on a brick pedestal; four flower beds with eglantines surrounded symmetrically the more useful kitchen garden bed. Right at the bottom, under the spruce bushes, was a cure in plaster reading his breviary. Emma went upstairs. The first room was not furnished, but in the second, which was their bedroom, was a mahogany bedstead in an alcove with red drapery. A shell box adorned the chest of drawers, and on the secretary near the window a bouquet of orange blossoms tied with white satin ribbons stood in a bottle. It was a bride's bouquet; it was the other one's. She looked at it. Charles noticed it; he took it and carried it up to the attic, while Emma seated in an arm-chair (they were putting her things down around her) thought of her bridal flowers packed up in a bandbox, and wondered, dreaming, what would be done with them if she were to die. During the first days she occupied herself in thinking about changes in the house. She took the shades off the candlesticks, had new wallpaper put up, the staircase repainted, and seats made in the garden round the sundial; she even inquired how she could get a basin with a jet fountain and fishes. Finally her husband, knowing that she liked to drive out, picked up a second-hand dogcart, which, with new lamps and splashboard in striped leather, looked almost like a tilbury. He was happy then, and without a care in the world. A meal together, a walk in the evening on the highroad, a gesture of her hands over her hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging from the window-fastener, and many another thing in which Charles had never dreamed of pleasure, now made up the endless round of his happiness. In bed, in the morning, by her side, on the pillow, he watched the sunlight sinking into the down on her fair cheek, half hidden by the lappets of her night-cap. Seen thus closely, her eyes looked to him enlarged, especially when, on waking up, she opened and shut them rapidly many times. Black in the shade, dark blue in broad daylight, they had, as it were, depths of different colours, that, darker in the centre, grew paler towards the surface of the eye. His own eyes lost themselves in these depths; he saw himself in miniature down to the shoulders, with his handkerchief round his head and the top of his shirt open. He rose. She came to the window to see him off, and stayed leaning on the sill between two pots of geranium, clad in her dressing gown hanging loosely about her. Charles, in the street buckled his spurs, his foot on the mounting stone, while she talked to him from above, picking with her mouth some scrap of flower or leaf that she blew out at him. Then this, eddying, floating, described semicircles in the air like a bird, and was caught before it reached the ground in the ill-groomed mane of the old white mare standing motionless at the door. Charles from horseback threw her a kiss; she answered with a nod; she shut the window, and he set off. And then along the highroad, spreading out its long ribbon of dust, along the deep lanes that the trees bent over as in arbours, along paths where the corn reached to the knees, with the sun on his back and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the joys of the past night, his mind at rest, his flesh at ease, he went on, re-chewing his happiness, like those who after dinner taste again the truffles which they are digesting. Until now what good had he had of his life? His time at school, when he remained shut up within the high walls, alone, in the midst of companions richer than he or cleverer at their work, who laughed at his accent, who jeered at his clothes, and whose mothers came to the school with cakes in their muffs? Later on, when he studied medicine, and never had his purse full enough to treat some little work-girl who would have become his mistress? Afterwards, he had lived fourteen months with the widow, whose feet in bed were cold as icicles. But now he had for life this beautiful woman whom he adored. For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat, and he reproached himself with not loving her. He wanted to see her again; he turned back quickly, ran up the stairs with a beating heart. Emma, in her room, was dressing; he came up on tiptoe, kissed her back; she gave a cry. He could not keep from constantly touching her comb, her ring, her fichu; sometimes he gave her great sounding kisses with all his mouth on her cheeks, or else little kisses in a row all along her bare arm from the tip of her fingers up to her shoulder, and she put him away half-smiling, half-vexed, as you do a child who hangs about you. Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.

part 1, Chapter 5

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/parti-chapter3-5

The small house in Tostes is comfortable and modestly furnished. The front of the house is flush with the street and a narrow garden extends to the rear. Upstairs Emma discovers the previous Madame Bovary's wedding bouquet sitting in the master bedroom. Charles carries the bouquet to the attic and Emma wonders what will become of her own bouquet if she dies. In the following days Emma makes small changes to the house's decor and Charles purchases a second-hand buggy. Charles is perfectly happy now that Emma has come to live with him and he takes pleasure in the smallest routines of daily life. Emma wonders why she hasn't yet experienced true happiness. Words like "bliss", "passion", and "rapture" that hold so much meaning in novels seem impossibly distant in her life with Charles.

Heoise Bovary's death clears the way for Charles to court Emma which he does in a very stilted and indirect fashion. We have no knowledge of her initial reaction to the proposal and only know as much as Charles who sees the shutters flapping against the house to signal acceptance. Small hints during these chapters indicate the difference in sentiment between Charles and Emma that will eventually lead to disaster for both. Emma would like a torch-lit ceremony but settles for a standard wedding. We can surmise that the wedding itself, full of drinking and carousing and country sensibilities, is not to her complete satisfaction because she requests that none of the traditional pranks be permitted. The true indication of the couple's incapability is Emma's apathy on the morning after and Charles' obviously augmented affection. This is typical of the gender reversals that will come to characterize Emma's relationships with men. Though she longed for a life in the city the village of Tostes is Emma's new home and she is already pondering thoughts of death in the fate of her bouquet. Though she tries to make the best of the situation it is obvious that she is not satisfied. The end of this chapter begins the process of winnowing in on Emma's interior world - a process that will continue over the course of the novel

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/06.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_2_part_1.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 6

part 1, chapter 6

{"name": "part 1, Chapter 6", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/parti-chapter6-9", "summary": "This chapter provides the details of Emma's life up to her marriage. At the age of thirteen she became a boarder at a convent in the city of Rouen. She was a quick student and enjoyed life in the convent. The mysticism of the church appealed to her romantic temperament which was \"more sentimental than artistic. An old spinster wash lady at the convent who had been a member of the aristocracy before the Revolution enthralled the girls with tales of the past and provided them with novels featuring romantic tales set in exotic locales. Emma took quickly to the notions in the novels. The idyllic pictures of heartsick maidens pining for their lovers deeply affected her. After her mother died she mourned profusely but gradually found that her sadness was contrived. Although she had initially loved the convent and the trappings of religious life she balked at the discipline and neither she nor the nuns were too disappointed when she left the school. She quickly tired of life on her father's farm, however, and when Charles appeared she thought her chance for true romantic happiness had arrived. The drab reality of the little house in Tostes, however, fails to match her idea of romance", "analysis": ""}

She had read "Paul and Virginia," and she had dreamed of the little bamboo-house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fidele, but above all of the sweet friendship of some dear little brother, who seeks red fruit for you on trees taller than steeples, or who runs barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird's nest. When she was thirteen, her father himself took her to town to place her in the convent. They stopped at an inn in the St. Gervais quarter, where, at their supper, they used painted plates that set forth the story of Mademoiselle de la Valliere. The explanatory legends, chipped here and there by the scratching of knives, all glorified religion, the tendernesses of the heart, and the pomps of court. Far from being bored at first at the convent, she took pleasure in the society of the good sisters, who, to amuse her, took her to the chapel, which one entered from the refectory by a long corridor. She played very little during recreation hours, knew her catechism well, and it was she who always answered Monsieur le Vicaire's difficult questions. Living thus, without ever leaving the warm atmosphere of the classrooms, and amid these pale-faced women wearing rosaries with brass crosses, she was softly lulled by the mystic languor exhaled in the perfumes of the altar, the freshness of the holy water, and the lights of the tapers. Instead of attending to mass, she looked at the pious vignettes with their azure borders in her book, and she loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries. She tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing a whole day. She puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfil. When she went to confession, she invented little sins in order that she might stay there longer, kneeling in the shadow, her hands joined, her face against the grating beneath the whispering of the priest. The comparisons of betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal marriage, that recur in sermons, stirred within her soul depths of unexpected sweetness. In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious reading in the study. On week-nights it was some abstract of sacred history or the Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous, and on Sundays passages from the "Genie du Christianisme," as a recreation. How she listened at first to the sonorous lamentations of its romantic melancholies reechoing through the world and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in the shop-parlour of some business quarter, she might perhaps have opened her heart to those lyrical invasions of Nature, which usually come to us only through 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 of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins. She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes. At the convent there was an old maid who came for a week each month to mend the linen. Patronized by the clergy, because she belonged to an ancient family of noblemen ruined by the Revolution, she dined in the refectory at the table of the good sisters, and after the meal had a bit of chat with them before going back to her work. The girls often slipped out from the study to go and see her. She knew by heart the love songs of the last century, and sang them in a low voice as she stitched away. She told stories, gave them news, went errands in the town, and on the sly lent the big girls some novel, that she always carried in the pockets of her apron, and of which the good lady herself swallowed long chapters in the intervals of her work. They were all love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, "gentlemen" brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries. Through Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guard-rooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches, spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching a cavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant fields. At this time she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan of Arc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, the beautiful Ferroniere, and Clemence Isaure stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of heaven, where also were seen, lost in shadow, and all unconnected, St. Louis with his oak, the dying Bayard, some cruelties of Louis XI, a little of St. Bartholomew's Day, the plume of the Bearnais, and always the remembrance of the plates painted in honour of Louis XIV. In the music class, in the ballads she sang, there was nothing but little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagunes, gondoliers;-mild compositions that allowed her to catch a glimpse athwart the obscurity of style and the weakness of the music of the attractive phantasmagoria of sentimental realities. Some of her companions brought "keepsakes" given them as new year's gifts to the convent. These had to be hidden; it was quite an undertaking; they were read in the dormitory. Delicately handling the beautiful satin bindings, Emma looked with dazzled eyes at the names of the unknown authors, who had signed their verses for the most part as counts or viscounts. She trembled as she blew back the tissue paper over the engraving and saw it folded in two and fall gently against the page. Here behind the balustrade of a balcony was a young man in a short cloak, holding in his arms a young girl in a white dress wearing an alms-bag at her belt; or there were nameless portraits of English ladies with fair curls, who looked at you from under their round straw hats with their large clear eyes. Some there were lounging in their carriages, gliding through parks, a greyhound bounding along in front of the equipage driven at a trot by two midget postilions in white breeches. Others, dreaming on sofas with an open letter, gazed at the moon through a slightly open window half draped by a black curtain. The naive ones, a tear on their cheeks, were kissing doves through the bars of a Gothic cage, or, smiling, their heads on one side, were plucking the leaves of a marguerite with their taper fingers, that curved at the tips like peaked shoes. And you, too, were there, Sultans with long pipes reclining beneath arbours in the arms of Bayaderes; Djiaours, Turkish sabres, Greek caps; and you especially, pale landscapes of dithyrambic lands, that often show us at once palm trees and firs, tigers on the right, a lion to the left, Tartar minarets on the horizon; the whole framed by a very neat virgin forest, and with a great perpendicular sunbeam trembling in the water, where, standing out in relief like white excoriations on a steel-grey ground, swans are swimming about. And the shade of the argand lamp fastened to the wall above Emma's head lighted up all these pictures of the world, that passed before her one by one in the silence of the dormitory, and to the distant noise of some belated carriage rolling over the Boulevards. When her mother died she cried much the first few days. She had a funeral picture made with the hair of the deceased, and, in a letter sent to the Bertaux full of sad reflections on life, she asked to be buried later on in the same grave. The goodman thought she must be ill, and came to see her. Emma was secretly pleased that she had reached at a first attempt the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts. She let herself glide along with Lamartine meanderings, listened to harps on lakes, to all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of the leaves, the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of the Eternal discoursing down the valleys. She wearied of it, would not confess it, continued from habit, and at last was surprised to feel herself soothed, and with no more sadness at heart than wrinkles on her brow. The good nuns, who had been so sure of her vocation, perceived with great astonishment that Mademoiselle Rouault seemed to be slipping from them. They had indeed been so lavish to her of prayers, retreats, novenas, and sermons, they had so often preached the respect due to saints and martyrs, and given so much good advice as to the modesty of the body and the salvation of her soul, that she did as tightly reined horses; she pulled up short and the bit slipped from her teeth. This nature, positive in the midst of its enthusiasms, that had loved the church for the sake of the flowers, and music for the words of the songs, and literature for its passional stimulus, rebelled against the mysteries of faith as it grew irritated by discipline, a thing antipathetic to her constitution. When her father took her from school, no one was sorry to see her go. The Lady Superior even thought that she had latterly been somewhat irreverent to the community. Emma, at home once more, first took pleasure in looking after the servants, then grew disgusted with the country and missed her convent. When Charles came to the Bertaux for the first time, she thought herself quite disillusioned, with nothing more to learn, and nothing more to feel. But the uneasiness of her new position, or perhaps the disturbance caused by the presence of this man, had sufficed to make her believe that she at last felt that wondrous passion which, till then, like a great bird with rose-coloured wings, hung in the splendour of the skies of poesy; and now she could not think that the calm in which she lived was the happiness she had dreamed.

part 1, Chapter 6

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/parti-chapter6-9

This chapter provides the details of Emma's life up to her marriage. At the age of thirteen she became a boarder at a convent in the city of Rouen. She was a quick student and enjoyed life in the convent. The mysticism of the church appealed to her romantic temperament which was "more sentimental than artistic. An old spinster wash lady at the convent who had been a member of the aristocracy before the Revolution enthralled the girls with tales of the past and provided them with novels featuring romantic tales set in exotic locales. Emma took quickly to the notions in the novels. The idyllic pictures of heartsick maidens pining for their lovers deeply affected her. After her mother died she mourned profusely but gradually found that her sadness was contrived. Although she had initially loved the convent and the trappings of religious life she balked at the discipline and neither she nor the nuns were too disappointed when she left the school. She quickly tired of life on her father's farm, however, and when Charles appeared she thought her chance for true romantic happiness had arrived. The drab reality of the little house in Tostes, however, fails to match her idea of romance

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/07.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_2_part_2.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 7

part 1, chapter 7

{"name": "part 1, Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/parti-chapter6-9", "summary": "As their marriage progresses Emma's feeling of detachment from her husband grows greater. She feels that a man should have all the answers to life and be experienced in a wide variety of things but she discerns that Charles is complacent, boring and uninterested in culture. He takes his wife's happiness for granted and she secretly resents this. To compensate she draws pictures, plays the piano and runs the household with meticulous care. Charles' mother disapproves of her new daughter-in-law's extravagances and Charles finds himself frequently caught between the mother he respects and the wife that he loves. Because Charles never expresses any deep emotions Emma concludes that his love is nothing out of the ordinary. She receives an Italian greyhound bitch as a gift from one of Charles' patients and she takes the dog, which she names Djali, on long walks. The sum of her thoughts during these excursions is: \"Why did I ever marry. She imagines that if she had waited longer to marry a more suitable man would have come into her life. Late in September Emma and Charles receive and invitation to attend a party at La Vaubyessard, home of the Marquis d'Andervilliers. The marquis had suffered from an abscess that Charles successfully treated and, noticing that Bovary's wife is pretty, the marquis determined that they could safely be invited to a gathering of their betters. So on the day of the party Charles and Emma load their carriage with boxes of clothing and journey to the estate. They arrive at sunset", "analysis": ""}

She thought, sometimes, that, after all, this was the happiest time of her life--the honeymoon, as people called it. To taste the full sweetness of it, it would have been necessary doubtless to fly to those lands with sonorous names where the days after marriage are full of laziness most suave. In post chaises behind blue silken curtains to ride slowly up steep road, listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed by the mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled sound of a waterfall; at sunset on the shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume of lemon trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces above, hand in hand to look at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills? Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her--the opportunity, the courage. If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed it, if his look had but once met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden plenty would have gone out from her heart, as the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by a hand. But as the intimacy of their life became deeper, the greater became the gulf that separated her from him. Charles's conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone's ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris. He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come across in a novel. A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him. Sometimes she would draw; and it was great amusement to Charles to stand there bolt upright and watch her bend over her cardboard, with eyes half-closed the better to see her work, or rolling, between her fingers, little bread-pellets. As to the piano, the more quickly her fingers glided over it the more he wondered. She struck the notes with aplomb, and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad bare-headed and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand. Emma, on the other hand, knew how to look after her house. She sent the patients' accounts in well-phrased letters that had no suggestion of a bill. When they had a neighbour to dinner on Sundays, she managed to have some tasty dish--piled up pyramids of greengages on vine leaves, served up preserves turned out into plates--and even spoke of buying finger-glasses for dessert. From all this much consideration was extended to Bovary. Charles finished by rising in his own esteem for possessing such a wife. He showed with pride in the sitting room two small pencil sketches by her that he had had framed in very large frames, and hung up against the wallpaper by long green cords. People returning from mass saw him at his door in his wool-work slippers. He came home late--at ten o'clock, at midnight sometimes. Then he asked for something to eat, and as the servant had gone to bed, Emma waited on him. He took off his coat to dine more at his ease. He told her, one after the other, the people he had met, the villages where he had been, the prescriptions he had written, and, well pleased with himself, he finished the remainder of the boiled beef and onions, picked pieces off the cheese, munched an apple, emptied his water-bottle, and then went to bed, and lay on his back and snored. As he had been for a time accustomed to wear nightcaps, his handkerchief would not keep down over his ears, so that his hair in the morning was all tumbled pell-mell about his face and whitened with the feathers of the pillow, whose strings came untied during the night. He always wore thick boots that had two long creases over the instep running obliquely towards the ankle, while the rest of the upper continued in a straight line as if stretched on a wooden foot. He said that "was quite good enough for the country." His mother approved of his economy, for she came to see him as formerly when there had been some violent row at her place; and yet Madame Bovary senior seemed prejudiced against her daughter-in-law. She thought "her ways too fine for their position"; the wood, the sugar, and the candles disappeared as "at a grand establishment," and the amount of firing in the kitchen would have been enough for twenty-five courses. She put her linen in order for her in the presses, and taught her to keep an eye on the butcher when he brought the meat. Emma put up with these lessons. Madame Bovary was lavish of them; and the words "daughter" and "mother" were exchanged all day long, accompanied by little quiverings of the lips, each one uttering gentle words in a voice trembling with anger. In Madame Dubuc's time the old woman felt that she was still the favorite; but now the love of Charles for Emma seemed to her a desertion from her tenderness, an encroachment upon what was hers, and she watched her son's happiness in sad silence, as a ruined man looks through the windows at people dining in his old house. She recalled to him as remembrances her troubles and her sacrifices, and, comparing these with Emma's negligence, came to the conclusion that it was not reasonable to adore her so exclusively. Charles knew not what to answer: he respected his mother, and he loved his wife infinitely; he considered the judgment of the one infallible, and yet he thought the conduct of the other irreproachable. When Madam Bovary had gone, he tried timidly and in the same terms to hazard one or two of the more anodyne observations he had heard from his mamma. Emma proved to him with a word that he was mistaken, and sent him off to his patients. And yet, in accord with theories she believed right, she wanted to make herself in love with him. By moonlight in the garden she recited all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him many melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after as before, and Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved. When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did not experience as of believing anything that did not present itself in conventional forms, she persuaded herself without difficulty that Charles's passion was nothing very exorbitant. His outbursts became regular; he embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one habit among other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony of dinner. A gamekeeper, cured by the doctor of inflammation of the lungs, had given madame a little Italian greyhound; she took her out walking, for she went out sometimes in order to be alone for a moment, and not to see before her eyes the eternal garden and the dusty road. She went as far as the beeches of Banneville, near the deserted pavilion which forms an angle of the wall on the side of the country. Amidst the vegetation of the ditch there are long reeds with leaves that cut you. She began by looking round her to see if nothing had changed since last she had been there. She found again in the same places the foxgloves and wallflowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and the patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts, aimless at first, wandered at random, like her greyhound, who ran round and round in the fields, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing the shrew-mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge of a cornfield. Then gradually her ideas took definite shape, and, sitting on the grass that she dug up with little prods of her sunshade, Emma repeated to herself, "Good heavens! Why did I marry?" She asked herself if by some other chance combination it would have not been possible to meet another man; and she tried to imagine what would have been these unrealised events, this different life, this unknown husband. All, surely, could not be like this one. He might have been handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive, such as, no doubt, her old companions of the convent had married. What were they doing now? In town, with the noise of the streets, the buzz of the theatres and the lights of the ballroom, they were living lives where the heart expands, the senses bourgeon out. But she--her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart. She recalled the prize days, when she mounted the platform to receive her little crowns, with her hair in long plaits. In her white frock and open prunella shoes she had a pretty way, and when she went back to her seat, the gentlemen bent over her to congratulate her; the courtyard was full of carriages; farewells were called to her through their windows; the music master with his violin case bowed in passing by. How far all of this! How far away! She called Djali, took her between her knees, and smoothed the long delicate head, saying, "Come, kiss mistress; you have no troubles." Then noting the melancholy face of the graceful animal, who yawned slowly, she softened, and comparing her to herself, spoke to her aloud as to somebody in trouble whom one is consoling. Occasionally there came gusts of winds, breezes from the sea rolling in one sweep over the whole plateau of the Caux country, which brought even to these fields a salt freshness. The rushes, close to the ground, whistled; the branches trembled in a swift rustling, while their summits, ceaselessly swaying, kept up a deep murmur. Emma drew her shawl round her shoulders and rose. In the avenue a green light dimmed by the leaves lit up the short moss that crackled softly beneath her feet. The sun was setting; the sky showed red between the branches, and the trunks of the trees, uniform, and planted in a straight line, seemed a brown colonnade standing out against a background of gold. A fear took hold of her; she called Djali, and hurriedly returned to Tostes by the high road, threw herself into an armchair, and for the rest of the evening did not speak. But towards the end of September something extraordinary fell upon her life; she was invited by the Marquis d'Andervilliers to Vaubyessard. Secretary of State under the Restoration, the Marquis, anxious to re-enter political life, set about preparing for his candidature to the Chamber of Deputies long beforehand. In the winter he distributed a great deal of wood, and in the Conseil General always enthusiastically demanded new roads for his arrondissement. During the dog-days he had suffered from an abscess, which Charles had cured as if by miracle by giving a timely little touch with the lancet. The steward sent to Tostes to pay for the operation reported in the evening that he had seen some superb cherries in the doctor's little garden. Now cherry trees did not thrive at Vaubyessard; the Marquis asked Bovary for some slips; made it his business to thank his personally; saw Emma; thought she had a pretty figure, and that she did not bow like a peasant; so that he did not think he was going beyond the bounds of condescension, nor, on the other hand, making a mistake, in inviting the young couple. On Wednesday at three o'clock, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, seated in their dog-cart, set out for Vaubyessard, with a great trunk strapped on behind and a bonnet-box in front of the apron. Besides these Charles held a bandbox between his knees. They arrived at nightfall, just as the lamps in the park were being lit to show the way for the carriages.

part 1, Chapter 7

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/parti-chapter6-9

As their marriage progresses Emma's feeling of detachment from her husband grows greater. She feels that a man should have all the answers to life and be experienced in a wide variety of things but she discerns that Charles is complacent, boring and uninterested in culture. He takes his wife's happiness for granted and she secretly resents this. To compensate she draws pictures, plays the piano and runs the household with meticulous care. Charles' mother disapproves of her new daughter-in-law's extravagances and Charles finds himself frequently caught between the mother he respects and the wife that he loves. Because Charles never expresses any deep emotions Emma concludes that his love is nothing out of the ordinary. She receives an Italian greyhound bitch as a gift from one of Charles' patients and she takes the dog, which she names Djali, on long walks. The sum of her thoughts during these excursions is: "Why did I ever marry. She imagines that if she had waited longer to marry a more suitable man would have come into her life. Late in September Emma and Charles receive and invitation to attend a party at La Vaubyessard, home of the Marquis d'Andervilliers. The marquis had suffered from an abscess that Charles successfully treated and, noticing that Bovary's wife is pretty, the marquis determined that they could safely be invited to a gathering of their betters. So on the day of the party Charles and Emma load their carriage with boxes of clothing and journey to the estate. They arrive at sunset

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/08.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_2_part_3.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 8

part 1, chapter 8

{"name": "part 1, Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/parti-chapter6-9", "summary": "At the marquis' new Italian-styled chateau the marquis leads Emma into the room where the marquise and some other ladies are sitting. The marquise talks to Emma easily and with kindness. The dinner is opulent and the service immaculate. The marquis' senile father-in-law sits at the head of the table. He is rumored to have been one of Marie-Antoinette's lovers. Despite the old man's grotesque appearance and poor manners Emma is thrilled to be in his presence. After dinner the ladies retire to prepare for the ball. Emma laughs at Charles when he informs her of his intention to dance and she dances several quadrilles with other partners. The men occupy themselves at the gaming tables but Charles is unable to make sense of the games. Scattered among them are the true blue-bloods who bear the marks of breeding - fine clothes, fine complexions and world weary countenances. Emma overhears a couple discussing the merits of travel in Italy. As the night progresses Emma is overcome by the glamour of the party but Charles is half asleep against a door. At 3am the band begins a waltz. Although she has never danced a waltz Emma accepts the invitation of a man whom everyone refers to as \"vicomte\". She is awkward on the floor and out of breath she leans her head against his chest. Later in their room Charles falls immediately asleep but Emma remains awake, leaning on the windowsill and pondering all she has experienced at the party. The next morning she and Charles dine with the remaining guests and then depart. On their way home they pass several groups of revelers and Charles finds a dropped cigar case bearing a crest still containing some cigars. At home Emma is enraged to discover that Nastasie does not have dinner ready and fires the old woman on the spot. After dinner Charles tries one of the cigars but the smoke makes him sick. Emma takes the cigar case and hides it in her closet. Though the specific details of the ball fade in Emma's memory the yearning for the glamour of that night does not abate", "analysis": ""}

The chateau, a modern building in Italian style, with two projecting wings and three flights of steps, lay at the foot of an immense green-sward, on which some cows were grazing among groups of large trees set out at regular intervals, while large beds of arbutus, rhododendron, syringas, and guelder roses bulged out their irregular clusters of green along the curve of the gravel path. A river flowed under a bridge; through the mist one could distinguish buildings with thatched roofs scattered over the field bordered by two gently sloping, well timbered hillocks, and in the background amid the trees rose in two parallel lines the coach houses and stables, all that was left of the ruined old chateau. Charles's dog-cart pulled up before the middle flight of steps; servants appeared; the Marquis came forward, and, offering his arm to the doctor's wife, conducted her to the vestibule. It was paved with marble slabs, was very lofty, and the sound of footsteps and that of voices re-echoed through it as in a church. Opposite rose a straight staircase, and on the left a gallery overlooking the garden led to the billiard room, through whose door one could hear the click of the ivory balls. As she crossed it to go to the drawing room, Emma saw standing round the table men with grave faces, their chins resting on high cravats. They all wore orders, and smiled silently as they made their strokes. On the dark wainscoting of the walls large gold frames bore at the bottom names written in black letters. She read: "Jean-Antoine d'Andervilliers d'Yvervonbille, Count de la Vaubyessard and Baron de la Fresnay, killed at the battle of Coutras on the 20th of October, 1587." And on another: "Jean-Antoine-Henry-Guy d'Andervilliers de la Vaubyessard, Admiral of France and Chevalier of the Order of St. Michael, wounded at the battle of the Hougue-Saint-Vaast on the 29th of May, 1692; died at Vaubyessard on the 23rd of January 1693." One could hardly make out those that followed, for the light of the lamps lowered over the green cloth threw a dim shadow round the room. Burnishing the horizontal pictures, it broke up against these in delicate lines where there were cracks in the varnish, and from all these great black squares framed in with gold stood out here and there some lighter portion of the painting--a pale brow, two eyes that looked at you, perukes flowing over and powdering red-coated shoulders, or the buckle of a garter above a well-rounded calf. The Marquis opened the drawing room door; one of the ladies (the Marchioness herself) came to meet Emma. She made her sit down by her on an ottoman, and began talking to her as amicably as if she had known her a long time. She was a woman of about forty, with fine shoulders, a hook nose, a drawling voice, and on this evening she wore over her brown hair a simple guipure fichu that fell in a point at the back. A fair young woman sat in a high-backed chair in a corner; and gentlemen with flowers in their buttonholes were talking to ladies round the fire. At seven dinner was served. The men, who were in the majority, sat down at the first table in the vestibule; the ladies at the second in the dining room with the Marquis and Marchioness. Emma, on entering, felt herself wrapped round by the warm air, a blending of the perfume of flowers and of the fine linen, of the fumes of the viands, and the odour of the truffles. The silver dish covers reflected the lighted wax candles in the candelabra, the cut crystal covered with light steam reflected from one to the other pale rays; bouquets were placed in a row the whole length of the table; and in the large-bordered plates each napkin, arranged after the fashion of a bishop's mitre, held between its two gaping folds a small oval shaped roll. The red claws of lobsters hung over the dishes; rich fruit in open baskets was piled up on moss; there were quails in their plumage; smoke was rising; and in silk stockings, knee-breeches, white cravat, and frilled shirt, the steward, grave as a judge, offering ready carved dishes between the shoulders of the guests, with a touch of the spoon gave you the piece chosen. On the large stove of porcelain inlaid with copper baguettes the statue of a woman, draped to the chin, gazed motionless on the room full of life. Madame Bovary noticed that many ladies had not put their gloves in their glasses. But at the upper end of the table, alone amongst all these women, bent over his full plate, and his napkin tied round his neck like a child, an old man sat eating, letting drops of gravy drip from his mouth. His eyes were bloodshot, and he wore a little queue tied with black ribbon. He was the Marquis's father-in-law, the old Duke de Laverdiere, once on a time favourite of the Count d'Artois, in the days of the Vaudreuil hunting-parties at the Marquis de Conflans', and had been, it was said, the lover of Queen Marie Antoinette, between Monsieur de Coigny and Monsieur de Lauzun. He had lived a life of noisy debauch, full of duels, bets, elopements; he had squandered his fortune and frightened all his family. A servant behind his chair named aloud to him in his ear the dishes that he pointed to stammering, and constantly Emma's eyes turned involuntarily to this old man with hanging lips, as to something extraordinary. He had lived at court and slept in the bed of queens! Iced champagne was poured out. Emma shivered all over as she felt it cold in her mouth. She had never seen pomegranates nor tasted pineapples. The powdered sugar even seemed to her whiter and finer than elsewhere. The ladies afterwards went to their rooms to prepare for the ball. Emma made her toilet with the fastidious care of an actress on her debut. She did her hair according to the directions of the hairdresser, and put on the barege dress spread out upon the bed. Charles's trousers were tight across the belly. "My trouser-straps will be rather awkward for dancing," he said. "Dancing?" repeated Emma. "Yes!" "Why, you must be mad! They would make fun of you; keep your place. Besides, it is more becoming for a doctor," she added. Charles was silent. He walked up and down waiting for Emma to finish dressing. He saw her from behind in the glass between two lights. Her black eyes seemed blacker than ever. Her hair, undulating towards the ears, shone with a blue lustre; a rose in her chignon trembled on its mobile stalk, with artificial dewdrops on the tip of the leaves. She wore a gown of pale saffron trimmed with three bouquets of pompon roses mixed with green. Charles came and kissed her on her shoulder. "Let me alone!" she said; "you are tumbling me." One could hear the flourish of the violin and the notes of a horn. She went downstairs restraining herself from running. Dancing had begun. Guests were arriving. There was some crushing. She sat down on a form near the door. The quadrille over, the floor was occupied by groups of men standing up and talking and servants in livery bearing large trays. Along the line of seated women painted fans were fluttering, bouquets half hid smiling faces, and gold stoppered scent-bottles were turned in partly-closed hands, whose white gloves outlined the nails and tightened on the flesh at the wrists. Lace trimmings, diamond brooches, medallion bracelets trembled on bodices, gleamed on breasts, clinked on bare arms. The hair, well-smoothed over the temples and knotted at the nape, bore crowns, or bunches, or sprays of mytosotis, jasmine, pomegranate blossoms, ears of corn, and corn-flowers. Calmly seated in their places, mothers with forbidding countenances were wearing red turbans. Emma's heart beat rather faster when, her partner holding her by the tips of the fingers, she took her place in a line with the dancers, and waited for the first note to start. But her emotion soon vanished, and, swaying to the rhythm of the orchestra, she glided forward with slight movements of the neck. A smile rose to her lips at certain delicate phrases of the violin, that sometimes played alone while the other instruments were silent; one could hear the clear clink of the louis d'or that were being thrown down upon the card tables in the next room; then all struck again, the cornet-a-piston uttered its sonorous note, feet marked time, skirts swelled and rustled, hands touched and parted; the same eyes falling before you met yours again. A few men (some fifteen or so), of twenty-five to forty, scattered here and there among the dancers or talking at the doorways, distinguished themselves from the crowd by a certain air of breeding, whatever their differences in age, dress, or face. Their clothes, better made, seemed of finer cloth, and their hair, brought forward in curls towards the temples, glossy with more delicate pomades. They had the complexion of wealth--that clear complexion that is heightened by the pallor of porcelain, the shimmer of satin, the veneer of old furniture, and that an ordered regimen of exquisite nurture maintains at its best. Their necks moved easily in their low cravats, their long whiskers fell over their turned-down collars, they wiped their lips upon handkerchiefs with embroidered initials that gave forth a subtle perfume. Those who were beginning to grow old had an air of youth, while there was something mature in the faces of the young. In their unconcerned looks was the calm of passions daily satiated, and through all their gentleness of manner pierced that peculiar brutality, the result of a command of half-easy things, in which force is exercised and vanity amused--the management of thoroughbred horses and the society of loose women. A few steps from Emma a gentleman in a blue coat was talking of Italy with a pale young woman wearing a parure of pearls. They were praising the breadth of the columns of St. Peter's, Tivoly, Vesuvius, Castellamare, and Cassines, the roses of Genoa, the Coliseum by moonlight. With her other ear Emma was listening to a conversation full of words she did not understand. A circle gathered round a very young man who the week before had beaten "Miss Arabella" and "Romolus," and won two thousand louis jumping a ditch in England. One complained that his racehorses were growing fat; another of the printers' errors that had disfigured the name of his horse. The atmosphere of the ball was heavy; the lamps were growing dim. Guests were flocking to the billiard room. A servant got upon a chair and broke the window-panes. At the crash of the glass Madame Bovary turned her head and saw in the garden the faces of peasants pressed against the window looking in at them. Then the memory of the Bertaux came back to her. She saw the farm again, the muddy pond, her father in a blouse under the apple trees, and she saw herself again as formerly, skimming with her finger the cream off the milk-pans in the dairy. But in the refulgence of the present hour her past life, so distinct until then, faded away completely, and she almost doubted having lived it. She was there; beyond the ball was only shadow overspreading all the rest. She was just eating a maraschino ice that she held with her left hand in a silver-gilt cup, her eyes half-closed, and the spoon between her teeth. A lady near her dropped her fan. A gentlemen was passing. "Would you be so good," said the lady, "as to pick up my fan that has fallen behind the sofa?" The gentleman bowed, and as he moved to stretch out his arm, Emma saw the hand of a young woman throw something white, folded in a triangle, into his hat. The gentleman, picking up the fan, offered it to the lady respectfully; she thanked him with an inclination of the head, and began smelling her bouquet. After supper, where were plenty of Spanish and Rhine wines, soups a la bisque and au lait d'amandes*, puddings a la Trafalgar, and all sorts of cold meats with jellies that trembled in the dishes, the carriages one after the other began to drive off. Raising the corners of the muslin curtain, one could see the light of their lanterns glimmering through the darkness. The seats began to empty, some card-players were still left; the musicians were cooling the tips of their fingers on their tongues. Charles was half asleep, his back propped against a door. *With almond milk At three o'clock the cotillion began. Emma did not know how to waltz. Everyone was waltzing, Mademoiselle d'Andervilliers herself and the Marquis; only the guests staying at the castle were still there, about a dozen persons. One of the waltzers, however, who was familiarly called Viscount, and whose low cut waistcoat seemed moulded to his chest, came a second time to ask Madame Bovary to dance, assuring her that he would guide her, and that she would get through it very well. They began slowly, then went more rapidly. They turned; all around them was turning--the lamps, the furniture, the wainscoting, the floor, like a disc on a pivot. On passing near the doors the bottom of Emma's dress caught against his trousers. Their legs commingled; he looked down at her; she raised her eyes to his. A torpor seized her; she stopped. They started again, and with a more rapid movement; the Viscount, dragging her along disappeared with her to the end of the gallery, where panting, she almost fell, and for a moment rested her head upon his breast. And then, still turning, but more slowly, he guided her back to her seat. She leaned back against the wall and covered her eyes with her hands. When she opened them again, in the middle of the drawing room three waltzers were kneeling before a lady sitting on a stool. She chose the Viscount, and the violin struck up once more. Everyone looked at them. They passed and re-passed, she with rigid body, her chin bent down, and he always in the same pose, his figure curved, his elbow rounded, his chin thrown forward. That woman knew how to waltz! They kept up a long time, and tired out all the others. Then they talked a few moments longer, and after the goodnights, or rather good mornings, the guests of the chateau retired to bed. Charles dragged himself up by the balusters. His "knees were going up into his body." He had spent five consecutive hours standing bolt upright at the card tables, watching them play whist, without understanding anything about it, and it was with a deep sigh of relief that he pulled off his boots. Emma threw a shawl over her shoulders, opened the window, and leant out. The night was dark; some drops of rain were falling. She breathed in the damp wind that refreshed her eyelids. The music of the ball was still murmuring in her ears. And she tried to keep herself awake in order to prolong the illusion of this luxurious life that she would soon have to give up. Day began to break. She looked long at the windows of the chateau, trying to guess which were the rooms of all those she had noticed the evening before. She would fain have known their lives, have penetrated, blended with them. But she was shivering with cold. She undressed, and cowered down between the sheets against Charles, who was asleep. There were a great many people to luncheon. The repast lasted ten minutes; no liqueurs were served, which astonished the doctor. Next, Mademoiselle d'Andervilliers collected some pieces of roll in a small basket to take them to the swans on the ornamental waters, and they went to walk in the hot-houses, where strange plants, bristling with hairs, rose in pyramids under hanging vases, whence, as from over-filled nests of serpents, fell long green cords interlacing. The orangery, which was at the other end, led by a covered way to the outhouses of the chateau. The Marquis, to amuse the young woman, took her to see the stables. Above the basket-shaped racks porcelain slabs bore the names of the horses in black letters. Each animal in its stall whisked its tail when anyone went near and said "Tchk! tchk!" The boards of the harness room shone like the flooring of a drawing room. The carriage harness was piled up in the middle against two twisted columns, and the bits, the whips, the spurs, the curbs, were ranged in a line all along the wall. Charles, meanwhile, went to ask a groom to put his horse to. The dog-cart was brought to the foot of the steps, and, all the parcels being crammed in, the Bovarys paid their respects to the Marquis and Marchioness and set out again for Tostes. Emma watched the turning wheels in silence. Charles, on the extreme edge of the seat, held the reins with his two arms wide apart, and the little horse ambled along in the shafts that were too big for him. The loose reins hanging over his crupper were wet with foam, and the box fastened on behind the chaise gave great regular bumps against it. They were on the heights of Thibourville when suddenly some horsemen with cigars between their lips passed laughing. Emma thought she recognized the Viscount, turned back, and caught on the horizon only the movement of the heads rising or falling with the unequal cadence of the trot or gallop. A mile farther on they had to stop to mend with some string the traces that had broken. But Charles, giving a last look to the harness, saw something on the ground between his horse's legs, and he picked up a cigar-case with a green silk border and beblazoned in the centre like the door of a carriage. "There are even two cigars in it," said he; "they'll do for this evening after dinner." "Why, do you smoke?" she asked. "Sometimes, when I get a chance." He put his find in his pocket and whipped up the nag. When they reached home the dinner was not ready. Madame lost her temper. Nastasie answered rudely. "Leave the room!" said Emma. "You are forgetting yourself. I give you warning." For dinner there was onion soup and a piece of veal with sorrel. Charles, seated opposite Emma, rubbed his hands gleefully. "How good it is to be at home again!" Nastasie could be heard crying. He was rather fond of the poor girl. She had formerly, during the wearisome time of his widowhood, kept him company many an evening. She had been his first patient, his oldest acquaintance in the place. "Have you given her warning for good?" he asked at last. "Yes. Who is to prevent me?" she replied. Then they warmed themselves in the kitchen while their room was being made ready. Charles began to smoke. He smoked with lips protruding, spitting every moment, recoiling at every puff. "You'll make yourself ill," she said scornfully. He put down his cigar and ran to swallow a glass of cold water at the pump. Emma seizing hold of the cigar case threw it quickly to the back of the cupboard. The next day was a long one. She walked about her little garden, up and down the same walks, stopping before the beds, before the espalier, before the plaster curate, looking with amazement at all these things of once-on-a-time that she knew so well. How far off the ball seemed already! What was it that thus set so far asunder the morning of the day before yesterday and the evening of to-day? Her journey to Vaubyessard had made a hole in her life, like one of those great crevices that a storm will sometimes make in one night in mountains. Still she was resigned. She devoutly put away in her drawers her beautiful dress, down to the satin shoes whose soles were yellowed with the slippery wax of the dancing floor. Her heart was like these. In its friction against wealth something had come over it that could not be effaced. The memory of this ball, then, became an occupation for Emma. Whenever the Wednesday came round she said to herself as she awoke, "Ah! I was there a week--a fortnight--three weeks ago." And little by little the faces grew confused in her remembrance. She forgot the tune of the quadrilles; she no longer saw the liveries and appointments so distinctly; some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her.

part 1, Chapter 8

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/parti-chapter6-9

At the marquis' new Italian-styled chateau the marquis leads Emma into the room where the marquise and some other ladies are sitting. The marquise talks to Emma easily and with kindness. The dinner is opulent and the service immaculate. The marquis' senile father-in-law sits at the head of the table. He is rumored to have been one of Marie-Antoinette's lovers. Despite the old man's grotesque appearance and poor manners Emma is thrilled to be in his presence. After dinner the ladies retire to prepare for the ball. Emma laughs at Charles when he informs her of his intention to dance and she dances several quadrilles with other partners. The men occupy themselves at the gaming tables but Charles is unable to make sense of the games. Scattered among them are the true blue-bloods who bear the marks of breeding - fine clothes, fine complexions and world weary countenances. Emma overhears a couple discussing the merits of travel in Italy. As the night progresses Emma is overcome by the glamour of the party but Charles is half asleep against a door. At 3am the band begins a waltz. Although she has never danced a waltz Emma accepts the invitation of a man whom everyone refers to as "vicomte". She is awkward on the floor and out of breath she leans her head against his chest. Later in their room Charles falls immediately asleep but Emma remains awake, leaning on the windowsill and pondering all she has experienced at the party. The next morning she and Charles dine with the remaining guests and then depart. On their way home they pass several groups of revelers and Charles finds a dropped cigar case bearing a crest still containing some cigars. At home Emma is enraged to discover that Nastasie does not have dinner ready and fires the old woman on the spot. After dinner Charles tries one of the cigars but the smoke makes him sick. Emma takes the cigar case and hides it in her closet. Though the specific details of the ball fade in Emma's memory the yearning for the glamour of that night does not abate

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/09.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_2_part_4.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 9

part 1, chapter 9

{"name": "part 1, Chapter 9", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/parti-chapter6-9", "summary": "Emma ponders over the ornate cigar case. She imagines that it was made for the vicomte by one of his lovers and that he is now in Paris. She envies anyone going to Paris including the fishmongers who pass beneath her window every morning. She buys a map of Paris and memorizes every line. She subscribes to women's magazines and she fantasizes about the lives of the royal ladies. Everything immediately surrounding her,\" observes the narrator, \"seemed to her the exception rather than the rule. She comes to believe that the only thing lacking in her life are the proper surroundings. She hires a fourteen-year-old country girl named Flicit to be her new maid and instructs the girl in the manner of serving royalty. Charles' practice prospers and though he spends countless days engaged in the dirty, mundane work of medicine he returns home to find a well-ordered house. Emma, however, is secretly aggravated that her husband seems to have no professional ambition save maintaining his current status. She finds that even his slightest mannerisms annoy her. She waits in vain for something exciting to happen. She becomes chronically depressed. Eventually she lets the details of the household lag and Charles' mother is surprised to find that her daughter-in-law has lapsed into lethargy and idleness. Charles, alarmed at his wife's fading vigor, resolves to relocate his practice. He secures a position in the market town of Yonville-l'Abbaye. While packing to leave Emma finds her wedding bouquet and throws it in the fire. When they depart for their new home she is pregnant.", "analysis": "The details of Emma's life in the convent and her attraction to novels mark her as a romantic whose outer life will never seem as full as her inner life. Her marriage to Charles is the first in a series of change for change's sake that she will make in her life. Though she tries, in her way, to make the best of her life in Tostes she is ultimately disappointed. Significantly she names her dog after Esmeralda's pet goat in Victor Hugo's great work of romanticism Notre Dame de Paris. Her outings with the dog are part of her search for a way out of her present predicament but, lacking any solution, she is left only with regret. This feeling is exacerbated by her experience at the ball where she is given a glimpse into the world of the aristocracy. Because she is blind to all but outward appearances she fails to consider that the inner life of the aristocrats might be as full of disappointment as her own. Thus, she is thrilled to be in the presence of the Marquis' disgusting father-in-law simply because he was rumored to have a colorful past. Similarly, she is enthralled by the conversation of the travelers and fails to comprehend that they are bored. Upon her return to Tostes she cannot escape the impression of the ball and, symbolized by the cigar case, she holds to it and imbues it with romantic hues. Her chronic unhappiness eventually affects her health. Charles correctly believes that his wife requires a change. When Emma throws her bouquet on the fire she is symbolically breaking ties with her dedication to her marriage and preparing herself for whatever opportunities to escape that arise"}

Often when Charles was out she took from the cupboard, between the folds of the linen where she had left it, the green silk cigar case. She looked at it, opened it, and even smelt the odour of the lining--a mixture of verbena and tobacco. Whose was it? The Viscount's? Perhaps it was a present from his mistress. It had been embroidered on some rosewood frame, a pretty little thing, hidden from all eyes, that had occupied many hours, and over which had fallen the soft curls of the pensive worker. A breath of love had passed over the stitches on the canvas; each prick of the needle had fixed there a hope or a memory, and all those interwoven threads of silk were but the continuity of the same silent passion. And then one morning the Viscount had taken it away with him. Of what had they spoken when it lay upon the wide-mantelled chimneys between flower-vases and Pompadour clocks? She was at Tostes; he was at Paris now, far away! What was this Paris like? What a vague name! She repeated it in a low voice, for the mere pleasure of it; it rang in her ears like a great cathedral bell; it shone before her eyes, even on the labels of her pomade-pots. At night, when the carriers passed under her windows in their carts singing the "Marjolaine," she awoke, and listened to the noise of the iron-bound wheels, which, as they gained the country road, was soon deadened by the soil. "They will be there to-morrow!" she said to herself. And she followed them in thought up and down the hills, traversing villages, gliding along the highroads by the light of the stars. At the end of some indefinite distance there was always a confused spot, into which her dream died. She bought a plan of Paris, and with the tip of her finger on the map she walked about the capital. She went up the boulevards, stopping at every turning, between the lines of the streets, in front of the white squares that represented the houses. At last she would close the lids of her weary eyes, and see in the darkness the gas jets flaring in the wind and the steps of carriages lowered with much noise before the peristyles of theatres. She took in "La Corbeille," a lady's journal, and the "Sylphe des Salons." She devoured, without skipping a word, all the accounts of first nights, races, and soirees, took interest in the debut of a singer, in the opening of a new shop. She knew the latest fashions, the addresses of the best tailors, the days of the Bois and the Opera. In Eugene Sue she studied descriptions of furniture; she read Balzac and George Sand, seeking in them imaginary satisfaction for her own desires. Even at table she had her book by her, and turned over the pages while Charles ate and talked to her. The memory of the Viscount always returned as she read. Between him and the imaginary personages she made comparisons. But the circle of which he was the centre gradually widened round him, and the aureole that he bore, fading from his form, broadened out beyond, lighting up her other dreams. Paris, more vague than the ocean, glimmered before Emma's eyes in an atmosphere of vermilion. The many lives that stirred amid this tumult were, however, divided into parts, classed as distinct pictures. Emma perceived only two or three that hid from her all the rest, and in themselves represented all humanity. The world of ambassadors moved over polished floors in drawing rooms lined with mirrors, round oval tables covered with velvet and gold-fringed cloths. There were dresses with trains, deep mysteries, anguish hidden beneath smiles. Then came the society of the duchesses; all were pale; all got up at four o'clock; the women, poor angels, wore English point on their petticoats; and the men, unappreciated geniuses under a frivolous outward seeming, rode horses to death at pleasure parties, spent the summer season at Baden, and towards the forties married heiresses. In the private rooms of restaurants, where one sups after midnight by the light of wax candles, laughed the motley crowd of men of letters and actresses. They were prodigal as kings, full of ideal, ambitious, fantastic frenzy. This was an existence outside that of all others, between heaven and earth, in the midst of storms, having something of the sublime. For the rest of the world it was lost, with no particular place and as if non-existent. The nearer things were, moreover, the more her thoughts turned away from them. All her immediate surroundings, the wearisome country, the middle-class imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to her exceptional, a peculiar chance that had caught hold of her, while beyond stretched, as far as eye could see, an immense land of joys and passions. She confused in her desire the sensualities of luxury with the delights of the heart, elegance of manners with delicacy of sentiment. Did not love, like Indian plants, need a special soil, a particular temperature? Signs by moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over yielded hands, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness could not be separated from the balconies of great castles full of indolence, from boudoirs with silken curtains and thick carpets, well-filled flower-stands, a bed on a raised dias, nor from the flashing of precious stones and the shoulder-knots of liveries. The lad from the posting house who came to groom the mare every morning passed through the passage with his heavy wooden shoes; there were holes in his blouse; his feet were bare in list slippers. And this was the groom in knee-britches with whom she had to be content! His work done, he did not come back again all day, for Charles on his return put up his horse himself, unsaddled him and put on the halter, while the servant-girl brought a bundle of straw and threw it as best she could into the manger. To replace Nastasie (who left Tostes shedding torrents of tears) Emma took into her service a young girl of fourteen, an orphan with a sweet face. She forbade her wearing cotton caps, taught her to address her in the third person, to bring a glass of water on a plate, to knock before coming into a room, to iron, starch, and to dress her--wanted to make a lady's-maid of her. The new servant obeyed without a murmur, so as not to be sent away; and as madame usually left the key in the sideboard, Felicite every evening took a small supply of sugar that she ate alone in her bed after she had said her prayers. Sometimes in the afternoon she went to chat with the postilions. Madame was in her room upstairs. She wore an open dressing gown that showed between the shawl facings of her bodice a pleated chamisette with three gold buttons. Her belt was a corded girdle with great tassels, and her small garnet coloured slippers had a large knot of ribbon that fell over her instep. She had bought herself a blotting book, writing case, pen-holder, and envelopes, although she had no one to write to; she dusted her what-not, looked at herself in the glass, picked up a book, and then, dreaming between the lines, let it drop on her knees. She longed to travel or to go back to her convent. She wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris. Charles in snow and rain trotted across country. He ate omelettes on farmhouse tables, poked his arm into damp beds, received the tepid spurt of blood-lettings in his face, listened to death-rattles, examined basins, turned over a good deal of dirty linen; but every evening he found a blazing fire, his dinner ready, easy-chairs, and a well-dressed woman, charming with an odour of freshness, though no one could say whence the perfume came, or if it were not her skin that made odorous her chemise. She charmed him by numerous attentions; now it was some new way of arranging paper sconces for the candles, a flounce that she altered on her gown, or an extraordinary name for some very simple dish that the servant had spoilt, but that Charles swallowed with pleasure to the last mouthful. At Rouen she saw some ladies who wore a bunch of charms on the watch-chains; she bought some charms. She wanted for her mantelpiece two large blue glass vases, and some time after an ivory necessaire with a silver-gilt thimble. The less Charles understood these refinements the more they seduced him. They added something to the pleasure of the senses and to the comfort of his fireside. It was like a golden dust sanding all along the narrow path of his life. He was well, looked well; his reputation was firmly established. The country-folk loved him because he was not proud. He petted the children, never went to the public house, and, moreover, his morals inspired confidence. He was specially successful with catarrhs and chest complaints. Being much afraid of killing his patients, Charles, in fact only prescribed sedatives, from time to time and emetic, a footbath, or leeches. It was not that he was afraid of surgery; he bled people copiously like horses, and for the taking out of teeth he had the "devil's own wrist." Finally, to keep up with the times, he took in "La Ruche Medicale," a new journal whose prospectus had been sent him. He read it a little after dinner, but in about five minutes the warmth of the room added to the effect of his dinner sent him to sleep; and he sat there, his chin on his two hands and his hair spreading like a mane to the foot of the lamp. Emma looked at him and shrugged her shoulders. Why, at least, was not her husband one of those men of taciturn passions who work at their books all night, and at last, when about sixty, the age of rheumatism sets in, wear a string of orders on their ill-fitting black coat? She could have wished this name of Bovary, which was hers, had been illustrious, to see it displayed at the booksellers', repeated in the newspapers, known to all France. But Charles had no ambition. An Yvetot doctor whom he had lately met in consultation had somewhat humiliated him at the very bedside of the patient, before the assembled relatives. When, in the evening, Charles told her this anecdote, Emma inveighed loudly against his colleague. Charles was much touched. He kissed her forehead with a tear in his eyes. But she was angered with shame; she felt a wild desire to strike him; she went to open the window in the passage and breathed in the fresh air to calm herself. "What a man! What a man!" she said in a low voice, biting her lips. Besides, she was becoming more irritated with him. As he grew older his manner grew heavier; at dessert he cut the corks of the empty bottles; after eating he cleaned his teeth with his tongue; in taking soup he made a gurgling noise with every spoonful; and, as he was getting fatter, the puffed-out cheeks seemed to push the eyes, always small, up to the temples. Sometimes Emma tucked the red borders of his under-vest unto his waistcoat, rearranged his cravat, and threw away the dirty gloves he was going to put on; and this was not, as he fancied, for himself; it was for herself, by a diffusion of egotism, of nervous irritation. Sometimes, too, she told him of what she had read, such as a passage in a novel, of a new play, or an anecdote of the "upper ten" that she had seen in a feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was something, an ever-open ear, and ever-ready approbation. She confided many a thing to her greyhound. She would have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to the pendulum of the clock. At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow. Spring came round. With the first warm weather, when the pear trees began to blossom, she suffered from dyspnoea. From the beginning of July she counted how many weeks there were to October, thinking that perhaps the Marquis d'Andervilliers would give another ball at Vaubyessard. But all September passed without letters or visits. After the ennui of this disappointment her heart once more remained empty, and then the same series of days recommenced. So now they would thus follow one another, always the same, immovable, and bringing nothing. Other lives, however flat, had at least the chance of some event. One adventure sometimes brought with it infinite consequences and the scene changed. But nothing happened to her; God had willed it so! The future was a dark corridor, with its door at the end shut fast. She gave up music. What was the good of playing? Who would hear her? Since she could never, in a velvet gown with short sleeves, striking with her light fingers the ivory keys of an Erard at a concert, feel the murmur of ecstasy envelop her like a breeze, it was not worth while boring herself with practicing. Her drawing cardboard and her embroidery she left in the cupboard. What was the good? What was the good? Sewing irritated her. "I have read everything," she said to herself. And she sat there making the tongs red-hot, or looked at the rain falling. How sad she was on Sundays when vespers sounded! She listened with dull attention to each stroke of the cracked bell. A cat slowly walking over some roof put up his back in the pale rays of the sun. The wind on the highroad blew up clouds of dust. Afar off a dog sometimes howled; and the bell, keeping time, continued its monotonous ringing that died away over the fields. But the people came out from church. The women in waxed clogs, the peasants in new blouses, the little bare-headed children skipping along in front of them, all were going home. And till nightfall, five or six men, always the same, stayed playing at corks in front of the large door of the inn. The winter was severe. The windows every morning were covered with rime, and the light shining through them, dim as through ground-glass, sometimes did not change the whole day long. At four o'clock the lamp had to be lighted. On fine days she went down into the garden. The dew had left on the cabbages a silver lace with long transparent threads spreading from one to the other. No birds were to be heard; everything seemed asleep, the espalier covered with straw, and the vine, like a great sick serpent under the coping of the wall, along which, on drawing near, one saw the many-footed woodlice crawling. Under the spruce by the hedgerow, the curie in the three-cornered hat reading his breviary had lost his right foot, and the very plaster, scaling off with the frost, had left white scabs on his face. Then she went up again, shut her door, put on coals, and fainting with the heat of the hearth, felt her boredom weigh more heavily than ever. She would have liked to go down and talk to the servant, but a sense of shame restrained her. Every day at the same time the schoolmaster in a black skullcap opened the shutters of his house, and the rural policeman, wearing his sabre over his blouse, passed by. Night and morning the post-horses, three by three, crossed the street to water at the pond. From time to time the bell of a public house door rang, and when it was windy one could hear the little brass basins that served as signs for the hairdresser's shop creaking on their two rods. This shop had as decoration an old engraving of a fashion-plate stuck against a windowpane and the wax bust of a woman with yellow hair. He, too, the hairdresser, lamented his wasted calling, his hopeless future, and dreaming of some shop in a big town--at Rouen, for example, overlooking the harbour, near the theatre--he walked up and down all day from the mairie to the church, sombre and waiting for customers. When Madame Bovary looked up, she always saw him there, like a sentinel on duty, with his skullcap over his ears and his vest of lasting. Sometimes in the afternoon outside the window of her room, the head of a man appeared, a swarthy head with black whiskers, smiling slowly, with a broad, gentle smile that showed his white teeth. A waltz immediately began and on the organ, in a little drawing room, dancers the size of a finger, women in pink turbans, Tyrolians in jackets, monkeys in frock coats, gentlemen in knee-breeches, turned and turned between the sofas, the consoles, multiplied in the bits of looking glass held together at their corners by a piece of gold paper. The man turned his handle, looking to the right and left, and up at the windows. Now and again, while he shot out a long squirt of brown saliva against the milestone, with his knee raised his instrument, whose hard straps tired his shoulder; and now, doleful and drawling, or gay and hurried, the music escaped from the box, droning through a curtain of pink taffeta under a brass claw in arabesque. They were airs played in other places at the theatres, sung in drawing rooms, danced to at night under lighted lustres, echoes of the world that reached even to Emma. Endless sarabands ran through her head, and, like an Indian dancing girl on the flowers of a carpet, her thoughts leapt with the notes, swung from dream to dream, from sadness to sadness. When the man had caught some coppers in his cap, he drew down an old cover of blue cloth, hitched his organ on to his back, and went off with a heavy tread. She watched him going. But it was above all the meal-times that were unbearable to her, in this small room on the ground floor, with its smoking stove, its creaking door, the walls that sweated, the damp flags; all the bitterness in life seemed served up on her plate, and with smoke of the boiled beef there rose from her secret soul whiffs of sickliness. Charles was a slow eater; she played with a few nuts, or, leaning on her elbow, amused herself with drawing lines along the oilcloth table cover with the point of her knife. She now let everything in her household take care of itself, and Madame Bovary senior, when she came to spend part of Lent at Tostes, was much surprised at the change. She who was formerly so careful, so dainty, now passed whole days without dressing, wore grey cotton stockings, and burnt tallow candles. She kept saying they must be economical since they were not rich, adding that she was very contented, very happy, that Tostes pleased her very much, with other speeches that closed the mouth of her mother-in-law. Besides, Emma no longer seemed inclined to follow her advice; once even, Madame Bovary having thought fit to maintain that mistresses ought to keep an eye on the religion of their servants, she had answered with so angry a look and so cold a smile that the good woman did not interfere again. Emma was growing difficult, capricious. She ordered dishes for herself, then she did not touch them; one day drank only pure milk, the next cups of tea by the dozen. Often she persisted in not going out, then, stifling, threw open the windows and put on light dresses. After she had well scolded her servant she gave her presents or sent her out to see neighbours, just as she sometimes threw beggars all the silver in her purse, although she was by no means tender-hearted or easily accessible to the feelings of others, like most country-bred people, who always retain in their souls something of the horny hardness of the paternal hands. Towards the end of February old Rouault, in memory of his cure, himself brought his son-in-law a superb turkey, and stayed three days at Tostes. Charles being with his patients, Emma kept him company. He smoked in the room, spat on the firedogs, talked farming, calves, cows, poultry, and municipal council, so that when he left she closed the door on him with a feeling of satisfaction that surprised even herself. Moreover she no longer concealed her contempt for anything or anybody, and at times she set herself to express singular opinions, finding fault with that which others approved, and approving things perverse and immoral, all of which made her husband open his eyes widely. Would this misery last for ever? Would she never issue from it? Yet she was as good as all the women who were living happily. She had seen duchesses at Vaubyessard with clumsier waists and commoner ways, and she execrated the injustice of God. She leant her head against the walls to weep; she envied lives of stir; longed for masked balls, for violent pleasures, with all the wildness that she did not know, but that these must surely yield. She grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the heart. Charles prescribed valerian and camphor baths. Everything that was tried only seemed to irritate her the more. On certain days she chatted with feverish rapidity, and this over-excitement was suddenly followed by a state of torpor, in which she remained without speaking, without moving. What then revived her was pouring a bottle of eau-de-cologne over her arms. As she was constantly complaining about Tostes, Charles fancied that her illness was no doubt due to some local cause, and fixing on this idea, began to think seriously of setting up elsewhere. From that moment she drank vinegar, contracted a sharp little cough, and completely lost her appetite. It cost Charles much to give up Tostes after living there four years and "when he was beginning to get on there." Yet if it must be! He took her to Rouen to see his old master. It was a nervous complaint: change of air was needed. After looking about him on this side and on that, Charles learnt that in the Neufchatel arrondissement there was a considerable market town called Yonville-l'Abbaye, whose doctor, a Polish refugee, had decamped a week before. Then he wrote to the chemist of the place to ask the number of the population, the distance from the nearest doctor, what his predecessor had made a year, and so forth; and the answer being satisfactory, he made up his mind to move towards the spring, if Emma's health did not improve. One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer, something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding bouquet. The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver bordered satin ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was, like a red bush in the cinders, slowly devoured. She watched it burn. The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold lace melted; and the shriveled paper corollas, fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at last flew up the chimney. When they left Tostes at the month of March, Madame Bovary was pregnant. Part II

part 1, Chapter 9

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/parti-chapter6-9

Emma ponders over the ornate cigar case. She imagines that it was made for the vicomte by one of his lovers and that he is now in Paris. She envies anyone going to Paris including the fishmongers who pass beneath her window every morning. She buys a map of Paris and memorizes every line. She subscribes to women's magazines and she fantasizes about the lives of the royal ladies. Everything immediately surrounding her," observes the narrator, "seemed to her the exception rather than the rule. She comes to believe that the only thing lacking in her life are the proper surroundings. She hires a fourteen-year-old country girl named Flicit to be her new maid and instructs the girl in the manner of serving royalty. Charles' practice prospers and though he spends countless days engaged in the dirty, mundane work of medicine he returns home to find a well-ordered house. Emma, however, is secretly aggravated that her husband seems to have no professional ambition save maintaining his current status. She finds that even his slightest mannerisms annoy her. She waits in vain for something exciting to happen. She becomes chronically depressed. Eventually she lets the details of the household lag and Charles' mother is surprised to find that her daughter-in-law has lapsed into lethargy and idleness. Charles, alarmed at his wife's fading vigor, resolves to relocate his practice. He secures a position in the market town of Yonville-l'Abbaye. While packing to leave Emma finds her wedding bouquet and throws it in the fire. When they depart for their new home she is pregnant.

The details of Emma's life in the convent and her attraction to novels mark her as a romantic whose outer life will never seem as full as her inner life. Her marriage to Charles is the first in a series of change for change's sake that she will make in her life. Though she tries, in her way, to make the best of her life in Tostes she is ultimately disappointed. Significantly she names her dog after Esmeralda's pet goat in Victor Hugo's great work of romanticism Notre Dame de Paris. Her outings with the dog are part of her search for a way out of her present predicament but, lacking any solution, she is left only with regret. This feeling is exacerbated by her experience at the ball where she is given a glimpse into the world of the aristocracy. Because she is blind to all but outward appearances she fails to consider that the inner life of the aristocrats might be as full of disappointment as her own. Thus, she is thrilled to be in the presence of the Marquis' disgusting father-in-law simply because he was rumored to have a colorful past. Similarly, she is enthralled by the conversation of the travelers and fails to comprehend that they are bored. Upon her return to Tostes she cannot escape the impression of the ball and, symbolized by the cigar case, she holds to it and imbues it with romantic hues. Her chronic unhappiness eventually affects her health. Charles correctly believes that his wife requires a change. When Emma throws her bouquet on the fire she is symbolically breaking ties with her dedication to her marriage and preparing herself for whatever opportunities to escape that arise

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/10.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_3_part_1.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 1

part 2, chapter 1

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 1", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter1-2", "summary": "The chapter opens with a description of the agricultural market town of Yonville-L'Abbaye and the surrounding countryside. The narrator characterizes the area as a \"mongrel region\" composed of equal parts Normandy, Picardy and the Ile-de-France. It is a relatively impoverished area with poor soil, ignorant natives and limited access to the greater world. A covered market occupies half the square which is bounded by the town hall, the Lion d'Or Hotel and Monsieur Homais' pharmacy. The evening that the Bovary's are expected to arrive the mistress of the inn, Madame Lefranois, is busy preparing for market day as well as providing for her regular diners: the tax collecter Monsieur Binet who always arrives on time and has particular tastes and Monsieur Lon Dupuis the young clerk who arrives at any time and doesn't care what he eats. The pharmacist Monsieur Homais, wearing a velvet skullcap with a gold tassel, converses with the busy woman while they wait for the Bovary's to arrive. The brief appearance of the cur causes Homais to express his disgust with organized religion and reaffirm his pragmatic agnosticism to the otherwise uninterested inn keeper. Eventually the Hirondelle, the town's rattling three horse coach, arrives with its driver Hivert who begins distributing packages and news to the town folk. He apologizes for the coach's tardiness but explains that Madame Bovary's greyhound ran away during the journey and could not be found. Emma blames the dog's disappearance on her husband", "analysis": ""}

Yonville-l'Abbaye (so called from an old Capuchin abbey of which not even the ruins remain) is a market-town twenty-four miles from Rouen, between the Abbeville and Beauvais roads, at the foot of a valley watered by the Rieule, a little river that runs into the Andelle after turning three water-mills near its mouth, where there are a few trout that the lads amuse themselves by fishing for on Sundays. We leave the highroad at La Boissiere and keep straight on to the top of the Leux hill, whence the valley is seen. The river that runs through it makes of it, as it were, two regions with distinct physiognomies--all on the left is pasture land, all of the right arable. The meadow stretches under a bulge of low hills to join at the back with the pasture land of the Bray country, while on the eastern side, the plain, gently rising, broadens out, showing as far as eye can follow its blond cornfields. The water, flowing by the grass, divides with a white line the colour of the roads and of the plains, and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver. Before us, on the verge of the horizon, lie the oaks of the forest of Argueil, with the steeps of the Saint-Jean hills scarred from top to bottom with red irregular lines; they are rain tracks, and these brick-tones standing out in narrow streaks against the grey colour of the mountain are due to the quantity of iron springs that flow beyond in the neighboring country. Here we are on the confines of Normandy, Picardy, and the Ile-de-France, a bastard land whose language is without accent and its landscape is without character. It is there that they make the worst Neufchatel cheeses of all the arrondissement; and, on the other hand, farming is costly because so much manure is needed to enrich this friable soil full of sand and flints. Up to 1835 there was no practicable road for getting to Yonville, but about this time a cross-road was made which joins that of Abbeville to that of Amiens, and is occasionally used by the Rouen wagoners on their way to Flanders. Yonville-l'Abbaye has remained stationary in spite of its "new outlet." Instead of improving the soil, they persist in keeping up the pasture lands, however depreciated they may be in value, and the lazy borough, growing away from the plain, has naturally spread riverwards. It is seem from afar sprawling along the banks like a cowherd taking a siesta by the water-side. At the foot of the hill beyond the bridge begins a roadway, planted with young aspens, that leads in a straight line to the first houses in the place. These, fenced in by hedges, are in the middle of courtyards full of straggling buildings, wine-presses, cart-sheds and distilleries scattered under thick trees, with ladders, poles, or scythes hung on to the branches. The thatched roofs, like fur caps drawn over eyes, reach down over about a third of the low windows, whose coarse convex glasses have knots in the middle like the bottoms of bottles. Against the plaster wall diagonally crossed by black joists, a meagre pear-tree sometimes leans and the ground-floors have at their door a small swing-gate to keep out the chicks that come pilfering crumbs of bread steeped in cider on the threshold. But the courtyards grow narrower, the houses closer together, and the fences disappear; a bundle of ferns swings under a window from the end of a broomstick; there is a blacksmith's forge and then a wheelwright's, with two or three new carts outside that partly block the way. Then across an open space appears a white house beyond a grass mound ornamented by a Cupid, his finger on his lips; two brass vases are at each end of a flight of steps; scutcheons* blaze upon the door. It is the notary's house, and the finest in the place. *The panonceaux that have to be hung over the doors of notaries. The Church is on the other side of the street, twenty paces farther down, at the entrance of the square. The little cemetery that surrounds it, closed in by a wall breast high, is so full of graves that the old stones, level with the ground, form a continuous pavement, on which the grass of itself has marked out regular green squares. The church was rebuilt during the last years of the reign of Charles X. The wooden roof is beginning to rot from the top, and here and there has black hollows in its blue colour. Over the door, where the organ should be, is a loft for the men, with a spiral staircase that reverberates under their wooden shoes. The daylight coming through the plain glass windows falls obliquely upon the pews ranged along the walls, which are adorned here and there with a straw mat bearing beneath it the words in large letters, "Mr. So-and-so's pew." Farther on, at a spot where the building narrows, the confessional forms a pendant to a statuette of the Virgin, clothed in a satin robe, coifed with a tulle veil sprinkled with silver stars, and with red cheeks, like an idol of the Sandwich Islands; and, finally, a copy of the "Holy Family, presented by the Minister of the Interior," overlooking the high altar, between four candlesticks, closes in the perspective. The choir stalls, of deal wood, have been left unpainted. The market, that is to say, a tiled roof supported by some twenty posts, occupies of itself about half the public square of Yonville. The town hall, constructed "from the designs of a Paris architect," is a sort of Greek temple that forms the corner next to the chemist's shop. On the ground-floor are three Ionic columns and on the first floor a semicircular gallery, while the dome that crowns it is occupied by a Gallic cock, resting one foot upon the "Charte" and holding in the other the scales of Justice. But that which most attracts the eye is opposite the Lion d'Or inn, the chemist's shop of Monsieur Homais. In the evening especially its argand lamp is lit up and the red and green jars that embellish his shop-front throw far across the street their two streams of colour; then across them as if in Bengal lights is seen the shadow of the chemist leaning over his desk. His house from top to bottom is placarded with inscriptions written in large hand, round hand, printed hand: "Vichy, Seltzer, Barege waters, blood purifiers, Raspail patent medicine, Arabian racahout, Darcet lozenges, Regnault paste, trusses, baths, hygienic chocolate," etc. And the signboard, which takes up all the breadth of the shop, bears in gold letters, "Homais, Chemist." Then at the back of the shop, behind the great scales fixed to the counter, the word "Laboratory" appears on a scroll above a glass door, which about half-way up once more repeats "Homais" in gold letters on a black ground. Beyond this there is nothing to see at Yonville. The street (the only one) a gunshot in length and flanked by a few shops on either side stops short at the turn of the highroad. If it is left on the right hand and the foot of the Saint-Jean hills followed the cemetery is soon reached. At the time of the cholera, in order to enlarge this, a piece of wall was pulled down, and three acres of land by its side purchased; but all the new portion is almost tenantless; the tombs, as heretofore, continue to crowd together towards the gate. The keeper, who is at once gravedigger and church beadle (thus making a double profit out of the parish corpses), has taken advantage of the unused plot of ground to plant potatoes there. From year to year, however, his small field grows smaller, and when there is an epidemic, he does not know whether to rejoice at the deaths or regret the burials. "You live on the dead, Lestiboudois!" the curie at last said to him one day. This grim remark made him reflect; it checked him for some time; but to this day he carries on the cultivation of his little tubers, and even maintains stoutly that they grow naturally. Since the events about to be narrated, nothing in fact has changed at Yonville. The tin tricolour flag still swings at the top of the church-steeple; the two chintz streamers still flutter in the wind from the linen-draper's; the chemist's fetuses, like lumps of white amadou, rot more and more in their turbid alcohol, and above the big door of the inn the old golden lion, faded by rain, still shows passers-by its poodle mane. On the evening when the Bovarys were to arrive at Yonville, Widow Lefrancois, the landlady of this inn, was so very busy that she sweated great drops as she moved her saucepans. To-morrow was market-day. The meat had to be cut beforehand, the fowls drawn, the soup and coffee made. Moreover, she had the boarders' meal to see to, and that of the doctor, his wife, and their servant; the billiard-room was echoing with bursts of laughter; three millers in a small parlour were calling for brandy; the wood was blazing, the brazen pan was hissing, and on the long kitchen table, amid the quarters of raw mutton, rose piles of plates that rattled with the shaking of the block on which spinach was being chopped. From the poultry-yard was heard the screaming of the fowls whom the servant was chasing in order to wring their necks. A man slightly marked with small-pox, in green leather slippers, and wearing a velvet cap with a gold tassel, was warming his back at the chimney. His face expressed nothing but self-satisfaction, and he appeared to take life as calmly as the goldfinch suspended over his head in its wicker cage: this was the chemist. "Artemise!" shouted the landlady, "chop some wood, fill the water bottles, bring some brandy, look sharp! If only I knew what dessert to offer the guests you are expecting! Good heavens! Those furniture-movers are beginning their racket in the billiard-room again; and their van has been left before the front door! The 'Hirondelle' might run into it when it draws up. Call Polyte and tell him to put it up. Only think, Monsieur Homais, that since morning they have had about fifteen games, and drunk eight jars of cider! Why, they'll tear my cloth for me," she went on, looking at them from a distance, her strainer in her hand. "That wouldn't be much of a loss," replied Monsieur Homais. "You would buy another." "Another billiard-table!" exclaimed the widow. "Since that one is coming to pieces, Madame Lefrancois. I tell you again you are doing yourself harm, much harm! And besides, players now want narrow pockets and heavy cues. Hazards aren't played now; everything is changed! One must keep pace with the times! Just look at Tellier!" The hostess reddened with vexation. The chemist went on-- "You may say what you like; his table is better than yours; and if one were to think, for example, of getting up a patriotic pool for Poland or the sufferers from the Lyons floods--" "It isn't beggars like him that'll frighten us," interrupted the landlady, shrugging her fat shoulders. "Come, come, Monsieur Homais; as long as the 'Lion d'Or' exists people will come to it. We've feathered our nest; while one of these days you'll find the 'Cafe Francais' closed with a big placard on the shutters. Change my billiard-table!" she went on, speaking to herself, "the table that comes in so handy for folding the washing, and on which, in the hunting season, I have slept six visitors! But that dawdler, Hivert, doesn't come!" "Are you waiting for him for your gentlemen's dinner?" "Wait for him! And what about Monsieur Binet? As the clock strikes six you'll see him come in, for he hasn't his equal under the sun for punctuality. He must always have his seat in the small parlour. He'd rather die than dine anywhere else. And so squeamish as he is, and so particular about the cider! Not like Monsieur Leon; he sometimes comes at seven, or even half-past, and he doesn't so much as look at what he eats. Such a nice young man! Never speaks a rough word!" "Well, you see, there's a great difference between an educated man and an old carabineer who is now a tax-collector." Six o'clock struck. Binet came in. He wore a blue frock-coat falling in a straight line round his thin body, and his leather cap, with its lappets knotted over the top of his head with string, showed under the turned-up peak a bald forehead, flattened by the constant wearing of a helmet. He wore a black cloth waistcoat, a hair collar, grey trousers, and, all the year round, well-blacked boots, that had two parallel swellings due to the sticking out of his big-toes. Not a hair stood out from the regular line of fair whiskers, which, encircling his jaws, framed, after the fashion of a garden border, his long, wan face, whose eyes were small and the nose hooked. Clever at all games of cards, a good hunter, and writing a fine hand, he had at home a lathe, and amused himself by turning napkin rings, with which he filled up his house, with the jealousy of an artist and the egotism of a bourgeois. He went to the small parlour, but the three millers had to be got out first, and during the whole time necessary for laying the cloth, Binet remained silent in his place near the stove. Then he shut the door and took off his cap in his usual way. "It isn't with saying civil things that he'll wear out his tongue," said the chemist, as soon as he was along with the landlady. "He never talks more," she replied. "Last week two travelers in the cloth line were here--such clever chaps who told such jokes in the evening, that I fairly cried with laughing; and he stood there like a dab fish and never said a word." "Yes," observed the chemist; "no imagination, no sallies, nothing that makes the society-man." "Yet they say he has parts," objected the landlady. "Parts!" replied Monsieur Homais; "he, parts! In his own line it is possible," he added in a calmer tone. And he went on-- "Ah! That a merchant, who has large connections, a jurisconsult, a doctor, a chemist, should be thus absent-minded, that they should become whimsical or even peevish, I can understand; such cases are cited in history. But at least it is because they are thinking of something. Myself, for example, how often has it happened to me to look on the bureau for my pen to write a label, and to find, after all, that I had put it behind my ear!" Madame Lefrancois just then went to the door to see if the "Hirondelle" were not coming. She started. A man dressed in black suddenly came into the kitchen. By the last gleam of the twilight one could see that his face was rubicund and his form athletic. "What can I do for you, Monsieur le Curie?" asked the landlady, as she reached down from the chimney one of the copper candlesticks placed with their candles in a row. "Will you take something? A thimbleful of Cassis*? A glass of wine?" *Black currant liqueur. The priest declined very politely. He had come for his umbrella, that he had forgotten the other day at the Ernemont convent, and after asking Madame Lefrancois to have it sent to him at the presbytery in the evening, he left for the church, from which the Angelus was ringing. When the chemist no longer heard the noise of his boots along the square, he thought the priest's behaviour just now very unbecoming. This refusal to take any refreshment seemed to him the most odious hypocrisy; all priests tippled on the sly, and were trying to bring back the days of the tithe. The landlady took up the defence of her curie. "Besides, he could double up four men like you over his knee. Last year he helped our people to bring in the straw; he carried as many as six trusses at once, he is so strong." "Bravo!" said the chemist. "Now just send your daughters to confess to fellows which such a temperament! I, if I were the Government, I'd have the priests bled once a month. Yes, Madame Lefrancois, every month--a good phlebotomy, in the interests of the police and morals." "Be quiet, Monsieur Homais. You are an infidel; you've no religion." The chemist answered: "I have a religion, my religion, and I even have more than all these others with their mummeries and their juggling. I adore God, on the contrary. I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfil our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don't need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one can know Him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the eternal vault like the ancients. My God! Mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I am for the profession of faith of the 'Savoyard Vicar,' and the immortal principles of '89! And I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them." He ceased, looking round for an audience, for in his bubbling over the chemist had for a moment fancied himself in the midst of the town council. But the landlady no longer heeded him; she was listening to a distant rolling. One could distinguish the noise of a carriage mingled with the clattering of loose horseshoes that beat against the ground, and at last the "Hirondelle" stopped at the door. It was a yellow box on two large wheels, that, reaching to the tilt, prevented travelers from seeing the road and dirtied their shoulders. The small panes of the narrow windows rattled in their sashes when the coach was closed, and retained here and there patches of mud amid the old layers of dust, that not even storms of rain had altogether washed away. It was drawn by three horses, the first a leader, and when it came down-hill its bottom jolted against the ground. Some of the inhabitants of Yonville came out into the square; they all spoke at once, asking for news, for explanations, for hampers. Hivert did not know whom to answer. It was he who did the errands of the place in town. He went to the shops and brought back rolls of leather for the shoemaker, old iron for the farrier, a barrel of herrings for his mistress, caps from the milliner's, locks from the hair-dresser's and all along the road on his return journey he distributed his parcels, which he threw, standing upright on his seat and shouting at the top of his voice, over the enclosures of the yards. An accident had delayed him. Madame Bovary's greyhound had run across the field. They had whistled for him a quarter of an hour; Hivert had even gone back a mile and a half expecting every moment to catch sight of her; but it had been necessary to go on. Emma had wept, grown angry; she had accused Charles of this misfortune. Monsieur Lheureux, a draper, who happened to be in the coach with her, had tried to console her by a number of examples of lost dogs recognizing their masters at the end of long years. One, he said had been told of, who had come back to Paris from Constantinople. Another had gone one hundred and fifty miles in a straight line, and swum four rivers; and his own father had possessed a poodle, which, after twelve years of absence, had all of a sudden jumped on his back in the street as he was going to dine in town.

part 2, Chapter 1

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter1-2

The chapter opens with a description of the agricultural market town of Yonville-L'Abbaye and the surrounding countryside. The narrator characterizes the area as a "mongrel region" composed of equal parts Normandy, Picardy and the Ile-de-France. It is a relatively impoverished area with poor soil, ignorant natives and limited access to the greater world. A covered market occupies half the square which is bounded by the town hall, the Lion d'Or Hotel and Monsieur Homais' pharmacy. The evening that the Bovary's are expected to arrive the mistress of the inn, Madame Lefranois, is busy preparing for market day as well as providing for her regular diners: the tax collecter Monsieur Binet who always arrives on time and has particular tastes and Monsieur Lon Dupuis the young clerk who arrives at any time and doesn't care what he eats. The pharmacist Monsieur Homais, wearing a velvet skullcap with a gold tassel, converses with the busy woman while they wait for the Bovary's to arrive. The brief appearance of the cur causes Homais to express his disgust with organized religion and reaffirm his pragmatic agnosticism to the otherwise uninterested inn keeper. Eventually the Hirondelle, the town's rattling three horse coach, arrives with its driver Hivert who begins distributing packages and news to the town folk. He apologizes for the coach's tardiness but explains that Madame Bovary's greyhound ran away during the journey and could not be found. Emma blames the dog's disappearance on her husband

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/11.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_3_part_2.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 2

part 2, chapter 2

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter1-2", "summary": "Homais greets the Bovary's and explains that he will be joining them for dinner. Monsieur Lon watches Emma warm herself by the fire and is delighted when the innkeeper suggests he join the new arrivals for dinner. While they eat the pharmacist explains the character of the region and its inhabitants to the Charles while Emma and Leon discover they have similar artistic tastes and sensibilities. Flicit leaves to prepare the Bovary's new home and Homais observes that the house benefits from a garden arbor on the river and a private entrance on the lane where they can come and go without being observed. Finally the lame stable boy comes with a lantern to lead them to their new home. Emma feels chilled by the house but she reasons that any change must be for the good and it must be better than what she has known before.", "analysis": "Although we know very little of Tostes and its inhabitants, Flaubert provides thorough descriptions of Yonville and we get to know several of its principle inhabitants even before the Bovary's arrive. We learn that Djali has disappeared during the journey from Tostes and the dog's association with her romantic dreams renders its escape foreshadows the romantic disaster that will befall her in Yonville. Though Emma has moved from her father's farm, to the village of Tostes and now to the market town of Yonville, Flaubert's descriptions of the region leave little doubt that these surroundings will fail to satisfy her romantic vision. However, as she observes at the end of the second chapter, at the very least it is a change and therefore for the better in her mind. We meet Monsieur Homais in this section and his dialogue reveals him to be a pragmatist with an Enlightenment ideology - just the sort of person Flaubert, who believed passionately in art for art's sake, would have despised in life. Emma and Lon's conversation is the first occasion that we have to hear Emma speak aloud her views. Her trite observations reveal that her opinions are simply those that she has been given by novels and fashion magazines. Homais' allusions to the garden arbor and the private entrance are important because both will make Emma's adulterous affair possible"}

Emma got out first, then Felicite, Monsieur Lheureux, and a nurse, and they had to wake up Charles in his corner, where he had slept soundly since night set in. Homais introduced himself; he offered his homages to madame and his respects to monsieur; said he was charmed to have been able to render them some slight service, and added with a cordial air that he had ventured to invite himself, his wife being away. When Madame Bovary was in the kitchen she went up to the chimney. With the tips of her fingers she caught her dress at the knee, and having thus pulled it up to her ankle, held out her foot in its black boot to the fire above the revolving leg of mutton. The flame lit up the whole of her, penetrating with a crude light the woof of her gowns, the fine pores of her fair skin, and even her eyelids, which she blinked now and again. A great red glow passed over her with the blowing of the wind through the half-open door. On the other side of the chimney a young man with fair hair watched her silently. As he was a good deal bored at Yonville, where he was a clerk at the notary's, Monsieur Guillaumin, Monsieur Leon Dupuis (it was he who was the second habitue of the "Lion d'Or") frequently put back his dinner-hour in hope that some traveler might come to the inn, with whom he could chat in the evening. On the days when his work was done early, he had, for want of something else to do, to come punctually, and endure from soup to cheese a tete-a-tete with Binet. It was therefore with delight that he accepted the landlady's suggestion that he should dine in company with the newcomers, and they passed into the large parlour where Madame Lefrancois, for the purpose of showing off, had had the table laid for four. Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his skull-cap, for fear of coryza; then, turning to his neighbour-- "Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so abominably in our 'Hirondelle.'" "That is true," replied Emma; "but moving about always amuses me. I like change of place." "It is so tedious," sighed the clerk, "to be always riveted to the same places." "If you were like me," said Charles, "constantly obliged to be in the saddle"-- "But," Leon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, "nothing, it seems to me, is more pleasant--when one can," he added. "Moreover," said the druggist, "the practice of medicine is not very hard work in our part of the world, for the state of our roads allows us the use of gigs, and generally, as the farmers are prosperous, they pay pretty well. We have, medically speaking, besides the ordinary cases of enteritis, bronchitis, bilious affections, etc., now and then a few intermittent fevers at harvest-time; but on the whole, little of a serious nature, nothing special to note, unless it be a great deal of scrofula, due, no doubt, to the deplorable hygienic conditions of our peasant dwellings. Ah! you will find many prejudices to combat, Monsieur Bovary, much obstinacy of routine, with which all the efforts of your science will daily come into collision; for people still have recourse to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than come straight to the doctor or the chemist. The climate, however, is not, truth to tell, bad, and we even have a few nonagenarians in our parish. The thermometer (I have made some observations) falls in winter to 4 degrees Centigrade at the outside, which gives us 24 degrees Reaumur as the maximum, or otherwise 54 degrees Fahrenheit (English scale), not more. And, as a matter of fact, we are sheltered from the north winds by the forest of Argueil on the one side, from the west winds by the St. Jean range on the other; and this heat, moreover, which, on account of the aqueous vapours given off by the river and the considerable number of cattle in the fields, which, as you know, exhale much ammonia, that is to say, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen (no, nitrogen and hydrogen alone), and which sucking up into itself the humus from the ground, mixing together all those different emanations, unites them into a stack, so to say, and combining with the electricity diffused through the atmosphere, when there is any, might in the long run, as in tropical countries, engender insalubrious miasmata--this heat, I say, finds itself perfectly tempered on the side whence it comes, or rather whence it should come--that is to say, the southern side--by the south-eastern winds, which, having cooled themselves passing over the Seine, reach us sometimes all at once like breezes from Russia." "At any rate, you have some walks in the neighbourhood?" continued Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man. "Oh, very few," he answered. "There is a place they call La Pature, on the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset." "I think there is nothing so admirable as sunsets," she resumed; "but especially by the side of the sea." "Oh, I adore the sea!" said Monsieur Leon. "And then, does it not seem to you," continued Madame Bovary, "that the mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal?" "It is the same with mountainous landscapes," continued Leon. "A cousin of mine who travelled in Switzerland last year told me that one could not picture to oneself the poetry of the lakes, the charm of the waterfalls, the gigantic effect of the glaciers. One sees pines of incredible size across torrents, cottages suspended over precipices, and, a thousand feet below one, whole valleys when the clouds open. Such spectacles must stir to enthusiasm, incline to prayer, to ecstasy; and I no longer marvel at that celebrated musician who, the better to inspire his imagination, was in the habit of playing the piano before some imposing site." "You play?" she asked. "No, but I am very fond of music," he replied. "Ah! don't you listen to him, Madame Bovary," interrupted Homais, bending over his plate. "That's sheer modesty. Why, my dear fellow, the other day in your room you were singing 'L'Ange Gardien' ravishingly. I heard you from the laboratory. You gave it like an actor." Leon, in fact, lodged at the chemist's where he had a small room on the second floor, overlooking the Place. He blushed at the compliment of his landlord, who had already turned to the doctor, and was enumerating to him, one after the other, all the principal inhabitants of Yonville. He was telling anecdotes, giving information; the fortune of the notary was not known exactly, and "there was the Tuvache household," who made a good deal of show. Emma continued, "And what music do you prefer?" "Oh, German music; that which makes you dream." "Have you been to the opera?" "Not yet; but I shall go next year, when I am living at Paris to finish reading for the bar." "As I had the honour of putting it to your husband," said the chemist, "with regard to this poor Yanoda who has run away, you will find yourself, thanks to his extravagance, in the possession of one of the most comfortable houses of Yonville. Its greatest convenience for a doctor is a door giving on the Walk, where one can go in and out unseen. Moreover, it contains everything that is agreeable in a household--a laundry, kitchen with offices, sitting-room, fruit-room, and so on. He was a gay dog, who didn't care what he spent. At the end of the garden, by the side of the water, he had an arbour built just for the purpose of drinking beer in summer; and if madame is fond of gardening she will be able--" "My wife doesn't care about it," said Charles; "although she has been advised to take exercise, she prefers always sitting in her room reading." "Like me," replied Leon. "And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?" "What, indeed?" she said, fixing her large black eyes wide open upon him. "One thinks of nothing," he continued; "the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes." "That is true! That is true?" she said. "Has it ever happened to you," Leon went on, "to come across some vague idea of one's own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?" "I have experienced it," she replied. "That is why," he said, "I especially love the poets. I think verse more tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears." "Still in the long run it is tiring," continued Emma. "Now I, on the contrary, adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one. I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in nature." "In fact," observed the clerk, "these works, not touching the heart, miss, it seems to me, the true end of art. It is so sweet, amid all the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness. For myself, living here far from the world, this is my one distraction; but Yonville affords so few resources." "Like Tostes, no doubt," replied Emma; "and so I always subscribed to a lending library." "If madame will do me the honour of making use of it", said the chemist, who had just caught the last words, "I have at her disposal a library composed of the best authors, Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter Scott, the 'Echo des Feuilletons'; and in addition I receive various periodicals, among them the 'Fanal de Rouen' daily, having the advantage to be its correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchatel, Yonville, and vicinity." For two hours and a half they had been at table; for the servant Artemis, carelessly dragging her old list slippers over the flags, brought one plate after the other, forgot everything, and constantly left the door of the billiard-room half open, so that it beat against the wall with its hooks. Unconsciously, Leon, while talking, had placed his foot on one of the bars of the chair on which Madame Bovary was sitting. She wore a small blue silk necktie, that kept up like a ruff a gauffered cambric collar, and with the movements of her head the lower part of her face gently sunk into the linen or came out from it. Thus side by side, while Charles and the chemist chatted, they entered into one of those vague conversations where the hazard of all that is said brings you back to the fixed centre of a common sympathy. The Paris theatres, titles of novels, new quadrilles, and the world they did not know; Tostes, where she had lived, and Yonville, where they were; they examined all, talked of everything till to the end of dinner. When coffee was served Felicite went away to get ready the room in the new house, and the guests soon raised the siege. Madame Lefrancois was asleep near the cinders, while the stable-boy, lantern in hand, was waiting to show Monsieur and Madame Bovary the way home. Bits of straw stuck in his red hair, and he limped with his left leg. When he had taken in his other hand the cure's umbrella, they started. The town was asleep; the pillars of the market threw great shadows; the earth was all grey as on a summer's night. But as the doctor's house was only some fifty paces from the inn, they had to say good-night almost immediately, and the company dispersed. As soon as she entered the passage, Emma felt the cold of the plaster fall about her shoulders like damp linen. The walls were new and the wooden stairs creaked. In their bedroom, on the first floor, a whitish light passed through the curtainless windows. She could catch glimpses of tree tops, and beyond, the fields, half-drowned in the fog that lay reeking in the moonlight along the course of the river. In the middle of the room, pell-mell, were scattered drawers, bottles, curtain-rods, gilt poles, with mattresses on the chairs and basins on the ground--the two men who had brought the furniture had left everything about carelessly. This was the fourth time that she had slept in a strange place. The first was the day of her going to the convent; the second, of her arrival at Tostes; the third, at Vaubyessard; and this was the fourth. And each one had marked, as it were, the inauguration of a new phase in her life. She did not believe that things could present themselves in the same way in different places, and since the portion of her life lived had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.

part 2, Chapter 2

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter1-2

Homais greets the Bovary's and explains that he will be joining them for dinner. Monsieur Lon watches Emma warm herself by the fire and is delighted when the innkeeper suggests he join the new arrivals for dinner. While they eat the pharmacist explains the character of the region and its inhabitants to the Charles while Emma and Leon discover they have similar artistic tastes and sensibilities. Flicit leaves to prepare the Bovary's new home and Homais observes that the house benefits from a garden arbor on the river and a private entrance on the lane where they can come and go without being observed. Finally the lame stable boy comes with a lantern to lead them to their new home. Emma feels chilled by the house but she reasons that any change must be for the good and it must be better than what she has known before.

Although we know very little of Tostes and its inhabitants, Flaubert provides thorough descriptions of Yonville and we get to know several of its principle inhabitants even before the Bovary's arrive. We learn that Djali has disappeared during the journey from Tostes and the dog's association with her romantic dreams renders its escape foreshadows the romantic disaster that will befall her in Yonville. Though Emma has moved from her father's farm, to the village of Tostes and now to the market town of Yonville, Flaubert's descriptions of the region leave little doubt that these surroundings will fail to satisfy her romantic vision. However, as she observes at the end of the second chapter, at the very least it is a change and therefore for the better in her mind. We meet Monsieur Homais in this section and his dialogue reveals him to be a pragmatist with an Enlightenment ideology - just the sort of person Flaubert, who believed passionately in art for art's sake, would have despised in life. Emma and Lon's conversation is the first occasion that we have to hear Emma speak aloud her views. Her trite observations reveal that her opinions are simply those that she has been given by novels and fashion magazines. Homais' allusions to the garden arbor and the private entrance are important because both will make Emma's adulterous affair possible

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/12.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_4_part_1.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 3

part 2, chapter 3

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter3-4", "summary": "Lon is deeply affected by his conversation with Emma. The pharmacist assists the Bovarys to become accustomed to life in Yonville. The narrator informs us that the apothecary's motives are not entirely based on kindness - Monsieur Homais had violated a law forbidding anyone without a diploma from practicing medicine and received a stern warning from the authorities in Rouen. He continued to practice medicine, however, and felt that by befriending Monsieur Bovary the latter would be more likely to ignore the indiscretion. At first Charles is bereft of patients and bored but he is overjoyed at the progress of Emma's pregnancy. Emma resigns herself to her condition but, because she cannot afford what she wants, she makes no preparations for the child. She hopes that it will be a boy so it can steer its own course in the world. The child, a girl, is born one Sunday morning at sunrise. Emma names the girl Berthe because she remembers hearing the marquise at La Vaubyessard use that name. Charles' parents come for the baptism and in the absence of Emma's father Monsieur Homais serves as the child's godfather. Charles' father spends a month in Yonville making drunken displays of mock chivalry which delight Emma but disgust the elder Madame Bovary. One day Emma decides to visit Berth at the wet nurses' house and Lon accompanies her on the walk. At the wet nurse's squalid country cottage Lon is amazed at the sight of such a refined lady as Emma surrounded by such poverty. Before they leave the midwife pesters Emma for more money and goods. The peaceful walk home touches both Emma and Lon deeply though they do not admit this to each other. Back in the village Emma returns to her house but Lon climbs to the pasture on the hilltop and muses on the dreariness of his existence in Yonville", "analysis": ""}

The next day, as she was getting up, she saw the clerk on the Place. She had on a dressing-gown. He looked up and bowed. She nodded quickly and reclosed the window. Leon waited all day for six o'clock in the evening to come, but on going to the inn, he found no one but Monsieur Binet, already at table. The dinner of the evening before had been a considerable event for him; he had never till then talked for two hours consecutively to a "lady." How then had he been able to explain, and in such language, the number of things that he could not have said so well before? He was usually shy, and maintained that reserve which partakes at once of modesty and dissimulation. At Yonville he was considered "well-bred." He listened to the arguments of the older people, and did not seem hot about politics--a remarkable thing for a young man. Then he had some accomplishments; he painted in water-colours, could read the key of G, and readily talked literature after dinner when he did not play cards. Monsieur Homais respected him for his education; Madame Homais liked him for his good-nature, for he often took the little Homais into the garden--little brats who were always dirty, very much spoilt, and somewhat lymphatic, like their mother. Besides the servant to look after them, they had Justin, the chemist's apprentice, a second cousin of Monsieur Homais, who had been taken into the house from charity, and who was useful at the same time as a servant. The druggist proved the best of neighbours. He gave Madame Bovary information as to the trades-people, sent expressly for his own cider merchant, tasted the drink himself, and saw that the casks were properly placed in the cellar; he explained how to set about getting in a supply of butter cheap, and made an arrangement with Lestiboudois, the sacristan, who, besides his sacerdotal and funeral functions, looked after the principal gardens at Yonville by the hour or the year, according to the taste of the customers. The need of looking after others was not the only thing that urged the chemist to such obsequious cordiality; there was a plan underneath it all. He had infringed the law of the 19th Ventose, year xi., article I, which forbade all persons not having a diploma to practise medicine; so that, after certain anonymous denunciations, Homais had been summoned to Rouen to see the procurer of the king in his own private room; the magistrate receiving him standing up, ermine on shoulder and cap on head. It was in the morning, before the court opened. In the corridors one heard the heavy boots of the gendarmes walking past, and like a far-off noise great locks that were shut. The druggist's ears tingled as if he were about to have an apoplectic stroke; he saw the depths of dungeons, his family in tears, his shop sold, all the jars dispersed; and he was obliged to enter a cafe and take a glass of rum and seltzer to recover his spirits. Little by little the memory of this reprimand grew fainter, and he continued, as heretofore, to give anodyne consultations in his back-parlour. But the mayor resented it, his colleagues were jealous, everything was to be feared; gaining over Monsieur Bovary by his attentions was to earn his gratitude, and prevent his speaking out later on, should he notice anything. So every morning Homais brought him "the paper," and often in the afternoon left his shop for a few moments to have a chat with the Doctor. Charles was dull: patients did not come. He remained seated for hours without speaking, went into his consulting room to sleep, or watched his wife sewing. Then for diversion he employed himself at home as a workman; he even tried to do up the attic with some paint which had been left behind by the painters. But money matters worried him. He had spent so much for repairs at Tostes, for madame's toilette, and for the moving, that the whole dowry, over three thousand crowns, had slipped away in two years. Then how many things had been spoilt or lost during their carriage from Tostes to Yonville, without counting the plaster cure, who falling out of the coach at an over-severe jolt, had been dashed into a thousand fragments on the pavements of Quincampoix! A pleasanter trouble came to distract him, namely, the pregnancy of his wife. As the time of her confinement approached he cherished her the more. It was another bond of the flesh establishing itself, and, as it were, a continued sentiment of a more complex union. When from afar he saw her languid walk, and her figure without stays turning softly on her hips; when opposite one another he looked at her at his ease, while she took tired poses in her armchair, then his happiness knew no bounds; he got up, embraced her, passed his hands over her face, called her little mamma, wanted to make her dance, and half-laughing, half-crying, uttered all kinds of caressing pleasantries that came into his head. The idea of having begotten a child delighted him. Now he wanted nothing. He knew human life from end to end, and he sat down to it with serenity. Emma at first felt a great astonishment; then was anxious to be delivered that she might know what it was to be a mother. But not being able to spend as much as she would have liked, to have a swing-bassinette with rose silk curtains, and embroidered caps, in a fit of bitterness she gave up looking after the trousseau, and ordered the whole of it from a village needlewoman, without choosing or discussing anything. Thus she did not amuse herself with those preparations that stimulate the tenderness of mothers, and so her affection was from the very outset, perhaps, to some extent attenuated. As Charles, however, spoke of the boy at every meal, she soon began to think of him more consecutively. She hoped for a son; he would be strong and dark; she would call him George; and this idea of having a male child was like an expected revenge for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least, is free; he may travel over passions and over countries, overcome obstacles, taste of the most far-away pleasures. But a woman is always hampered. At once inert and flexible, she has against her the weakness of the flesh and legal dependence. Her will, like the veil of her bonnet, held by a string, flutters in every wind; there is always some desire that draws her, some conventionality that restrains. She was confined on a Sunday at about six o'clock, as the sun was rising. "It is a girl!" said Charles. She turned her head away and fainted. Madame Homais, as well as Madame Lefrancois of the Lion d'Or, almost immediately came running in to embrace her. The chemist, as man of discretion, only offered a few provincial felicitations through the half-opened door. He wished to see the child and thought it well made. Whilst she was getting well she occupied herself much in seeking a name for her daughter. First she went over all those that have Italian endings, such as Clara, Louisa, Amanda, Atala; she liked Galsuinde pretty well, and Yseult or Leocadie still better. Charles wanted the child to be called after her mother; Emma opposed this. They ran over the calendar from end to end, and then consulted outsiders. "Monsieur Leon," said the chemist, "with whom I was talking about it the other day, wonders you do not chose Madeleine. It is very much in fashion just now." But Madame Bovary, senior, cried out loudly against this name of a sinner. As to Monsieur Homais, he had a preference for all those that recalled some great man, an illustrious fact, or a generous idea, and it was on this system that he had baptized his four children. Thus Napoleon represented glory and Franklin liberty; Irma was perhaps a concession to romanticism, but Athalie was a homage to the greatest masterpiece of the French stage. For his philosophical convictions did not interfere with his artistic tastes; in him the thinker did not stifle the man of sentiment; he could make distinctions, make allowances for imagination and fanaticism. In this tragedy, for example, he found fault with the ideas, but admired the style; he detested the conception, but applauded all the details, and loathed the characters while he grew enthusiastic over their dialogue. When he read the fine passages he was transported, but when he thought that mummers would get something out of them for their show, he was disconsolate; and in this confusion of sentiments in which he was involved he would have liked at once to crown Racine with both his hands and discuss with him for a good quarter of an hour. At last Emma remembered that at the chateau of Vaubyessard she had heard the Marchioness call a young lady Berthe; from that moment this name was chosen; and as old Rouault could not come, Monsieur Homais was requested to stand godfather. His gifts were all products from his establishment, to wit: six boxes of jujubes, a whole jar of racahout, three cakes of marshmallow paste, and six sticks of sugar-candy into the bargain that he had come across in a cupboard. On the evening of the ceremony there was a grand dinner; the cure was present; there was much excitement. Monsieur Homais towards liqueur-time began singing "Le Dieu des bonnes gens." Monsieur Leon sang a barcarolle, and Madame Bovary, senior, who was godmother, a romance of the time of the Empire; finally, M. Bovary, senior, insisted on having the child brought down, and began baptizing it with a glass of champagne that he poured over its head. This mockery of the first of the sacraments made the Abbe Bournisien angry; old Bovary replied by a quotation from "La Guerre des Dieux"; the cure wanted to leave; the ladies implored, Homais interfered; and they succeeded in making the priest sit down again, and he quietly went on with the half-finished coffee in his saucer. Monsieur Bovary, senior, stayed at Yonville a month, dazzling the natives by a superb policeman's cap with silver tassels that he wore in the morning when he smoked his pipe in the square. Being also in the habit of drinking a good deal of brandy, he often sent the servant to the Lion d'Or to buy him a bottle, which was put down to his son's account, and to perfume his handkerchiefs he used up his daughter-in-law's whole supply of eau-de-cologne. The latter did not at all dislike his company. He had knocked about the world, he talked about Berlin, Vienna, and Strasbourg, of his soldier times, of the mistresses he had had, the grand luncheons of which he had partaken; then he was amiable, and sometimes even, either on the stairs, or in the garden, would seize hold of her waist, crying, "Charles, look out for yourself." Then Madame Bovary, senior, became alarmed for her son's happiness, and fearing that her husband might in the long-run have an immoral influence upon the ideas of the young woman, took care to hurry their departure. Perhaps she had more serious reasons for uneasiness. Monsieur Bovary was not the man to respect anything. One day Emma was suddenly seized with the desire to see her little girl, who had been put to nurse with the carpenter's wife, and, without looking at the calendar to see whether the six weeks of the Virgin were yet passed, she set out for the Rollets' house, situated at the extreme end of the village, between the highroad and the fields. It was mid-day, the shutters of the houses were closed and the slate roofs that glittered beneath the fierce light of the blue sky seemed to strike sparks from the crest of the gables. A heavy wind was blowing; Emma felt weak as she walked; the stones of the pavement hurt her; she was doubtful whether she would not go home again, or go in somewhere to rest. At this moment Monsieur Leon came out from a neighbouring door with a bundle of papers under his arm. He came to greet her, and stood in the shade in front of the Lheureux's shop under the projecting grey awning. Madame Bovary said she was going to see her baby, but that she was beginning to grow tired. "If--" said Leon, not daring to go on. "Have you any business to attend to?" she asked. And on the clerk's answer, she begged him to accompany her. That same evening this was known in Yonville, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor's wife, declared in the presence of her servant that "Madame Bovary was compromising herself." To get to the nurse's it was necessary to turn to the left on leaving the street, as if making for the cemetery, and to follow between little houses and yards a small path bordered with privet hedges. They were in bloom, and so were the speedwells, eglantines, thistles, and the sweetbriar that sprang up from the thickets. Through openings in the hedges one could see into the huts, some pigs on a dung-heap, or tethered cows rubbing their horns against the trunk of trees. The two, side by side walked slowly, she leaning upon him, and he restraining his pace, which he regulated by hers; in front of them a swarm of midges fluttered, buzzing in the warm air. They recognized the house by an old walnut-tree which shaded it. Low and covered with brown tiles, there hung outside it, beneath the dormer-window of the garret, a string of onions. Faggots upright against a thorn fence surrounded a bed of lettuce, a few square feet of lavender, and sweet peas strung on sticks. Dirty water was running here and there on the grass, and all round were several indefinite rags, knitted stockings, a red calico jacket, and a large sheet of coarse linen spread over the hedge. At the noise of the gate the nurse appeared with a baby she was suckling on one arm. With her other hand she was pulling along a poor puny little fellow, his face covered with scrofula, the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with their business, left in the country. "Go in," she said; "your little one is there asleep." The room on the ground-floor, the only one in the dwelling, had at its farther end, against the wall, a large bed without curtains, while a kneading-trough took up the side by the window, one pane of which was mended with a piece of blue paper. In the corner behind the door, shining hob-nailed shoes stood in a row under the slab of the washstand, near a bottle of oil with a feather stuck in its mouth; a Matthieu Laensberg lay on the dusty mantelpiece amid gunflints, candle-ends, and bits of amadou. Finally, the last luxury in the apartment was a "Fame" blowing her trumpets, a picture cut out, no doubt, from some perfumer's prospectus and nailed to the wall with six wooden shoe-pegs. Emma's child was asleep in a wicker-cradle. She took it up in the wrapping that enveloped it and began singing softly as she rocked herself to and fro. Leon walked up and down the room; it seemed strange to him to see this beautiful woman in her nankeen dress in the midst of all this poverty. Madam Bovary reddened; he turned away, thinking perhaps there had been an impertinent look in his eyes. Then she put back the little girl, who had just been sick over her collar. The nurse at once came to dry her, protesting that it wouldn't show. "She gives me other doses," she said: "I am always a-washing of her. If you would have the goodness to order Camus, the grocer, to let me have a little soap, it would really be more convenient for you, as I needn't trouble you then." "Very well! very well!" said Emma. "Good morning, Madame Rollet," and she went out, wiping her shoes at the door. The good woman accompanied her to the end of the garden, talking all the time of the trouble she had getting up of nights. "I'm that worn out sometimes as I drop asleep on my chair. I'm sure you might at least give me just a pound of ground coffee; that'd last me a month, and I'd take it of a morning with some milk." After having submitted to her thanks, Madam Bovary left. She had gone a little way down the path when, at the sound of wooden shoes, she turned round. It was the nurse. "What is it?" Then the peasant woman, taking her aside behind an elm tree, began talking to her of her husband, who with his trade and six francs a year that the captain-- "Oh, be quick!" said Emma. "Well," the nurse went on, heaving sighs between each word, "I'm afraid he'll be put out seeing me have coffee alone, you know men--" "But you are to have some," Emma repeated; "I will give you some. You bother me!" "Oh, dear! my poor, dear lady! you see in consequence of his wounds he has terrible cramps in the chest. He even says that cider weakens him." "Do make haste, Mere Rollet!" "Well," the latter continued, making a curtsey, "if it weren't asking too much," and she curtsied once more, "if you would"--and her eyes begged--"a jar of brandy," she said at last, "and I'd rub your little one's feet with it; they're as tender as one's tongue." Once rid of the nurse, Emma again took Monsieur Leon's arm. She walked fast for some time, then more slowly, and looking straight in front of her, her eyes rested on the shoulder of the young man, whose frock-coat had a black-velvety collar. His brown hair fell over it, straight and carefully arranged. She noticed his nails which were longer than one wore them at Yonville. It was one of the clerk's chief occupations to trim them, and for this purpose he kept a special knife in his writing desk. They returned to Yonville by the water-side. In the warm season the bank, wider than at other times, showed to their foot the garden walls whence a few steps led to the river. It flowed noiselessly, swift, and cold to the eye; long, thin grasses huddled together in it as the current drove them, and spread themselves upon the limpid water like streaming hair; sometimes at the tip of the reeds or on the leaf of a water-lily an insect with fine legs crawled or rested. The sun pierced with a ray the small blue bubbles of the waves that, breaking, followed each other; branchless old willows mirrored their grey backs in the water; beyond, all around, the meadows seemed empty. It was the dinner-hour at the farms, and the young woman and her companion heard nothing as they walked but the fall of their steps on the earth of the path, the words they spoke, and the sound of Emma's dress rustling round her. The walls of the gardens with pieces of bottle on their coping were hot as the glass windows of a conservatory. Wallflowers had sprung up between the bricks, and with the tip of her open sunshade Madame Bovary, as she passed, made some of their faded flowers crumble into a yellow dust, or a spray of overhanging honeysuckle and clematis caught in its fringe and dangled for a moment over the silk. They were talking of a troupe of Spanish dancers who were expected shortly at the Rouen theatre. "Are you going?" she asked. "If I can," he answered. Had they nothing else to say to one another? Yet their eyes were full of more serious speech, and while they forced themselves to find trivial phrases, they felt the same languor stealing over them both. It was the whisper of the soul, deep, continuous, dominating that of their voices. Surprised with wonder at this strange sweetness, they did not think of speaking of the sensation or of seeking its cause. Coming joys, like tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know. In one place the ground had been trodden down by the cattle; they had to step on large green stones put here and there in the mud. She often stopped a moment to look where to place her foot, and tottering on a stone that shook, her arms outspread, her form bent forward with a look of indecision, she would laugh, afraid of falling into the puddles of water. When they arrived in front of her garden, Madame Bovary opened the little gate, ran up the steps and disappeared. Leon returned to his office. His chief was away; he just glanced at the briefs, then cut himself a pen, and at last took up his hat and went out. He went to La Pature at the top of the Argueil hills at the beginning of the forest; he threw himself upon the ground under the pines and watched the sky through his fingers. "How bored I am!" he said to himself, "how bored I am!" He thought he was to be pitied for living in this village, with Homais for a friend and Monsieru Guillaumin for master. The latter, entirely absorbed by his business, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and red whiskers over a white cravat, understood nothing of mental refinements, although he affected a stiff English manner, which in the beginning had impressed the clerk. As to the chemist's spouse, she was the best wife in Normandy, gentle as a sheep, loving her children, her father, her mother, her cousins, weeping for other's woes, letting everything go in her household, and detesting corsets; but so slow of movement, such a bore to listen to, so common in appearance, and of such restricted conversation, that although she was thirty, he only twenty, although they slept in rooms next each other and he spoke to her daily, he never thought that she might be a woman for another, or that she possessed anything else of her sex than the gown. And what else was there? Binet, a few shopkeepers, two or three publicans, the cure, and finally, Monsieur Tuvache, the mayor, with his two sons, rich, crabbed, obtuse persons, who farmed their own lands and had feasts among themselves, bigoted to boot, and quite unbearable companions. But from the general background of all these human faces Emma's stood out isolated and yet farthest off; for between her and him he seemed to see a vague abyss. In the beginning he had called on her several times along with the druggist. Charles had not appeared particularly anxious to see him again, and Leon did not know what to do between his fear of being indiscreet and the desire for an intimacy that seemed almost impossible.

part 2, Chapter 3

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter3-4

Lon is deeply affected by his conversation with Emma. The pharmacist assists the Bovarys to become accustomed to life in Yonville. The narrator informs us that the apothecary's motives are not entirely based on kindness - Monsieur Homais had violated a law forbidding anyone without a diploma from practicing medicine and received a stern warning from the authorities in Rouen. He continued to practice medicine, however, and felt that by befriending Monsieur Bovary the latter would be more likely to ignore the indiscretion. At first Charles is bereft of patients and bored but he is overjoyed at the progress of Emma's pregnancy. Emma resigns herself to her condition but, because she cannot afford what she wants, she makes no preparations for the child. She hopes that it will be a boy so it can steer its own course in the world. The child, a girl, is born one Sunday morning at sunrise. Emma names the girl Berthe because she remembers hearing the marquise at La Vaubyessard use that name. Charles' parents come for the baptism and in the absence of Emma's father Monsieur Homais serves as the child's godfather. Charles' father spends a month in Yonville making drunken displays of mock chivalry which delight Emma but disgust the elder Madame Bovary. One day Emma decides to visit Berth at the wet nurses' house and Lon accompanies her on the walk. At the wet nurse's squalid country cottage Lon is amazed at the sight of such a refined lady as Emma surrounded by such poverty. Before they leave the midwife pesters Emma for more money and goods. The peaceful walk home touches both Emma and Lon deeply though they do not admit this to each other. Back in the village Emma returns to her house but Lon climbs to the pasture on the hilltop and muses on the dreariness of his existence in Yonville

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/13.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_4_part_2.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 4

part 2, chapter 4

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 4", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter3-4", "summary": "Winter arrives and most evenings Homais visits the Bovarys to tell them the news of the day. His wife's young cousin Justin, whom he keeps as an understudy but uses like a servant, usually comes for him at 8 o'clock. On Sunday evenings Charles and Emma attend the poorly attended gatherings at the Homais' house. Lon who boards with the Homais, is always in attendance. While Charles and Homais play dominos Emma and Lon look through fashion magazines and read poetry to each other. When the rest of the group has fallen asleep they have quiet conversations. Charles accepts their friendship as natural and does not question Lon's motives. Lon brings Emma various gifts including an exotic plant and he also gives Charles a phrenological head. Both Emma and Lon spend much time at their windows tending to their indoor gardens and every afternoon they can see each other as well as Monsieur Binet, the tax collector, bent over his lathe engaged in his hobby of making napkin rings. The monotonous tone of the lathe is clearly audible throughout the village. Lon is determined to declare his love to Emma but he is unable to work up the courage. Emma, who believes that falling in love is something that happens suddenly and violently does not consider her true feelings for the clerk.", "analysis": "Here we learn that, appropriate to his progressive bourgeois character, Monsieur Homais' kindness stems from self-interest. We also learn that Lon's love for Emma is in earnest. Like her he feels trapped by the confines of the small town and until she arrived had no one who shared his outlook. He and Emma develop a relationship of friendly intimacy and though he would like to confess his love he is intimidated by her refinement and position. Ironically, Emma's own conceptions of love prevent her from seeing the passion evident in the young man. The birth of her daughter is an even that Emma seemingly regards as an imposition. Binet's lathe makes its first appearance in this section - its drone will come up at pivotal points in the novel"}

When the first cold days set in Emma left her bedroom for the sitting-room, a long apartment with a low ceiling, in which there was on the mantelpiece a large bunch of coral spread out against the looking-glass. Seated in her arm chair near the window, she could see the villagers pass along the pavement. Twice a day Leon went from his office to the Lion d'Or. Emma could hear him coming from afar; she leant forward listening, and the young man glided past the curtain, always dressed in the same way, and without turning his head. But in the twilight, when, her chin resting on her left hand, she let the embroidery she had begun fall on her knees, she often shuddered at the apparition of this shadow suddenly gliding past. She would get up and order the table to be laid. Monsieur Homais called at dinner-time. Skull-cap in hand, he came in on tiptoe, in order to disturb no one, always repeating the same phrase, "Good evening, everybody." Then, when he had taken his seat at the table between the pair, he asked the doctor about his patients, and the latter consulted his as to the probability of their payment. Next they talked of "what was in the paper." Homais by this hour knew it almost by heart, and he repeated it from end to end, with the reflections of the penny-a-liners, and all the stories of individual catastrophes that had occurred in France or abroad. But the subject becoming exhausted, he was not slow in throwing out some remarks on the dishes before him. Sometimes even, half-rising, he delicately pointed out to madame the tenderest morsel, or turning to the servant, gave her some advice on the manipulation of stews and the hygiene of seasoning. He talked aroma, osmazome, juices, and gelatine in a bewildering manner. Moreover, Homais, with his head fuller of recipes than his shop of jars, excelled in making all kinds of preserves, vinegars, and sweet liqueurs; he knew also all the latest inventions in economic stoves, together with the art of preserving cheese and of curing sick wines. At eight o'clock Justin came to fetch him to shut up the shop. Then Monsieur Homais gave him a sly look, especially if Felicite was there, for he half noticed that his apprentice was fond of the doctor's house. "The young dog," he said, "is beginning to have ideas, and the devil take me if I don't believe he's in love with your servant!" But a more serious fault with which he reproached Justin was his constantly listening to conversation. On Sunday, for example, one could not get him out of the drawing-room, whither Madame Homais had called him to fetch the children, who were falling asleep in the arm-chairs, and dragging down with their backs calico chair-covers that were too large. Not many people came to these soirees at the chemist's, his scandal-mongering and political opinions having successfully alienated various respectable persons from him. The clerk never failed to be there. As soon as he heard the bell he ran to meet Madame Bovary, took her shawl, and put away under the shop-counter the thick list shoes that she wore over her boots when there was snow. First they played some hands at trente-et-un; next Monsieur Homais played ecarte with Emma; Leon behind her gave her advice. Standing up with his hands on the back of her chair he saw the teeth of her comb that bit into her chignon. With every movement that she made to throw her cards the right side of her dress was drawn up. From her turned-up hair a dark colour fell over her back, and growing gradually paler, lost itself little by little in the shade. Then her dress fell on both sides of her chair, puffing out full of folds, and reached the ground. When Leon occasionally felt the sole of his boot resting on it, he drew back as if he had trodden upon some one. When the game of cards was over, the druggist and the Doctor played dominoes, and Emma, changing her place, leant her elbow on the table, turning over the leaves of "L'Illustration". She had brought her ladies' journal with her. Leon sat down near her; they looked at the engravings together, and waited for one another at the bottom of the pages. She often begged him to read her the verses; Leon declaimed them in a languid voice, to which he carefully gave a dying fall in the love passages. But the noise of the dominoes annoyed him. Monsieur Homais was strong at the game; he could beat Charles and give him a double-six. Then the three hundred finished, they both stretched themselves out in front of the fire, and were soon asleep. The fire was dying out in the cinders; the teapot was empty, Leon was still reading. Emma listened to him, mechanically turning around the lampshade, on the gauze of which were painted clowns in carriages, and tight-rope dances with their balancing-poles. Leon stopped, pointing with a gesture to his sleeping audience; then they talked in low tones, and their conversation seemed the more sweet to them because it was unheard. Thus a kind of bond was established between them, a constant commerce of books and of romances. Monsieur Bovary, little given to jealousy, did not trouble himself about it. On his birthday he received a beautiful phrenological head, all marked with figures to the thorax and painted blue. This was an attention of the clerk's. He showed him many others, even to doing errands for him at Rouen; and the book of a novelist having made the mania for cactuses fashionable, Leon bought some for Madame Bovary, bringing them back on his knees in the "Hirondelle," pricking his fingers on their hard hairs. She had a board with a balustrade fixed against her window to hold the pots. The clerk, too, had his small hanging garden; they saw each other tending their flowers at their windows. Of the windows of the village there was one yet more often occupied; for on Sundays from morning to night, and every morning when the weather was bright, one could see at the dormer-window of the garret the profile of Monsieur Binet bending over his lathe, whose monotonous humming could be heard at the Lion d'Or. One evening on coming home Leon found in his room a rug in velvet and wool with leaves on a pale ground. He called Madame Homais, Monsieur Homais, Justin, the children, the cook; he spoke of it to his chief; every one wanted to see this rug. Why did the doctor's wife give the clerk presents? It looked queer. They decided that she must be his lover. He made this seem likely, so ceaselessly did he talk of her charms and of her wit; so much so, that Binet once roughly answered him-- "What does it matter to me since I'm not in her set?" He tortured himself to find out how he could make his declaration to her, and always halting between the fear of displeasing her and the shame of being such a coward, he wept with discouragement and desire. Then he took energetic resolutions, wrote letters that he tore up, put it off to times that he again deferred. Often he set out with the determination to dare all; but this resolution soon deserted him in Emma's presence, and when Charles, dropping in, invited him to jump into his chaise to go with him to see some patient in the neighbourhood, he at once accepted, bowed to madame, and went out. Her husband, was he not something belonging to her? As to Emma, she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss. She did not know that on the terrace of houses it makes lakes when the pipes are choked, and she would thus have remained in her security when she suddenly discovered a rent in the wall of it.

part 2, Chapter 4

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter3-4

Winter arrives and most evenings Homais visits the Bovarys to tell them the news of the day. His wife's young cousin Justin, whom he keeps as an understudy but uses like a servant, usually comes for him at 8 o'clock. On Sunday evenings Charles and Emma attend the poorly attended gatherings at the Homais' house. Lon who boards with the Homais, is always in attendance. While Charles and Homais play dominos Emma and Lon look through fashion magazines and read poetry to each other. When the rest of the group has fallen asleep they have quiet conversations. Charles accepts their friendship as natural and does not question Lon's motives. Lon brings Emma various gifts including an exotic plant and he also gives Charles a phrenological head. Both Emma and Lon spend much time at their windows tending to their indoor gardens and every afternoon they can see each other as well as Monsieur Binet, the tax collector, bent over his lathe engaged in his hobby of making napkin rings. The monotonous tone of the lathe is clearly audible throughout the village. Lon is determined to declare his love to Emma but he is unable to work up the courage. Emma, who believes that falling in love is something that happens suddenly and violently does not consider her true feelings for the clerk.

Here we learn that, appropriate to his progressive bourgeois character, Monsieur Homais' kindness stems from self-interest. We also learn that Lon's love for Emma is in earnest. Like her he feels trapped by the confines of the small town and until she arrived had no one who shared his outlook. He and Emma develop a relationship of friendly intimacy and though he would like to confess his love he is intimidated by her refinement and position. Ironically, Emma's own conceptions of love prevent her from seeing the passion evident in the young man. The birth of her daughter is an even that Emma seemingly regards as an imposition. Binet's lathe makes its first appearance in this section - its drone will come up at pivotal points in the novel

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/14.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_5_part_1.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 5

part 2, chapter 5

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter5-6", "summary": "On a cold Sunday afternoon in February, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais and Lon, the Homais children and Justin go to view a flax mill being built outside of town. The sight is dull and Emma, watching her husband, is disgusted by his stupidity and dullness. She contrasts his appearance with Lon's much more desirable countenance and later that evening, alone in her home, comes to the sudden realization that the clerk is in love with her. This pleases her but she again laments that she is married to Charles. The next day Monsieur Lheureux, the owner of the dry-goods store, visits and tries to tempt her with the fine things he can procure for her on credit. She politely refuses and congratulates herself for her thrift. That evening Lon visits her but finds Madame Bovary distracted. To his chagrin she refers several times to the duties of home and hearth. In the following days she exerts herself to be a devoted mother and wife and Lon determines that she is inaccessible. Over the following weeks Emma grows thinner, more melancholy, sweet and subdued. Inside, however, she is torn by passionate love for Lon. Emma's suppressed feelings and unrealized dreams cause her torment and her husband's complete ignorance of her suffering exasperates her even more. Over time Charles becomes the object of her resentment. Only Flicit notices her mistress' sorrow but Emma blames it on nerves", "analysis": ""}

It was a Sunday in February, an afternoon when the snow was falling. They had all, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais, and Monsieur Leon, gone to see a yarn-mill that was being built in the valley a mile and a half from Yonville. The druggist had taken Napoleon and Athalie to give them some exercise, and Justin accompanied them, carrying the umbrellas on his shoulder. Nothing, however, could be less curious than this curiosity. A great piece of waste ground, on which pell-mell, amid a mass of sand and stones, were a few break-wheels, already rusty, surrounded by a quadrangular building pierced by a number of little windows. The building was unfinished; the sky could be seen through the joists of the roofing. Attached to the stop-plank of the gable a bunch of straw mixed with corn-ears fluttered its tricoloured ribbons in the wind. Homais was talking. He explained to the company the future importance of this establishment, computed the strength of the floorings, the thickness of the walls, and regretted extremely not having a yard-stick such as Monsieur Binet possessed for his own special use. Emma, who had taken his arm, bent lightly against his shoulder, and she looked at the sun's disc shedding afar through the mist his pale splendour. She turned. Charles was there. His cap was drawn down over his eyebrows, and his two thick lips were trembling, which added a look of stupidity to his face; his very back, his calm back, was irritating to behold, and she saw written upon his coat all the platitude of the bearer. While she was considering him thus, tasting in her irritation a sort of depraved pleasure, Leon made a step forward. The cold that made him pale seemed to add a more gentle languor to his face; between his cravat and his neck the somewhat loose collar of his shirt showed the skin; the lobe of his ear looked out from beneath a lock of hair, and his large blue eyes, raised to the clouds, seemed to Emma more limpid and more beautiful than those mountain-lakes where the heavens are mirrored. "Wretched boy!" suddenly cried the chemist. And he ran to his son, who had just precipitated himself into a heap of lime in order to whiten his boots. At the reproaches with which he was being overwhelmed Napoleon began to roar, while Justin dried his shoes with a wisp of straw. But a knife was wanted; Charles offered his. "Ah!" she said to herself, "he carried a knife in his pocket like a peasant." The hoar-frost was falling, and they turned back to Yonville. In the evening Madame Bovary did not go to her neighbour's, and when Charles had left and she felt herself alone, the comparison re-began with the clearness of a sensation almost actual, and with that lengthening of perspective which memory gives to things. Looking from her bed at the clean fire that was burning, she still saw, as she had down there, Leon standing up with one hand behind his cane, and with the other holding Athalie, who was quietly sucking a piece of ice. She thought him charming; she could not tear herself away from him; she recalled his other attitudes on other days, the words he had spoken, the sound of his voice, his whole person; and she repeated, pouting out her lips as if for a kiss-- "Yes, charming! charming! Is he not in love?" she asked herself; "but with whom? With me?" All the proofs arose before her at once; her heart leapt. The flame of the fire threw a joyous light upon the ceiling; she turned on her back, stretching out her arms. Then began the eternal lamentation: "Oh, if Heaven had not willed it! And why not? What prevented it?" When Charles came home at midnight, she seemed to have just awakened, and as he made a noise undressing, she complained of a headache, then asked carelessly what had happened that evening. "Monsieur Leon," he said, "went to his room early." She could not help smiling, and she fell asleep, her soul filled with a new delight. The next day, at dusk, she received a visit from Monsieur Lherueux, the draper. He was a man of ability, was this shopkeeper. Born a Gascon but bred a Norman, he grafted upon his southern volubility the cunning of the Cauchois. His fat, flabby, beardless face seemed dyed by a decoction of liquorice, and his white hair made even more vivid the keen brilliance of his small black eyes. No one knew what he had been formerly; a pedlar said some, a banker at Routot according to others. What was certain was that he made complex calculations in his head that would have frightened Binet himself. Polite to obsequiousness, he always held himself with his back bent in the position of one who bows or who invites. After leaving at the door his hat surrounded with crape, he put down a green bandbox on the table, and began by complaining to madame, with many civilities, that he should have remained till that day without gaining her confidence. A poor shop like his was not made to attract a "fashionable lady"; he emphasized the words; yet she had only to command, and he would undertake to provide her with anything she might wish, either in haberdashery or linen, millinery or fancy goods, for he went to town regularly four times a month. He was connected with the best houses. You could speak of him at the "Trois Freres," at the "Barbe d'Or," or at the "Grand Sauvage"; all these gentlemen knew him as well as the insides of their pockets. To-day, then he had come to show madame, in passing, various articles he happened to have, thanks to the most rare opportunity. And he pulled out half-a-dozen embroidered collars from the box. Madame Bovary examined them. "I do not require anything," she said. Then Monsieur Lheureux delicately exhibited three Algerian scarves, several packets of English needles, a pair of straw slippers, and finally, four eggcups in cocoanut wood, carved in open work by convicts. Then, with both hands on the table, his neck stretched out, his figure bent forward, open-mouthed, he watched Emma's look, who was walking up and down undecided amid these goods. From time to time, as if to remove some dust, he filliped with his nail the silk of the scarves spread out at full length, and they rustled with a little noise, making in the green twilight the gold spangles of their tissue scintillate like little stars. "How much are they?" "A mere nothing," he replied, "a mere nothing. But there's no hurry; whenever it's convenient. We are not Jews." She reflected for a few moments, and ended by again declining Monsieur Lheureux's offer. He replied quite unconcernedly-- "Very well. We shall understand one another by and by. I have always got on with ladies--if I didn't with my own!" Emma smiled. "I wanted to tell you," he went on good-naturedly, after his joke, "that it isn't the money I should trouble about. Why, I could give you some, if need be." She made a gesture of surprise. "Ah!" said he quickly and in a low voice, "I shouldn't have to go far to find you some, rely on that." And he began asking after Pere Tellier, the proprietor of the "Cafe Francais," whom Monsieur Bovary was then attending. "What's the matter with Pere Tellier? He coughs so that he shakes his whole house, and I'm afraid he'll soon want a deal covering rather than a flannel vest. He was such a rake as a young man! Those sort of people, madame, have not the least regularity; he's burnt up with brandy. Still it's sad, all the same, to see an acquaintance go off." And while he fastened up his box he discoursed about the doctor's patients. "It's the weather, no doubt," he said, looking frowningly at the floor, "that causes these illnesses. I, too, don't feel the thing. One of these days I shall even have to consult the doctor for a pain I have in my back. Well, good-bye, Madame Bovary. At your service; your very humble servant." And he closed the door gently. Emma had her dinner served in her bedroom on a tray by the fireside; she was a long time over it; everything was well with her. "How good I was!" she said to herself, thinking of the scarves. She heard some steps on the stairs. It was Leon. She got up and took from the chest of drawers the first pile of dusters to be hemmed. When he came in she seemed very busy. The conversation languished; Madame Bovary gave it up every few minutes, whilst he himself seemed quite embarrassed. Seated on a low chair near the fire, he turned round in his fingers the ivory thimble-case. She stitched on, or from time to time turned down the hem of the cloth with her nail. She did not speak; he was silent, captivated by her silence, as he would have been by her speech. "Poor fellow!" she thought. "How have I displeased her?" he asked himself. At last, however, Leon said that he should have, one of these days, to go to Rouen on some office business. "Your music subscription is out; am I to renew it?" "No," she replied. "Why?" "Because--" And pursing her lips she slowly drew a long stitch of grey thread. This work irritated Leon. It seemed to roughen the ends of her fingers. A gallant phrase came into his head, but he did not risk it. "Then you are giving it up?" he went on. "What?" she asked hurriedly. "Music? Ah! yes! Have I not my house to look after, my husband to attend to, a thousand things, in fact, many duties that must be considered first?" She looked at the clock. Charles was late. Then, she affected anxiety. Two or three times she even repeated, "He is so good!" The clerk was fond of Monsieur Bovary. But this tenderness on his behalf astonished him unpleasantly; nevertheless he took up on his praises, which he said everyone was singing, especially the chemist. "Ah! he is a good fellow," continued Emma. "Certainly," replied the clerk. And he began talking of Madame Homais, whose very untidy appearance generally made them laugh. "What does it matter?" interrupted Emma. "A good housewife does not trouble about her appearance." Then she relapsed into silence. It was the same on the following days; her talks, her manners, everything changed. She took interest in the housework, went to church regularly, and looked after her servant with more severity. She took Berthe from nurse. When visitors called, Felicite brought her in, and Madame Bovary undressed her to show off her limbs. She declared she adored children; this was her consolation, her joy, her passion, and she accompanied her caresses with lyrical outburst which would have reminded anyone but the Yonville people of Sachette in "Notre Dame de Paris." When Charles came home he found his slippers put to warm near the fire. His waistcoat now never wanted lining, nor his shirt buttons, and it was quite a pleasure to see in the cupboard the night-caps arranged in piles of the same height. She no longer grumbled as formerly at taking a turn in the garden; what he proposed was always done, although she did not understand the wishes to which she submitted without a murmur; and when Leon saw him by his fireside after dinner, his two hands on his stomach, his two feet on the fender, his two cheeks red with feeding, his eyes moist with happiness, the child crawling along the carpet, and this woman with the slender waist who came behind his arm-chair to kiss his forehead: "What madness!" he said to himself. "And how to reach her!" And thus she seemed so virtuous and inaccessible to him that he lost all hope, even the faintest. But by this renunciation he placed her on an extraordinary pinnacle. To him she stood outside those fleshly attributes from which he had nothing to obtain, and in his heart she rose ever, and became farther removed from him after the magnificent manner of an apotheosis that is taking wing. It was one of those pure feelings that do not interfere with life, that are cultivated because they are rare, and whose loss would afflict more than their passion rejoices. Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paler, her face longer. With her black hair, her large eyes, her aquiline nose, her birdlike walk, and always silent now, did she not seem to be passing through life scarcely touching it, and to bear on her brow the vague impress of some divine destiny? She was so sad and so calm, at once so gentle and so reserved, that near her one felt oneself seized by an icy charm, as we shudder in churches at the perfume of the flowers mingling with the cold of the marble. The others even did not escape from this seduction. The chemist said-- "She is a woman of great parts, who wouldn't be misplaced in a sub-prefecture." The housewives admired her economy, the patients her politeness, the poor her charity. But she was eaten up with desires, with rage, with hate. That dress with the narrow folds hid a distracted fear, of whose torment those chaste lips said nothing. She was in love with Leon, and sought solitude that she might with the more ease delight in his image. The sight of his form troubled the voluptuousness of this mediation. Emma thrilled at the sound of his step; then in his presence the emotion subsided, and afterwards there remained to her only an immense astonishment that ended in sorrow. Leon did not know that when he left her in despair she rose after he had gone to see him in the street. She concerned herself about his comings and goings; she watched his face; she invented quite a history to find an excuse for going to his room. The chemist's wife seemed happy to her to sleep under the same roof, and her thoughts constantly centered upon this house, like the "Lion d'Or" pigeons, who came there to dip their red feet and white wings in its gutters. But the more Emma recognised her love, the more she crushed it down, that it might not be evident, that she might make it less. She would have liked Leon to guess it, and she imagined chances, catastrophes that should facilitate this. What restrained her was, no doubt, idleness and fear, and a sense of shame also. She thought she had repulsed him too much, that the time was past, that all was lost. Then, pride, and joy of being able to say to herself, "I am virtuous," and to look at herself in the glass taking resigned poses, consoled her a little for the sacrifice she believed she was making. Then the lusts of the flesh, the longing for money, and the melancholy of passion all blended themselves into one suffering, and instead of turning her thoughts from it, she clave to it the more, urging herself to pain, and seeking everywhere occasion for it. She was irritated by an ill-served dish or by a half-open door; bewailed the velvets she had not, the happiness she had missed, her too exalted dreams, her narrow home. What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness on this point ingratitude. For whose sake, then was she virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all felicity, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of that complex strap that bucked her in on all sides. On him alone, then, she concentrated all the various hatreds that resulted from her boredom, and every effort to diminish only augmented it; for this useless trouble was added to the other reasons for despair, and contributed still more to the separation between them. Her own gentleness to herself made her rebel against him. Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires. She would have liked Charles to beat her, that she might have a better right to hate him, to revenge herself upon him. She was surprised sometimes at the atrocious conjectures that came into her thoughts, and she had to go on smiling, to hear repeated to her at all hours that she was happy, to pretend to be happy, to let it be believed. Yet she had loathing of this hypocrisy. She was seized with the temptation to flee somewhere with Leon to try a new life; but at once a vague chasm full of darkness opened within her soul. "Besides, he no longer loves me," she thought. "What is to become of me? What help is to be hoped for, what consolation, what solace?" She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in a low voice, with flowing tears. "Why don't you tell master?" the servant asked her when she came in during these crises. "It is the nerves," said Emma. "Do not speak to him of it; it would worry him." "Ah! yes," Felicite went on, "you are just like La Guerine, Pere Guerin's daughter, the fisherman at Pollet, that I used to know at Dieppe before I came to you. She was so sad, so sad, to see her standing upright on the threshold of her house, she seemed to you like a winding-sheet spread out before the door. Her illness, it appears, was a kind of fog that she had in her head, and the doctors could not do anything, nor the priest either. When she was taken too bad she went off quite alone to the sea-shore, so that the customs officer, going his rounds, often found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle. Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say." "But with me," replied Emma, "it was after marriage that it began."

part 2, Chapter 5

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter5-6

On a cold Sunday afternoon in February, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais and Lon, the Homais children and Justin go to view a flax mill being built outside of town. The sight is dull and Emma, watching her husband, is disgusted by his stupidity and dullness. She contrasts his appearance with Lon's much more desirable countenance and later that evening, alone in her home, comes to the sudden realization that the clerk is in love with her. This pleases her but she again laments that she is married to Charles. The next day Monsieur Lheureux, the owner of the dry-goods store, visits and tries to tempt her with the fine things he can procure for her on credit. She politely refuses and congratulates herself for her thrift. That evening Lon visits her but finds Madame Bovary distracted. To his chagrin she refers several times to the duties of home and hearth. In the following days she exerts herself to be a devoted mother and wife and Lon determines that she is inaccessible. Over the following weeks Emma grows thinner, more melancholy, sweet and subdued. Inside, however, she is torn by passionate love for Lon. Emma's suppressed feelings and unrealized dreams cause her torment and her husband's complete ignorance of her suffering exasperates her even more. Over time Charles becomes the object of her resentment. Only Flicit notices her mistress' sorrow but Emma blames it on nerves

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/15.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_5_part_2.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 6

part 2, chapter 6

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 6", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter5-6", "summary": "One evening, while sitting at her window, Emma hears the church bell tolling and she is reminded of her girlhood in the convent. Seeking spiritual guidance she makes her way to the church where the boys from the village are gathering for catechism. She finds the abb, Monsieur Bournisien, in a distracted state of mind and despite her attempt to draw him into a conversation about her spiritual crises he does not glean the true reason for her visit and offers only banalities. He cannot fathom why anyone who is warm and fed would have troubles. At home she falls into a foul mood and when Berthe pesters her she pushes the child who falls and suffers a cut to her cheek. Emma immediately calls for help and Charles dresses the wound but that evening the mother watches the sleeping child closely. She notices with some surprise that her daughter is ugly. Lon becomes exceedingly morose and dissatisfied with life in Yonville and he finally resolves to move to Paris to complete his law studies. Lon and Emma part awkwardly and leaving much unsaid. Homais visits that night as usual and Emma suffers greatly as he and Charles discuss all the distractions and trappings of society that Lon will experience in Paris. Before he leaves, Homais mentions that there is a rumor that the region's annual Agricultural Show will be held in Yonville.", "analysis": "Emma's conviction that her happiness is dependent upon the proper surroundings leads her to associate her disgust with the dullness of the landscape and the flax mill with her disgust for Charles. In this manner she realizes that Lon, who stands apart from the drabness of Yonville, is in love with her. Shackled by propriety to her marriage she can only suffer as her love for the clerk mounts. Nevertheless she not only resists the urge to act on her love but she continues to be a responsible wife as evidenced of her refusal to purchase expensive goods from Lheureux. This is the first appearance of the merchant and his promise to her that he knows what ladies want indicates that he intends to make Emma a regular customer. Her attempt to find comfort in religion is deterred by the abbe's small-minded failure to appreciate the nature of her crises. This attitude is in keeping with the nineteenth century conception of women as mere recipients of a man's desires without their own sexual agenda or need for pleasure. Although Emma is trapped by her gender and marital status, Lon is a single man and he has the choice of escaping to Paris. This fact is particularly painful to Emma when she hears Homais and her husband, both of whom could have presumably exercised the same freedom at some point in their lives, discuss the clerk's future. Emma is revealed to be a caring mother when she worries over her daughter following her injury but her observation that her daughter is ugly reveals that she feels no great emotional identification with the child"}

One evening when the window was open, and she, sitting by it, had been watching Lestiboudois, the beadle, trimming the box, she suddenly heard the Angelus ringing. It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are in bloom, and a warm wind blows over the flower-beds newly turned, and the gardens, like women, seem to be getting ready for the summer fetes. Through the bars of the arbour and away beyond the river seen in the fields, meandering through the grass in wandering curves. The evening vapours rose between the leafless poplars, touching their outlines with a violet tint, paler and more transparent than a subtle gauze caught athwart their branches. In the distance cattle moved about; neither their steps nor their lowing could be heard; and the bell, still ringing through the air, kept up its peaceful lamentation. With this repeated tinkling the thoughts of the young woman lost themselves in old memories of her youth and school-days. She remembered the great candlesticks that rose above the vases full of flowers on the altar, and the tabernacle with its small columns. She would have liked to be once more lost in the long line of white veils, marked off here and there by the stuff black hoods of the good sisters bending over their prie-Dieu. At mass on Sundays, when she looked up, she saw the gentle face of the Virgin amid the blue smoke of the rising incense. Then she was moved; she felt herself weak and quite deserted, like the down of a bird whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she went towards the church, included to no matter what devotions, so that her soul was absorbed and all existence lost in it. On the Place she met Lestivoudois on his way back, for, in order not to shorten his day's labour, he preferred interrupting his work, then beginning it again, so that he rang the Angelus to suit his own convenience. Besides, the ringing over a little earlier warned the lads of catechism hour. Already a few who had arrived were playing marbles on the stones of the cemetery. Others, astride the wall, swung their legs, kicking with their clogs the large nettles growing between the little enclosure and the newest graves. This was the only green spot. All the rest was but stones, always covered with a fine powder, despite the vestry-broom. The children in list shoes ran about there as if it were an enclosure made for them. The shouts of their voices could be heard through the humming of the bell. This grew less and less with the swinging of the great rope that, hanging from the top of the belfry, dragged its end on the ground. Swallows flitted to and fro uttering little cries, cut the air with the edge of their wings, and swiftly returned to their yellow nests under the tiles of the coping. At the end of the church a lamp was burning, the wick of a night-light in a glass hung up. Its light from a distance looked like a white stain trembling in the oil. A long ray of the sun fell across the nave and seemed to darken the lower sides and the corners. "Where is the cure?" asked Madame Bovary of one of the lads, who was amusing himself by shaking a swivel in a hole too large for it. "He is just coming," he answered. And in fact the door of the presbytery grated; Abbe Bournisien appeared; the children, pell-mell, fled into the church. "These young scamps!" murmured the priest, "always the same!" Then, picking up a catechism all in rags that he had struck with is foot, "They respect nothing!" But as soon as he caught sight of Madame Bovary, "Excuse me," he said; "I did not recognise you." He thrust the catechism into his pocket, and stopped short, balancing the heavy vestry key between his two fingers. The light of the setting sun that fell full upon his face paled the lasting of his cassock, shiny at the elbows, unravelled at the hem. Grease and tobacco stains followed along his broad chest the lines of the buttons, and grew more numerous the farther they were from his neckcloth, in which the massive folds of his red chin rested; this was dotted with yellow spots, that disappeared beneath the coarse hair of his greyish beard. He had just dined and was breathing noisily. "How are you?" he added. "Not well," replied Emma; "I am ill." "Well, and so am I," answered the priest. "These first warm days weaken one most remarkably, don't they? But, after all, we are born to suffer, as St. Paul says. But what does Monsieur Bovary think of it?" "He!" she said with a gesture of contempt. "What!" replied the good fellow, quite astonished, "doesn't he prescribe something for you?" "Ah!" said Emma, "it is no earthly remedy I need." But the cure from time to time looked into the church, where the kneeling boys were shouldering one another, and tumbling over like packs of cards. "I should like to know--" she went on. "You look out, Riboudet," cried the priest in an angry voice; "I'll warm your ears, you imp!" Then turning to Emma, "He's Boudet the carpenter's son; his parents are well off, and let him do just as he pleases. Yet he could learn quickly if he would, for he is very sharp. And so sometimes for a joke I call him Riboudet (like the road one takes to go to Maromme) and I even say 'Mon Riboudet.' Ha! Ha! 'Mont Riboudet.' The other day I repeated that just to Monsignor, and he laughed at it; he condescended to laugh at it. And how is Monsieur Bovary?" She seemed not to hear him. And he went on-- "Always very busy, no doubt; for he and I are certainly the busiest people in the parish. But he is doctor of the body," he added with a thick laugh, "and I of the soul." She fixed her pleading eyes upon the priest. "Yes," she said, "you solace all sorrows." "Ah! don't talk to me of it, Madame Bovary. This morning I had to go to Bas-Diauville for a cow that was ill; they thought it was under a spell. All their cows, I don't know how it is--But pardon me! Longuemarre and Boudet! Bless me! Will you leave off?" And with a bound he ran into the church. The boys were just then clustering round the large desk, climbing over the precentor's footstool, opening the missal; and others on tiptoe were just about to venture into the confessional. But the priest suddenly distributed a shower of cuffs among them. Seizing them by the collars of their coats, he lifted them from the ground, and deposited them on their knees on the stones of the choir, firmly, as if he meant planting them there. "Yes," said he, when he returned to Emma, unfolding his large cotton handkerchief, one corner of which he put between his teeth, "farmers are much to be pitied." "Others, too," she replied. "Assuredly. Town-labourers, for example." "It is not they--" "Pardon! I've there known poor mothers of families, virtuous women, I assure you, real saints, who wanted even bread." "But those," replied Emma, and the corners of her mouth twitched as she spoke, "those, Monsieur le Cure, who have bread and have no--" "Fire in the winter," said the priest. "Oh, what does that matter?" "What! What does it matter? It seems to me that when one has firing and food--for, after all--" "My God! my God!" she sighed. "It is indigestion, no doubt? You must get home, Madame Bovary; drink a little tea, that will strengthen you, or else a glass of fresh water with a little moist sugar." "Why?" And she looked like one awaking from a dream. "Well, you see, you were putting your hand to your forehead. I thought you felt faint." Then, bethinking himself, "But you were asking me something? What was it? I really don't remember." "I? Nothing! nothing!" repeated Emma. And the glance she cast round her slowly fell upon the old man in the cassock. They looked at one another face to face without speaking. "Then, Madame Bovary," he said at last, "excuse me, but duty first, you know; I must look after my good-for-nothings. The first communion will soon be upon us, and I fear we shall be behind after all. So after Ascension Day I keep them recta* an extra hour every Wednesday. Poor children! One cannot lead them too soon into the path of the Lord, as, moreover, he has himself recommended us to do by the mouth of his Divine Son. Good health to you, madame; my respects to your husband." *On the straight and narrow path. And he went into the church making a genuflexion as soon as he reached the door. Emma saw him disappear between the double row of forms, walking with a heavy tread, his head a little bent over his shoulder, and with his two hands half-open behind him. Then she turned on her heel all of one piece, like a statue on a pivot, and went homewards. But the loud voice of the priest, the clear voices of the boys still reached her ears, and went on behind her. "Are you a Christian?" "Yes, I am a Christian." "What is a Christian?" "He who, being baptized-baptized-baptized--" She went up the steps of the staircase holding on to the banisters, and when she was in her room threw herself into an arm-chair. The whitish light of the window-panes fell with soft undulations. The furniture in its place seemed to have become more immobile, and to lose itself in the shadow as in an ocean of darkness. The fire was out, the clock went on ticking, and Emma vaguely marvelled at this calm of all things while within herself was such tumult. But little Berthe was there, between the window and the work-table, tottering on her knitted shoes, and trying to come to her mother to catch hold of the ends of her apron-strings. "Leave me alone," said the latter, putting her from her with her hand. The little girl soon came up closer against her knees, and leaning on them with her arms, she looked up with her large blue eyes, while a small thread of pure saliva dribbled from her lips on to the silk apron. "Leave me alone," repeated the young woman quite irritably. Her face frightened the child, who began to scream. "Will you leave me alone?" she said, pushing her with her elbow. Berthe fell at the foot of the drawers against the brass handle, cutting her cheek, which began to bleed, against it. Madame Bovary sprang to lift her up, broke the bell-rope, called for the servant with all her might, and she was just going to curse herself when Charles appeared. It was the dinner-hour; he had come home. "Look, dear!" said Emma, in a calm voice, "the little one fell down while she was playing, and has hurt herself." Charles reassured her; the case was not a serious one, and he went for some sticking plaster. Madame Bovary did not go downstairs to the dining-room; she wished to remain alone to look after the child. Then watching her sleep, the little anxiety she felt gradually wore off, and she seemed very stupid to herself, and very good to have been so worried just now at so little. Berthe, in fact, no longer sobbed. Her breathing now imperceptibly raised the cotton covering. Big tears lay in the corner of the half-closed eyelids, through whose lashes one could see two pale sunken pupils; the plaster stuck on her cheek drew the skin obliquely. "It is very strange," thought Emma, "how ugly this child is!" When at eleven o'clock Charles came back from the chemist's shop, whither he had gone after dinner to return the remainder of the sticking-plaster, he found his wife standing by the cradle. "I assure you it's nothing." he said, kissing her on the forehead. "Don't worry, my poor darling; you will make yourself ill." He had stayed a long time at the chemist's. Although he had not seemed much moved, Homais, nevertheless, had exerted himself to buoy him up, to "keep up his spirits." Then they had talked of the various dangers that threaten childhood, of the carelessness of servants. Madame Homais knew something of it, having still upon her chest the marks left by a basin full of soup that a cook had formerly dropped on her pinafore, and her good parents took no end of trouble for her. The knives were not sharpened, nor the floors waxed; there were iron gratings to the windows and strong bars across the fireplace; the little Homais, in spite of their spirit, could not stir without someone watching them; at the slightest cold their father stuffed them with pectorals; and until they were turned four they all, without pity, had to wear wadded head-protectors. This, it is true, was a fancy of Madame Homais'; her husband was inwardly afflicted at it. Fearing the possible consequences of such compression to the intellectual organs. He even went so far as to say to her, "Do you want to make Caribs or Botocudos of them?" Charles, however, had several times tried to interrupt the conversation. "I should like to speak to you," he had whispered in the clerk's ear, who went upstairs in front of him. "Can he suspect anything?" Leon asked himself. His heart beat, and he racked his brain with surmises. At last, Charles, having shut the door, asked him to see himself what would be the price at Rouen of a fine daguerreotypes. It was a sentimental surprise he intended for his wife, a delicate attention--his portrait in a frock-coat. But he wanted first to know "how much it would be." The inquiries would not put Monsieur Leon out, since he went to town almost every week. Why? Monsieur Homais suspected some "young man's affair" at the bottom of it, an intrigue. But he was mistaken. Leon was after no love-making. He was sadder than ever, as Madame Lefrancois saw from the amount of food he left on his plate. To find out more about it she questioned the tax-collector. Binet answered roughly that he "wasn't paid by the police." All the same, his companion seemed very strange to him, for Leon often threw himself back in his chair, and stretching out his arms, complained vaguely of life. "It's because you don't take enough recreation," said the collector. "What recreation?" "If I were you I'd have a lathe." "But I don't know how to turn," answered the clerk. "Ah! that's true," said the other, rubbing his chin with an air of mingled contempt and satisfaction. Leon was weary of loving without any result; moreover he was beginning to feel that depression caused by the repetition of the same kind of life, when no interest inspires and no hope sustains it. He was so bored with Yonville and its inhabitants, that the sight of certain persons, of certain houses, irritated him beyond endurance; and the chemist, good fellow though he was, was becoming absolutely unbearable to him. Yet the prospect of a new condition of life frightened as much as it seduced him. This apprehension soon changed into impatience, and then Paris from afar sounded its fanfare of masked balls with the laugh of grisettes. As he was to finish reading there, why not set out at once? What prevented him? And he began making home-preparations; he arranged his occupations beforehand. He furnished in his head an apartment. He would lead an artist's life there! He would take lessons on the guitar! He would have a dressing-gown, a Basque cap, blue velvet slippers! He even already was admiring two crossed foils over his chimney-piece, with a death's head on the guitar above them. The difficulty was the consent of his mother; nothing, however, seemed more reasonable. Even his employer advised him to go to some other chambers where he could advance more rapidly. Taking a middle course, then, Leon looked for some place as second clerk at Rouen; found none, and at last wrote his mother a long letter full of details, in which he set forth the reasons for going to live at Paris immediately. She consented. He did not hurry. Every day for a month Hivert carried boxes, valises, parcels for him from Yonville to Rouen and from Rouen to Yonville; and when Leon had packed up his wardrobe, had his three arm-chairs restuffed, bought a stock of neckties, in a word, had made more preparations than for a voyage around the world, he put it off from week to week, until he received a second letter from his mother urging him to leave, since he wanted to pass his examination before the vacation. When the moment for the farewells had come, Madame Homais wept, Justin sobbed; Homais, as a man of nerve, concealed his emotion; he wished to carry his friend's overcoat himself as far as the gate of the notary, who was taking Leon to Rouen in his carriage. The latter had just time to bid farewell to Monsieur Bovary. When he reached the head of the stairs, he stopped, he was so out of breath. As he came in, Madame Bovary arose hurriedly. "It is I again!" said Leon. "I was sure of it!" She bit her lips, and a rush of blood flowing under her skin made her red from the roots of her hair to the top of her collar. She remained standing, leaning with her shoulder against the wainscot. "The doctor is not here?" he went on. "He is out." She repeated, "He is out." Then there was silence. They looked at one another and their thoughts, confounded in the same agony, clung close together like two throbbing breasts. "I should like to kiss Berthe," said Leon. Emma went down a few steps and called Felicite. He threw one long look around him that took in the walls, the decorations, the fireplace, as if to penetrate everything, carry away everything. But she returned, and the servant brought Berthe, who was swinging a windmill roof downwards at the end of a string. Leon kissed her several times on the neck. "Good-bye, poor child! good-bye, dear little one! good-bye!" And he gave her back to her mother. "Take her away," she said. They remained alone--Madame Bovary, her back turned, her face pressed against a window-pane; Leon held his cap in his hand, knocking it softly against his thigh. "It is going to rain," said Emma. "I have a cloak," he answered. "Ah!" She turned around, her chin lowered, her forehead bent forward. The light fell on it as on a piece of marble, to the curve of the eyebrows, without one's being able to guess what Emma was seeing on the horizon or what she was thinking within herself. "Well, good-bye," he sighed. She raised her head with a quick movement. "Yes, good-bye--go!" They advanced towards each other; he held out his hand; she hesitated. "In the English fashion, then," she said, giving her own hand wholly to him, and forcing a laugh. Leon felt it between his fingers, and the very essence of all his being seemed to pass down into that moist palm. Then he opened his hand; their eyes met again, and he disappeared. When he reached the market-place, he stopped and hid behind a pillar to look for the last time at this white house with the four green blinds. He thought he saw a shadow behind the window in the room; but the curtain, sliding along the pole as though no one were touching it, slowly opened its long oblique folds that spread out with a single movement, and thus hung straight and motionless as a plaster wall. Leon set off running. From afar he saw his employer's gig in the road, and by it a man in a coarse apron holding the horse. Homais and Monsieur Guillaumin were talking. They were waiting for him. "Embrace me," said the druggist with tears in his eyes. "Here is your coat, my good friend. Mind the cold; take care of yourself; look after yourself." "Come, Leon, jump in," said the notary. Homais bent over the splash-board, and in a voice broken by sobs uttered these three sad words-- "A pleasant journey!" "Good-night," said Monsieur Guillaumin. "Give him his head." They set out, and Homais went back. Madame Bovary had opened her window overlooking the garden and watched the clouds. They gathered around the sunset on the side of Rouen and then swiftly rolled back their black columns, behind which the great rays of the sun looked out like the golden arrows of a suspended trophy, while the rest of the empty heavens was white as porcelain. But a gust of wind bowed the poplars, and suddenly the rain fell; it pattered against the green leaves. Then the sun reappeared, the hens clucked, sparrows shook their wings in the damp thickets, and the pools of water on the gravel as they flowed away carried off the pink flowers of an acacia. "Ah! how far off he must be already!" she thought. Monsieur Homais, as usual, came at half-past six during dinner. "Well," said he, "so we've sent off our young friend!" "So it seems," replied the doctor. Then turning on his chair; "Any news at home?" "Nothing much. Only my wife was a little moved this afternoon. You know women--a nothing upsets them, especially my wife. And we should be wrong to object to that, since their nervous organization is much more malleable than ours." "Poor Leon!" said Charles. "How will he live at Paris? Will he get used to it?" Madame Bovary sighed. "Get along!" said the chemist, smacking his lips. "The outings at restaurants, the masked balls, the champagne--all that'll be jolly enough, I assure you." "I don't think he'll go wrong," objected Bovary. "Nor do I," said Monsieur Homais quickly; "although he'll have to do like the rest for fear of passing for a Jesuit. And you don't know what a life those dogs lead in the Latin quarter with actresses. Besides, students are thought a great deal of in Paris. Provided they have a few accomplishments, they are received in the best society; there are even ladies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who fall in love with them, which subsequently furnishes them opportunities for making very good matches." "But," said the doctor, "I fear for him that down there--" "You are right," interrupted the chemist; "that is the reverse of the medal. And one is constantly obliged to keep one's hand in one's pocket there. Thus, we will suppose you are in a public garden. An individual presents himself, well dressed, even wearing an order, and whom one would take for a diplomatist. He approaches you, he insinuates himself; offers you a pinch of snuff, or picks up your hat. Then you become more intimate; he takes you to a cafe, invites you to his country-house, introduces you, between two drinks, to all sorts of people; and three-fourths of the time it's only to plunder your watch or lead you into some pernicious step. "That is true," said Charles; "but I was thinking especially of illnesses--of typhoid fever, for example, that attacks students from the provinces." Emma shuddered. "Because of the change of regimen," continued the chemist, "and of the perturbation that results therefrom in the whole system. And then the water at Paris, don't you know! The dishes at restaurants, all the spiced food, end by heating the blood, and are not worth, whatever people may say of them, a good soup. For my own part, I have always preferred plain living; it is more healthy. So when I was studying pharmacy at Rouen, I boarded in a boarding house; I dined with the professors." And thus he went on, expounding his opinions generally and his personal likings, until Justin came to fetch him for a mulled egg that was wanted. "Not a moment's peace!" he cried; "always at it! I can't go out for a minute! Like a plough-horse, I have always to be moiling and toiling. What drudgery!" Then, when he was at the door, "By the way, do you know the news?" "What news?" "That it is very likely," Homais went on, raising his eyebrows and assuming one of his most serious expression, "that the agricultural meeting of the Seine-Inferieure will be held this year at Yonville-l'Abbaye. The rumour, at all events, is going the round. This morning the paper alluded to it. It would be of the utmost importance for our district. But we'll talk it over later on. I can see, thank you; Justin has the lantern."

part 2, Chapter 6

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter5-6

One evening, while sitting at her window, Emma hears the church bell tolling and she is reminded of her girlhood in the convent. Seeking spiritual guidance she makes her way to the church where the boys from the village are gathering for catechism. She finds the abb, Monsieur Bournisien, in a distracted state of mind and despite her attempt to draw him into a conversation about her spiritual crises he does not glean the true reason for her visit and offers only banalities. He cannot fathom why anyone who is warm and fed would have troubles. At home she falls into a foul mood and when Berthe pesters her she pushes the child who falls and suffers a cut to her cheek. Emma immediately calls for help and Charles dresses the wound but that evening the mother watches the sleeping child closely. She notices with some surprise that her daughter is ugly. Lon becomes exceedingly morose and dissatisfied with life in Yonville and he finally resolves to move to Paris to complete his law studies. Lon and Emma part awkwardly and leaving much unsaid. Homais visits that night as usual and Emma suffers greatly as he and Charles discuss all the distractions and trappings of society that Lon will experience in Paris. Before he leaves, Homais mentions that there is a rumor that the region's annual Agricultural Show will be held in Yonville.

Emma's conviction that her happiness is dependent upon the proper surroundings leads her to associate her disgust with the dullness of the landscape and the flax mill with her disgust for Charles. In this manner she realizes that Lon, who stands apart from the drabness of Yonville, is in love with her. Shackled by propriety to her marriage she can only suffer as her love for the clerk mounts. Nevertheless she not only resists the urge to act on her love but she continues to be a responsible wife as evidenced of her refusal to purchase expensive goods from Lheureux. This is the first appearance of the merchant and his promise to her that he knows what ladies want indicates that he intends to make Emma a regular customer. Her attempt to find comfort in religion is deterred by the abbe's small-minded failure to appreciate the nature of her crises. This attitude is in keeping with the nineteenth century conception of women as mere recipients of a man's desires without their own sexual agenda or need for pleasure. Although Emma is trapped by her gender and marital status, Lon is a single man and he has the choice of escaping to Paris. This fact is particularly painful to Emma when she hears Homais and her husband, both of whom could have presumably exercised the same freedom at some point in their lives, discuss the clerk's future. Emma is revealed to be a caring mother when she worries over her daughter following her injury but her observation that her daughter is ugly reveals that she feels no great emotional identification with the child

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/16.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_6_part_1.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 7

part 2, chapter 7

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter7-8", "summary": "After Leon's departure, Emma is melancholy like she was during the days following the ball at La Vaubyessard. She regrets not making her love known to Leon. To compensate for what she perceives as her self-sacrifice by remaining faithful to Charles she begins ordering expensive items from Lheureux's shop. She becomes fatalistic and Charles, who notices only the outward signs of her decline, despairs for her health. Charles sends for his mother who advises him to prevent his wife from reading novels. The elder Madame Bovary departs on a market day and Emma leans out her window to watch the activity in the square. She sees a well-dressed man leading a peasant to her house and hears him instruct Justin to summon Monsieur Bovary. The man identifies himself as Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger a newcomer to the area who recently purchased a large estate called La Huchette near the village. Boulanger has brought his servant, who complains of feeling \"prickly\" all over, to be bled and Charles employs Justin to help him. Soon after the blood begins to flow, however, both the peasant and Justin fall into a dead faint and Emma comes running to assist her husband. Monsieur Boulanger notices that Bovary's wife is very pretty. On the way back to La Huchette, Boulanger resolves to have Emma as well. He decides upon a direct strategy of seduction to be implemented during the upcoming Agricultural Show", "analysis": ""}

The next day was a dreary one for Emma. Everything seemed to her enveloped in a black atmosphere floating confusedly over the exterior of things, and sorrow was engulfed within her soul with soft shrieks such as the winter wind makes in ruined castles. It was that reverie which we give to things that will not return, the lassitude that seizes you after everything was done; that pain, in fine, that the interruption of every wonted movement, the sudden cessation of any prolonged vibration, brings on. As on the return from Vaubyessard, when the quadrilles were running in her head, she was full of a gloomy melancholy, of a numb despair. Leon reappeared, taller, handsomer, more charming, more vague. Though separated from her, he had not left her; he was there, and the walls of the house seemed to hold his shadow. She could not detach her eyes from the carpet where he had walked, from those empty chairs where he had sat. The river still flowed on, and slowly drove its ripples along the slippery banks. They had often walked there to the murmur of the waves over the moss-covered pebbles. How bright the sun had been! What happy afternoons they had seen alone in the shade at the end of the garden! He read aloud, bareheaded, sitting on a footstool of dry sticks; the fresh wind of the meadow set trembling the leaves of the book and the nasturtiums of the arbour. Ah! he was gone, the only charm of her life, the only possible hope of joy. Why had she not seized this happiness when it came to her? Why not have kept hold of it with both hands, with both knees, when it was about to flee from her? And she cursed herself for not having loved Leon. She thirsted for his lips. The wish took possession of her to run after and rejoin him, throw herself into his arms and say to him, "It is I; I am yours." But Emma recoiled beforehand at the difficulties of the enterprise, and her desires, increased by regret, became only the more acute. Henceforth the memory of Leon was the centre of her boredom; it burnt there more brightly than the fire travellers have left on the snow of a Russian steppe. She sprang towards him, she pressed against him, she stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything that could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined, her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tete-a-tete--she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy. The flames, however, subsided, either because the supply had exhausted itself, or because it had been piled up too much. Love, little by little, was quelled by absence; regret stifled beneath habit; and this incendiary light that had empurpled her pale sky was overspread and faded by degrees. In the supineness of her conscience she even took her repugnance towards her husband for aspirations towards her lover, the burning of hate for the warmth of tenderness; but as the tempest still raged, and as passion burnt itself down to the very cinders, and no help came, no sun rose, there was night on all sides, and she was lost in the terrible cold that pierced her. Then the evil days of Tostes began again. She thought herself now far more unhappy; for she had the experience of grief, with the certainty that it would not end. A woman who had laid on herself such sacrifices could well allow herself certain whims. She bought a Gothic prie-dieu, and in a month spent fourteen francs on lemons for polishing her nails; she wrote to Rouen for a blue cashmere gown; she chose one of Lheureux's finest scarves, and wore it knotted around her waist over her dressing-gown; and, with closed blinds and a book in her hand, she lay stretched out on a couch in this garb. She often changed her coiffure; she did her hair a la Chinoise, in flowing curls, in plaited coils; she parted in on one side and rolled it under like a man's. She wanted to learn Italian; she bought dictionaries, a grammar, and a supply of white paper. She tried serious reading, history, and philosophy. Sometimes in the night Charles woke up with a start, thinking he was being called to a patient. "I'm coming," he stammered; and it was the noise of a match Emma had struck to relight the lamp. But her reading fared like her piece of embroidery, all of which, only just begun, filled her cupboard; she took it up, left it, passed on to other books. She had attacks in which she could easily have been driven to commit any folly. She maintained one day, in opposition to her husband, that she could drink off a large glass of brandy, and, as Charles was stupid enough to dare her to, she swallowed the brandy to the last drop. In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed. She was pale all over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old age. She often fainted. One day she even spat blood, and, as Charles fussed around her showing his anxiety-- "Bah!" she answered, "what does it matter?" Charles fled to his study and wept there, both his elbows on the table, sitting in an arm-chair at his bureau under the phrenological head. Then he wrote to his mother begging her to come, and they had many long consultations together on the subject of Emma. What should they decide? What was to be done since she rejected all medical treatment? "Do you know what your wife wants?" replied Madame Bovary senior. "She wants to be forced to occupy herself with some manual work. If she were obliged, like so many others, to earn her living, she wouldn't have these vapours, that come to her from a lot of ideas she stuffs into her head, and from the idleness in which she lives." "Yet she is always busy," said Charles. "Ah! always busy at what? Reading novels, bad books, works against religion, and in which they mock at priests in speeches taken from Voltaire. But all that leads you far astray, my poor child. Anyone who has no religion always ends by turning out badly." So it was decided to stop Emma reading novels. The enterprise did not seem easy. The good lady undertook it. She was, when she passed through Rouen, to go herself to the lending-library and represent that Emma had discontinued her subscription. Would they not have a right to apply to the police if the librarian persisted all the same in his poisonous trade? The farewells of mother and daughter-in-law were cold. During the three weeks that they had been together they had not exchanged half-a-dozen words apart from the inquiries and phrases when they met at table and in the evening before going to bed. Madame Bovary left on a Wednesday, the market-day at Yonville. The Place since morning had been blocked by a row of carts, which, on end and their shafts in the air, spread all along the line of houses from the church to the inn. On the other side there were canvas booths, where cotton checks, blankets, and woollen stockings were sold, together with harness for horses, and packets of blue ribbon, whose ends fluttered in the wind. The coarse hardware was spread out on the ground between pyramids of eggs and hampers of cheeses, from which sticky straw stuck out. Near the corn-machines clucking hens passed their necks through the bars of flat cages. The people, crowding in the same place and unwilling to move thence, sometimes threatened to smash the shop front of the chemist. On Wednesdays his shop was never empty, and the people pushed in less to buy drugs than for consultations. So great was Homais' reputation in the neighbouring villages. His robust aplomb had fascinated the rustics. They considered him a greater doctor than all the doctors. Emma was leaning out at the window; she was often there. The window in the provinces replaces the theatre and the promenade, she was amusing herself with watching the crowd of boors when she saw a gentleman in a green velvet coat. He had on yellow gloves, although he wore heavy gaiters; he was coming towards the doctor's house, followed by a peasant walking with a bent head and quite a thoughtful air. "Can I see the doctor?" he asked Justin, who was talking on the doorsteps with Felicite, and, taking him for a servant of the house--"Tell him that Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger of La Huchette is here." It was not from territorial vanity that the new arrival added "of La Huchette" to his name, but to make himself the better known. La Huchette, in fact, was an estate near Yonville, where he had just bought the chateau and two farms that he cultivated himself, without, however, troubling very much about them. He lived as a bachelor, and was supposed to have "at least fifteen thousand francs a year." Charles came into the room. Monsieur Boulanger introduced his man, who wanted to be bled because he felt "a tingling all over." "That'll purge me," he urged as an objection to all reasoning. So Bovary ordered a bandage and a basin, and asked Justin to hold it. Then addressing the peasant, who was already pale-- "Don't be afraid, my lad." "No, no, sir," said the other; "get on." And with an air of bravado he held out his great arm. At the prick of the lancet the blood spurted out, splashing against the looking-glass. "Hold the basin nearer," exclaimed Charles. "Lor!" said the peasant, "one would swear it was a little fountain flowing. How red my blood is! That's a good sign, isn't it?" "Sometimes," answered the doctor, "one feels nothing at first, and then syncope sets in, and more especially with people of strong constitution like this man." At these words the rustic let go the lancet-case he was twisting between his fingers. A shudder of his shoulders made the chair-back creak. His hat fell off. "I thought as much," said Bovary, pressing his finger on the vein. The basin was beginning to tremble in Justin's hands; his knees shook, he turned pale. "Emma! Emma!" called Charles. With one bound she came down the staircase. "Some vinegar," he cried. "O dear! two at once!" And in his emotion he could hardly put on the compress. "It is nothing," said Monsieur Boulanger quietly, taking Justin in his arms. He seated him on the table with his back resting against the wall. Madame Bovary began taking off his cravat. The strings of his shirt had got into a knot, and she was for some minutes moving her light fingers about the young fellow's neck. Then she poured some vinegar on her cambric handkerchief; she moistened his temples with little dabs, and then blew upon them softly. The ploughman revived, but Justin's syncope still lasted, and his eyeballs disappeared in the pale sclerotics like blue flowers in milk. "We must hide this from him," said Charles. Madame Bovary took the basin to put it under the table. With the movement she made in bending down, her dress (it was a summer dress with four flounces, yellow, long in the waist and wide in the skirt) spread out around her on the flags of the room; and as Emma stooping, staggered a little as she stretched out her arms. The stuff here and there gave with the inflections of her bust. Then she went to fetch a bottle of water, and she was melting some pieces of sugar when the chemist arrived. The servant had been to fetch him in the tumult. Seeing his pupil's eyes staring he drew a long breath; then going around him he looked at him from head to foot. "Fool!" he said, "really a little fool! A fool in four letters! A phlebotomy's a big affair, isn't it! And a fellow who isn't afraid of anything; a kind of squirrel, just as he is who climbs to vertiginous heights to shake down nuts. Oh, yes! you just talk to me, boast about yourself! Here's a fine fitness for practising pharmacy later on; for under serious circumstances you may be called before the tribunals in order to enlighten the minds of the magistrates, and you would have to keep your head then, to reason, show yourself a man, or else pass for an imbecile." Justin did not answer. The chemist went on-- "Who asked you to come? You are always pestering the doctor and madame. On Wednesday, moreover, your presence is indispensable to me. There are now twenty people in the shop. I left everything because of the interest I take in you. Come, get along! Sharp! Wait for me, and keep an eye on the jars." When Justin, who was rearranging his dress, had gone, they talked for a little while about fainting-fits. Madame Bovary had never fainted. "That is extraordinary for a lady," said Monsieur Boulanger; "but some people are very susceptible. Thus in a duel, I have seen a second lose consciousness at the mere sound of the loading of pistols." "For my part," said the chemist, "the sight of other people's blood doesn't affect me at all, but the mere thought of my own flowing would make me faint if I reflected upon it too much." Monsieur Boulanger, however, dismissed his servant, advising him to calm himself, since his fancy was over. "It procured me the advantage of making your acquaintance," he added, and he looked at Emma as he said this. Then he put three francs on the corner of the table, bowed negligently, and went out. He was soon on the other side of the river (this was his way back to La Huchette), and Emma saw him in the meadow, walking under the poplars, slackening his pace now and then as one who reflects. "She is very pretty," he said to himself; "she is very pretty, this doctor's wife. Fine teeth, black eyes, a dainty foot, a figure like a Parisienne's. Where the devil does she come from? Wherever did that fat fellow pick her up?" Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger was thirty-four; he was of brutal temperament and intelligent perspicacity, having, moreover, had much to do with women, and knowing them well. This one had seemed pretty to him; so he was thinking about her and her husband. "I think he is very stupid. She is tired of him, no doubt. He has dirty nails, and hasn't shaved for three days. While he is trotting after his patients, she sits there botching socks. And she gets bored! She would like to live in town and dance polkas every evening. Poor little woman! She is gaping after love like a carp after water on a kitchen-table. With three words of gallantry she'd adore one, I'm sure of it. She'd be tender, charming. Yes; but how to get rid of her afterwards?" Then the difficulties of love-making seen in the distance made him by contrast think of his mistress. She was an actress at Rouen, whom he kept; and when he had pondered over this image, with which, even in remembrance, he was satiated-- "Ah! Madame Bovary," he thought, "is much prettier, especially fresher. Virginie is decidedly beginning to grow fat. She is so finiky about her pleasures; and, besides, she has a mania for prawns." The fields were empty, and around him Rodolphe only heard the regular beating of the grass striking against his boots, with a cry of the grasshopper hidden at a distance among the oats. He again saw Emma in her room, dressed as he had seen her, and he undressed her. "Oh, I will have her," he cried, striking a blow with his stick at a clod in front of him. And he at once began to consider the political part of the enterprise. He asked himself-- "Where shall we meet? By what means? We shall always be having the brat on our hands, and the servant, the neighbours, and husband, all sorts of worries. Pshaw! one would lose too much time over it." Then he resumed, "She really has eyes that pierce one's heart like a gimlet. And that pale complexion! I adore pale women!" When he reached the top of the Arguiel hills he had made up his mind. "It's only finding the opportunities. Well, I will call in now and then. I'll send them venison, poultry; I'll have myself bled, if need be. We shall become friends; I'll invite them to my place. By Jove!" added he, "there's the agricultural show coming on. She'll be there. I shall see her. We'll begin boldly, for that's the surest way."

part 2, Chapter 7

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter7-8

After Leon's departure, Emma is melancholy like she was during the days following the ball at La Vaubyessard. She regrets not making her love known to Leon. To compensate for what she perceives as her self-sacrifice by remaining faithful to Charles she begins ordering expensive items from Lheureux's shop. She becomes fatalistic and Charles, who notices only the outward signs of her decline, despairs for her health. Charles sends for his mother who advises him to prevent his wife from reading novels. The elder Madame Bovary departs on a market day and Emma leans out her window to watch the activity in the square. She sees a well-dressed man leading a peasant to her house and hears him instruct Justin to summon Monsieur Bovary. The man identifies himself as Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger a newcomer to the area who recently purchased a large estate called La Huchette near the village. Boulanger has brought his servant, who complains of feeling "prickly" all over, to be bled and Charles employs Justin to help him. Soon after the blood begins to flow, however, both the peasant and Justin fall into a dead faint and Emma comes running to assist her husband. Monsieur Boulanger notices that Bovary's wife is very pretty. On the way back to La Huchette, Boulanger resolves to have Emma as well. He decides upon a direct strategy of seduction to be implemented during the upcoming Agricultural Show

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/17.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_6_part_2.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 8

part 2, chapter 8

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter7-8", "summary": "On the morning of the Agricultural Show the entire town is decorated full of anticipation. An antique fieldpiece will sound at the arrival of the King's prefect. Homais engages Madame Lefraneois in conversation on his way to serve on the show's advisory committee. Madame Lefraneois doesn't think much of the fair and even less of the activity at her competitor's cafe but she reserves her harshest judgment for Monsieur Lheureux whose loan notes will cause her competitor's cafe to close soon. Homais rushes off to greet Madame Bovary whom he sees walking on the arm of Rodolphe Boulanger. The pair manages to avoid not only Homais but Lheureux as well and Rodolphe steers Emma down a side lane. They make a cursory examination of the livestock exhibits and Rodolphe, noticing that Madame Bovary cares little for these things, begins to mock the show and the fashions of the Yonville ladies. They pass Lestiboudois, the gravedigger who keeps a potato patch in the cemetery, carrying chairs from the church to rent to the crowd. As they walk Rodolphe begins his seduction by explaining to Emma that despite his outward appearance of gaiety he spends much of his time feeling depressed and often wonders if he wouldn't be better off dead. The report of the canon interrupts his reverie and the crowd rushes to the square only to find that it was a false alarm. Soon, however, a stately carriage rushes into the square and a small benign-looking man emerges. He explains that the prefect is unable to attend but he, as prefectural councilor, has come in his place. Mayor Tuvache exchanges awkward greetings with the man. Rodolphe and Emma make their way to the empty second floor of the town hall in order to have a better view of the proceedings. While the prefectural councilor, whose name is Lieuvain, begins his official remarks with a lengthy discourse upon the worthiness of the King, Rodolphe continues his wooing of Emma. He tells her that though he is known for his excesses of pleasure he has never known true happiness but he asserts his belief that happiness will come suddenly one day. Lieuvain's makes several statements regarding duty which prompts Rodolphe to opine that real duty is to be true to ones own feelings. Emma protests that people must adhere to some of society's conventions but Rodolphe insists that the only true morality is the eternal one. As Lieuvain proceeds to explicate the advances in agriculture, Rodolphe moves closer to Emma and lowers his voice. He laments the manner in which society destroys noble sentiments and prevents worthy souls from mingling. Emma is overcome by the scent of Rodolphe's perfume and she imagines that she is back at the party at La Vaubyessard and then she sees the Hirondelle cresting the hill and she thinks of Leon. Lieuvain finishes his speech and other functionaries deliver orations. As the prizes for the show are announced Rodolphe states his belief that fate has brought he and Emma together and he enumerates the details of his passion for her. Emma is beguiled by his speech and grasps his hand in her own. The final prize is to an old peasant woman who scarcely understands what is happening to her. With the ceremonies over the crowd disperses and Rodolphe escorts Emma to her home. Later that evening he joins the Bovary's to watch the feeble fireworks display.", "analysis": "Emma's renewed bout of depression and unfulfilled desires makes her ripe for a man like Rodolphe whom the reader learns is bent upon seduction. Flaubert masterfully juxtaposes the official's lugubrious speechifying with Rodolphe's seduction of Emma. This passage is considered one of the novel's best and amply demonstrates the advantages of the free indirect discourse style of composition. Positioning is important in this section as Emma first views Rodolphe from above while leaning out her window onto the market and then when he woos her while they sit looking down upon the market. Thus the man and woman are linked by their sense of superiority to the town and the petty business concerns of its inhabitants"}

At last it came, the famous agricultural show. On the morning of the solemnity all the inhabitants at their doors were chatting over the preparations. The pediment of the town hall had been hung with garlands of ivy; a tent had been erected in a meadow for the banquet; and in the middle of the Place, in front of the church, a kind of bombarde was to announce the arrival of the prefect and the names of the successful farmers who had obtained prizes. The National Guard of Buchy (there was none at Yonville) had come to join the corps of firemen, of whom Binet was captain. On that day he wore a collar even higher than usual; and, tightly buttoned in his tunic, his figure was so stiff and motionless that the whole vital portion of his person seemed to have descended into his legs, which rose in a cadence of set steps with a single movement. As there was some rivalry between the tax-collector and the colonel, both, to show off their talents, drilled their men separately. One saw the red epaulettes and the black breastplates pass and re-pass alternately; there was no end to it, and it constantly began again. There had never been such a display of pomp. Several citizens had scoured their houses the evening before; tri-coloured flags hung from half-open windows; all the public-houses were full; and in the lovely weather the starched caps, the golden crosses, and the coloured neckerchiefs seemed whiter than snow, shone in the sun, and relieved with the motley colours the sombre monotony of the frock-coats and blue smocks. The neighbouring farmers' wives, when they got off their horses, pulled out the long pins that fastened around them their dresses, turned up for fear of mud; and the husbands, for their part, in order to save their hats, kept their handkerchiefs around them, holding one corner between their teeth. The crowd came into the main street from both ends of the village. People poured in from the lanes, the alleys, the houses; and from time to time one heard knockers banging against doors closing behind women with their gloves, who were going out to see the fete. What was most admired were two long lamp-stands covered with lanterns, that flanked a platform on which the authorities were to sit. Besides this there were against the four columns of the town hall four kinds of poles, each bearing a small standard of greenish cloth, embellished with inscriptions in gold letters. On one was written, "To Commerce"; on the other, "To Agriculture"; on the third, "To Industry"; and on the fourth, "To the Fine Arts." But the jubilation that brightened all faces seemed to darken that of Madame Lefrancois, the innkeeper. Standing on her kitchen-steps she muttered to herself, "What rubbish! what rubbish! With their canvas booth! Do they think the prefect will be glad to dine down there under a tent like a gipsy? They call all this fussing doing good to the place! Then it wasn't worth while sending to Neufchatel for the keeper of a cookshop! And for whom? For cowherds! tatterdemalions!" The druggist was passing. He had on a frock-coat, nankeen trousers, beaver shoes, and, for a wonder, a hat with a low crown. "Your servant! Excuse me, I am in a hurry." And as the fat widow asked where he was going-- "It seems odd to you, doesn't it, I who am always more cooped up in my laboratory than the man's rat in his cheese." "What cheese?" asked the landlady. "Oh, nothing! nothing!" Homais continued. "I merely wished to convey to you, Madame Lefrancois, that I usually live at home like a recluse. To-day, however, considering the circumstances, it is necessary--" "Oh, you're going down there!" she said contemptuously. "Yes, I am going," replied the druggist, astonished. "Am I not a member of the consulting commission?" Mere Lefrancois looked at him for a few moments, and ended by saying with a smile-- "That's another pair of shoes! But what does agriculture matter to you? Do you understand anything about it?" "Certainly I understand it, since I am a druggist--that is to say, a chemist. And the object of chemistry, Madame Lefrancois, being the knowledge of the reciprocal and molecular action of all natural bodies, it follows that agriculture is comprised within its domain. And, in fact, the composition of the manure, the fermentation of liquids, the analyses of gases, and the influence of miasmata, what, I ask you, is all this, if it isn't chemistry, pure and simple?" The landlady did not answer. Homais went on-- "Do you think that to be an agriculturist it is necessary to have tilled the earth or fattened fowls oneself? It is necessary rather to know the composition of the substances in question--the geological strata, the atmospheric actions, the quality of the soil, the minerals, the waters, the density of the different bodies, their capillarity, and what not. And one must be master of all the principles of hygiene in order to direct, criticize the construction of buildings, the feeding of animals, the diet of domestics. And, moreover, Madame Lefrancois, one must know botany, be able to distinguish between plants, you understand, which are the wholesome and those that are deleterious, which are unproductive and which nutritive, if it is well to pull them up here and re-sow them there, to propagate some, destroy others; in brief, one must keep pace with science by means of pamphlets and public papers, be always on the alert to find out improvements." The landlady never took her eyes off the "Cafe Francois" and the chemist went on-- "Would to God our agriculturists were chemists, or that at least they would pay more attention to the counsels of science. Thus lately I myself wrote a considerable tract, a memoir of over seventy-two pages, entitled, 'Cider, its Manufacture and its Effects, together with some New Reflections on the Subject,' that I sent to the Agricultural Society of Rouen, and which even procured me the honour of being received among its members--Section, Agriculture; Class, Pomological. Well, if my work had been given to the public--" But the druggist stopped, Madame Lefrancois seemed so preoccupied. "Just look at them!" she said. "It's past comprehension! Such a cookshop as that!" And with a shrug of the shoulders that stretched out over her breast the stitches of her knitted bodice, she pointed with both hands at her rival's inn, whence songs were heard issuing. "Well, it won't last long," she added. "It'll be over before a week." Homais drew back with stupefaction. She came down three steps and whispered in his ear-- "What! you didn't know it? There is to be an execution in next week. It's Lheureux who is selling him out; he has killed him with bills." "What a terrible catastrophe!" cried the druggist, who always found expressions in harmony with all imaginable circumstances. Then the landlady began telling him the story that she had heard from Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's servant, and although she detested Tellier, she blamed Lheureux. He was "a wheedler, a sneak." "There!" she said. "Look at him! he is in the market; he is bowing to Madame Bovary, who's got on a green bonnet. Why, she's taking Monsieur Boulanger's arm." "Madame Bovary!" exclaimed Homais. "I must go at once and pay her my respects. Perhaps she'll be very glad to have a seat in the enclosure under the peristyle." And, without heeding Madame Lefrancois, who was calling him back to tell him more about it, the druggist walked off rapidly with a smile on his lips, with straight knees, bowing copiously to right and left, and taking up much room with the large tails of his frock-coat that fluttered behind him in the wind. Rodolphe, having caught sight of him from afar, hurried on, but Madame Bovary lost her breath; so he walked more slowly, and, smiling at her, said in a rough tone-- "It's only to get away from that fat fellow, you know, the druggist." She pressed his elbow. "What's the meaning of that?" he asked himself. And he looked at her out of the corner of his eyes. Her profile was so calm that one could guess nothing from it. It stood out in the light from the oval of her bonnet, with pale ribbons on it like the leaves of weeds. Her eyes with their long curved lashes looked straight before her, and though wide open, they seemed slightly puckered by the cheek-bones, because of the blood pulsing gently under the delicate skin. A pink line ran along the partition between her nostrils. Her head was bent upon her shoulder, and the pearl tips of her white teeth were seen between her lips. "Is she making fun of me?" thought Rodolphe. Emma's gesture, however, had only been meant for a warning; for Monsieur Lheureux was accompanying them, and spoke now and again as if to enter into the conversation. "What a superb day! Everybody is out! The wind is east!" And neither Madame Bovary nor Rodolphe answered him, whilst at the slightest movement made by them he drew near, saying, "I beg your pardon!" and raised his hat. When they reached the farrier's house, instead of following the road up to the fence, Rodolphe suddenly turned down a path, drawing with him Madame Bovary. He called out-- "Good evening, Monsieur Lheureux! See you again presently." "How you got rid of him!" she said, laughing. "Why," he went on, "allow oneself to be intruded upon by others? And as to-day I have the happiness of being with you--" Emma blushed. He did not finish his sentence. Then he talked of the fine weather and of the pleasure of walking on the grass. A few daisies had sprung up again. "Here are some pretty Easter daisies," he said, "and enough of them to furnish oracles to all the amorous maids in the place." He added, "Shall I pick some? What do you think?" "Are you in love?" she asked, coughing a little. "H'm, h'm! who knows?" answered Rodolphe. The meadow began to fill, and the housewives hustled you with their great umbrellas, their baskets, and their babies. One had often to get out of the way of a long file of country folk, servant-maids with blue stockings, flat shoes, silver rings, and who smelt of milk, when one passed close to them. They walked along holding one another by the hand, and thus they spread over the whole field from the row of open trees to the banquet tent. But this was the examination time, and the farmers one after the other entered a kind of enclosure formed by a long cord supported on sticks. The beasts were there, their noses towards the cord, and making a confused line with their unequal rumps. Drowsy pigs were burrowing in the earth with their snouts, calves were bleating, lambs baaing; the cows, on knees folded in, were stretching their bellies on the grass, slowly chewing the cud, and blinking their heavy eyelids at the gnats that buzzed round them. Plough-men with bare arms were holding by the halter prancing stallions that neighed with dilated nostrils looking towards the mares. These stood quietly, stretching out their heads and flowing manes, while their foals rested in their shadow, or now and then came and sucked them. And above the long undulation of these crowded animals one saw some white mane rising in the wind like a wave, or some sharp horns sticking out, and the heads of men running about. Apart, outside the enclosure, a hundred paces off, was a large black bull, muzzled, with an iron ring in its nostrils, and who moved no more than if he had been in bronze. A child in rags was holding him by a rope. Between the two lines the committee-men were walking with heavy steps, examining each animal, then consulting one another in a low voice. One who seemed of more importance now and then took notes in a book as he walked along. This was the president of the jury, Monsieur Derozerays de la Panville. As soon as he recognised Rodolphe he came forward quickly, and smiling amiably, said-- "What! Monsieur Boulanger, you are deserting us?" Rodolphe protested that he was just coming. But when the president had disappeared-- "Ma foi!*" said he, "I shall not go. Your company is better than his." *Upon my word! And while poking fun at the show, Rodolphe, to move about more easily, showed the gendarme his blue card, and even stopped now and then in front of some fine beast, which Madame Bovary did not at all admire. He noticed this, and began jeering at the Yonville ladies and their dresses; then he apologised for the negligence of his own. He had that incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for social conventions, that seduces or exasperates them. Thus his cambric shirt with plaited cuffs was blown out by the wind in the opening of his waistcoat of grey ticking, and his broad-striped trousers disclosed at the ankle nankeen boots with patent leather gaiters. These were so polished that they reflected the grass. He trampled on horses's dung with them, one hand in the pocket of his jacket and his straw hat on one side. "Besides," added he, "when one lives in the country--" "It's waste of time," said Emma. "That is true," replied Rodolphe. "To think that not one of these people is capable of understanding even the cut of a coat!" Then they talked about provincial mediocrity, of the lives it crushed, the illusions lost there. "And I too," said Rodolphe, "am drifting into depression." "You!" she said in astonishment; "I thought you very light-hearted." "Ah! yes. I seem so, because in the midst of the world I know how to wear the mask of a scoffer upon my face; and yet, how many a time at the sight of a cemetery by moonlight have I not asked myself whether it were not better to join those sleeping there!" "Oh! and your friends?" she said. "You do not think of them." "My friends! What friends? Have I any? Who cares for me?" And he accompanied the last words with a kind of whistling of the lips. But they were obliged to separate from each other because of a great pile of chairs that a man was carrying behind them. He was so overladen with them that one could only see the tips of his wooden shoes and the ends of his two outstretched arms. It was Lestiboudois, the gravedigger, who was carrying the church chairs about amongst the people. Alive to all that concerned his interests, he had hit upon this means of turning the show to account; and his idea was succeeding, for he no longer knew which way to turn. In fact, the villagers, who were hot, quarreled for these seats, whose straw smelt of incense, and they leant against the thick backs, stained with the wax of candles, with a certain veneration. Madame Bovary again took Rodolphe's arm; he went on as if speaking to himself-- "Yes, I have missed so many things. Always alone! Ah! if I had some aim in life, if I had met some love, if I had found someone! Oh, how I would have spent all the energy of which I am capable, surmounted everything, overcome everything!" "Yet it seems to me," said Emma, "that you are not to be pitied." "Ah! you think so?" said Rodolphe. "For, after all," she went on, "you are free--" she hesitated, "rich--" "Do not mock me," he replied. And she protested that she was not mocking him, when the report of a cannon resounded. Immediately all began hustling one another pell-mell towards the village. It was a false alarm. The prefect seemed not to be coming, and the members of the jury felt much embarrassed, not knowing if they ought to begin the meeting or still wait. At last at the end of the Place a large hired landau appeared, drawn by two thin horses, which a coachman in a white hat was whipping lustily. Binet had only just time to shout, "Present arms!" and the colonel to imitate him. All ran towards the enclosure; everyone pushed forward. A few even forgot their collars; but the equipage of the prefect seemed to anticipate the crowd, and the two yoked jades, trapesing in their harness, came up at a little trot in front of the peristyle of the town hall at the very moment when the National Guard and firemen deployed, beating drums and marking time. "Present!" shouted Binet. "Halt!" shouted the colonel. "Left about, march." And after presenting arms, during which the clang of the band, letting loose, rang out like a brass kettle rolling downstairs, all the guns were lowered. Then was seen stepping down from the carriage a gentleman in a short coat with silver braiding, with bald brow, and wearing a tuft of hair at the back of his head, of a sallow complexion and the most benign appearance. His eyes, very large and covered by heavy lids, were half-closed to look at the crowd, while at the same time he raised his sharp nose, and forced a smile upon his sunken mouth. He recognised the mayor by his scarf, and explained to him that the prefect was not able to come. He himself was a councillor at the prefecture; then he added a few apologies. Monsieur Tuvache answered them with compliments; the other confessed himself nervous; and they remained thus, face to face, their foreheads almost touching, with the members of the jury all round, the municipal council, the notable personages, the National Guard and the crowd. The councillor pressing his little cocked hat to his breast repeated his bows, while Tuvache, bent like a bow, also smiled, stammered, tried to say something, protested his devotion to the monarchy and the honour that was being done to Yonville. Hippolyte, the groom from the inn, took the head of the horses from the coachman, and, limping along with his club-foot, led them to the door of the "Lion d'Or", where a number of peasants collected to look at the carriage. The drum beat, the howitzer thundered, and the gentlemen one by one mounted the platform, where they sat down in red utrecht velvet arm-chairs that had been lent by Madame Tuvache. All these people looked alike. Their fair flabby faces, somewhat tanned by the sun, were the colour of sweet cider, and their puffy whiskers emerged from stiff collars, kept up by white cravats with broad bows. All the waist-coats were of velvet, double-breasted; all the watches had, at the end of a long ribbon, an oval cornelian seal; everyone rested his two hands on his thighs, carefully stretching the stride of their trousers, whose unsponged glossy cloth shone more brilliantly than the leather of their heavy boots. The ladies of the company stood at the back under the vestibule between the pillars while the common herd was opposite, standing up or sitting on chairs. As a matter of fact, Lestiboudois had brought thither all those that he had moved from the field, and he even kept running back every minute to fetch others from the church. He caused such confusion with this piece of business that one had great difficulty in getting to the small steps of the platform. "I think," said Monsieur Lheureux to the chemist, who was passing to his place, "that they ought to have put up two Venetian masts with something rather severe and rich for ornaments; it would have been a very pretty effect." "To be sure," replied Homais; "but what can you expect? The mayor took everything on his own shoulders. He hasn't much taste. Poor Tuvache! and he is even completely destitute of what is called the genius of art." Rodolphe, meanwhile, with Madame Bovary, had gone up to the first floor of the town hall, to the "council-room," and, as it was empty, he declared that they could enjoy the sight there more comfortably. He fetched three stools from the round table under the bust of the monarch, and having carried them to one of the windows, they sat down by each other. There was commotion on the platform, long whisperings, much parleying. At last the councillor got up. They knew now that his name was Lieuvain, and in the crowd the name was passed from one to the other. After he had collated a few pages, and bent over them to see better, he began-- "Gentlemen! May I be permitted first of all (before addressing you on the object of our meeting to-day, and this sentiment will, I am sure, be shared by you all), may I be permitted, I say, to pay a tribute to the higher administration, to the government to the monarch, gentle men, our sovereign, to that beloved king, to whom no branch of public or private prosperity is a matter of indifference, and who directs with a hand at once so firm and wise the chariot of the state amid the incessant perils of a stormy sea, knowing, moreover, how to make peace respected as well as war, industry, commerce, agriculture, and the fine arts?" "I ought," said Rodolphe, "to get back a little further." "Why?" said Emma. But at this moment the voice of the councillor rose to an extraordinary pitch. He declaimed-- "This is no longer the time, gentlemen, when civil discord ensanguined our public places, when the landlord, the business-man, the working-man himself, falling asleep at night, lying down to peaceful sleep, trembled lest he should be awakened suddenly by the noise of incendiary tocsins, when the most subversive doctrines audaciously sapped foundations." "Well, someone down there might see me," Rodolphe resumed, "then I should have to invent excuses for a fortnight; and with my bad reputation--" "Oh, you are slandering yourself," said Emma. "No! It is dreadful, I assure you." "But, gentlemen," continued the councillor, "if, banishing from my memory the remembrance of these sad pictures, I carry my eyes back to the actual situation of our dear country, what do I see there? Everywhere commerce and the arts are flourishing; everywhere new means of communication, like so many new arteries in the body of the state, establish within it new relations. Our great industrial centres have recovered all their activity; religion, more consolidated, smiles in all hearts; our ports are full, confidence is born again, and France breathes once more!" "Besides," added Rodolphe, "perhaps from the world's point of view they are right." "How so?" she asked. "What!" said he. "Do you not know that there are souls constantly tormented? They need by turns to dream and to act, the purest passions and the most turbulent joys, and thus they fling themselves into all sorts of fantasies, of follies." Then she looked at him as one looks at a traveller who has voyaged over strange lands, and went on-- "We have not even this distraction, we poor women!" "A sad distraction, for happiness isn't found in it." "But is it ever found?" she asked. "Yes; one day it comes," he answered. "And this is what you have understood," said the councillor. "You, farmers, agricultural labourers! you pacific pioneers of a work that belongs wholly to civilization! you, men of progress and morality, you have understood, I say, that political storms are even more redoubtable than atmospheric disturbances!" "It comes one day," repeated Rodolphe, "one day suddenly, and when one is despairing of it. Then the horizon expands; it is as if a voice cried, 'It is here!' You feel the need of confiding the whole of your life, of giving everything, sacrificing everything to this being. There is no need for explanations; they understand one another. They have seen each other in dreams!" (And he looked at her.) "In fine, here it is, this treasure so sought after, here before you. It glitters, it flashes; yet one still doubts, one does not believe it; one remains dazzled, as if one went out from darkness into light." And as he ended Rodolphe suited the action to the word. He passed his hand over his face, like a man seized with giddiness. Then he let it fall on Emma's. She took hers away. "And who would be surprised at it, gentlemen? He only who is so blind, so plunged (I do not fear to say it), so plunged in the prejudices of another age as still to misunderstand the spirit of agricultural populations. Where, indeed, is to be found more patriotism than in the country, greater devotion to the public welfare, more intelligence, in a word? And, gentlemen, I do not mean that superficial intelligence, vain ornament of idle minds, but rather that profound and balanced intelligence that applies itself above all else to useful objects, thus contributing to the good of all, to the common amelioration and to the support of the state, born of respect for law and the practice of duty--" "Ah! again!" said Rodolphe. "Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us." "Yet--yet--" objected Madame Bovary. "No, no! Why cry out against the passions? Are they not the one beautiful thing on the earth, the source of heroism, of enthusiasm, of poetry, music, the arts, of everything, in a word?" "But one must," said Emma, "to some extent bow to the opinion of the world and accept its moral code." "Ah! but there are two," he replied. "The small, the conventional, that of men, that which constantly changes, that brays out so loudly, that makes such a commotion here below, of the earth earthly, like the mass of imbeciles you see down there. But the other, the eternal, that is about us and above, like the landscape that surrounds us, and the blue heavens that give us light." Monsieur Lieuvain had just wiped his mouth with a pocket-handkerchief. He continued-- "And what should I do here gentlemen, pointing out to you the uses of agriculture? Who supplies our wants? Who provides our means of subsistence? Is it not the agriculturist? The agriculturist, gentlemen, who, sowing with laborious hand the fertile furrows of the country, brings forth the corn, which, being ground, is made into a powder by means of ingenious machinery, comes out thence under the name of flour, and from there, transported to our cities, is soon delivered at the baker's, who makes it into food for poor and rich alike. Again, is it not the agriculturist who fattens, for our clothes, his abundant flocks in the pastures? For how should we clothe ourselves, how nourish ourselves, without the agriculturist? And, gentlemen, is it even necessary to go so far for examples? Who has not frequently reflected on all the momentous things that we get out of that modest animal, the ornament of poultry-yards, that provides us at once with a soft pillow for our bed, with succulent flesh for our tables, and eggs? But I should never end if I were to enumerate one after the other all the different products which the earth, well cultivated, like a generous mother, lavishes upon her children. Here it is the vine, elsewhere the apple tree for cider, there colza, farther on cheeses and flax. Gentlemen, let us not forget flax, which has made such great strides of late years, and to which I will more particularly call your attention." He had no need to call it, for all the mouths of the multitude were wide open, as if to drink in his words. Tuvache by his side listened to him with staring eyes. Monsieur Derozerays from time to time softly closed his eyelids, and farther on the chemist, with his son Napoleon between his knees, put his hand behind his ear in order not to lose a syllable. The chins of the other members of the jury went slowly up and down in their waistcoats in sign of approval. The firemen at the foot of the platform rested on their bayonets; and Binet, motionless, stood with out-turned elbows, the point of his sabre in the air. Perhaps he could hear, but certainly he could see nothing, because of the visor of his helmet, that fell down on his nose. His lieutenant, the youngest son of Monsieur Tuvache, had a bigger one, for his was enormous, and shook on his head, and from it an end of his cotton scarf peeped out. He smiled beneath it with a perfectly infantine sweetness, and his pale little face, whence drops were running, wore an expression of enjoyment and sleepiness. The square as far as the houses was crowded with people. One saw folk leaning on their elbows at all the windows, others standing at doors, and Justin, in front of the chemist's shop, seemed quite transfixed by the sight of what he was looking at. In spite of the silence Monsieur Lieuvain's voice was lost in the air. It reached you in fragments of phrases, and interrupted here and there by the creaking of chairs in the crowd; then you suddenly heard the long bellowing of an ox, or else the bleating of the lambs, who answered one another at street corners. In fact, the cowherds and shepherds had driven their beasts thus far, and these lowed from time to time, while with their tongues they tore down some scrap of foliage that hung above their mouths. Rodolphe had drawn nearer to Emma, and said to her in a low voice, speaking rapidly-- "Does not this conspiracy of the world revolt you? Is there a single sentiment it does not condemn? The noblest instincts, the purest sympathies are persecuted, slandered; and if at length two poor souls do meet, all is so organised that they cannot blend together. Yet they will make the attempt; they will flutter their wings; they will call upon each other. Oh! no matter. Sooner or later, in six months, ten years, they will come together, will love; for fate has decreed it, and they are born one for the other." His arms were folded across his knees, and thus lifting his face towards Emma, close by her, he looked fixedly at her. She noticed in his eyes small golden lines radiating from black pupils; she even smelt the perfume of the pomade that made his hair glossy. Then a faintness came over her; she recalled the Viscount who had waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his beard exhaled like this air an odour of vanilla and citron, and mechanically she half-closed her eyes the better to breathe it in. But in making this movement, as she leant back in her chair, she saw in the distance, right on the line of the horizon, the old diligence, the "Hirondelle," that was slowly descending the hill of Leux, dragging after it a long trail of dust. It was in this yellow carriage that Leon had so often come back to her, and by this route down there that he had gone for ever. She fancied she saw him opposite at his windows; then all grew confused; clouds gathered; it seemed to her that she was again turning in the waltz under the light of the lustres on the arm of the Viscount, and that Leon was not far away, that he was coming; and yet all the time she was conscious of the scent of Rodolphe's head by her side. This sweetness of sensation pierced through her old desires, and these, like grains of sand under a gust of wind, eddied to and fro in the subtle breath of the perfume which suffused her soul. She opened wide her nostrils several times to drink in the freshness of the ivy round the capitals. She took off her gloves, she wiped her hands, then fanned her face with her handkerchief, while athwart the throbbing of her temples she heard the murmur of the crowd and the voice of the councillor intoning his phrases. He said--"Continue, persevere; listen neither to the suggestions of routine, nor to the over-hasty councils of a rash empiricism. "Apply yourselves, above all, to the amelioration of the soil, to good manures, to the development of the equine, bovine, ovine, and porcine races. Let these shows be to you pacific arenas, where the victor in leaving it will hold forth a hand to the vanquished, and will fraternise with him in the hope of better success. And you, aged servants, humble domestics, whose hard labour no Government up to this day has taken into consideration, come hither to receive the reward of your silent virtues, and be assured that the state henceforward has its eye upon you; that it encourages you, protects you; that it will accede to your just demands, and alleviate as much as in it lies the burden of your painful sacrifices." Monsieur Lieuvain then sat down; Monsieur Derozerays got up, beginning another speech. His was not perhaps so florid as that of the councillor, but it recommended itself by a more direct style, that is to say, by more special knowledge and more elevated considerations. Thus the praise of the Government took up less space in it; religion and agriculture more. He showed in it the relations of these two, and how they had always contributed to civilisation. Rodolphe with Madame Bovary was talking dreams, presentiments, magnetism. Going back to the cradle of society, the orator painted those fierce times when men lived on acorns in the heart of woods. Then they had left off the skins of beasts, had put on cloth, tilled the soil, planted the vine. Was this a good, and in this discovery was there not more of injury than of gain? Monsieur Derozerays set himself this problem. From magnetism little by little Rodolphe had come to affinities, and while the president was citing Cincinnatus and his plough, Diocletian, planting his cabbages, and the Emperors of China inaugurating the year by the sowing of seed, the young man was explaining to the young woman that these irresistible attractions find their cause in some previous state of existence. "Thus we," he said, "why did we come to know one another? What chance willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that flow but to unite; our special bents of mind had driven us towards each other." And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it. "For good farming generally!" cried the president. "Just now, for example, when I went to your house." "To Monsieur Bizat of Quincampoix." "Did I know I should accompany you?" "Seventy francs." "A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you--I remained." "Manures!" "And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!" "To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!" "For I have never in the society of any other person found so complete a charm." "To Monsieur Bain of Givry-Saint-Martin." "And I shall carry away with me the remembrance of you." "For a merino ram!" "But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow." "To Monsieur Belot of Notre-Dame." "Oh, no! I shall be something in your thought, in your life, shall I not?" "Porcine race; prizes--equal, to Messrs. Leherisse and Cullembourg, sixty francs!" Rodolphe was pressing her hand, and he felt it all warm and quivering like a captive dove that wants to fly away; but, whether she was trying to take it away or whether she was answering his pressure; she made a movement with her fingers. He exclaimed-- "Oh, I thank you! You do not repulse me! You are good! You understand that I am yours! Let me look at you; let me contemplate you!" A gust of wind that blew in at the window ruffled the cloth on the table, and in the square below all the great caps of the peasant women were uplifted by it like the wings of white butterflies fluttering. "Use of oil-cakes," continued the president. He was hurrying on: "Flemish manure-flax-growing-drainage-long leases-domestic service." Rodolphe was no longer speaking. They looked at one another. A supreme desire made their dry lips tremble, and wearily, without an effort, their fingers intertwined. "Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux, of Sassetot-la-Guerriere, for fifty-four years of service at the same farm, a silver medal--value, twenty-five francs!" "Where is Catherine Leroux?" repeated the councillor. She did not present herself, and one could hear voices whispering-- "Go up!" "Don't be afraid!" "Oh, how stupid she is!" "Well, is she there?" cried Tuvache. "Yes; here she is." "Then let her come up!" Then there came forward on the platform a little old woman with timid bearing, who seemed to shrink within her poor clothes. On her feet she wore heavy wooden clogs, and from her hips hung a large blue apron. Her pale face framed in a borderless cap was more wrinkled than a withered russet apple. And from the sleeves of her red jacket looked out two large hands with knotty joints, the dust of barns, the potash of washing the grease of wools had so encrusted, roughened, hardened these that they seemed dirty, although they had been rinsed in clear water; and by dint of long service they remained half open, as if to bear humble witness for themselves of so much suffering endured. Something of monastic rigidity dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion weakened that pale look. In her constant living with animals she had caught their dumbness and their calm. It was the first time that she found herself in the midst of so large a company, and inwardly scared by the flags, the drums, the gentlemen in frock-coats, and the order of the councillor, she stood motionless, not knowing whether to advance or run away, nor why the crowd was pushing her and the jury were smiling at her. Thus stood before these radiant bourgeois this half-century of servitude. "Approach, venerable Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux!" said the councillor, who had taken the list of prize-winners from the president; and, looking at the piece of paper and the old woman by turns, he repeated in a fatherly tone--"Approach! approach!" "Are you deaf?" said Tuvache, fidgeting in his armchair; and he began shouting in her ear, "Fifty-four years of service. A silver medal! Twenty-five francs! For you!" Then, when she had her medal, she looked at it, and a smile of beatitude spread over her face; and as she walked away they could hear her muttering "I'll give it to our cure up home, to say some masses for me!" "What fanaticism!" exclaimed the chemist, leaning across to the notary. The meeting was over, the crowd dispersed, and now that the speeches had been read, each one fell back into his place again, and everything into the old grooves; the masters bullied the servants, and these struck the animals, indolent victors, going back to the stalls, a green-crown on their horns. The National Guards, however, had gone up to the first floor of the town hall with buns spitted on their bayonets, and the drummer of the battalion carried a basket with bottles. Madame Bovary took Rodolphe's arm; he saw her home; they separated at her door; then he walked about alone in the meadow while he waited for the time of the banquet. The feast was long, noisy, ill served; the guests were so crowded that they could hardly move their elbows; and the narrow planks used for forms almost broke down under their weight. They ate hugely. Each one stuffed himself on his own account. Sweat stood on every brow, and a whitish steam, like the vapour of a stream on an autumn morning, floated above the table between the hanging lamps. Rodolphe, leaning against the calico of the tent was thinking so earnestly of Emma that he heard nothing. Behind him on the grass the servants were piling up the dirty plates, his neighbours were talking; he did not answer them; they filled his glass, and there was silence in his thoughts in spite of the growing noise. He was dreaming of what she had said, of the line of her lips; her face, as in a magic mirror, shone on the plates of the shakos, the folds of her gown fell along the walls, and days of love unrolled to all infinity before him in the vistas of the future. He saw her again in the evening during the fireworks, but she was with her husband, Madame Homais, and the druggist, who was worrying about the danger of stray rockets, and every moment he left the company to go and give some advice to Binet. The pyrotechnic pieces sent to Monsieur Tuvache had, through an excess of caution, been shut up in his cellar, and so the damp powder would not light, and the principal set piece, that was to represent a dragon biting his tail, failed completely. Now and then a meagre Roman-candle went off; then the gaping crowd sent up a shout that mingled with the cry of the women, whose waists were being squeezed in the darkness. Emma silently nestled against Charles's shoulder; then, raising her chin, she watched the luminous rays of the rockets against the dark sky. Rodolphe gazed at her in the light of the burning lanterns. They went out one by one. The stars shone out. A few crops of rain began to fall. She knotted her fichu round her bare head. At this moment the councillor's carriage came out from the inn. His coachman, who was drunk, suddenly dozed off, and one could see from the distance, above the hood, between the two lanterns, the mass of his body, that swayed from right to left with the giving of the traces. "Truly," said the druggist, "one ought to proceed most rigorously against drunkenness! I should like to see written up weekly at the door of the town hall on a board ad hoc* the names of all those who during the week got intoxicated on alcohol. Besides, with regard to statistics, one would thus have, as it were, public records that one could refer to in case of need. But excuse me!" *Specifically for that. And he once more ran off to the captain. The latter was going back to see his lathe again. "Perhaps you would not do ill," Homais said to him, "to send one of your men, or to go yourself--" "Leave me alone!" answered the tax-collector. "It's all right!" "Do not be uneasy," said the druggist, when he returned to his friends. "Monsieur Binet has assured me that all precautions have been taken. No sparks have fallen; the pumps are full. Let us go to rest." "Ma foi! I want it," said Madame Homais, yawning at large. "But never mind; we've had a beautiful day for our fete." Rodolphe repeated in a low voice, and with a tender look, "Oh, yes! very beautiful!" And having bowed to one another, they separated. Two days later, in the "Final de Rouen," there was a long article on the show. Homais had composed it with verve the very next morning. "Why these festoons, these flowers, these garlands? Whither hurries this crowd like the waves of a furious sea under the torrents of a tropical sun pouring its heat upon our heads?" Then he spoke of the condition of the peasants. Certainly the Government was doing much, but not enough. "Courage!" he cried to it; "a thousand reforms are indispensable; let us accomplish them!" Then touching on the entry of the councillor, he did not forget "the martial air of our militia;" nor "our most merry village maidens;" nor the "bald-headed old men like patriarchs who were there, and of whom some, the remnants of our phalanxes, still felt their hearts beat at the manly sound of the drums." He cited himself among the first of the members of the jury, and he even called attention in a note to the fact that Monsieur Homais, chemist, had sent a memoir on cider to the agricultural society. When he came to the distribution of the prizes, he painted the joy of the prize-winners in dithyrambic strophes. "The father embraced the son, the brother the brother, the husband his consort. More than one showed his humble medal with pride; and no doubt when he got home to his good housewife, he hung it up weeping on the modest walls of his cot. "About six o'clock a banquet prepared in the meadow of Monsieur Leigeard brought together the principal personages of the fete. The greatest cordiality reigned here. Divers toasts were proposed: Monsieur Lieuvain, the King; Monsieur Tuvache, the Prefect; Monsieur Derozerays, Agriculture; Monsieur Homais, Industry and the Fine Arts, those twin sisters; Monsieur Leplichey, Progress. In the evening some brilliant fireworks on a sudden illumined the air. One would have called it a veritable kaleidoscope, a real operatic scene; and for a moment our little locality might have thought itself transported into the midst of a dream of the 'Thousand and One Nights.' Let us state that no untoward event disturbed this family meeting." And he added "Only the absence of the clergy was remarked. No doubt the priests understand progress in another fashion. Just as you please, messieurs the followers of Loyola!"

part 2, Chapter 8

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter7-8

On the morning of the Agricultural Show the entire town is decorated full of anticipation. An antique fieldpiece will sound at the arrival of the King's prefect. Homais engages Madame Lefraneois in conversation on his way to serve on the show's advisory committee. Madame Lefraneois doesn't think much of the fair and even less of the activity at her competitor's cafe but she reserves her harshest judgment for Monsieur Lheureux whose loan notes will cause her competitor's cafe to close soon. Homais rushes off to greet Madame Bovary whom he sees walking on the arm of Rodolphe Boulanger. The pair manages to avoid not only Homais but Lheureux as well and Rodolphe steers Emma down a side lane. They make a cursory examination of the livestock exhibits and Rodolphe, noticing that Madame Bovary cares little for these things, begins to mock the show and the fashions of the Yonville ladies. They pass Lestiboudois, the gravedigger who keeps a potato patch in the cemetery, carrying chairs from the church to rent to the crowd. As they walk Rodolphe begins his seduction by explaining to Emma that despite his outward appearance of gaiety he spends much of his time feeling depressed and often wonders if he wouldn't be better off dead. The report of the canon interrupts his reverie and the crowd rushes to the square only to find that it was a false alarm. Soon, however, a stately carriage rushes into the square and a small benign-looking man emerges. He explains that the prefect is unable to attend but he, as prefectural councilor, has come in his place. Mayor Tuvache exchanges awkward greetings with the man. Rodolphe and Emma make their way to the empty second floor of the town hall in order to have a better view of the proceedings. While the prefectural councilor, whose name is Lieuvain, begins his official remarks with a lengthy discourse upon the worthiness of the King, Rodolphe continues his wooing of Emma. He tells her that though he is known for his excesses of pleasure he has never known true happiness but he asserts his belief that happiness will come suddenly one day. Lieuvain's makes several statements regarding duty which prompts Rodolphe to opine that real duty is to be true to ones own feelings. Emma protests that people must adhere to some of society's conventions but Rodolphe insists that the only true morality is the eternal one. As Lieuvain proceeds to explicate the advances in agriculture, Rodolphe moves closer to Emma and lowers his voice. He laments the manner in which society destroys noble sentiments and prevents worthy souls from mingling. Emma is overcome by the scent of Rodolphe's perfume and she imagines that she is back at the party at La Vaubyessard and then she sees the Hirondelle cresting the hill and she thinks of Leon. Lieuvain finishes his speech and other functionaries deliver orations. As the prizes for the show are announced Rodolphe states his belief that fate has brought he and Emma together and he enumerates the details of his passion for her. Emma is beguiled by his speech and grasps his hand in her own. The final prize is to an old peasant woman who scarcely understands what is happening to her. With the ceremonies over the crowd disperses and Rodolphe escorts Emma to her home. Later that evening he joins the Bovary's to watch the feeble fireworks display.

Emma's renewed bout of depression and unfulfilled desires makes her ripe for a man like Rodolphe whom the reader learns is bent upon seduction. Flaubert masterfully juxtaposes the official's lugubrious speechifying with Rodolphe's seduction of Emma. This passage is considered one of the novel's best and amply demonstrates the advantages of the free indirect discourse style of composition. Positioning is important in this section as Emma first views Rodolphe from above while leaning out her window onto the market and then when he woos her while they sit looking down upon the market. Thus the man and woman are linked by their sense of superiority to the town and the petty business concerns of its inhabitants

novelguide

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finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_7_part_1.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 9

part 2, chapter 9

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 9", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter9-10", "summary": "Rodolphe resolves to wait awhile before seeing Emma again and then a hunting trip further delays him. Six weeks later he finally visits her. He plies her with romantic platitudes and she is overwhelmed by the force of his passion. Charles, who suspects nothing, interrupts them. Rodolphe greets the officier de saint as docteur which flatters Charles' pride. Rodolphe suggests that horseback riding would be good for Madame Bovary's health and Charles, who is worried about his wife, readily agrees. Rodolphe offers to lend her a horse but Emma refuses. After Rodolphe departs Charles convinces his wife to accept by offering to buy her a riding habit. When the habit arrives Charles writes to Monsieur Boulanger that his wife was at his disposal and the next day Rodolphe arrives with two horses. As they ride out of the village Homais yells to the pair, \"Accidents happen so quickly,\" and \"Your horses may be more spirited than you know. They ride to a wooded hill overlooking the town and Emma notices that the wretched village looks exceedingly small. They ride into the forest, dismount and continue on foot. Emma pleads exhaustion but Rodolphe urges her onward. They come to an area recently cleared of saplings and while they sit on a log Rodolphe gently woos her. She resists and insists that what he asks for is impossible. She asks to return to the horses and he reluctantly acquiesces but before they reach the animals he convinces her to walk to the edge of a nearby pond where, weeping and filled with emotion, she surrenders and gives herself to him. Afterward they ride back to the village and Emma notices that though the outside world has not changed she feels very different. She is distracted at dinner and hardly notices when Charles tells her that he has bought her a horse. After dinner he leaves to see patients and Emma goes to her room and thinks of Rodolphe. She repeats joyfully \"I have a lover. She sees herself as a heroine in a novel. Rodolphe and Emma meet the next day and spend the afternoon in a rude hut in the forest. They write to each other every day and one morning when Charles has left before daybreak she runs to La Huchette to spend the early morning with her lover. From then on, whenever Charles leaves early, she dares the journey to the estate. One morning, however, Rodolphe tells her that her visits are foolhardy and she is risking her reputation", "analysis": ""}

Six weeks passed. Rodolphe did not come again. At last one evening he appeared. The day after the show he had said to himself--"We mustn't go back too soon; that would be a mistake." And at the end of a week he had gone off hunting. After the hunting he had thought it was too late, and then he reasoned thus-- "If from the first day she loved me, she must from impatience to see me again love me more. Let's go on with it!" And he knew that his calculation had been right when, on entering the room, he saw Emma turn pale. She was alone. The day was drawing in. The small muslin curtain along the windows deepened the twilight, and the gilding of the barometer, on which the rays of the sun fell, shone in the looking-glass between the meshes of the coral. Rodolphe remained standing, and Emma hardly answered his first conventional phrases. "I," he said, "have been busy. I have been ill." "Seriously?" she cried. "Well," said Rodolphe, sitting down at her side on a footstool, "no; it was because I did not want to come back." "Why?" "Can you not guess?" He looked at her again, but so hard that she lowered her head, blushing. He went on-- "Emma!" "Sir," she said, drawing back a little. "Ah! you see," replied he in a melancholy voice, "that I was right not to come back; for this name, this name that fills my whole soul, and that escaped me, you forbid me to use! Madame Bovary! why all the world calls you thus! Besides, it is not your name; it is the name of another!" He repeated, "of another!" And he hid his face in his hands. "Yes, I think of you constantly. The memory of you drives me to despair. Ah! forgive me! I will leave you! Farewell! I will go far away, so far that you will never hear of me again; and yet--to-day--I know not what force impelled me towards you. For one does not struggle against Heaven; one cannot resist the smile of angels; one is carried away by that which is beautiful, charming, adorable." It was the first time that Emma had heard such words spoken to herself, and her pride, like one who reposes bathed in warmth, expanded softly and fully at this glowing language. "But if I did not come," he continued, "if I could not see you, at least I have gazed long on all that surrounds you. At night-every night-I arose; I came hither; I watched your house, its glimmering in the moon, the trees in the garden swaying before your window, and the little lamp, a gleam shining through the window-panes in the darkness. Ah! you never knew that there, so near you, so far from you, was a poor wretch!" She turned towards him with a sob. "Oh, you are good!" she said. "No, I love you, that is all! You do not doubt that! Tell me--one word--only one word!" And Rodolphe imperceptibly glided from the footstool to the ground; but a sound of wooden shoes was heard in the kitchen, and he noticed the door of the room was not closed. "How kind it would be of you," he went on, rising, "if you would humour a whim of mine." It was to go over her house; he wanted to know it; and Madame Bovary seeing no objection to this, they both rose, when Charles came in. "Good morning, doctor," Rodolphe said to him. The doctor, flattered at this unexpected title, launched out into obsequious phrases. Of this the other took advantage to pull himself together a little. "Madame was speaking to me," he then said, "about her health." Charles interrupted him; he had indeed a thousand anxieties; his wife's palpitations of the heart were beginning again. Then Rodolphe asked if riding would not be good. "Certainly! excellent! just the thing! There's an idea! You ought to follow it up." And as she objected that she had no horse, Monsieur Rodolphe offered one. She refused his offer; he did not insist. Then to explain his visit he said that his ploughman, the man of the blood-letting, still suffered from giddiness. "I'll call around," said Bovary. "No, no! I'll send him to you; we'll come; that will be more convenient for you." "Ah! very good! I thank you." And as soon as they were alone, "Why don't you accept Monsieur Boulanger's kind offer?" She assumed a sulky air, invented a thousand excuses, and finally declared that perhaps it would look odd. "Well, what the deuce do I care for that?" said Charles, making a pirouette. "Health before everything! You are wrong." "And how do you think I can ride when I haven't got a habit?" "You must order one," he answered. The riding-habit decided her. When the habit was ready, Charles wrote to Monsieur Boulanger that his wife was at his command, and that they counted on his good-nature. The next day at noon Rodolphe appeared at Charles's door with two saddle-horses. One had pink rosettes at his ears and a deerskin side-saddle. Rodolphe had put on high soft boots, saying to himself that no doubt she had never seen anything like them. In fact, Emma was charmed with his appearance as he stood on the landing in his great velvet coat and white corduroy breeches. She was ready; she was waiting for him. Justin escaped from the chemist's to see her start, and the chemist also came out. He was giving Monsieur Boulanger a little good advice. "An accident happens so easily. Be careful! Your horses perhaps are mettlesome." She heard a noise above her; it was Felicite drumming on the windowpanes to amuse little Berthe. The child blew her a kiss; her mother answered with a wave of her whip. "A pleasant ride!" cried Monsieur Homais. "Prudence! above all, prudence!" And he flourished his newspaper as he saw them disappear. As soon as he felt the ground, Emma's horse set off at a gallop. Rodolphe galloped by her side. Now and then they exchanged a word. Her figure slightly bent, her hand well up, and her right arm stretched out, she gave herself up to the cadence of the movement that rocked her in her saddle. At the bottom of the hill Rodolphe gave his horse its head; they started together at a bound, then at the top suddenly the horses stopped, and her large blue veil fell about her. It was early in October. There was fog over the land. Hazy clouds hovered on the horizon between the outlines of the hills; others, rent asunder, floated up and disappeared. Sometimes through a rift in the clouds, beneath a ray of sunshine, gleamed from afar the roots of Yonville, with the gardens at the water's edge, the yards, the walls and the church steeple. Emma half closed her eyes to pick out her house, and never had this poor village where she lived appeared so small. From the height on which they were the whole valley seemed an immense pale lake sending off its vapour into the air. Clumps of trees here and there stood out like black rocks, and the tall lines of the poplars that rose above the mist were like a beach stirred by the wind. By the side, on the turf between the pines, a brown light shimmered in the warm atmosphere. The earth, ruddy like the powder of tobacco, deadened the noise of their steps, and with the edge of their shoes the horses as they walked kicked the fallen fir cones in front of them. Rodolphe and Emma thus went along the skirt of the wood. She turned away from time to time to avoid his look, and then she saw only the pine trunks in lines, whose monotonous succession made her a little giddy. The horses were panting; the leather of the saddles creaked. Just as they were entering the forest the sun shone out. "God protects us!" said Rodolphe. "Do you think so?" she said. "Forward! forward!" he continued. He "tchk'd" with his tongue. The two beasts set off at a trot. Long ferns by the roadside caught in Emma's stirrup. Rodolphe leant forward and removed them as they rode along. At other times, to turn aside the branches, he passed close to her, and Emma felt his knee brushing against her leg. The sky was now blue, the leaves no longer stirred. There were spaces full of heather in flower, and plots of violets alternated with the confused patches of the trees that were grey, fawn, or golden coloured, according to the nature of their leaves. Often in the thicket was heard the fluttering of wings, or else the hoarse, soft cry of the ravens flying off amidst the oaks. They dismounted. Rodolphe fastened up the horses. She walked on in front on the moss between the paths. But her long habit got in her way, although she held it up by the skirt; and Rodolphe, walking behind her, saw between the black cloth and the black shoe the fineness of her white stocking, that seemed to him as if it were a part of her nakedness. She stopped. "I am tired," she said. "Come, try again," he went on. "Courage!" Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped, and through her veil, that fell sideways from her man's hat over her hips, her face appeared in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure waves. "But where are we going?" He did not answer. She was breathing irregularly. Rodolphe looked round him biting his moustache. They came to a larger space where the coppice had been cut. They sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, and Rodolphe began speaking to her of his love. He did not begin by frightening her with compliments. He was calm, serious, melancholy. Emma listened to him with bowed head, and stirred the bits of wood on the ground with the tip of her foot. But at the words, "Are not our destinies now one?" "Oh, no!" she replied. "You know that well. It is impossible!" She rose to go. He seized her by the wrist. She stopped. Then, having gazed at him for a few moments with an amorous and humid look, she said hurriedly-- "Ah! do not speak of it again! Where are the horses? Let us go back." He made a gesture of anger and annoyance. She repeated: "Where are the horses? Where are the horses?" Then smiling a strange smile, his pupil fixed, his teeth set, he advanced with outstretched arms. She recoiled trembling. She stammered: "Oh, you frighten me! You hurt me! Let me go!" "If it must be," he went on, his face changing; and he again became respectful, caressing, timid. She gave him her arm. They went back. He said-- "What was the matter with you? Why? I do not understand. You were mistaken, no doubt. In my soul you are as a Madonna on a pedestal, in a place lofty, secure, immaculate. But I need you to live! I must have your eyes, your voice, your thought! Be my friend, my sister, my angel!" And he put out his arm round her waist. She feebly tried to disengage herself. He supported her thus as they walked along. But they heard the two horses browsing on the leaves. "Oh! one moment!" said Rodolphe. "Do not let us go! Stay!" He drew her farther on to a small pool where duckweeds made a greenness on the water. Faded water lilies lay motionless between the reeds. At the noise of their steps in the grass, frogs jumped away to hide themselves. "I am wrong! I am wrong!" she said. "I am mad to listen to you!" "Why? Emma! Emma!" "Oh, Rodolphe!" said the young woman slowly, leaning on his shoulder. The cloth of her habit caught against the velvet of his coat. She threw back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and faltering, in tears, with a long shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself up to him-- The shades of night were falling; the horizontal sun passing between the branches dazzled the eyes. Here and there around her, in the leaves or on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as it hummingbirds flying about had scattered their feathers. Silence was everywhere; something sweet seemed to come forth from the trees; she felt her heart, whose beating had begun again, and the blood coursing through her flesh like a stream of milk. Then far away, beyond the wood, on the other hills, she heard a vague prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in silence she heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his lips, was mending with his penknife one of the two broken bridles. They returned to Yonville by the same road. On the mud they saw again the traces of their horses side by side, the same thickets, the same stones to the grass; nothing around them seemed changed; and yet for her something had happened more stupendous than if the mountains had moved in their places. Rodolphe now and again bent forward and took her hand to kiss it. She was charming on horseback--upright, with her slender waist, her knee bent on the mane of her horse, her face somewhat flushed by the fresh air in the red of the evening. On entering Yonville she made her horse prance in the road. People looked at her from the windows. At dinner her husband thought she looked well, but she pretended not to hear him when he inquired about her ride, and she remained sitting there with her elbow at the side of her plate between the two lighted candles. "Emma!" he said. "What?" "Well, I spent the afternoon at Monsieur Alexandre's. He has an old cob, still very fine, only a little broken-kneed, and that could be bought; I am sure, for a hundred crowns." He added, "And thinking it might please you, I have bespoken it--bought it. Have I done right? Do tell me?" She nodded her head in assent; then a quarter of an hour later-- "Are you going out to-night?" she asked. "Yes. Why?" "Oh, nothing, nothing, my dear!" And as soon as she had got rid of Charles she went and shut herself up in her room. At first she felt stunned; she saw the trees, the paths, the ditches, Rodolphe, and she again felt the pressure of his arm, while the leaves rustled and the reeds whistled. But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, "I have a lover! a lover!" delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary existence appeared only afar off, down below in the shade, through the interspaces of these heights. Then she recalled the heroines of the books that she had read, and the lyric legion of these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with the voice of sisters that charmed her. She became herself, as it were, an actual part of these imaginings, and realised the love-dream of her youth as she saw herself in this type of amorous women whom she had so envied. Besides, Emma felt a satisfaction of revenge. Had she not suffered enough? But now she triumphed, and the love so long pent up burst forth in full joyous bubblings. She tasted it without remorse, without anxiety, without trouble. The day following passed with a new sweetness. They made vows to one another She told him of her sorrows. Rodolphe interrupted her with kisses; and she looking at him through half-closed eyes, asked him to call her again by her name--to say that he loved her They were in the forest, as yesterday, in the shed of some woodenshoe maker. The walls were of straw, and the roof so low they had to stoop. They were seated side by side on a bed of dry leaves. From that day forth they wrote to one another regularly every evening. Emma placed her letter at the end of the garden, by the river, in a fissure of the wall. Rodolphe came to fetch it, and put another there, that she always found fault with as too short. One morning, when Charles had gone out before day break, she was seized with the fancy to see Rodolphe at once. She would go quickly to La Huchette, stay there an hour, and be back again at Yonville while everyone was still asleep. This idea made her pant with desire, and she soon found herself in the middle of the field, walking with rapid steps, without looking behind her. Day was just breaking. Emma from afar recognised her lover's house. Its two dove-tailed weathercocks stood out black against the pale dawn. Beyond the farmyard there was a detached building that she thought must be the chateau She entered--it was if the doors at her approach had opened wide of their own accord. A large straight staircase led up to the corridor. Emma raised the latch of a door, and suddenly at the end of the room she saw a man sleeping. It was Rodolphe. She uttered a cry. "You here? You here?" he repeated. "How did you manage to come? Ah! your dress is damp." "I love you," she answered, throwing her arms about his neck. This first piece of daring successful, now every time Charles went out early Emma dressed quickly and slipped on tiptoe down the steps that led to the waterside. But when the plank for the cows was taken up, she had to go by the walls alongside of the river; the bank was slippery; in order not to fall she caught hold of the tufts of faded wallflowers. Then she went across ploughed fields, in which she sank, stumbling; and clogging her thin shoes. Her scarf, knotted round her head, fluttered to the wind in the meadows. She was afraid of the oxen; she began to run; she arrived out of breath, with rosy cheeks, and breathing out from her whole person a fresh perfume of sap, of verdure, of the open air. At this hour Rodolphe still slept. It was like a spring morning coming into his room. The yellow curtains along the windows let a heavy, whitish light enter softly. Emma felt about, opening and closing her eyes, while the drops of dew hanging from her hair formed, as it were, a topaz aureole around her face. Rodolphe, laughing, drew her to him, and pressed her to his breast. Then she examined the apartment, opened the drawers of the tables, combed her hair with his comb, and looked at herself in his shaving-glass. Often she even put between her teeth the big pipe that lay on the table by the bed, amongst lemons and pieces of sugar near a bottle of water. It took them a good quarter of an hour to say goodbye. Then Emma cried. She would have wished never to leave Rodolphe. Something stronger than herself forced her to him; so much so, that one day, seeing her come unexpectedly, he frowned as one put out. "What is the matter with you?" she said. "Are you ill? Tell me!" At last he declared with a serious air that her visits were becoming imprudent--that she was compromising herself.

part 2, Chapter 9

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter9-10

Rodolphe resolves to wait awhile before seeing Emma again and then a hunting trip further delays him. Six weeks later he finally visits her. He plies her with romantic platitudes and she is overwhelmed by the force of his passion. Charles, who suspects nothing, interrupts them. Rodolphe greets the officier de saint as docteur which flatters Charles' pride. Rodolphe suggests that horseback riding would be good for Madame Bovary's health and Charles, who is worried about his wife, readily agrees. Rodolphe offers to lend her a horse but Emma refuses. After Rodolphe departs Charles convinces his wife to accept by offering to buy her a riding habit. When the habit arrives Charles writes to Monsieur Boulanger that his wife was at his disposal and the next day Rodolphe arrives with two horses. As they ride out of the village Homais yells to the pair, "Accidents happen so quickly," and "Your horses may be more spirited than you know. They ride to a wooded hill overlooking the town and Emma notices that the wretched village looks exceedingly small. They ride into the forest, dismount and continue on foot. Emma pleads exhaustion but Rodolphe urges her onward. They come to an area recently cleared of saplings and while they sit on a log Rodolphe gently woos her. She resists and insists that what he asks for is impossible. She asks to return to the horses and he reluctantly acquiesces but before they reach the animals he convinces her to walk to the edge of a nearby pond where, weeping and filled with emotion, she surrenders and gives herself to him. Afterward they ride back to the village and Emma notices that though the outside world has not changed she feels very different. She is distracted at dinner and hardly notices when Charles tells her that he has bought her a horse. After dinner he leaves to see patients and Emma goes to her room and thinks of Rodolphe. She repeats joyfully "I have a lover. She sees herself as a heroine in a novel. Rodolphe and Emma meet the next day and spend the afternoon in a rude hut in the forest. They write to each other every day and one morning when Charles has left before daybreak she runs to La Huchette to spend the early morning with her lover. From then on, whenever Charles leaves early, she dares the journey to the estate. One morning, however, Rodolphe tells her that her visits are foolhardy and she is risking her reputation

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/19.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_7_part_2.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 10

part 2, chapter 10

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 10", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter9-10", "summary": "Though Emma practices greater caution in her trips to La Huchette one morning she inadvertently surprises Monsieur Binet duck hunting. Although Emma does not know it Binet is hunting illegally so he is content to let the encounter be forgotten but Emma is nervous that he will see through her weak lies. That evening she and Charles go to the pharmacy and Emma is horrified to see Binet at the counter. After the close call Emma and Rodolphe change their meeting place to the arbor in the garden behind the Bovary's house. Over time Rodolphe begins to be annoyed by the intensity of Emma's devotion to him and her constant demands to reaffirm his love. One night, as they lay concealed in the small consulting room they hear someone approaching and Emma asks, in all seriousness, if Rodolphe has his pistols with which to defend her. Afterward he muses that he has nothing against the physician and observes that he is certainly not jealous or frightened of the man. Eventually, certain of her love, he stops making an effort to win her and she gleans that his passion is fading. Nevertheless she realizes that he holds complete power over her. After six months of liaisons their relationship becomes cold and formalized. When Emma's father sends a letter to the Bovary's with his annual turkey Emma is reminded of her lost youth and the romantic illusions that used to be dear to her. She reflects that she no longer has any illusions. She runs to her daughter and smothers her with affection. In her subsequent meetings with Rodolphe she is sullen and distant. Touched with remorse she begins to wonder why she doesn't love Charles. She is at a loss, however, to find something noble in her husband until one day the pharmacist provides an opportunity.", "analysis": "Emma realizes that she will be tempted to succumb to Rodolphe's advances so she resists the suggestion that they should be riding partners. Significantly, she agrees to ride with him after Charles agrees to buy her a riding outfit. Thus, her love of expensive goods coupled with her desire for a lover overcomes her reticence. Homais' warnings - such as \"accidents happen so quickly\" - as they leave town on their horses presages Emma's fall into adultery. Irnonically, it is Charles who makes this possible by insisting that she ride with Rodolphe and then writing to him that his wife is at his disposal. The simple observation that the area in the woods has recently been cleared of saplings leads the reader to suppose that he has planned the moment with great care. Unlike her wedding night, Emma feels different after her sexual encounter with Rodolphe. Charles unwittingly becomes complicit in the affair when he buys her a horse. Emma feels like a character in a novel and Rodolphe's lies easily conform to the expectations of a lover in a story. Her idealized emotional love coupled with a newly aroused passion for physical love renders Emma dependent upon Rodolphe's favors. As such, she cannot perceive the risks she is taking by visiting him at his estate and he, with a more realistic perspective on the affair, must point out the risks to her. As his passion fades she comes to realize that the real world does not offer the same romantic permanence of the novels"}

Gradually Rodolphe's fears took possession of her. At first, love had intoxicated her; and she had thought of nothing beyond. But now that he was indispensable to her life, she feared to lose anything of this, or even that it should be disturbed. When she came back from his house she looked all about her, anxiously watching every form that passed in the horizon, and every village window from which she could be seen. She listened for steps, cries, the noise of the ploughs, and she stopped short, white, and trembling more than the aspen leaves swaying overhead. One morning as she was thus returning, she suddenly thought she saw the long barrel of a carbine that seemed to be aimed at her. It stuck out sideways from the end of a small tub half-buried in the grass on the edge of a ditch. Emma, half-fainting with terror, nevertheless walked on, and a man stepped out of the tub like a Jack-in-the-box. He had gaiters buckled up to the knees, his cap pulled down over his eyes, trembling lips, and a red nose. It was Captain Binet lying in ambush for wild ducks. "You ought to have called out long ago!" he exclaimed; "When one sees a gun, one should always give warning." The tax-collector was thus trying to hide the fright he had had, for a prefectorial order having prohibited duckhunting except in boats, Monsieur Binet, despite his respect for the laws, was infringing them, and so he every moment expected to see the rural guard turn up. But this anxiety whetted his pleasure, and, all alone in his tub, he congratulated himself on his luck and on his cuteness. At sight of Emma he seemed relieved from a great weight, and at once entered upon a conversation. "It isn't warm; it's nipping." Emma answered nothing. He went on-- "And you're out so early?" "Yes," she said stammering; "I am just coming from the nurse where my child is." "Ah! very good! very good! For myself, I am here, just as you see me, since break of day; but the weather is so muggy, that unless one had the bird at the mouth of the gun--" "Good evening, Monsieur Binet," she interrupted him, turning on her heel. "Your servant, madame," he replied drily; and he went back into his tub. Emma regretted having left the tax-collector so abruptly. No doubt he would form unfavourable conjectures. The story about the nurse was the worst possible excuse, everyone at Yonville knowing that the little Bovary had been at home with her parents for a year. Besides, no one was living in this direction; this path led only to La Huchette. Binet, then, would guess whence she came, and he would not keep silence; he would talk, that was certain. She remained until evening racking her brain with every conceivable lying project, and had constantly before her eyes that imbecile with the game-bag. Charles after dinner, seeing her gloomy, proposed, by way of distraction, to take her to the chemist's, and the first person she caught sight of in the shop was the taxcollector again. He was standing in front of the counter, lit up by the gleams of the red bottle, and was saying-- "Please give me half an ounce of vitriol." "Justin," cried the druggist, "bring us the sulphuric acid." Then to Emma, who was going up to Madame Homais' room, "No, stay here; it isn't worth while going up; she is just coming down. Warm yourself at the stove in the meantime. Excuse me. Good-day, doctor," (for the chemist much enjoyed pronouncing the word "doctor," as if addressing another by it reflected on himself some of the grandeur that he found in it). "Now, take care not to upset the mortars! You'd better fetch some chairs from the little room; you know very well that the arm-chairs are not to be taken out of the drawing-room." And to put his arm-chair back in its place he was darting away from the counter, when Binet asked him for half an ounce of sugar acid. "Sugar acid!" said the chemist contemptuously, "don't know it; I'm ignorant of it! But perhaps you want oxalic acid. It is oxalic acid, isn't it?" Binet explained that he wanted a corrosive to make himself some copperwater with which to remove rust from his hunting things. Emma shuddered. The chemist began saying-- "Indeed the weather is not propitious on account of the damp." "Nevertheless," replied the tax-collector, with a sly look, "there are people who like it." She was stifling. "And give me--" "Will he never go?" thought she. "Half an ounce of resin and turpentine, four ounces of yellow wax, and three half ounces of animal charcoal, if you please, to clean the varnished leather of my togs." The druggist was beginning to cut the wax when Madame Homais appeared, Irma in her arms, Napoleon by her side, and Athalie following. She sat down on the velvet seat by the window, and the lad squatted down on a footstool, while his eldest sister hovered round the jujube box near her papa. The latter was filling funnels and corking phials, sticking on labels, making up parcels. Around him all were silent; only from time to time, were heard the weights jingling in the balance, and a few low words from the chemist giving directions to his pupil. "And how's the little woman?" suddenly asked Madame Homais. "Silence!" exclaimed her husband, who was writing down some figures in his waste-book. "Why didn't you bring her?" she went on in a low voice. "Hush! hush!" said Emma, pointing with her finger to the druggist. But Binet, quite absorbed in looking over his bill, had probably heard nothing. At last he went out. Then Emma, relieved, uttered a deep sigh. "How hard you are breathing!" said Madame Homais. "Well, you see, it's rather warm," she replied. So the next day they talked over how to arrange their rendezvous. Emma wanted to bribe her servant with a present, but it would be better to find some safe house at Yonville. Rodolphe promised to look for one. All through the winter, three or four times a week, in the dead of night he came to the garden. Emma had on purpose taken away the key of the gate, which Charles thought lost. To call her, Rodolphe threw a sprinkle of sand at the shutters. She jumped up with a start; but sometimes he had to wait, for Charles had a mania for chatting by the fireside, and he would not stop. She was wild with impatience; if her eyes could have done it, she would have hurled him out at the window. At last she would begin to undress, then take up a book, and go on reading very quietly as if the book amused her. But Charles, who was in bed, called to her to come too. "Come, now, Emma," he said, "it is time." "Yes, I am coming," she answered. Then, as the candles dazzled him; he turned to the wall and fell asleep. She escaped, smiling, palpitating, undressed. Rodolphe had a large cloak; he wrapped her in it, and putting his arm round her waist, he drew her without a word to the end of the garden. It was in the arbour, on the same seat of old sticks where formerly Leon had looked at her so amorously on the summer evenings. She never thought of him now. The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling of the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the darkness, and sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up and swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them. The cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips seemed to them deeper; their eyes that they could hardly see, larger; and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on their souls sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied vibrations. When the night was rainy, they took refuge in the consulting-room between the cart-shed and the stable. She lighted one of the kitchen candles that she had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe settled down there as if at home. The sight of the library, of the bureau, of the whole apartment, in fine, excited his merriment, and he could not refrain from making jokes about Charles, which rather embarrassed Emma. She would have liked to see him more serious, and even on occasions more dramatic; as, for example, when she thought she heard a noise of approaching steps in the alley. "Someone is coming!" she said. He blew out the light. "Have you your pistols?" "Why?" "Why, to defend yourself," replied Emma. "From your husband? Oh, poor devil!" And Rodolphe finished his sentence with a gesture that said, "I could crush him with a flip of my finger." She was wonder-stricken at his bravery, although she felt in it a sort of indecency and a naive coarseness that scandalised her. Rodolphe reflected a good deal on the affair of the pistols. If she had spoken seriously, it was very ridiculous, he thought, even odious; for he had no reason to hate the good Charles, not being what is called devoured by jealousy; and on this subject Emma had taken a great vow that he did not think in the best of taste. Besides, she was growing very sentimental. She had insisted on exchanging miniatures; they had cut off handfuls of hair, and now she was asking for a ring--a real wedding-ring, in sign of an eternal union. She often spoke to him of the evening chimes, of the voices of nature. Then she talked to him of her mother--hers! and of his mother--his! Rodolphe had lost his twenty years ago. Emma none the less consoled him with caressing words as one would have done a lost child, and she sometimes even said to him, gazing at the moon-- "I am sure that above there together they approve of our love." But she was so pretty. He had possessed so few women of such ingenuousness. This love without debauchery was a new experience for him, and, drawing him out of his lazy habits, caressed at once his pride and his sensuality. Emma's enthusiasm, which his bourgeois good sense disdained, seemed to him in his heart of hearts charming, since it was lavished on him. Then, sure of being loved, he no longer kept up appearances, and insensibly his ways changed. He had no longer, as formerly, words so gentle that they made her cry, nor passionate caresses that made her mad, so that their great love, which engrossed her life, seemed to lessen beneath her like the water of a stream absorbed into its channel, and she could see the bed of it. She would not believe it; she redoubled in tenderness, and Rodolphe concealed his indifference less and less. She did not know if she regretted having yielded to him, or whether she did not wish, on the contrary, to enjoy him the more. The humiliation of feeling herself weak was turning to rancour, tempered by their voluptuous pleasures. It was not affection; it was like a continual seduction. He subjugated her; she almost feared him. Appearances, nevertheless, were calmer than ever, Rodolphe having succeeded in carrying out the adultery after his own fancy; and at the end of six months, when the spring-time came, they were to one another like a married couple, tranquilly keeping up a domestic flame. It was the time of year when old Rouault sent his turkey in remembrance of the setting of his leg. The present always arrived with a letter. Emma cut the string that tied it to the basket, and read the following lines:-- "My Dear Children--I hope this will find you well, and that this one will be as good as the others. For it seems to me a little more tender, if I may venture to say so, and heavier. But next time, for a change, I'll give you a turkeycock, unless you have a preference for some dabs; and send me back the hamper, if you please, with the two old ones. I have had an accident with my cart-sheds, whose covering flew off one windy night among the trees. The harvest has not been overgood either. Finally, I don't know when I shall come to see you. It is so difficult now to leave the house since I am alone, my poor Emma." Here there was a break in the lines, as if the old fellow had dropped his pen to dream a little while. "For myself, I am very well, except for a cold I caught the other day at the fair at Yvetot, where I had gone to hire a shepherd, having turned away mine because he was too dainty. How we are to be pitied with such a lot of thieves! Besides, he was also rude. I heard from a pedlar, who, travelling through your part of the country this winter, had a tooth drawn, that Bovary was as usual working hard. That doesn't surprise me; and he showed me his tooth; we had some coffee together. I asked him if he had seen you, and he said not, but that he had seen two horses in the stables, from which I conclude that business is looking up. So much the better, my dear children, and may God send you every imaginable happiness! It grieves me not yet to have seen my dear little grand-daughter, Berthe Bovary. I have planted an Orleans plum-tree for her in the garden under your room, and I won't have it touched unless it is to have jam made for her by and bye, that I will keep in the cupboard for her when she comes. "Good-bye, my dear children. I kiss you, my girl, you too, my son-in-law, and the little one on both cheeks. I am, with best compliments, your loving father. "Theodore Rouault." She held the coarse paper in her fingers for some minutes. The spelling mistakes were interwoven one with the other, and Emma followed the kindly thought that cackled right through it like a hen half hidden in the hedge of thorns. The writing had been dried with ashes from the hearth, for a little grey powder slipped from the letter on to her dress, and she almost thought she saw her father bending over the hearth to take up the tongs. How long since she had been with him, sitting on the footstool in the chimney-corner, where she used to burn the end of a bit of wood in the great flame of the sea-sedges! She remembered the summer evenings all full of sunshine. The colts neighed when anyone passed by, and galloped, galloped. Under her window there was a beehive, and sometimes the bees wheeling round in the light struck against her window like rebounding balls of gold. What happiness there had been at that time, what freedom, what hope! What an abundance of illusions! Nothing was left of them now. She had got rid of them all in her soul's life, in all her successive conditions of life, maidenhood, her marriage, and her love--thus constantly losing them all her life through, like a traveller who leaves something of his wealth at every inn along his road. But what then, made her so unhappy? What was the extraordinary catastrophe that had transformed her? And she raised her head, looking round as if to seek the cause of that which made her suffer. An April ray was dancing on the china of the whatnot; the fire burned; beneath her slippers she felt the softness of the carpet; the day was bright, the air warm, and she heard her child shouting with laughter. In fact, the little girl was just then rolling on the lawn in the midst of the grass that was being turned. She was lying flat on her stomach at the top of a rick. The servant was holding her by her skirt. Lestiboudois was raking by her side, and every time he came near she lent forward, beating the air with both her arms. "Bring her to me," said her mother, rushing to embrace her. "How I love you, my poor child! How I love you!" Then noticing that the tips of her ears were rather dirty, she rang at once for warm water, and washed her, changed her linen, her stockings, her shoes, asked a thousand questions about her health, as if on the return from a long journey, and finally, kissing her again and crying a little, she gave her back to the servant, who stood quite thunderstricken at this excess of tenderness. That evening Rodolphe found her more serious than usual. "That will pass over," he concluded; "it's a whim:" And he missed three rendezvous running. When he did come, she showed herself cold and almost contemptuous. "Ah! you're losing your time, my lady!" And he pretended not to notice her melancholy sighs, nor the handkerchief she took out. Then Emma repented. She even asked herself why she detested Charles; if it had not been better to have been able to love him? But he gave her no opportunities for such a revival of sentiment, so that she was much embarrassed by her desire for sacrifice, when the druggist came just in time to provide her with an opportunity.

part 2, Chapter 10

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter9-10

Though Emma practices greater caution in her trips to La Huchette one morning she inadvertently surprises Monsieur Binet duck hunting. Although Emma does not know it Binet is hunting illegally so he is content to let the encounter be forgotten but Emma is nervous that he will see through her weak lies. That evening she and Charles go to the pharmacy and Emma is horrified to see Binet at the counter. After the close call Emma and Rodolphe change their meeting place to the arbor in the garden behind the Bovary's house. Over time Rodolphe begins to be annoyed by the intensity of Emma's devotion to him and her constant demands to reaffirm his love. One night, as they lay concealed in the small consulting room they hear someone approaching and Emma asks, in all seriousness, if Rodolphe has his pistols with which to defend her. Afterward he muses that he has nothing against the physician and observes that he is certainly not jealous or frightened of the man. Eventually, certain of her love, he stops making an effort to win her and she gleans that his passion is fading. Nevertheless she realizes that he holds complete power over her. After six months of liaisons their relationship becomes cold and formalized. When Emma's father sends a letter to the Bovary's with his annual turkey Emma is reminded of her lost youth and the romantic illusions that used to be dear to her. She reflects that she no longer has any illusions. She runs to her daughter and smothers her with affection. In her subsequent meetings with Rodolphe she is sullen and distant. Touched with remorse she begins to wonder why she doesn't love Charles. She is at a loss, however, to find something noble in her husband until one day the pharmacist provides an opportunity.

Emma realizes that she will be tempted to succumb to Rodolphe's advances so she resists the suggestion that they should be riding partners. Significantly, she agrees to ride with him after Charles agrees to buy her a riding outfit. Thus, her love of expensive goods coupled with her desire for a lover overcomes her reticence. Homais' warnings - such as "accidents happen so quickly" - as they leave town on their horses presages Emma's fall into adultery. Irnonically, it is Charles who makes this possible by insisting that she ride with Rodolphe and then writing to him that his wife is at his disposal. The simple observation that the area in the woods has recently been cleared of saplings leads the reader to suppose that he has planned the moment with great care. Unlike her wedding night, Emma feels different after her sexual encounter with Rodolphe. Charles unwittingly becomes complicit in the affair when he buys her a horse. Emma feels like a character in a novel and Rodolphe's lies easily conform to the expectations of a lover in a story. Her idealized emotional love coupled with a newly aroused passion for physical love renders Emma dependent upon Rodolphe's favors. As such, she cannot perceive the risks she is taking by visiting him at his estate and he, with a more realistic perspective on the affair, must point out the risks to her. As his passion fades she comes to realize that the real world does not offer the same romantic permanence of the novels

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/20.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_8_part_1.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 11

part 2, chapter 11

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 11", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter11-13", "summary": "Homais reads an article about an experimental surgical procedure to cure club foot. He convinces Emma and the rest of the village that it would bring them all prestige if Charles were to perform the surgery on Hippolyte, the stable boy. Hippolyte initially resists the idea but he eventually agrees to undergo the procedure. Charles instructs the blacksmith and the cabinet maker to construct the complicated box device to be fitted upon the leg after the operation. On the morning of the surgery Charles is very nervous but successfully cuts the Achilles tendon - according to the instructions in the article - and the operation is deemed a success. That evening, while Charles and Emma are basking in the glow of the success Homais arrives with an article he has written about the operation that flatters Charles. Five days later, however, Hippolyte is writhing in pain and when Homais and Bovary remove the wooden box they find that the skin is swollen and covered with bruises. They remove the box for a few hours but then determine to reapply it. Three days later the leg has turned gangrenous. Emma brings food for the suffering boy who is convalescing in the inn's billiard room where everyone from the travelers to the priest offers him advice. Finally Charles agrees that Monsieur Canivet, the celebrated surgeon in Neufachtel, should be called. Cavinet arrives and declares that the leg will need to be amputated. He upbraids and lectures Homais who suffers under the criticism but fails to defend Bovary. On the day of the amputation the whole town waits to hear the outcome. Charles, however, remains inside his dark house despondent and fearful of what effects the botched operation will have on his career. Emma sits with him and silently renews her conviction that he is worthless. She pities herself for being married to such a weak man. Charles asks his wife for a kiss and she vehemently refuses and rushes from the room leaving him baffled. That night Rodolphe finds Emma waiting for him, her passion renewed", "analysis": ""}

He had recently read a eulogy on a new method for curing club-foot, and as he was a partisan of progress, he conceived the patriotic idea that Yonville, in order to keep to the fore, ought to have some operations for strephopody or club-foot. "For," said he to Emma, "what risk is there? See--" (and he enumerated on his fingers the advantages of the attempt), "success, almost certain relief and beautifying of the patient, celebrity acquired by the operator. Why, for example, should not your husband relieve poor Hippolyte of the 'Lion d'Or'? Note that he would not fail to tell about his cure to all the travellers, and then" (Homais lowered his voice and looked round him) "who is to prevent me from sending a short paragraph on the subject to the paper? Eh! goodness me! an article gets about; it is talked of; it ends by making a snowball! And who knows? who knows?" In fact, Bovary might succeed. Nothing proved to Emma that he was not clever; and what a satisfaction for her to have urged him to a step by which his reputation and fortune would be increased! She only wished to lean on something more solid than love. Charles, urged by the druggist and by her, allowed himself to be persuaded. He sent to Rouen for Dr. Duval's volume, and every evening, holding his head between both hands, plunged into the reading of it. While he was studying equinus, varus, and valgus, that is to say, katastrephopody, endostrephopody, and exostrephopody (or better, the various turnings of the foot downwards, inwards, and outwards, with the hypostrephopody and anastrephopody), otherwise torsion downwards and upwards, Monsier Homais, with all sorts of arguments, was exhorting the lad at the inn to submit to the operation. "You will scarcely feel, probably, a slight pain; it is a simple prick, like a little blood-letting, less than the extraction of certain corns." Hippolyte, reflecting, rolled his stupid eyes. "However," continued the chemist, "it doesn't concern me. It's for your sake, for pure humanity! I should like to see you, my friend, rid of your hideous caudication, together with that waddling of the lumbar regions which, whatever you say, must considerably interfere with you in the exercise of your calling." Then Homais represented to him how much jollier and brisker he would feel afterwards, and even gave him to understand that he would be more likely to please the women; and the stable-boy began to smile heavily. Then he attacked him through his vanity: "Aren't you a man? Hang it! what would you have done if you had had to go into the army, to go and fight beneath the standard? Ah! Hippolyte!" And Homais retired, declaring that he could not understand this obstinacy, this blindness in refusing the benefactions of science. The poor fellow gave way, for it was like a conspiracy. Binet, who never interfered with other people's business, Madame Lefrancois, Artemise, the neighbours, even the mayor, Monsieur Tuvache--everyone persuaded him, lectured him, shamed him; but what finally decided him was that it would cost him nothing. Bovary even undertook to provide the machine for the operation. This generosity was an idea of Emma's, and Charles consented to it, thinking in his heart of hearts that his wife was an angel. So by the advice of the chemist, and after three fresh starts, he had a kind of box made by the carpenter, with the aid of the locksmith, that weighed about eight pounds, and in which iron, wood, sheer-iron, leather, screws, and nuts had not been spared. But to know which of Hippolyte's tendons to cut, it was necessary first of all to find out what kind of club-foot he had. He had a foot forming almost a straight line with the leg, which, however, did not prevent it from being turned in, so that it was an equinus together with something of a varus, or else a slight varus with a strong tendency to equinus. But with this equinus, wide in foot like a horse's hoof, with rugose skin, dry tendons, and large toes, on which the black nails looked as if made of iron, the clubfoot ran about like a deer from morn till night. He was constantly to be seen on the Place, jumping round the carts, thrusting his limping foot forwards. He seemed even stronger on that leg than the other. By dint of hard service it had acquired, as it were, moral qualities of patience and energy; and when he was given some heavy work, he stood on it in preference to its fellow. Now, as it was an equinus, it was necessary to cut the tendon of Achilles, and, if need were, the anterior tibial muscle could be seen to afterwards for getting rid of the varus; for the doctor did not dare to risk both operations at once; he was even trembling already for fear of injuring some important region that he did not know. Neither Ambrose Pare, applying for the first time since Celsus, after an interval of fifteen centuries, a ligature to an artery, nor Dupuytren, about to open an abscess in the brain, nor Gensoul when he first took away the superior maxilla, had hearts that trembled, hands that shook, minds so strained as Monsieur Bovary when he approached Hippolyte, his tenotome between his fingers. And as at hospitals, near by on a table lay a heap of lint, with waxed thread, many bandages--a pyramid of bandages--every bandage to be found at the druggist's. It was Monsieur Homais who since morning had been organising all these preparations, as much to dazzle the multitude as to keep up his illusions. Charles pierced the skin; a dry crackling was heard. The tendon was cut, the operation over. Hippolyte could not get over his surprise, but bent over Bovary's hands to cover them with kisses. "Come, be calm," said the druggist; "later on you will show your gratitude to your benefactor." And he went down to tell the result to five or six inquirers who were waiting in the yard, and who fancied that Hippolyte would reappear walking properly. Then Charles, having buckled his patient into the machine, went home, where Emma, all anxiety, awaited him at the door. She threw herself on his neck; they sat down to table; he ate much, and at dessert he even wanted to take a cup of coffee, a luxury he only permitted himself on Sundays when there was company. The evening was charming, full of prattle, of dreams together. They talked about their future fortune, of the improvements to be made in their house; he saw people's estimation of him growing, his comforts increasing, his wife always loving him; and she was happy to refresh herself with a new sentiment, healthier, better, to feel at last some tenderness for this poor fellow who adored her. The thought of Rodolphe for one moment passed through her mind, but her eyes turned again to Charles; she even noticed with surprise that he had not bad teeth. They were in bed when Monsieur Homais, in spite of the servant, suddenly entered the room, holding in his hand a sheet of paper just written. It was the paragraph he intended for the "Fanal de Rouen." He brought it for them to read. "Read it yourself," said Bovary. He read-- "'Despite the prejudices that still invest a part of the face of Europe like a net, the light nevertheless begins to penetrate our country places. Thus on Tuesday our little town of Yonville found itself the scene of a surgical operation which is at the same time an act of loftiest philanthropy. Monsieur Bovary, one of our most distinguished practitioners--'" "Oh, that is too much! too much!" said Charles, choking with emotion. "No, no! not at all! What next!" "'--Performed an operation on a club-footed man.' I have not used the scientific term, because you know in a newspaper everyone would not perhaps understand. The masses must--'" "No doubt," said Bovary; "go on!" "I proceed," said the chemist. "'Monsieur Bovary, one of our most distinguished practitioners, performed an operation on a club-footed man called Hippolyte Tautain, stableman for the last twenty-five years at the hotel of the "Lion d'Or," kept by Widow Lefrancois, at the Place d'Armes. The novelty of the attempt, and the interest incident to the subject, had attracted such a concourse of persons that there was a veritable obstruction on the threshold of the establishment. The operation, moreover, was performed as if by magic, and barely a few drops of blood appeared on the skin, as though to say that the rebellious tendon had at last given way beneath the efforts of art. The patient, strangely enough--we affirm it as an eye-witness--complained of no pain. His condition up to the present time leaves nothing to be desired. Everything tends to show that his convelescence will be brief; and who knows even if at our next village festivity we shall not see our good Hippolyte figuring in the bacchic dance in the midst of a chorus of joyous boon-companions, and thus proving to all eyes by his verve and his capers his complete cure? Honour, then, to the generous savants! Honour to those indefatigable spirits who consecrate their vigils to the amelioration or to the alleviation of their kind! Honour, thrice honour! Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men. We shall keep our readers informed as to the successive phases of this remarkable cure.'" This did not prevent Mere Lefrancois, from coming five days after, scared, and crying out-- "Help! he is dying! I am going crazy!" Charles rushed to the "Lion d'Or," and the chemist, who caught sight of him passing along the Place hatless, abandoned his shop. He appeared himself breathless, red, anxious, and asking everyone who was going up the stairs-- "Why, what's the matter with our interesting strephopode?" The strephopode was writhing in hideous convulsions, so that the machine in which his leg was enclosed was knocked against the wall enough to break it. With many precautions, in order not to disturb the position of the limb, the box was removed, and an awful sight presented itself. The outlines of the foot disappeared in such a swelling that the entire skin seemed about to burst, and it was covered with ecchymosis, caused by the famous machine. Hippolyte had already complained of suffering from it. No attention had been paid to him; they had to acknowledge that he had not been altogether wrong, and he was freed for a few hours. But, hardly had the oedema gone down to some extent, than the two savants thought fit to put back the limb in the apparatus, strapping it tighter to hasten matters. At last, three days after, Hippolyte being unable to endure it any longer, they once more removed the machine, and were much surprised at the result they saw. The livid tumefaction spread over the leg, with blisters here and there, whence there oozed a black liquid. Matters were taking a serious turn. Hippolyte began to worry himself, and Mere Lefrancois, had him installed in the little room near the kitchen, so that he might at least have some distraction. But the tax-collector, who dined there every day, complained bitterly of such companionship. Then Hippolyte was removed to the billiard-room. He lay there moaning under his heavy coverings, pale with long beard, sunken eyes, and from time to time turning his perspiring head on the dirty pillow, where the flies alighted. Madame Bovary went to see him. She brought him linen for his poultices; she comforted, and encouraged him. Besides, he did not want for company, especially on market-days, when the peasants were knocking about the billiard-balls round him, fenced with the cues, smoked, drank, sang, and brawled. "How are you?" they said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Ah! you're not up to much, it seems, but it's your own fault. You should do this! do that!" And then they told him stories of people who had all been cured by other remedies than his. Then by way of consolation they added-- "You give way too much! Get up! You coddle yourself like a king! All the same, old chap, you don't smell nice!" Gangrene, in fact, was spreading more and more. Bovary himself turned sick at it. He came every hour, every moment. Hippolyte looked at him with eyes full of terror, sobbing-- "When shall I get well? Oh, save me! How unfortunate I am! How unfortunate I am!" And the doctor left, always recommending him to diet himself. "Don't listen to him, my lad," said Mere Lefrancois, "Haven't they tortured you enough already? You'll grow still weaker. Here! swallow this." And she gave him some good beef-tea, a slice of mutton, a piece of bacon, and sometimes small glasses of brandy, that he had not the strength to put to his lips. Abbe Bournisien, hearing that he was growing worse, asked to see him. He began by pitying his sufferings, declaring at the same time that he ought to rejoice at them since it was the will of the Lord, and take advantage of the occasion to reconcile himself to Heaven. "For," said the ecclesiastic in a paternal tone, "you rather neglected your duties; you were rarely seen at divine worship. How many years is it since you approached the holy table? I understand that your work, that the whirl of the world may have kept you from care for your salvation. But now is the time to reflect. Yet don't despair. I have known great sinners, who, about to appear before God (you are not yet at this point I know), had implored His mercy, and who certainly died in the best frame of mind. Let us hope that, like them, you will set us a good example. Thus, as a precaution, what is to prevent you from saying morning and evening a 'Hail Mary, full of grace,' and 'Our Father which art in heaven'? Yes, do that, for my sake, to oblige me. That won't cost you anything. Will you promise me?" The poor devil promised. The cure came back day after day. He chatted with the landlady; and even told anecdotes interspersed with jokes and puns that Hippolyte did not understand. Then, as soon as he could, he fell back upon matters of religion, putting on an appropriate expression of face. His zeal seemed successful, for the club-foot soon manifested a desire to go on a pilgrimage to Bon-Secours if he were cured; to which Monsieur Bournisien replied that he saw no objection; two precautions were better than one; it was no risk anyhow. The druggist was indignant at what he called the manoeuvres of the priest; they were prejudicial, he said, to Hippolyte's convalescence, and he kept repeating to Madame Lefrancois, "Leave him alone! leave him alone! You perturb his morals with your mysticism." But the good woman would no longer listen to him; he was the cause of it all. From a spirit of contradiction she hung up near the bedside of the patient a basin filled with holy-water and a branch of box. Religion, however, seemed no more able to succour him than surgery, and the invincible gangrene still spread from the extremities towards the stomach. It was all very well to vary the potions and change the poultices; the muscles each day rotted more and more; and at last Charles replied by an affirmative nod of the head when Mere Lefrancois, asked him if she could not, as a forlorn hope, send for Monsieur Canivet of Neufchatel, who was a celebrity. A doctor of medicine, fifty years of age, enjoying a good position and self-possessed, Charles's colleague did not refrain from laughing disdainfully when he had uncovered the leg, mortified to the knee. Then having flatly declared that it must be amputated, he went off to the chemist's to rail at the asses who could have reduced a poor man to such a state. Shaking Monsieur Homais by the button of his coat, he shouted out in the shop-- "These are the inventions of Paris! These are the ideas of those gentry of the capital! It is like strabismus, chloroform, lithotrity, a heap of monstrosities that the Government ought to prohibit. But they want to do the clever, and they cram you with remedies without, troubling about the consequences. We are not so clever, not we! We are not savants, coxcombs, fops! We are practitioners; we cure people, and we should not dream of operating on anyone who is in perfect health. Straighten club-feet! As if one could straighten club-feet! It is as if one wished, for example, to make a hunchback straight!" Homais suffered as he listened to this discourse, and he concealed his discomfort beneath a courtier's smile; for he needed to humour Monsier Canivet, whose prescriptions sometimes came as far as Yonville. So he did not take up the defence of Bovary; he did not even make a single remark, and, renouncing his principles, he sacrificed his dignity to the more serious interests of his business. This amputation of the thigh by Doctor Canivet was a great event in the village. On that day all the inhabitants got up earlier, and the Grande Rue, although full of people, had something lugubrious about it, as if an execution had been expected. At the grocer's they discussed Hippolyte's illness; the shops did no business, and Madame Tuvache, the mayor's wife, did not stir from her window, such was her impatience to see the operator arrive. He came in his gig, which he drove himself. But the springs of the right side having at length given way beneath the weight of his corpulence, it happened that the carriage as it rolled along leaned over a little, and on the other cushion near him could be seen a large box covered in red sheep-leather, whose three brass clasps shone grandly. After he had entered like a whirlwind the porch of the "Lion d'Or," the doctor, shouting very loud, ordered them to unharness his horse. Then he went into the stable to see that she was eating her oats all right; for on arriving at a patient's he first of all looked after his mare and his gig. People even said about this-- "Ah! Monsieur Canivet's a character!" And he was the more esteemed for this imperturbable coolness. The universe to the last man might have died, and he would not have missed the smallest of his habits. Homais presented himself. "I count on you," said the doctor. "Are we ready? Come along!" But the druggist, turning red, confessed that he was too sensitive to assist at such an operation. "When one is a simple spectator," he said, "the imagination, you know, is impressed. And then I have such a nervous system!" "Pshaw!" interrupted Canivet; "on the contrary, you seem to me inclined to apoplexy. Besides, that doesn't astonish me, for you chemist fellows are always poking about your kitchens, which must end by spoiling your constitutions. Now just look at me. I get up every day at four o'clock; I shave with cold water (and am never cold). I don't wear flannels, and I never catch cold; my carcass is good enough! I live now in one way, now in another, like a philosopher, taking pot-luck; that is why I am not squeamish like you, and it is as indifferent to me to carve a Christian as the first fowl that turns up. Then, perhaps, you will say, habit! habit!" Then, without any consideration for Hippolyte, who was sweating with agony between his sheets, these gentlemen entered into a conversation, in which the druggist compared the coolness of a surgeon to that of a general; and this comparison was pleasing to Canivet, who launched out on the exigencies of his art. He looked upon, it as a sacred office, although the ordinary practitioners dishonoured it. At last, coming back to the patient, he examined the bandages brought by Homais, the same that had appeared for the club-foot, and asked for someone to hold the limb for him. Lestiboudois was sent for, and Monsieur Canivet having turned up his sleeves, passed into the billiard-room, while the druggist stayed with Artemise and the landlady, both whiter than their aprons, and with ears strained towards the door. Bovary during this time did not dare to stir from his house. He kept downstairs in the sitting-room by the side of the fireless chimney, his chin on his breast, his hands clasped, his eyes staring. "What a mishap!" he thought, "what a mishap!" Perhaps, after all, he had made some slip. He thought it over, but could hit upon nothing. But the most famous surgeons also made mistakes; and that is what no one would ever believe! People, on the contrary, would laugh, jeer! It would spread as far as Forges, as Neufchatel, as Rouen, everywhere! Who could say if his colleagues would not write against him. Polemics would ensue; he would have to answer in the papers. Hippolyte might even prosecute him. He saw himself dishonoured, ruined, lost; and his imagination, assailed by a world of hypotheses, tossed amongst them like an empty cask borne by the sea and floating upon the waves. Emma, opposite, watched him; she did not share his humiliation; she felt another--that of having supposed such a man was worth anything. As if twenty times already she had not sufficiently perceived his mediocrity. Charles was walking up and down the room; his boots creaked on the floor. "Sit down," she said; "you fidget me." He sat down again. How was it that she--she, who was so intelligent--could have allowed herself to be deceived again? and through what deplorable madness had she thus ruined her life by continual sacrifices? She recalled all her instincts of luxury, all the privations of her soul, the sordidness of marriage, of the household, her dream sinking into the mire like wounded swallows; all that she had longed for, all that she had denied herself, all that she might have had! And for what? for what? In the midst of the silence that hung over the village a heart-rending cry rose on the air. Bovary turned white to fainting. She knit her brows with a nervous gesture, then went on. And it was for him, for this creature, for this man, who understood nothing, who felt nothing! For he was there quite quiet, not even suspecting that the ridicule of his name would henceforth sully hers as well as his. She had made efforts to love him, and she had repented with tears for having yielded to another! "But it was perhaps a valgus!" suddenly exclaimed Bovary, who was meditating. At the unexpected shock of this phrase falling on her thought like a leaden bullet on a silver plate, Emma, shuddering, raised her head in order to find out what he meant to say; and they looked at the other in silence, almost amazed to see each other, so far sundered were they by their inner thoughts. Charles gazed at her with the dull look of a drunken man, while he listened motionless to the last cries of the sufferer, that followed each other in long-drawn modulations, broken by sharp spasms like the far-off howling of some beast being slaughtered. Emma bit her wan lips, and rolling between her fingers a piece of coral that she had broken, fixed on Charles the burning glance of her eyes like two arrows of fire about to dart forth. Everything in him irritated her now; his face, his dress, what he did not say, his whole person, his existence, in fine. She repented of her past virtue as of a crime, and what still remained of it rumbled away beneath the furious blows of her pride. She revelled in all the evil ironies of triumphant adultery. The memory of her lover came back to her with dazzling attractions; she threw her whole soul into it, borne away towards this image with a fresh enthusiasm; and Charles seemed to her as much removed from her life, as absent forever, as impossible and annihilated, as if he had been about to die and were passing under her eyes. There was a sound of steps on the pavement. Charles looked up, and through the lowered blinds he saw at the corner of the market in the broad sunshine Dr. Canivet, who was wiping his brow with his handkerchief. Homais, behind him, was carrying a large red box in his hand, and both were going towards the chemist's. Then with a feeling of sudden tenderness and discouragement Charles turned to his wife saying to her-- "Oh, kiss me, my own!" "Leave me!" she said, red with anger. "What is the matter?" he asked, stupefied. "Be calm; compose yourself. You know well enough that I love you. Come!" "Enough!" she cried with a terrible look. And escaping from the room, Emma closed the door so violently that the barometer fell from the wall and smashed on the floor. Charles sank back into his arm-chair overwhelmed, trying to discover what could be wrong with her, fancying some nervous illness, weeping, and vaguely feeling something fatal and incomprehensible whirling round him. When Rodolphe came to the garden that evening, he found his mistress waiting for him at the foot of the steps on the lowest stair. They threw their arms round one another, and all their rancour melted like snow beneath the warmth of that kiss.

part 2, Chapter 11

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter11-13

Homais reads an article about an experimental surgical procedure to cure club foot. He convinces Emma and the rest of the village that it would bring them all prestige if Charles were to perform the surgery on Hippolyte, the stable boy. Hippolyte initially resists the idea but he eventually agrees to undergo the procedure. Charles instructs the blacksmith and the cabinet maker to construct the complicated box device to be fitted upon the leg after the operation. On the morning of the surgery Charles is very nervous but successfully cuts the Achilles tendon - according to the instructions in the article - and the operation is deemed a success. That evening, while Charles and Emma are basking in the glow of the success Homais arrives with an article he has written about the operation that flatters Charles. Five days later, however, Hippolyte is writhing in pain and when Homais and Bovary remove the wooden box they find that the skin is swollen and covered with bruises. They remove the box for a few hours but then determine to reapply it. Three days later the leg has turned gangrenous. Emma brings food for the suffering boy who is convalescing in the inn's billiard room where everyone from the travelers to the priest offers him advice. Finally Charles agrees that Monsieur Canivet, the celebrated surgeon in Neufachtel, should be called. Cavinet arrives and declares that the leg will need to be amputated. He upbraids and lectures Homais who suffers under the criticism but fails to defend Bovary. On the day of the amputation the whole town waits to hear the outcome. Charles, however, remains inside his dark house despondent and fearful of what effects the botched operation will have on his career. Emma sits with him and silently renews her conviction that he is worthless. She pities herself for being married to such a weak man. Charles asks his wife for a kiss and she vehemently refuses and rushes from the room leaving him baffled. That night Rodolphe finds Emma waiting for him, her passion renewed

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/21.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_8_part_2.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 12

part 2, chapter 12

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 12", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter11-13", "summary": "Emma's hatred of Charles fuels her love for Rodolphe. She asks Rodolphe to take her away from her present life but he discounts her request as ridiculous and impossible. Emma works Flicit hard to keep the house and her clothes immaculate and Justin takes particular pleasure in spending time at the Bovary's while Flicit cleans Madame Bovary's things. Emma convinces Charles to purchase an expensive wooden leg for Hippolyte that proves too ornate for everyday use so Bovary purchases a modest one for him as well. The stable boy's clacking leg can be heard all over town. Emma establishes a regular relationship with Monsieur Lheureux and begins to order anything that strikes her fancy, including expensive gifts such as a silver-gilt riding crop for Rodolphe. When the bill comes due Emma is at a loss for money and Lheureux learns her secret when he gleans that the riding crop was not for Charles. Emma uses a large payment from one of Charles' patients to pay the merchant who seems disappointed to find that Emma has the funds. Rodolphe begins to tire of Emma and her constant demands for affection. He treats her as a sexual plaything. Over time Emma's passion for Rodolphe eclipses her sense of propriety and the village matrons begin to talk of her scandalous behavior. She is seen smoking a cigarette and wearing a man's tight fitting vest. Charles' mother, who comes for a visit at this time, is particularly alarmed by her daughter-in-law's behavior and the two quarrel violently. Charles begs Emma to apologize and she reluctantly agrees. After the apology she begs Rodolphe to rescue her from her life as a Bovary. He reluctantly consents to take her and Berthe away with him. Emma becomes exceedingly happy and everyone is astonished by the sudden change in her temperament. Charles begins to have hope for the future and imagines the happy life of his child. Emma, however, dreams of the impossibly romantic life she and Rodolphe will lead in some faraway land. She orders a cloak, trunk and overnight bag from Lheureux who surmises that she must be going on a trip. Rodolphe and Emma agree to elope in a month and they make plans for their departure. Rodolphe notices that she does not mention her daughter in the plans. When the time comes Rodolphe stalls for several weeks and finally settles on the fourth of September, a Monday, as the date. The Saturday before he visits her and they reaffirms their love for each other. Shortly after midnight he leaves with the words \"Till tomorrow\" but on his trip home he reminds himself that it would be too burdensome to follow through with the plan and consoles himself with the thought that she has been a pretty mistress", "analysis": ""}

They began to love one another again. Often, even in the middle of the day, Emma suddenly wrote to him, then from the window made a sign to Justin, who, taking his apron off, quickly ran to La Huchette. Rodolphe would come; she had sent for him to tell him that she was bored, that her husband was odious, her life frightful. "But what can I do?" he cried one day impatiently. "Ah! if you would--" She was sitting on the floor between his knees, her hair loose, her look lost. "Why, what?" said Rodolphe. She sighed. "We would go and live elsewhere--somewhere!" "You are really mad!" he said laughing. "How could that be possible?" She returned to the subject; he pretended not to understand, and turned the conversation. What he did not understand was all this worry about so simple an affair as love. She had a motive, a reason, and, as it were, a pendant to her affection. Her tenderness, in fact, grew each day with her repulsion to her husband. The more she gave up herself to the one, the more she loathed the other. Never had Charles seemed to her so disagreeable, to have such stodgy fingers, such vulgar ways, to be so dull as when they found themselves together after her meeting with Rodolphe. Then, while playing the spouse and virtue, she was burning at the thought of that head whose black hair fell in a curl over the sunburnt brow, of that form at once so strong and elegant, of that man, in a word, who had such experience in his reasoning, such passion in his desires. It was for him that she filed her nails with the care of a chaser, and that there was never enough cold-cream for her skin, nor of patchouli for her handkerchiefs. She loaded herself with bracelets, rings, and necklaces. When he was coming she filled the two large blue glass vases with roses, and prepared her room and her person like a courtesan expecting a prince. The servant had to be constantly washing linen, and all day Felicite did not stir from the kitchen, where little Justin, who often kept her company, watched her at work. With his elbows on the long board on which she was ironing, he greedily watched all these women's clothes spread about him, the dimity petticoats, the fichus, the collars, and the drawers with running strings, wide at the hips and growing narrower below. "What is that for?" asked the young fellow, passing his hand over the crinoline or the hooks and eyes. "Why, haven't you ever seen anything?" Felicite answered laughing. "As if your mistress, Madame Homais, didn't wear the same." "Oh, I daresay! Madame Homais!" And he added with a meditative air, "As if she were a lady like madame!" But Felicite grew impatient of seeing him hanging round her. She was six years older than he, and Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's servant, was beginning to pay court to her. "Let me alone," she said, moving her pot of starch. "You'd better be off and pound almonds; you are always dangling about women. Before you meddle with such things, bad boy, wait till you've got a beard to your chin." "Oh, don't be cross! I'll go and clean her boots." And he at once took down from the shelf Emma's boots, all coated with mud, the mud of the rendezvous, that crumbled into powder beneath his fingers, and that he watched as it gently rose in a ray of sunlight. "How afraid you are of spoiling them!" said the servant, who wasn't so particular when she cleaned them herself, because as soon as the stuff of the boots was no longer fresh madame handed them over to her. Emma had a number in her cupboard that she squandered one after the other, without Charles allowing himself the slightest observation. So also he disbursed three hundred francs for a wooden leg that she thought proper to make a present of to Hippolyte. Its top was covered with cork, and it had spring joints, a complicated mechanism, covered over by black trousers ending in a patent-leather boot. But Hippolyte, not daring to use such a handsome leg every day, begged Madame Bovary to get him another more convenient one. The doctor, of course, had again to defray the expense of this purchase. So little by little the stable-man took up his work again. One saw him running about the village as before, and when Charles heard from afar the sharp noise of the wooden leg, he at once went in another direction. It was Monsieur Lheureux, the shopkeeper, who had undertaken the order; this provided him with an excuse for visiting Emma. He chatted with her about the new goods from Paris, about a thousand feminine trifles, made himself very obliging, and never asked for his money. Emma yielded to this lazy mode of satisfying all her caprices. Thus she wanted to have a very handsome ridding-whip that was at an umbrella-maker's at Rouen to give to Rodolphe. The week after Monsieur Lheureux placed it on her table. But the next day he called on her with a bill for two hundred and seventy francs, not counting the centimes. Emma was much embarrassed; all the drawers of the writing-table were empty; they owed over a fortnight's wages to Lestiboudois, two quarters to the servant, for any quantity of other things, and Bovary was impatiently expecting Monsieur Derozeray's account, which he was in the habit of paying every year about Midsummer. She succeeded at first in putting off Lheureux. At last he lost patience; he was being sued; his capital was out, and unless he got some in he should be forced to take back all the goods she had received. "Oh, very well, take them!" said Emma. "I was only joking," he replied; "the only thing I regret is the whip. My word! I'll ask monsieur to return it to me." "No, no!" she said. "Ah! I've got you!" thought Lheureux. And, certain of his discovery, he went out repeating to himself in an undertone, and with his usual low whistle-- "Good! we shall see! we shall see!" She was thinking how to get out of this when the servant coming in put on the mantelpiece a small roll of blue paper "from Monsieur Derozeray's." Emma pounced upon and opened it. It contained fifteen napoleons; it was the account. She heard Charles on the stairs; threw the gold to the back of her drawer, and took out the key. Three days after Lheureux reappeared. "I have an arrangement to suggest to you," he said. "If, instead of the sum agreed on, you would take--" "Here it is," she said placing fourteen napoleons in his hand. The tradesman was dumfounded. Then, to conceal his disappointment, he was profuse in apologies and proffers of service, all of which Emma declined; then she remained a few moments fingering in the pocket of her apron the two five-franc pieces that he had given her in change. She promised herself she would economise in order to pay back later on. "Pshaw!" she thought, "he won't think about it again." Besides the riding-whip with its silver-gilt handle, Rodolphe had received a seal with the motto Amor nel cor* furthermore, a scarf for a muffler, and, finally, a cigar-case exactly like the Viscount's, that Charles had formerly picked up in the road, and that Emma had kept. These presents, however, humiliated him; he refused several; she insisted, and he ended by obeying, thinking her tyrannical and overexacting. *A loving heart. Then she had strange ideas. "When midnight strikes," she said, "you must think of me." And if he confessed that he had not thought of her, there were floods of reproaches that always ended with the eternal question-- "Do you love me?" "Why, of course I love you," he answered. "A great deal?" "Certainly!" "You haven't loved any others?" "Did you think you'd got a virgin?" he exclaimed laughing. Emma cried, and he tried to console her, adorning his protestations with puns. "Oh," she went on, "I love you! I love you so that I could not live without you, do you see? There are times when I long to see you again, when I am torn by all the anger of love. I ask myself, Where is he? Perhaps he is talking to other women. They smile upon him; he approaches. Oh no; no one else pleases you. There are some more beautiful, but I love you best. I know how to love best. I am your servant, your concubine! You are my king, my idol! You are good, you are beautiful, you are clever, you are strong!" He had so often heard these things said that they did not strike him as original. Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars. But with that superior critical judgment that belongs to him who, in no matter what circumstance, holds back, Rodolphe saw other delights to be got out of this love. He thought all modesty in the way. He treated her quite sans facon.* He made of her something supple and corrupt. Hers was an idiotic sort of attachment, full of admiration for him, of voluptuousness for her, a beatitude that benumbed her; her soul sank into this drunkenness, shrivelled up, drowned in it, like Clarence in his butt of Malmsey. *Off-handedly. By the mere effect of her love Madame Bovary's manners changed. Her looks grew bolder, her speech more free; she even committed the impropriety of walking out with Monsieur Rodolphe, a cigarette in her mouth, "as if to defy the people." At last, those who still doubted doubted no longer when one day they saw her getting out of the "Hirondelle," her waist squeezed into a waistcoat like a man; and Madame Bovary senior, who, after a fearful scene with her husband, had taken refuge at her son's, was not the least scandalised of the women-folk. Many other things displeased her. First, Charles had not attended to her advice about the forbidding of novels; then the "ways of the house" annoyed her; she allowed herself to make some remarks, and there were quarrels, especially one on account of Felicite. Madame Bovary senior, the evening before, passing along the passage, had surprised her in company of a man--a man with a brown collar, about forty years old, who, at the sound of her step, had quickly escaped through the kitchen. Then Emma began to laugh, but the good lady grew angry, declaring that unless morals were to be laughed at one ought to look after those of one's servants. "Where were you brought up?" asked the daughter-in-law, with so impertinent a look that Madame Bovary asked her if she were not perhaps defending her own case. "Leave the room!" said the young woman, springing up with a bound. "Emma! Mamma!" cried Charles, trying to reconcile them. But both had fled in their exasperation. Emma was stamping her feet as she repeated-- "Oh! what manners! What a peasant!" He ran to his mother; she was beside herself. She stammered "She is an insolent, giddy-headed thing, or perhaps worse!" And she was for leaving at once if the other did not apologise. So Charles went back again to his wife and implored her to give way; he knelt to her; she ended by saying-- "Very well! I'll go to her." And in fact she held out her hand to her mother-in-law with the dignity of a marchioness as she said-- "Excuse me, madame." Then, having gone up again to her room, she threw herself flat on her bed and cried there like a child, her face buried in the pillow. She and Rodolphe had agreed that in the event of anything extraordinary occurring, she should fasten a small piece of white paper to the blind, so that if by chance he happened to be in Yonville, he could hurry to the lane behind the house. Emma made the signal; she had been waiting three-quarters of an hour when she suddenly caught sight of Rodolphe at the corner of the market. She felt tempted to open the window and call him, but he had already disappeared. She fell back in despair. Soon, however, it seemed to her that someone was walking on the pavement. It was he, no doubt. She went downstairs, crossed the yard. He was there outside. She threw herself into his arms. "Do take care!" he said. "Ah! if you knew!" she replied. And she began telling him everything, hurriedly, disjointedly, exaggerating the facts, inventing many, and so prodigal of parentheses that he understood nothing of it. "Come, my poor angel, courage! Be comforted! be patient!" "But I have been patient; I have suffered for four years. A love like ours ought to show itself in the face of heaven. They torture me! I can bear it no longer! Save me!" She clung to Rodolphe. Her eyes, full of tears, flashed like flames beneath a wave; her breast heaved; he had never loved her so much, so that he lost his head and said "What is, it? What do you wish?" "Take me away," she cried, "carry me off! Oh, I pray you!" And she threw herself upon his mouth, as if to seize there the unexpected consent if breathed forth in a kiss. "But--" Rodolphe resumed. "What?" "Your little girl!" She reflected a few moments, then replied-- "We will take her! It can't be helped!" "What a woman!" he said to himself, watching her as she went. For she had run into the garden. Someone was calling her. On the following days Madame Bovary senior was much surprised at the change in her daughter-in-law. Emma, in fact, was showing herself more docile, and even carried her deference so far as to ask for a recipe for pickling gherkins. Was it the better to deceive them both? Or did she wish by a sort of voluptuous stoicism to feel the more profoundly the bitterness of the things she was about to leave? But she paid no heed to them; on the contrary, she lived as lost in the anticipated delight of her coming happiness. It was an eternal subject for conversation with Rodolphe. She leant on his shoulder murmuring-- "Ah! when we are in the mail-coach! Do you think about it? Can it be? It seems to me that the moment I feel the carriage start, it will be as if we were rising in a balloon, as if we were setting out for the clouds. Do you know that I count the hours? And you?" Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this period; she had that indefinable beauty that results from joy, from enthusiasm, from success, and that is only the harmony of temperament with circumstances. Her desires, her sorrows, the experience of pleasure, and her ever-young illusions, that had, as soil and rain and winds and the sun make flowers grow, gradually developed her, and she at length blossomed forth in all the plenitude of her nature. Her eyelids seemed chiselled expressly for her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down. One would have thought that an artist apt in conception had arranged the curls of hair upon her neck; they fell in a thick mass, negligently, and with the changing chances of their adultery, that unbound them every day. Her voice now took more mellow infections, her figure also; something subtle and penetrating escaped even from the folds of her gown and from the line of her foot. Charles, as when they were first married, thought her delicious and quite irresistible. When he came home in the middle of the night, he did not dare to wake her. The porcelain night-light threw a round trembling gleam upon the ceiling, and the drawn curtains of the little cot formed as it were a white hut standing out in the shade, and by the bedside Charles looked at them. He seemed to hear the light breathing of his child. She would grow big now; every season would bring rapid progress. He already saw her coming from school as the day drew in, laughing, with ink-stains on her jacket, and carrying her basket on her arm. Then she would have to be sent to the boarding-school; that would cost much; how was it to be done? Then he reflected. He thought of hiring a small farm in the neighbourhood, that he would superintend every morning on his way to his patients. He would save up what he brought in; he would put it in the savings-bank. Then he would buy shares somewhere, no matter where; besides, his practice would increase; he counted upon that, for he wanted Berthe to be well-educated, to be accomplished, to learn to play the piano. Ah! how pretty she would be later on when she was fifteen, when, resembling her mother, she would, like her, wear large straw hats in the summer-time; from a distance they would be taken for two sisters. He pictured her to himself working in the evening by their side beneath the light of the lamp; she would embroider him slippers; she would look after the house; she would fill all the home with her charm and her gaiety. At last, they would think of her marriage; they would find her some good young fellow with a steady business; he would make her happy; this would last for ever. Emma was not asleep; she pretended to be; and while he dozed off by her side she awakened to other dreams. To the gallop of four horses she was carried away for a week towards a new land, whence they would return no more. They went on and on, their arms entwined, without a word. Often from the top of a mountain there suddenly glimpsed some splendid city with domes, and bridges, and ships, forests of citron trees, and cathedrals of white marble, on whose pointed steeples were storks' nests. They went at a walking-pace because of the great flag-stones, and on the ground there were bouquets of flowers, offered you by women dressed in red bodices. They heard the chiming of bells, the neighing of mules, together with the murmur of guitars and the noise of fountains, whose rising spray refreshed heaps of fruit arranged like a pyramid at the foot of pale statues that smiled beneath playing waters. And then, one night they came to a fishing village, where brown nets were drying in the wind along the cliffs and in front of the huts. It was there that they would stay; they would live in a low, flat-roofed house, shaded by a palm-tree, in the heart of a gulf, by the sea. They would row in gondolas, swing in hammocks, and their existence would be easy and large as their silk gowns, warm and star-spangled as the nights they would contemplate. However, in the immensity of this future that she conjured up, nothing special stood forth; the days, all magnificent, resembled each other like waves; and it swayed in the horizon, infinite, harmonised, azure, and bathed in sunshine. But the child began to cough in her cot or Bovary snored more loudly, and Emma did not fall asleep till morning, when the dawn whitened the windows, and when little Justin was already in the square taking down the shutters of the chemist's shop. She had sent for Monsieur Lheureux, and had said to him-- "I want a cloak--a large lined cloak with a deep collar." "You are going on a journey?" he asked. "No; but--never mind. I may count on you, may I not, and quickly?" He bowed. "Besides, I shall want," she went on, "a trunk--not too heavy--handy." "Yes, yes, I understand. About three feet by a foot and a half, as they are being made just now." "And a travelling bag." "Decidedly," thought Lheureux, "there's a row on here." "And," said Madame Bovary, taking her watch from her belt, "take this; you can pay yourself out of it." But the tradesman cried out that she was wrong; they knew one another; did he doubt her? What childishness! She insisted, however, on his taking at least the chain, and Lheureux had already put it in his pocket and was going, when she called him back. "You will leave everything at your place. As to the cloak"--she seemed to be reflecting--"do not bring it either; you can give me the maker's address, and tell him to have it ready for me." It was the next month that they were to run away. She was to leave Yonville as if she was going on some business to Rouen. Rodolphe would have booked the seats, procured the passports, and even have written to Paris in order to have the whole mail-coach reserved for them as far as Marseilles, where they would buy a carriage, and go on thence without stopping to Genoa. She would take care to send her luggage to Lheureux whence it would be taken direct to the "Hirondelle," so that no one would have any suspicion. And in all this there never was any allusion to the child. Rodolphe avoided speaking of her; perhaps he no longer thought about it. He wished to have two more weeks before him to arrange some affairs; then at the end of a week he wanted two more; then he said he was ill; next he went on a journey. The month of August passed, and, after all these delays, they decided that it was to be irrevocably fixed for the 4th September--a Monday. At length the Saturday before arrived. Rodolphe came in the evening earlier than usual. "Everything is ready?" she asked him. "Yes." Then they walked round a garden-bed, and went to sit down near the terrace on the kerb-stone of the wall. "You are sad," said Emma. "No; why?" And yet he looked at her strangely in a tender fashion. "It is because you are going away?" she went on; "because you are leaving what is dear to you--your life? Ah! I understand. I have nothing in the world! you are all to me; so shall I be to you. I will be your people, your country; I will tend, I will love you!" "How sweet you are!" he said, seizing her in his arms. "Really!" she said with a voluptuous laugh. "Do you love me? Swear it then!" "Do I love you--love you? I adore you, my love." The moon, full and purple-coloured, was rising right out of the earth at the end of the meadow. She rose quickly between the branches of the poplars, that hid her here and there like a black curtain pierced with holes. Then she appeared dazzling with whiteness in the empty heavens that she lit up, and now sailing more slowly along, let fall upon the river a great stain that broke up into an infinity of stars; and the silver sheen seemed to writhe through the very depths like a heedless serpent covered with luminous scales; it also resembled some monster candelabra all along which sparkled drops of diamonds running together. The soft night was about them; masses of shadow filled the branches. Emma, her eyes half closed, breathed in with deep sighs the fresh wind that was blowing. They did not speak, lost as they were in the rush of their reverie. The tenderness of the old days came back to their hearts, full and silent as the flowing river, with the softness of the perfume of the syringas, and threw across their memories shadows more immense and more sombre 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 to-morrow. 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 to-morrow 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-- "To-morrow!" 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."

part 2, Chapter 12

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter11-13

Emma's hatred of Charles fuels her love for Rodolphe. She asks Rodolphe to take her away from her present life but he discounts her request as ridiculous and impossible. Emma works Flicit hard to keep the house and her clothes immaculate and Justin takes particular pleasure in spending time at the Bovary's while Flicit cleans Madame Bovary's things. Emma convinces Charles to purchase an expensive wooden leg for Hippolyte that proves too ornate for everyday use so Bovary purchases a modest one for him as well. The stable boy's clacking leg can be heard all over town. Emma establishes a regular relationship with Monsieur Lheureux and begins to order anything that strikes her fancy, including expensive gifts such as a silver-gilt riding crop for Rodolphe. When the bill comes due Emma is at a loss for money and Lheureux learns her secret when he gleans that the riding crop was not for Charles. Emma uses a large payment from one of Charles' patients to pay the merchant who seems disappointed to find that Emma has the funds. Rodolphe begins to tire of Emma and her constant demands for affection. He treats her as a sexual plaything. Over time Emma's passion for Rodolphe eclipses her sense of propriety and the village matrons begin to talk of her scandalous behavior. She is seen smoking a cigarette and wearing a man's tight fitting vest. Charles' mother, who comes for a visit at this time, is particularly alarmed by her daughter-in-law's behavior and the two quarrel violently. Charles begs Emma to apologize and she reluctantly agrees. After the apology she begs Rodolphe to rescue her from her life as a Bovary. He reluctantly consents to take her and Berthe away with him. Emma becomes exceedingly happy and everyone is astonished by the sudden change in her temperament. Charles begins to have hope for the future and imagines the happy life of his child. Emma, however, dreams of the impossibly romantic life she and Rodolphe will lead in some faraway land. She orders a cloak, trunk and overnight bag from Lheureux who surmises that she must be going on a trip. Rodolphe and Emma agree to elope in a month and they make plans for their departure. Rodolphe notices that she does not mention her daughter in the plans. When the time comes Rodolphe stalls for several weeks and finally settles on the fourth of September, a Monday, as the date. The Saturday before he visits her and they reaffirms their love for each other. Shortly after midnight he leaves with the words "Till tomorrow" but on his trip home he reminds himself that it would be too burdensome to follow through with the plan and consoles himself with the thought that she has been a pretty mistress

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/22.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_8_part_3.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 13

part 2, chapter 13

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 13", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter11-13", "summary": "Back at his estate Rodolphe wants to write Emma a letter and for inspiration he begins to search through the box in which he keeps remembrances from his lovers. The copious articles serve only to confuse him and he becomes disgusted with the task. He writes her a letter in which he claims to be breaking off their relationship because their passion would have cooled with time and the shame of her situation would have eventually affected her. He blames fate for and explains that he will be going into exile. He signs the letter \"Your Friend\" and drops some water on it to substitute for tears. The next day his servant delivers the letter disguised in a fruit basket. Emma immediately senses that something horrible has happened and she ignores Charles who arrives home at that moment. She runs to the hot stuffy attic to read the letter. She opens the window and sunlight fills the room. She looks over the rooftops of the village and hears the monotonous grinding of Binet's lathe. She reads the letter and the world seems to collapse around her. She staggers to the open window and dares herself to throw her body from it and end her miserable life. As she stands there in a swoon she hears Charles calling for her and Flicit, touching her mistress' arm, tells her that the meal is ready. She joins her husband at the table and realizes that she has lost the letter. Charles tells her that he has heard that Monsieur Rodolphe is leaving on a trip and to her horror she sees her lover's carriage pass outside the door. She falls backward onto the floor and is unable to rise. With Homais' help the distraught Charles is able to resuscitate her and they carry her delirious to her bed. For forty-three days Charles remains by the side of his prostrate and silent wife. Finally her strength returns and one day in October he is able to take her for a walk in the garden. She complains of aches and pains. On top of these worries Charles begins to realize he is in financial trouble.", "analysis": "Emma loses all respect for Charles after the operation on Hippolyte's leg fails. Curiously, Charles performs the operation correctly but the procedure itself is flawed and those who were in favor of performing it - namely Homais and Emma - do not suffer as much as Charles. Rather, Emma's renewed hatred of Charles fuels her passion for Rodolphe and causes her to spend increasingly large amounts of her husband's money. As her passion increases Rodolphe's wanes. Although he has played the part of a romantic in order to seduce Emma, Rodolphe is ultimately a bourgeois realist and will not be burdened by the necessity of fleeing with his mistress and her child. The force of his power over her becomes evident when she is tempted to take her own life following his betrayal. The sound of Binet's lathe permeates this scene and though Emma is called back from the brink by the rather mundane domestic demand to dine her body cannot withstand the force of her emotions and she becomes physically ill and catatonic. Emma is unable to appreciate the depth of her husband's love, evidenced by his devotion during her illness, because it does not cohere with the violent and spontaneous emotions found in her novels"}

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 pell-mell 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 we might have gone, it would have persecuted us. You would have had to put up with indiscreet questions, calumny, contempt, insult perhaps. Insult to you! Oh! And I, who would place you on a throne! I who bear with me your memory as a talisman! For I am going to punish myself by exile for all the ill I have done you. I am going away. Whither I know not. I am mad. Adieu! Be good always. Preserve the memory of the unfortunate who has lost you. Teach my name to your child; let her repeat it in her prayers." The wicks of the candles flickered. Rodolphe got up to, shut the window, and when he had sat down again-- "I think it's all right. Ah! and this for fear she should come and hunt me up." "I shall be far away when you read these sad lines, for I have wished to flee as quickly as possible to shun the temptation of seeing you again. No weakness! I shall return, and perhaps later on we shall talk together very coldly of our old love. Adieu!" And there was a last "adieu" divided into two words! "A Dieu!" which he thought in very excellent taste. "Now how am I to sign?" he said to himself. "'Yours devotedly?' No! 'Your friend?' Yes, that's it." "Your friend." He re-read his letter. He considered it very good. "Poor little woman!" he thought with emotion. "She'll think me harder than a rock. There ought to have been some tears on this; but I can't cry; it isn't my fault." Then, having emptied some water into a glass, Rodolphe dipped his finger into it, and let a big drop fall on the paper, that made a pale stain on the ink. Then looking for a seal, he came upon the one "Amor nel cor." "That doesn't at all fit in with the circumstances. Pshaw! never mind!" After which he smoked three pipes and went to bed. The next day when he was up (at about two o'clock--he had slept late), Rodolphe had a basket of apricots picked. He put his letter at the bottom under some vine leaves, and at once ordered Girard, his ploughman, to take it with care to Madame Bovary. He made use of this means for corresponding with her, sending according to the season fruits or game. "If she asks after me," he said, "you will tell her that I have gone on a journey. You must give the basket to her herself, into her own hands. Get along and take care!" Girard put on his new blouse, knotted his handkerchief round the apricots, and walking with great heavy steps in his thick iron-bound galoshes, made his way to Yonville. Madame Bovary, when he got to her house, was arranging a bundle of linen on the kitchen-table with Felicite. "Here," said the ploughboy, "is something for you--from the master." She was seized with apprehension, and as she sought in her pocket for some coppers, she looked at the peasant with haggard eyes, while he himself looked at her with amazement, not understanding how such a present could so move anyone. At last he went out. Felicite remained. She could bear it no longer; she ran into the sitting room as if to take the apricots there, overturned the basket, tore away the leaves, found the letter, opened it, and, as if some fearful fire were behind her, Emma flew to her room terrified. Charles was there; she saw him; he spoke to her; she heard nothing, and she went on quickly up the stairs, breathless, distraught, dumb, and ever holding this horrible piece of paper, that crackled between her fingers like a plate of sheet-iron. On the second floor she stopped before the attic door, which was closed. Then she tried to calm herself; she recalled the letter; she must finish it; she did not dare to. And where? How? She would be seen! "Ah, no! here," she thought, "I shall be all right." Emma pushed open the door and went in. The slates threw straight down a heavy heat that gripped her temples, stifled her; she dragged herself to the closed garret-window. She drew back the bolt, and the dazzling light burst in with a leap. Opposite, beyond the roofs, stretched the open country till it was lost to sight. Down below, underneath her, the village square was empty; the stones of the pavement glittered, the weathercocks on the houses were motionless. At the corner of the street, from a lower storey, rose a kind of humming with strident modulations. It was Binet turning. She leant against the embrasure of the window, and reread the letter with angry sneers. But the more she fixed her attention upon it, the more confused were her ideas. She saw him again, heard him, encircled him with her arms, and throbs of her heart, that beat against her breast like blows of a sledge-hammer, grew faster and faster, with uneven intervals. She looked about her with the wish that the earth might crumble into pieces. Why not end it all? What restrained her? She was free. She advanced, looking at the paving-stones, saying to herself, "Come! come!" The luminous ray that came straight up from below drew the weight of her body towards the abyss. It seemed to her that the ground of the oscillating square went up the walls and that the floor dipped on end like a tossing boat. She was right at the edge, almost hanging, surrounded by vast space. The blue of the heavens suffused her, the air was whirling in her hollow head; she had but to yield, to let herself be taken; and the humming of the lathe never ceased, like an angry voice calling her. "Emma! Emma!" cried Charles. She stopped. "Wherever are you? Come!" The thought that she had just escaped from death almost made her faint with terror. She closed her eyes; then she shivered at the touch of a hand on her sleeve; it was Felicite. "Master is waiting for you, madame; the soup is on the table." And she had to go down to sit at table. She tried to eat. The food choked her. Then she unfolded her napkin as if to examine the darns, and she really thought of applying herself to this work, counting the threads in the linen. Suddenly the remembrance of the letter returned to her. How had she lost it? Where could she find it? But she felt such weariness of spirit that she could not even invent a pretext for leaving the table. Then she became a coward; she was afraid of Charles; he knew all, that was certain! Indeed he pronounced these words in a strange manner: "We are not likely to see Monsieur Rodolphe soon again, it seems." "Who told you?" she said, shuddering. "Who told me!" he replied, rather astonished at her abrupt tone. "Why, Girard, whom I met just now at the door of the Cafe Francais. He has gone on a journey, or is to go." She gave a sob. "What surprises you in that? He absents himself like that from time to time for a change, and, ma foi, I think he's right, when one has a fortune and is a bachelor. Besides, he has jolly times, has our friend. He's a bit of a rake. Monsieur Langlois told me--" He stopped for propriety's sake because the servant came in. She put back into the basket the apricots scattered on the sideboard. Charles, without noticing his wife's colour, had them brought to him, took one, and bit into it. "Ah! perfect!" said he; "just taste!" And he handed her the basket, which she put away from her gently. "Do just smell! What an odour!" he remarked, passing it under her nose several times. "I am choking," she cried, leaping up. But by an effort of will the spasm passed; then-- "It is nothing," she said, "it is nothing! It is nervousness. Sit down and go on eating." For she dreaded lest he should begin questioning her, attending to her, that she should not be left alone. Charles, to obey her, sat down again, and he spat the stones of the apricots into his hands, afterwards putting them on his plate. Suddenly a blue tilbury passed across the square at a rapid trot. Emma uttered a cry and fell back rigid to the ground. In fact, Rodolphe, after many reflections, had decided to set out for Rouen. Now, as from La Huchette to Buchy there is no other way than by Yonville, he had to go through the village, and Emma had recognised him by the rays of the lanterns, which like lightning flashed through the twilight. The chemist, at the tumult which broke out in the house ran thither. The table with all the plates was upset; sauce, meat, knives, the salt, and cruet-stand were strewn over the room; Charles was calling for help; Berthe, scared, was crying; and Felicite, whose hands trembled, was unlacing her mistress, whose whole body shivered convulsively. "I'll run to my laboratory for some aromatic vinegar," said the druggist. Then as she opened her eyes on smelling the bottle-- "I was sure of it," he remarked; "that would wake any dead person for you!" "Speak to us," said Charles; "collect yourself; it is your Charles, who loves you. Do you know me? See! here is your little girl! Oh, kiss her!" The child stretched out her arms to her mother to cling to her neck. But turning away her head, Emma said in a broken voice "No, no! no one!" She fainted again. They carried her to her bed. She lay there stretched at full length, her lips apart, her eyelids closed, her hands open, motionless, and white as a waxen image. Two streams of tears flowed from her eyes and fell slowly upon the pillow. Charles, standing up, was at the back of the alcove, and the chemist, near him, maintained that meditative silence that is becoming on the serious occasions of life. "Do not be uneasy," he said, touching his elbow; "I think the paroxysm is past." "Yes, she is resting a little now," answered Charles, watching her sleep. "Poor girl! poor girl! She had gone off now!" Then Homais asked how the accident had come about. Charles answered that she had been taken ill suddenly while she was eating some apricots. "Extraordinary!" continued the chemist. "But it might be that the apricots had brought on the syncope. Some natures are so sensitive to certain smells; and it would even be a very fine question to study both in its pathological and physiological relation. The priests know the importance of it, they who have introduced aromatics into all their ceremonies. It is to stupefy the senses and to bring on ecstasies--a thing, moreover, very easy in persons of the weaker sex, who are more delicate than the other. Some are cited who faint at the smell of burnt hartshorn, of new bread--" "Take care; you'll wake her!" said Bovary in a low voice. "And not only," the druggist went on, "are human beings subject to such anomalies, but animals also. Thus you are not ignorant of the singularly aphrodisiac effect produced by the Nepeta cataria, vulgarly called catmint, on the feline race; and, on the other hand, to quote an example whose authenticity I can answer for. Bridaux (one of my old comrades, at present established in the Rue Malpalu) possesses a dog that falls into convulsions as soon as you hold out a snuff-box to him. He often even makes the experiment before his friends at his summer-house at Guillaume Wood. Would anyone believe that a simple sternutation could produce such ravages on a quadrupedal organism? It is extremely curious, is it not?" "Yes," said Charles, who was not listening to him. "This shows us," went on the other, smiling with benign self-sufficiency, "the innumerable irregularities of the nervous system. With regard to madame, she has always seemed to me, I confess, very susceptible. And so I should by no means recommend to you, my dear friend, any of those so-called remedies that, under the pretence of attacking the symptoms, attack the constitution. No; no useless physicking! Diet, that is all; sedatives, emollients, dulcification. Then, don't you think that perhaps her imagination should be worked upon?" "In what way? How?" said Bovary. "Ah! that is it. Such is indeed the question. 'That is the question,' as I lately read in a newspaper." But Emma, awaking, cried out-- "The letter! the letter!" They thought she was delirious; and she was by midnight. Brain-fever had set in. For forty-three days Charles did not leave her. He gave up all his patients; he no longer went to bed; he was constantly feeling her pulse, putting on sinapisms and cold-water compresses. He sent Justin as far as Neufchatel for ice; the ice melted on the way; he sent him back again. He called Monsieur Canivet into consultation; he sent for Dr. Lariviere, his old master, from Rouen; he was in despair. What alarmed him most was Emma's prostration, for she did not speak, did not listen, did not even seem to suffer, as if her body and soul were both resting together after all their troubles. About the middle of October she could sit up in bed supported by pillows. Charles wept when he saw her eat her first bread-and-jelly. Her strength returned to her; she got up for a few hours of an afternoon, and one day, when she felt better, he tried to take her, leaning on his arm, for a walk round the garden. The sand of the paths was disappearing beneath the dead leaves; she walked slowly, dragging along her slippers, and leaning against Charles's shoulder. She smiled all the time. They went thus to the bottom of the garden near the terrace. She drew herself up slowly, shading her eyes with her hand to look. She looked far off, as far as she could, but on the horizon were only great bonfires of grass smoking on the hills. "You will tire yourself, my darling!" said Bovary. And, pushing her gently to make her go into the arbour, "Sit down on this seat; you'll be comfortable." "Oh! no; not there!" she said in a faltering voice. She was seized with giddiness, and from that evening her illness recommenced, with a more uncertain character, it is true, and more complex symptoms. Now she suffered in her heart, then in the chest, the head, the limbs; she had vomitings, in which Charles thought he saw the first signs of cancer. And besides this, the poor fellow was worried about money matters.

part 2, Chapter 13

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter11-13

Back at his estate Rodolphe wants to write Emma a letter and for inspiration he begins to search through the box in which he keeps remembrances from his lovers. The copious articles serve only to confuse him and he becomes disgusted with the task. He writes her a letter in which he claims to be breaking off their relationship because their passion would have cooled with time and the shame of her situation would have eventually affected her. He blames fate for and explains that he will be going into exile. He signs the letter "Your Friend" and drops some water on it to substitute for tears. The next day his servant delivers the letter disguised in a fruit basket. Emma immediately senses that something horrible has happened and she ignores Charles who arrives home at that moment. She runs to the hot stuffy attic to read the letter. She opens the window and sunlight fills the room. She looks over the rooftops of the village and hears the monotonous grinding of Binet's lathe. She reads the letter and the world seems to collapse around her. She staggers to the open window and dares herself to throw her body from it and end her miserable life. As she stands there in a swoon she hears Charles calling for her and Flicit, touching her mistress' arm, tells her that the meal is ready. She joins her husband at the table and realizes that she has lost the letter. Charles tells her that he has heard that Monsieur Rodolphe is leaving on a trip and to her horror she sees her lover's carriage pass outside the door. She falls backward onto the floor and is unable to rise. With Homais' help the distraught Charles is able to resuscitate her and they carry her delirious to her bed. For forty-three days Charles remains by the side of his prostrate and silent wife. Finally her strength returns and one day in October he is able to take her for a walk in the garden. She complains of aches and pains. On top of these worries Charles begins to realize he is in financial trouble.

Emma loses all respect for Charles after the operation on Hippolyte's leg fails. Curiously, Charles performs the operation correctly but the procedure itself is flawed and those who were in favor of performing it - namely Homais and Emma - do not suffer as much as Charles. Rather, Emma's renewed hatred of Charles fuels her passion for Rodolphe and causes her to spend increasingly large amounts of her husband's money. As her passion increases Rodolphe's wanes. Although he has played the part of a romantic in order to seduce Emma, Rodolphe is ultimately a bourgeois realist and will not be burdened by the necessity of fleeing with his mistress and her child. The force of his power over her becomes evident when she is tempted to take her own life following his betrayal. The sound of Binet's lathe permeates this scene and though Emma is called back from the brink by the rather mundane domestic demand to dine her body cannot withstand the force of her emotions and she becomes physically ill and catatonic. Emma is unable to appreciate the depth of her husband's love, evidenced by his devotion during her illness, because it does not cohere with the violent and spontaneous emotions found in her novels

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/23.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_9_part_1.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 14

part 2, chapter 14

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 14", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter14-15", "summary": "Not only has Charles been neglecting his practice but he is deeply in debt to Monsieur Homais for Emma's medicine. Also, Flicit in the role of mistress of the house has been overspending. Monsieur Lheureux is especially insistent upon being paid and at the height of Emma's illness delivers the cloak and bags she ordered. Eventually he convinces Charles to sign a six-month promissory note which he compounds by loaning him one thousand francs at six percent interest due in one year. Lheureux's fortunes are on the rise during this period and he looks forward to sapping the Bovary's for every franc he can. Although Charles despairs of raising so large a sum in one year's time he spends the severe winter doting on his sick wife. Emma's recovers slowly and settles into a monotonous routine. During the peak of her illness she sent for the priest for Communion and experienced a splendid vision of God. She became enchanted with religious symbols and wished for an emerald-studded reliquary. The abb Bournisien is pleased by her new religiosity but fears the extent of her passion borders on heresy. He sends for an assortment of books including some religious novels which Emma reads but finds lacking in any connection to the passions of the real world. She comes away convinced that \"hers was the most exquisite Catholic melancholy that had ever entered an ethereal soul. She buries Rodolphe's memory deep inside her though it affects everything she does particularly her religious ardor. She becomes extravagantly charitable. Charles' mother arrives for an extended visit and is pleased at the changes in her daughter-in-law. Emma has many other visitors including the Homais children and Justin who, watching her comb her hair one day is overcome by new and marvelous feelings. That spring the abb stops by every afternoon for cider with Charles and sometimes Binet in the arbor. One day Homais proposes that Charles take Emma to the opera in Rouen to hear the famous singer Lagardy. To the pharmacist's surprise the abb does not object and this sparks a heated debate as to whether music or drama is considered more sinful by the church. Bovary is taken with the idea of the opera and convinces Emma that they should go. So on the appointed day they go to Rouen where Charles has arranged for a cheap hotel. He immediately sets out to procure the tickets, becomes confused by the arrangement of the seats and finally is so nervous about missing the beginning that when they arrive the theater doors are not yet open", "analysis": ""}

To begin with, he did not know how he could pay Monsieur Homais for all the physic supplied by him, and though, as a medical man, he was not obliged to pay for it, he nevertheless blushed a little at such an obligation. Then the expenses of the household, now that the servant was mistress, became terrible. Bills rained in upon the house; the tradesmen grumbled; Monsieur Lheureux especially harassed him. In fact, at the height of Emma's illness, the latter, taking advantage of the circumstances to make his bill larger, had hurriedly brought the cloak, the travelling-bag, two trunks instead of one, and a number of other things. It was very well for Charles to say he did not want them. The tradesman answered arrogantly that these articles had been ordered, and that he would not take them back; besides, it would vex madame in her convalescence; the doctor had better think it over; in short, he was resolved to sue him rather than give up his rights and take back his goods. Charles subsequently ordered them to be sent back to the shop. Felicite forgot; he had other things to attend to; then thought no more about them. Monsieur Lheureux returned to the charge, and, by turns threatening and whining, so managed that Bovary ended by signing a bill at six months. But hardly had he signed this bill than a bold idea occurred to him: it was to borrow a thousand francs from Lheureux. So, with an embarrassed air, he asked if it were possible to get them, adding that it would be for a year, at any interest he wished. Lheureux ran off to his shop, brought back the money, and dictated another bill, by which Bovary undertook to pay to his order on the 1st of September next the sum of one thousand and seventy francs, which, with the hundred and eighty already agreed to, made just twelve hundred and fifty, thus lending at six per cent in addition to one-fourth for commission: and the things bringing him in a good third at the least, this ought in twelve months to give him a profit of a hundred and thirty francs. He hoped that the business would not stop there; that the bills would not be paid; that they would be renewed; and that his poor little money, having thriven at the doctor's as at a hospital, would come back to him one day considerably more plump, and fat enough to burst his bag. Everything, moreover, succeeded with him. He was adjudicator for a supply of cider to the hospital at Neufchatel; Monsieur Guillaumin promised him some shares in the turf-pits of Gaumesnil, and he dreamt of establishing a new diligence service between Arcueil and Rouen, which no doubt would not be long in ruining the ramshackle van of the "Lion d'Or," and that, travelling faster, at a cheaper rate, and carrying more luggage, would thus put into his hands the whole commerce of Yonville. Charles several times asked himself by what means he should next year be able to pay back so much money. He reflected, imagined expedients, such as applying to his father or selling something. But his father would be deaf, and he--he had nothing to sell. Then he foresaw such worries that he quickly dismissed so disagreeable a subject of meditation from his mind. He reproached himself with forgetting Emma, as if, all his thoughts belonging to this woman, it was robbing her of something not to be constantly thinking of her. The winter was severe, Madame Bovary's convalescence slow. When it was fine they wheeled her arm-chair to the window that overlooked the square, for she now had an antipathy to the garden, and the blinds on that side were always down. She wished the horse to be sold; what she formerly liked now displeased her. All her ideas seemed to be limited to the care of herself. She stayed in bed taking little meals, rang for the servant to inquire about her gruel or to chat with her. The snow on the market-roof threw a white, still light into the room; then the rain began to fall; and Emma waited daily with a mind full of eagerness for the inevitable return of some trifling events which nevertheless had no relation to her. The most important was the arrival of the "Hirondelle" in the evening. Then the landlady shouted out, and other voices answered, while Hippolyte's lantern, as he fetched the boxes from the boot, was like a star in the darkness. At mid-day Charles came in; then he went out again; next she took some beef-tea, and towards five o'clock, as the day drew in, the children coming back from school, dragging their wooden shoes along the pavement, knocked the clapper of the shutters with their rulers one after the other. It was at this hour that Monsieur Bournisien came to see her. He inquired after her health, gave her news, exhorted her to religion, in a coaxing little prattle that was not without its charm. The mere thought of his cassock comforted her. One day, when at the height of her illness, she had thought herself dying, and had asked for the communion; and, while they were making the preparations in her room for the sacrament, while they were turning the night table covered with syrups into an altar, and while Felicite was strewing dahlia flowers on the floor, Emma felt some power passing over her that freed her from her pains, from all perception, from all feeling. Her body, relieved, no longer thought; another life was beginning; it seemed to her that her being, mounting toward God, would be annihilated in that love like a burning incense that melts into vapour. The bed-clothes were sprinkled with holy water, the priest drew from the holy pyx the white wafer; and it was fainting with a celestial joy that she put out her lips to accept the body of the Saviour presented to her. The curtains of the alcove floated gently round her like clouds, and the rays of the two tapers burning on the night-table seemed to shine like dazzling halos. Then she let her head fall back, fancying she heard in space the music of seraphic harps, and perceived in an azure sky, on a golden throne in the midst of saints holding green palms, God the Father, resplendent with majesty, who with a sign sent to earth angels with wings of fire to carry her away in their arms. This splendid vision dwelt in her memory as the most beautiful thing that it was possible to dream, so that now she strove to recall her sensation. That still lasted, however, but in a less exclusive fashion and with a deeper sweetness. Her soul, tortured by pride, at length found rest in Christian humility, and, tasting the joy of weakness, she saw within herself the destruction of her will, that must have left a wide entrance for the inroads of heavenly grace. There existed, then, in the place of happiness, still greater joys--another love beyond all loves, without pause and without end, one that would grow eternally! She saw amid the illusions of her hope a state of purity floating above the earth mingling with heaven, to which she aspired. She wanted to become a saint. She bought chaplets and wore amulets; she wished to have in her room, by the side of her bed, a reliquary set in emeralds that she might kiss it every evening. The cure marvelled at this humour, although Emma's religion, he thought, might, from its fervour, end by touching on heresy, extravagance. But not being much versed in these matters, as soon as they went beyond a certain limit he wrote to Monsieur Boulard, bookseller to Monsignor, to send him "something good for a lady who was very clever." The bookseller, with as much indifference as if he had been sending off hardware to niggers, packed up, pellmell, everything that was then the fashion in the pious book trade. There were little manuals in questions and answers, pamphlets of aggressive tone after the manner of Monsieur de Maistre, and certain novels in rose-coloured bindings and with a honied style, manufactured by troubadour seminarists or penitent blue-stockings. There were the "Think of it; the Man of the World at Mary's Feet, by Monsieur de ***, decorated with many Orders"; "The Errors of Voltaire, for the Use of the Young," etc. Madame Bovary's mind was not yet sufficiently clear to apply herself seriously to anything; moreover, she began this reading in too much hurry. She grew provoked at the doctrines of religion; the arrogance of the polemic writings displeased her by their inveteracy in attacking people she did not know; and the secular stories, relieved with religion, seemed to her written in such ignorance of the world, that they insensibly estranged her from the truths for whose proof she was looking. Nevertheless, she persevered; and when the volume slipped from her hands, she fancied herself seized with the finest Catholic melancholy that an ethereal soul could conceive. As for the memory of Rodolphe, she had thrust it back to the bottom of her heart, and it remained there more solemn and more motionless than a king's mummy in a catacomb. An exhalation escaped from this embalmed love, that, penetrating through everything, perfumed with tenderness the immaculate atmosphere in which she longed to live. When she knelt on her Gothic prie-Dieu, she addressed to the Lord the same suave words that she had murmured formerly to her lover in the outpourings of adultery. It was to make faith come; but no delights descended from the heavens, and she arose with tired limbs and with a vague feeling of a gigantic dupery. This searching after faith, she thought, was only one merit the more, and in the pride of her devoutness Emma compared herself to those grand ladies of long ago whose glory she had dreamed of over a portrait of La Valliere, and who, trailing with so much majesty the lace-trimmed trains of their long gowns, retired into solitudes to shed at the feet of Christ all the tears of hearts that life had wounded. Then she gave herself up to excessive charity. She sewed clothes for the poor, she sent wood to women in childbed; and Charles one day, on coming home, found three good-for-nothings in the kitchen seated at the table eating soup. She had her little girl, whom during her illness her husband had sent back to the nurse, brought home. She wanted to teach her to read; even when Berthe cried, she was not vexed. She had made up her mind to resignation, to universal indulgence. Her language about everything was full of ideal expressions. She said to her child, "Is your stomach-ache better, my angel?" Madame Bovary senior found nothing to censure except perhaps this mania of knitting jackets for orphans instead of mending her own house-linen; but, harassed with domestic quarrels, the good woman took pleasure in this quiet house, and she even stayed there till after Easter, to escape the sarcasms of old Bovary, who never failed on Good Friday to order chitterlings. Besides the companionship of her mother-in-law, who strengthened her a little by the rectitude of her judgment and her grave ways, Emma almost every day had other visitors. These were Madame Langlois, Madame Caron, Madame Dubreuil, Madame Tuvache, and regularly from two to five o'clock the excellent Madame Homais, who, for her part, had never believed any of the tittle-tattle about her neighbour. The little Homais also came to see her; Justin accompanied them. He went up with them to her bedroom, and remained standing near the door, motionless and mute. Often even Madame Bovary; taking no heed of him, began her toilette. She began by taking out her comb, shaking her head with a quick movement, and when he for the first time saw all this mass of hair that fell to her knees unrolling in black ringlets, it was to him, poor child! like a sudden entrance into something new and strange, whose splendour terrified him. Emma, no doubt, did not notice his silent attentions or his timidity. She had no suspicion that the love vanished from her life was there, palpitating by her side, beneath that coarse holland shirt, in that youthful heart open to the emanations of her beauty. Besides, she now enveloped all things with such indifference, she had words so affectionate with looks so haughty, such contradictory ways, that one could no longer distinguish egotism from charity, or corruption from virtue. One evening, for example, she was angry with the servant, who had asked to go out, and stammered as she tried to find some pretext. Then suddenly-- "So you love him?" she said. And without waiting for any answer from Felicite, who was blushing, she added, "There! run along; enjoy yourself!" In the beginning of spring she had the garden turned up from end to end, despite Bovary's remonstrances. However, he was glad to see her at last manifest a wish of any kind. As she grew stronger she displayed more wilfulness. First, she found occasion to expel Mere Rollet, the nurse, who during her convalescence had contracted the habit of coming too often to the kitchen with her two nurslings and her boarder, better off for teeth than a cannibal. Then she got rid of the Homais family, successively dismissed all the other visitors, and even frequented church less assiduously, to the great approval of the druggist, who said to her in a friendly way-- "You were going in a bit for the cassock!" As formerly, Monsieur Bournisien dropped in every day when he came out after catechism class. He preferred staying out of doors to taking the air "in the grove," as he called the arbour. This was the time when Charles came home. They were hot; some sweet cider was brought out, and they drank together to madame's complete restoration. Binet was there; that is to say, a little lower down against the terrace wall, fishing for crayfish. Bovary invited him to have a drink, and he thoroughly understood the uncorking of the stone bottles. "You must," he said, throwing a satisfied glance all round him, even to the very extremity of the landscape, "hold the bottle perpendicularly on the table, and after the strings are cut, press up the cork with little thrusts, gently, gently, as indeed they do seltzer-water at restaurants." But during his demonstration the cider often spurted right into their faces, and then the ecclesiastic, with a thick laugh, never missed this joke-- "Its goodness strikes the eye!" He was, in fact, a good fellow and one day he was not even scandalised at the chemist, who advised Charles to give madame some distraction by taking her to the theatre at Rouen to hear the illustrious tenor, Lagardy. Homais, surprised at this silence, wanted to know his opinion, and the priest declared that he considered music less dangerous for morals than literature. But the chemist took up the defence of letters. The theatre, he contended, served for railing at prejudices, and, beneath a mask of pleasure, taught virtue. "'Castigat ridendo mores,'* Monsieur Bournisien! Thus consider the greater part of Voltaire's tragedies; they are cleverly strewn with philosophical reflections, that made them a vast school of morals and diplomacy for the people." *It corrects customs through laughter. "I," said Binet, "once saw a piece called the 'Gamin de Paris,' in which there was the character of an old general that is really hit off to a T. He sets down a young swell who had seduced a working girl, who at the ending--" "Certainly," continued Homais, "there is bad literature as there is bad pharmacy, but to condemn in a lump the most important of the fine arts seems to me a stupidity, a Gothic idea, worthy of the abominable times that imprisoned Galileo." "I know very well," objected the cure, "that there are good works, good authors. However, if it were only those persons of different sexes united in a bewitching apartment, decorated rouge, those lights, those effeminate voices, all this must, in the long-run, engender a certain mental libertinage, give rise to immodest thoughts and impure temptations. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of all the Fathers. Finally," he added, suddenly assuming a mystic tone of voice while he rolled a pinch of snuff between his fingers, "if the Church has condemned the theatre, she must be right; we must submit to her decrees." "Why," asked the druggist, "should she excommunicate actors? For formerly they openly took part in religious ceremonies. Yes, in the middle of the chancel they acted; they performed a kind of farce called 'Mysteries,' which often offended against the laws of decency." The ecclesiastic contented himself with uttering a groan, and the chemist went on-- "It's like it is in the Bible; there there are, you know, more than one piquant detail, matters really libidinous!" And on a gesture of irritation from Monsieur Bournisien-- "Ah! you'll admit that it is not a book to place in the hands of a young girl, and I should be sorry if Athalie--" "But it is the Protestants, and not we," cried the other impatiently, "who recommend the Bible." "No matter," said Homais. "I am surprised that in our days, in this century of enlightenment, anyone should still persist in proscribing an intellectual relaxation that is inoffensive, moralising, and sometimes even hygienic; is it not, doctor?" "No doubt," replied the doctor carelessly, either because, sharing the same ideas, he wished to offend no one, or else because he had not any ideas. The conversation seemed at an end when the chemist thought fit to shoot a Parthian arrow. "I've known priests who put on ordinary clothes to go and see dancers kicking about." "Come, come!" said the cure. "Ah! I've known some!" And separating the words of his sentence, Homais repeated, "I--have--known--some!" "Well, they were wrong," said Bournisien, resigned to anything. "By Jove! they go in for more than that," exclaimed the druggist. "Sir!" replied the ecclesiastic, with such angry eyes that the druggist was intimidated by them. "I only mean to say," he replied in less brutal a tone, "that toleration is the surest way to draw people to religion." "That is true! that is true!" agreed the good fellow, sitting down again on his chair. But he stayed only a few moments. Then, as soon as he had gone, Monsieur Homais said to the doctor-- "That's what I call a cock-fight. I beat him, did you see, in a way!--Now take my advice. Take madame to the theatre, if it were only for once in your life, to enrage one of these ravens, hang it! If anyone could take my place, I would accompany you myself. Be quick about it. Lagardy is only going to give one performance; he's engaged to go to England at a high salary. From what I hear, he's a regular dog; he's rolling in money; he's taking three mistresses and a cook along with him. All these great artists burn the candle at both ends; they require a dissolute life, that suits the imagination to some extent. But they die at the hospital, because they haven't the sense when young to lay by. Well, a pleasant dinner! Goodbye till to-morrow." The idea of the theatre quickly germinated in Bovary's head, for he at once communicated it to his wife, who at first refused, alleging the fatigue, the worry, the expense; but, for a wonder, Charles did not give in, so sure was he that this recreation would be good for her. He saw nothing to prevent it: his mother had sent them three hundred francs which he had no longer expected; the current debts were not very large, and the falling in of Lheureux's bills was still so far off that there was no need to think about them. Besides, imagining that she was refusing from delicacy, he insisted the more; so that by dint of worrying her she at last made up her mind, and the next day at eight o'clock they set out in the "Hirondelle." The druggist, whom nothing whatever kept at Yonville, but who thought himself bound not to budge from it, sighed as he saw them go. "Well, a pleasant journey!" he said to them; "happy mortals that you are!" Then addressing himself to Emma, who was wearing a blue silk gown with four flounces-- "You are as lovely as a Venus. You'll cut a figure at Rouen." The diligence stopped at the "Croix-Rouge" in the Place Beauvoisine. It was the inn that is in every provincial faubourg, with large stables and small bedrooms, where one sees in the middle of the court chickens pilfering the oats under the muddy gigs of the commercial travellers--a good old house, with worm-eaten balconies that creak in the wind on winter nights, always full of people, noise, and feeding, whose black tables are sticky with coffee and brandy, the thick windows made yellow by the flies, the damp napkins stained with cheap wine, and that always smells of the village, like ploughboys dressed in Sundayclothes, has a cafe on the street, and towards the countryside a kitchen-garden. Charles at once set out. He muddled up the stage-boxes with the gallery, the pit with the boxes; asked for explanations, did not understand them; was sent from the box-office to the acting-manager; came back to the inn, returned to the theatre, and thus several times traversed the whole length of the town from the theatre to the boulevard. Madame Bovary bought a bonnet, gloves, and a bouquet. The doctor was much afraid of missing the beginning, and, without having had time to swallow a plate of soup, they presented themselves at the doors of the theatre, which were still closed.

part 2, Chapter 14

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter14-15

Not only has Charles been neglecting his practice but he is deeply in debt to Monsieur Homais for Emma's medicine. Also, Flicit in the role of mistress of the house has been overspending. Monsieur Lheureux is especially insistent upon being paid and at the height of Emma's illness delivers the cloak and bags she ordered. Eventually he convinces Charles to sign a six-month promissory note which he compounds by loaning him one thousand francs at six percent interest due in one year. Lheureux's fortunes are on the rise during this period and he looks forward to sapping the Bovary's for every franc he can. Although Charles despairs of raising so large a sum in one year's time he spends the severe winter doting on his sick wife. Emma's recovers slowly and settles into a monotonous routine. During the peak of her illness she sent for the priest for Communion and experienced a splendid vision of God. She became enchanted with religious symbols and wished for an emerald-studded reliquary. The abb Bournisien is pleased by her new religiosity but fears the extent of her passion borders on heresy. He sends for an assortment of books including some religious novels which Emma reads but finds lacking in any connection to the passions of the real world. She comes away convinced that "hers was the most exquisite Catholic melancholy that had ever entered an ethereal soul. She buries Rodolphe's memory deep inside her though it affects everything she does particularly her religious ardor. She becomes extravagantly charitable. Charles' mother arrives for an extended visit and is pleased at the changes in her daughter-in-law. Emma has many other visitors including the Homais children and Justin who, watching her comb her hair one day is overcome by new and marvelous feelings. That spring the abb stops by every afternoon for cider with Charles and sometimes Binet in the arbor. One day Homais proposes that Charles take Emma to the opera in Rouen to hear the famous singer Lagardy. To the pharmacist's surprise the abb does not object and this sparks a heated debate as to whether music or drama is considered more sinful by the church. Bovary is taken with the idea of the opera and convinces Emma that they should go. So on the appointed day they go to Rouen where Charles has arranged for a cheap hotel. He immediately sets out to procure the tickets, becomes confused by the arrangement of the seats and finally is so nervous about missing the beginning that when they arrive the theater doors are not yet open

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/24.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_9_part_2.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 15

part 2, chapter 15

{"name": "part 2, Chapter 15", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter14-15", "summary": "When they finally enter the theater Emma is delighted to find they have box seats. She looks down upon the crowd of older men discussing business and younger men dressed in the height of fashion. The opera begins with a musical flourish and the curtain rises on a country scene. Emma is instantly transported back to the novels she read as a girl. The star, Edgar Lagardy, comes onto the stage and immediately captures the hearts of the audience who are unaware that he was something of a charlatan and self-promoter. The crowd obviously enjoys his bombastic performance. Charles cannot follow the story and Emma, to her annoyance, must continually explain the plot. Emma finds herself relating her own life to the story on the stage but reminds herself that real life passions are different from those portrayed in art. Toward the end of the first half, however, she is carried away by Edgar's performance and longs to be with him. When the curtain falls the odors of the theater and the stifling atmosphere suffocate her. Charles rushes to find some beverages. When he returns, after spilling half the drink on a woman's dress, he tells her that he has seen Monsieur Lon. Soon the young man joins them and Emma is immediately reminded of her former passion for the clerk. During the second half of the play she can only think of Lon and when he suggests that they leave the theater for some fresh air she readily assents. At an outdoor caf they sit and talk but soon run out of subjects that can be discussed in front of Charles. Charles insists that Emma stay in Rouen an extra day to see the end of the play. Lon quickly encourages her to do so but she does not commit. Lon pays for their drinks and promises to see them soon in Yonville.", "analysis": "In these chapters we learn that Monsieur Lheureux is bent upon squeezing every possible franc from the Bovary's through subtle manipulation and pretended favors. His greed knows no bounds. As before, the abb proves incapable of dealing with Emma's intense emotions and cannot fathom a conception of religion that stems from passion rather than principle. Emma's reaction to the theater proves that her experience with Rodolphe has taught her to temper her romanticism with some elements of realism - as when she reminds herself that art does not accurately convey the real world - but she is eventually swept away by the force of the performance. This momentary realization, which assault everything that she has spent her life believing - is her first step toward death. Immediately following the singer's powerful close to the first half the lights come on and she is left deflated by her real surroundings but Lon returns to her life and the theater and the play seems unimportant by comparison"}

The crowd was waiting against the wall, symmetrically enclosed between the balustrades. At the corner of the neighbouring streets huge bills repeated in quaint letters "Lucie de Lammermoor-Lagardy-Opera-etc." The weather was fine, the people were hot, perspiration trickled amid the curls, and handkerchiefs taken from pockets were mopping red foreheads; and now and then a warm wind that blew from the river gently stirred the border of the tick awnings hanging from the doors of the public-houses. A little lower down, however, one was refreshed by a current of icy air that smelt of tallow, leather, and oil. This was an exhalation from the Rue des Charrettes, full of large black warehouses where they made casks. For fear of seeming ridiculous, Emma before going in wished to have a little stroll in the harbour, and Bovary prudently kept his tickets in his hand, in the pocket of his trousers, which he pressed against his stomach. Her heart began to beat as soon as she reached the vestibule. She involuntarily smiled with vanity on seeing the crowd rushing to the right by the other corridor while she went up the staircase to the reserved seats. She was as pleased as a child to push with her finger the large tapestried door. She breathed in with all her might the dusty smell of the lobbies, and when she was seated in her box she bent forward with the air of a duchess. The theatre was beginning to fill; opera-glasses were taken from their cases, and the subscribers, catching sight of one another, were bowing. They came to seek relaxation in the fine arts after the anxieties of business; but "business" was not forgotten; they still talked cottons, spirits of wine, or indigo. The heads of old men were to be seen, inexpressive and peaceful, with their hair and complexions looking like silver medals tarnished by steam of lead. The young beaux were strutting about in the pit, showing in the opening of their waistcoats their pink or applegreen cravats, and Madame Bovary from above admired them leaning on their canes with golden knobs in the open palm of their yellow gloves. Now the lights of the orchestra were lit, the lustre, let down from the ceiling, throwing by the glimmering of its facets a sudden gaiety over the theatre; then the musicians came in one after the other; and first there was the protracted hubbub of the basses grumbling, violins squeaking, cornets trumpeting, flutes and flageolets fifing. But three knocks were heard on the stage, a rolling of drums began, the brass instruments played some chords, and the curtain rising, discovered a country-scene. It was the cross-roads of a wood, with a fountain shaded by an oak to the left. Peasants and lords with plaids on their shoulders were singing a hunting-song together; then a captain suddenly came on, who evoked the spirit of evil by lifting both his arms to heaven. Another appeared; they went away, and the hunters started afresh. She felt herself transported to the reading of her youth, into the midst of Walter Scott. She seemed to hear through the mist the sound of the Scotch bagpipes re-echoing over the heather. Then her remembrance of the novel helping her to understand the libretto, she followed the story phrase by phrase, while vague thoughts that came back to her dispersed at once again with the bursts of music. She gave herself up to the lullaby of the melodies, and felt all her being vibrate as if the violin bows were drawn over her nerves. She had not eyes enough to look at the costumes, the scenery, the actors, the painted trees that shook when anyone walked, and the velvet caps, cloaks, swords--all those imaginary things that floated amid the harmony as in the atmosphere of another world. But a young woman stepped forward, throwing a purse to a squire in green. She was left alone, and the flute was heard like the murmur of a fountain or the warbling of birds. Lucie attacked her cavatina in G major bravely. She plained of love; she longed for wings. Emma, too, fleeing from life, would have liked to fly away in an embrace. Suddenly Edgar-Lagardy appeared. He had that splendid pallor that gives something of the majesty of marble to the ardent races of the South. His vigorous form was tightly clad in a brown-coloured doublet; a small chiselled poniard hung against his left thigh, and he cast round laughing looks showing his white teeth. They said that a Polish princess having heard him sing one night on the beach at Biarritz, where he mended boats, had fallen in love with him. She had ruined herself for him. He had deserted her for other women, and this sentimental celebrity did not fail to enhance his artistic reputation. The diplomatic mummer took care always to slip into his advertisements some poetic phrase on the fascination of his person and the susceptibility of his soul. A fine organ, imperturbable coolness, more temperament than intelligence, more power of emphasis than of real singing, made up the charm of this admirable charlatan nature, in which there was something of the hairdresser and the toreador. From the first scene he evoked enthusiasm. He pressed Lucy in his arms, he left her, he came back, he seemed desperate; he had outbursts of rage, then elegiac gurglings of infinite sweetness, and the notes escaped from his bare neck full of sobs and kisses. Emma leant forward to see him, clutching the velvet of the box with her nails. She was filling her heart with these melodious lamentations that were drawn out to the accompaniment of the double-basses, like the cries of the drowning in the tumult of a tempest. She recognised all the intoxication and the anguish that had almost killed her. The voice of a prima donna seemed to her to be but echoes of her conscience, and this illusion that charmed her as some very thing of her own life. But no one on earth had loved her with such love. He had not wept like Edgar that last moonlit night when they said, "To-morrow! to-morrow!" The theatre rang with cheers; they recommenced the entire movement; the lovers spoke of the flowers on their tomb, of vows, exile, fate, hopes; and when they uttered the final adieu, Emma gave a sharp cry that mingled with the vibrations of the last chords. "But why," asked Bovary, "does that gentleman persecute her?" "No, no!" she answered; "he is her lover!" "Yet he vows vengeance on her family, while the other one who came on before said, 'I love Lucie and she loves me!' Besides, he went off with her father arm in arm. For he certainly is her father, isn't he--the ugly little man with a cock's feather in his hat?" Despite Emma's explanations, as soon as the recitative duet began in which Gilbert lays bare his abominable machinations to his master Ashton, Charles, seeing the false troth-ring that is to deceive Lucie, thought it was a love-gift sent by Edgar. He confessed, moreover, that he did not understand the story because of the music, which interfered very much with the words. "What does it matter?" said Emma. "Do be quiet!" "Yes, but you know," he went on, leaning against her shoulder, "I like to understand things." "Be quiet! be quiet!" she cried impatiently. Lucie advanced, half supported by her women, a wreath of orange blossoms in her hair, and paler than the white satin of her gown. Emma dreamed of her marriage day; she saw herself at home again amid the corn in the little path as they walked to the church. Oh, why had not she, like this woman, resisted, implored? She, on the contrary, had been joyous, without seeing the abyss into which she was throwing herself. Ah! if in the freshness of her beauty, before the soiling of marriage and the disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon some great, strong heart, then virtue, tenderness, voluptuousness, and duty blending, she would never have fallen from so high a happiness. But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire. She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated. So, striving to divert her thoughts, Emma determined now to see in this reproduction of her sorrows only a plastic fantasy, well enough to please the eye, and she even smiled internally with disdainful pity when at the back of the stage under the velvet hangings a man appeared in a black cloak. His large Spanish hat fell at a gesture he made, and immediately the instruments and the singers began the sextet. Edgar, flashing with fury, dominated all the others with his clearer voice; Ashton hurled homicidal provocations at him in deep notes; Lucie uttered her shrill plaint, Arthur at one side, his modulated tones in the middle register, and the bass of the minister pealed forth like an organ, while the voices of the women repeating his words took them up in chorus delightfully. They were all in a row gesticulating, and anger, vengeance, jealousy, terror, and stupefaction breathed forth at once from their half-opened mouths. The outraged lover brandished his naked sword; his guipure ruffle rose with jerks to the movements of his chest, and he walked from right to left with long strides, clanking against the boards the silver-gilt spurs of his soft boots, widening out at the ankles. He, she thought must have an inexhaustible love to lavish it upon the crowd with such effusion. All her small fault-findings faded before the poetry of the part that absorbed her; and, drawn towards this man by the illusion of the character, she tried to imagine to herself his life--that life resonant, extraordinary, splendid, and that might have been hers if fate had willed it. They would have known one another, loved one another. With him, through all the kingdoms of Europe she would have travelled from capital to capital, sharing his fatigues and his pride, picking up the flowers thrown to him, herself embroidering his costumes. Then each evening, at the back of a box, behind the golden trellis-work she would have drunk in eagerly the expansions of this soul that would have sung for her alone; from the stage, even as he acted, he would have looked at her. But the mad idea seized her that he was looking at her; it was certain. She longed to run to his arms, to take refuge in his strength, as in the incarnation of love itself, and to say to him, to cry out, "Take me away! carry me with you! let us go! Thine, thine! all my ardour and all my dreams!" The curtain fell. The smell of the gas mingled with that of the breaths, the waving of the fans, made the air more suffocating. Emma wanted to go out; the crowd filled the corridors, and she fell back in her arm-chair with palpitations that choked her. Charles, fearing that she would faint, ran to the refreshment-room to get a glass of barley-water. He had great difficulty in getting back to his seat, for his elbows were jerked at every step because of the glass he held in his hands, and he even spilt three-fourths on the shoulders of a Rouen lady in short sleeves, who feeling the cold liquid running down to her loins, uttered cries like a peacock, as if she were being assassinated. Her husband, who was a millowner, railed at the clumsy fellow, and while she was with her handkerchief wiping up the stains from her handsome cherry-coloured taffeta gown, he angrily muttered about indemnity, costs, reimbursement. At last Charles reached his wife, saying to her, quite out of breath-- "Ma foi! I thought I should have had to stay there. There is such a crowd--SUCH a crowd!" He added-- "Just guess whom I met up there! Monsieur Leon!" "Leon?" "Himself! He's coming along to pay his respects." And as he finished these words the ex-clerk of Yonville entered the box. He held out his hand with the ease of a gentleman; and Madame Bovary extended hers, without doubt obeying the attraction of a stronger will. She had not felt it since that spring evening when the rain fell upon the green leaves, and they had said good-bye standing at the window. But soon recalling herself to the necessities of the situation, with an effort she shook off the torpor of her memories, and began stammering a few hurried words. "Ah, good-day! What! you here?" "Silence!" cried a voice from the pit, for the third act was beginning. "So you are at Rouen?" "Yes." "And since when?" "Turn them out! turn them out!" People were looking at them. They were silent. But from that moment she listened no more; and the chorus of the guests, the scene between Ashton and his servant, the grand duet in D major, all were for her as far off as if the instruments had grown less sonorous and the characters more remote. She remembered the games at cards at the druggist's, and the walk to the nurse's, the reading in the arbour, the tete-a-tete by the fireside--all that poor love, so calm and so protracted, so discreet, so tender, and that she had nevertheless forgotten. And why had he come back? What combination of circumstances had brought him back into her life? He was standing behind her, leaning with his shoulder against the wall of the box; now and again she felt herself shuddering beneath the hot breath from his nostrils falling upon her hair. "Does this amuse you?" said he, bending over her so closely that the end of his moustache brushed her cheek. She replied carelessly-- "Oh, dear me, no, not much." Then he proposed that they should leave the theatre and go and take an ice somewhere. "Oh, not yet; let us stay," said Bovary. "Her hair's undone; this is going to be tragic." But the mad scene did not at all interest Emma, and the acting of the singer seemed to her exaggerated. "She screams too loud," said she, turning to Charles, who was listening. "Yes--a little," he replied, undecided between the frankness of his pleasure and his respect for his wife's opinion. Then with a sigh Leon said-- "The heat is--" "Unbearable! Yes!" "Do you feel unwell?" asked Bovary. "Yes, I am stifling; let us go." Monsieur Leon put her long lace shawl carefully about her shoulders, and all three went off to sit down in the harbour, in the open air, outside the windows of a cafe. First they spoke of her illness, although Emma interrupted Charles from time to time, for fear, she said, of boring Monsieur Leon; and the latter told them that he had come to spend two years at Rouen in a large office, in order to get practice in his profession, which was different in Normandy and Paris. Then he inquired after Berthe, the Homais, Mere Lefrancois, and as they had, in the husband's presence, nothing more to say to one another, the conversation soon came to an end. People coming out of the theatre passed along the pavement, humming or shouting at the top of their voices, "O bel ange, ma Lucie!*" Then Leon, playing the dilettante, began to talk music. He had seen Tambourini, Rubini, Persiani, Grisi, and, compared with them, Lagardy, despite his grand outbursts, was nowhere. *Oh beautiful angel, my Lucie. "Yet," interrupted Charles, who was slowly sipping his rum-sherbet, "they say that he is quite admirable in the last act. I regret leaving before the end, because it was beginning to amuse me." "Why," said the clerk, "he will soon give another performance." But Charles replied that they were going back next day. "Unless," he added, turning to his wife, "you would like to stay alone, kitten?" And changing his tactics at this unexpected opportunity that presented itself to his hopes, the young man sang the praises of Lagardy in the last number. It was really superb, sublime. Then Charles insisted-- "You would get back on Sunday. Come, make up your mind. You are wrong if you feel that this is doing you the least good." The tables round them, however, were emptying; a waiter came and stood discreetly near them. Charles, who understood, took out his purse; the clerk held back his arm, and did not forget to leave two more pieces of silver that he made chink on the marble. "I am really sorry," said Bovary, "about the money which you are--" The other made a careless gesture full of cordiality, and taking his hat said-- "It is settled, isn't it? To-morrow at six o'clock?" Charles explained once more that he could not absent himself longer, but that nothing prevented Emma-- "But," she stammered, with a strange smile, "I am not sure--" "Well, you must think it over. We'll see. Night brings counsel." Then to Leon, who was walking along with them, "Now that you are in our part of the world, I hope you'll come and ask us for some dinner now and then." The clerk declared he would not fail to do so, being obliged, moreover, to go to Yonville on some business for his office. And they parted before the Saint-Herbland Passage just as the clock in the cathedral struck half-past eleven. Part III

part 2, Chapter 15

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partii-chapter14-15

When they finally enter the theater Emma is delighted to find they have box seats. She looks down upon the crowd of older men discussing business and younger men dressed in the height of fashion. The opera begins with a musical flourish and the curtain rises on a country scene. Emma is instantly transported back to the novels she read as a girl. The star, Edgar Lagardy, comes onto the stage and immediately captures the hearts of the audience who are unaware that he was something of a charlatan and self-promoter. The crowd obviously enjoys his bombastic performance. Charles cannot follow the story and Emma, to her annoyance, must continually explain the plot. Emma finds herself relating her own life to the story on the stage but reminds herself that real life passions are different from those portrayed in art. Toward the end of the first half, however, she is carried away by Edgar's performance and longs to be with him. When the curtain falls the odors of the theater and the stifling atmosphere suffocate her. Charles rushes to find some beverages. When he returns, after spilling half the drink on a woman's dress, he tells her that he has seen Monsieur Lon. Soon the young man joins them and Emma is immediately reminded of her former passion for the clerk. During the second half of the play she can only think of Lon and when he suggests that they leave the theater for some fresh air she readily assents. At an outdoor caf they sit and talk but soon run out of subjects that can be discussed in front of Charles. Charles insists that Emma stay in Rouen an extra day to see the end of the play. Lon quickly encourages her to do so but she does not commit. Lon pays for their drinks and promises to see them soon in Yonville.

In these chapters we learn that Monsieur Lheureux is bent upon squeezing every possible franc from the Bovary's through subtle manipulation and pretended favors. His greed knows no bounds. As before, the abb proves incapable of dealing with Emma's intense emotions and cannot fathom a conception of religion that stems from passion rather than principle. Emma's reaction to the theater proves that her experience with Rodolphe has taught her to temper her romanticism with some elements of realism - as when she reminds herself that art does not accurately convey the real world - but she is eventually swept away by the force of the performance. This momentary realization, which assault everything that she has spent her life believing - is her first step toward death. Immediately following the singer's powerful close to the first half the lights come on and she is left deflated by her real surroundings but Lon returns to her life and the theater and the play seems unimportant by comparison

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/25.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_10_part_1.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 1

part 3, chapter 1

{"name": "part 3, Chapter 1", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter1-4", "summary": "While in Paris, Lon had been popular with the working girls and had enjoyed going to the theater but he had also been a responsible student. He never forgot Emma, however, and seeing her in Rouen had convinced him that he must seduce her. Accordingly he follows Emma and Charles to their hotel and returns the next day. He is pleased to find that Emma has decided to stay for another night. After a long conversation about their problems and dreams Lon finally works up the courage to tell Emma that he loved her during their time in Yonville. She is pleased but claims that he is too young and she too old. The hour grows late and Lon rises to leave but he makes her promise to meet him the following day. She finally agrees and tells him that she will be at the cathedral at 11am. When he departs he says \"Till tomorrow. Emma immediately writes a long letter to explain why they cannot be lovers but, not knowing how to send it, she elects to give it to him the following day. Lon arrives early the next day and to the verger's suppressed anger Lon walks about the cathedral unguided. Finally Emma arrives, shoves the letter into Lon's hand and immediately falls to her knees in the chapel of the Virgin and begins to pray for strength of will. Lon impatiently waits for her to finish and is further exasperated when, upon rising, she accepts the verger's offer of a tour. As the verger drones on about the details of the church Lon's impatience grows to the breaking point. Finally he shoves a silver piece into the man's hand, grabs Emma by the arm and pulls her from the church and into a cab. Lon orders the driver to go anywhere and all afternoon, despite several attempts by the weary driver to slow or come to a stop, the cab is seen repeating a circuitous course about the town and countryside. At one point a bare hand emerges from the window and throws bits of torn paper into the wind. At 6pm the carriage finally stops and Emma, covered in a veil emerges and walks quickly away", "analysis": ""}

Monsieur Leon, while studying law, had gone pretty often to the dancing-rooms, where he was even a great success amongst the grisettes, who thought he had a distinguished air. He was the best-mannered of the students; he wore his hair neither too long nor too short, didn't spend all his quarter's money on the first day of the month, and kept on good terms with his professors. As for excesses, he had always abstained from them, as much from cowardice as from refinement. Often when he stayed in his room to read, or else when sitting of an evening under the lime-trees of the Luxembourg, he let his Code fall to the ground, and the memory of Emma came back to him. But gradually this feeling grew weaker, and other desires gathered over it, although it still persisted through them all. For Leon did not lose all hope; there was for him, as it were, a vague promise floating in the future, like a golden fruit suspended from some fantastic tree. Then, seeing her again after three years of absence his passion reawakened. He must, he thought, at last make up his mind to possess her. Moreover, his timidity had worn off by contact with his gay companions, and he returned to the provinces despising everyone who had not with varnished shoes trodden the asphalt of the boulevards. By the side of a Parisienne in her laces, in the drawing-room of some illustrious physician, a person driving his carriage and wearing many orders, the poor clerk would no doubt have trembled like a child; but here, at Rouen, on the harbour, with the wife of this small doctor he felt at his ease, sure beforehand he would shine. Self-possession depends on its environment. We don't speak on the first floor as on the fourth; and the wealthy woman seems to have, about her, to guard her virtue, all her banknotes, like a cuirass in the lining of her corset. On leaving the Bovarys the night before, Leon had followed them through the streets at a distance; then having seen them stop at the "Croix-Rouge," he turned on his heel, and spent the night meditating a plan. So the next day about five o'clock he walked into the kitchen of the inn, with a choking sensation in his throat, pale cheeks, and that resolution of cowards that stops at nothing. "The gentleman isn't in," answered a servant. This seemed to him a good omen. He went upstairs. She was not disturbed at his approach; on the contrary, she apologised for having neglected to tell him where they were staying. "Oh, I divined it!" said Leon. He pretended he had been guided towards her by chance, by, instinct. She began to smile; and at once, to repair his folly, Leon told her that he had spent his morning in looking for her in all the hotels in the town one after the other. "So you have made up your mind to stay?" he added. "Yes," she said, "and I am wrong. One ought not to accustom oneself to impossible pleasures when there are a thousand demands upon one." "Oh, I can imagine!" "Ah! no; for you, you are a man!" But men too had had their trials, and the conversation went off into certain philosophical reflections. Emma expatiated much on the misery of earthly affections, and the eternal isolation in which the heart remains entombed. To show off, or from a naive imitation of this melancholy which called forth his, the young man declared that he had been awfully bored during the whole course of his studies. The law irritated him, other vocations attracted him, and his mother never ceased worrying him in every one of her letters. As they talked they explained more and more fully the motives of their sadness, working themselves up in their progressive confidence. But they sometimes stopped short of the complete exposition of their thought, and then sought to invent a phrase that might express it all the same. She did not confess her passion for another; he did not say that he had forgotten her. Perhaps he no longer remembered his suppers with girls after masked balls; and no doubt she did not recollect the rendezvous of old when she ran across the fields in the morning to her lover's house. The noises of the town hardly reached them, and the room seemed small, as if on purpose to hem in their solitude more closely. Emma, in a dimity dressing-gown, leant her head against the back of the old arm-chair; the yellow wall-paper formed, as it were, a golden background behind her, and her bare head was mirrored in the glass with the white parting in the middle, and the tip of her ears peeping out from the folds of her hair. "But pardon me!" she said. "It is wrong of me. I weary you with my eternal complaints." "No, never, never!" "If you knew," she went on, raising to the ceiling her beautiful eyes, in which a tear was trembling, "all that I had dreamed!" "And I! Oh, I too have suffered! Often I went out; I went away. I dragged myself along the quays, seeking distraction amid the din of the crowd without being able to banish the heaviness that weighed upon me. In an engraver's shop on the boulevard there is an Italian print of one of the Muses. She is draped in a tunic, and she is looking at the moon, with forget-me-nots in her flowing hair. Something drove me there continually; I stayed there hours together." Then in a trembling voice, "She resembled you a little." Madame Bovary turned away her head that he might not see the irrepressible smile she felt rising to her lips. "Often," he went on, "I wrote you letters that I tore up." She did not answer. He continued-- "I sometimes fancied that some chance would bring you. I thought I recognised you at street-corners, and I ran after all the carriages through whose windows I saw a shawl fluttering, a veil like yours." She seemed resolved to let him go on speaking without interruption. Crossing her arms and bending down her face, she looked at the rosettes on her slippers, and at intervals made little movements inside the satin of them with her toes. At last she sighed. "But the most wretched thing, is it not--is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice." He started off in praise of virtue, duty, and silent immolation, having himself an incredible longing for self-sacrifice that he could not satisfy. "I should much like," she said, "to be a nurse at a hospital." "Alas! men have none of these holy missions, and I see nowhere any calling--unless perhaps that of a doctor." With a slight shrug of her shoulders, Emma interrupted him to speak of her illness, which had almost killed her. What a pity! She should not be suffering now! Leon at once envied the calm of the tomb, and one evening he had even made his will, asking to be buried in that beautiful rug with velvet stripes he had received from her. For this was how they would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal to which they were now adapting their past life. Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always thins out the sentiment. But at this invention of the rug she asked, "But why?" "Why?" He hesitated. "Because I loved you so!" And congratulating himself at having surmounted the difficulty, Leon watched her face out of the corner of his eyes. It was like the sky when a gust of wind drives the clouds across. The mass of sad thoughts that darkened them seemed to be lifted from her blue eyes; her whole face shone. He waited. At last she replied-- "I always suspected it." Then they went over all the trifling events of that far-off existence, whose joys and sorrows they had just summed up in one word. They recalled the arbour with clematis, the dresses she had worn, the furniture of her room, the whole of her house. "And our poor cactuses, where are they?" "The cold killed them this winter." "Ah! how I have thought of them, do you know? I often saw them again as of yore, when on the summer mornings the sun beat down upon your blinds, and I saw your two bare arms passing out amongst the flowers." "Poor friend!" she said, holding out her hand to him. Leon swiftly pressed his lips to it. Then, when he had taken a deep breath-- "At that time you were to me I know not what incomprehensible force that took captive my life. Once, for instance, I went to see you; but you, no doubt, do not remember it." "I do," she said; "go on." "You were downstairs in the ante-room, ready to go out, standing on the last stair; you were wearing a bonnet with small blue flowers; and without any invitation from you, in spite of myself, I went with you. Every moment, however, I grew more and more conscious of my folly, and I went on walking by you, not daring to follow you completely, and unwilling to leave you. When you went into a shop, I waited in the street, and I watched you through the window taking off your gloves and counting the change on the counter. Then you rang at Madame Tuvache's; you were let in, and I stood like an idiot in front of the great heavy door that had closed after you." Madame Bovary, as she listened to him, wondered that she was so old. All these things reappearing before her seemed to widen out her life; it was like some sentimental immensity to which she returned; and from time to time she said in a low voice, her eyes half closed-- "Yes, it is true--true--true!" They heard eight strike on the different clocks of the Beauvoisine quarter, which is full of schools, churches, and large empty hotels. They no longer spoke, but they felt as they looked upon each other a buzzing in their heads, as if something sonorous had escaped from the fixed eyes of each of them. They were hand in hand now, and the past, the future, reminiscences and dreams, all were confounded in the sweetness of this ecstasy. Night was darkening over the walls, on which still shone, half hidden in the shade, the coarse colours of four bills representing four scenes from the "Tour de Nesle," with a motto in Spanish and French at the bottom. Through the sash-window a patch of dark sky was seen between the pointed roofs. She rose to light two wax-candles on the drawers, then she sat down again. "Well!" said Leon. "Well!" she replied. He was thinking how to resume the interrupted conversation, when she said to him-- "How is it that no one until now has ever expressed such sentiments to me?" The clerk said that ideal natures were difficult to understand. He from the first moment had loved her, and he despaired when he thought of the happiness that would have been theirs, if thanks to fortune, meeting her earlier, they had been indissolubly bound to one another. "I have sometimes thought of it," she went on. "What a dream!" murmured Leon. And fingering gently the blue binding of her long white sash, he added, "And who prevents us from beginning now?" "No, my friend," she replied; "I am too old; you are too young. Forget me! Others will love you; you will love them." "Not as you!" he cried. "What a child you are! Come, let us be sensible. I wish it." She showed him the impossibility of their love, and that they must remain, as formerly, on the simple terms of a fraternal friendship. Was she speaking thus seriously? No doubt Emma did not herself know, quite absorbed as she was by the charm of the seduction, and the necessity of defending herself from it; and contemplating the young man with a moved look, she gently repulsed the timid caresses that his trembling hands attempted. "Ah! forgive me!" he cried, drawing back. Emma was seized with a vague fear at this shyness, more dangerous to her than the boldness of Rodolphe when he advanced to her open-armed. No man had ever seemed to her so beautiful. An exquisite candour emanated from his being. He lowered his long fine eyelashes, that curled upwards. His cheek, with the soft skin reddened, she thought, with desire of her person, and Emma felt an invincible longing to press her lips to it. Then, leaning towards the clock as if to see the time-- "Ah! how late it is!" she said; "how we do chatter!" He understood the hint and took up his hat. "It has even made me forget the theatre. And poor Bovary has left me here especially for that. Monsieur Lormeaux, of the Rue Grand-Pont, was to take me and his wife." And the opportunity was lost, as she was to leave the next day. "Really!" said Leon. "Yes." "But I must see you again," he went on. "I wanted to tell you--" "What?" "Something--important--serious. Oh, no! Besides, you will not go; it is impossible. If you should--listen to me. Then you have not understood me; you have not guessed--" "Yet you speak plainly," said Emma. "Ah! you can jest. Enough! enough! Oh, for pity's sake, let me see you once--only once!" "Well--" She stopped; then, as if thinking better of it, "Oh, not here!" "Where you will." "Will you--" She seemed to reflect; then abruptly, "To-morrow at eleven o'clock in the cathedral." "I shall be there," he cried, seizing her hands, which she disengaged. And as they were both standing up, he behind her, and Emma with her head bent, he stooped over her and pressed long kisses on her neck. "You are mad! Ah! you are mad!" she said, with sounding little laughs, while the kisses multiplied. Then bending his head over her shoulder, he seemed to beg the consent of her eyes. They fell upon him full of an icy dignity. Leon stepped back to go out. He stopped on the threshold; then he whispered with a trembling voice, "Tomorrow!" She answered with a nod, and disappeared like a bird into the next room. In the evening Emma wrote the clerk an interminable letter, in which she cancelled the rendezvous; all was over; they must not, for the sake of their happiness, meet again. But when the letter was finished, as she did not know Leon's address, she was puzzled. "I'll give it to him myself," she said; "he will come." The next morning, at the open window, and humming on his balcony, Leon himself varnished his pumps with several coatings. He put on white trousers, fine socks, a green coat, emptied all the scent he had into his handkerchief, then having had his hair curled, he uncurled it again, in order to give it a more natural elegance. "It is still too early," he thought, looking at the hairdresser's cuckoo-clock, that pointed to the hour of nine. He read an old fashion journal, went out, smoked a cigar, walked up three streets, thought it was time, and went slowly towards the porch of Notre Dame. It was a beautiful summer morning. Silver plate sparkled in the jeweller's windows, and the light falling obliquely on the cathedral made mirrors of the corners of the grey stones; a flock of birds fluttered in the grey sky round the trefoil bell-turrets; the square, resounding with cries, was fragrant with the flowers that bordered its pavement, roses, jasmines, pinks, narcissi, and tube-roses, unevenly spaced out between moist grasses, catmint, and chickweed for the birds; the fountains gurgled in the centre, and under large umbrellas, amidst melons, piled up in heaps, flower-women, bare-headed, were twisting paper round bunches of violets. The young man took one. It was the first time that he had bought flowers for a woman, and his breast, as he smelt them, swelled with pride, as if this homage that he meant for another had recoiled upon himself. But he was afraid of being seen; he resolutely entered the church. The beadle, who was just then standing on the threshold in the middle of the left doorway, under the "Dancing Marianne," with feather cap, and rapier dangling against his calves, came in, more majestic than a cardinal, and as shining as a saint on a holy pyx. He came towards Leon, and, with that smile of wheedling benignity assumed by ecclesiastics when they question children-- "The gentleman, no doubt, does not belong to these parts? The gentleman would like to see the curiosities of the church?" "No!" said the other. And he first went round the lower aisles. Then he went out to look at the Place. Emma was not coming yet. He went up again to the choir. The nave was reflected in the full fonts with the beginning of the arches and some portions of the glass windows. But the reflections of the paintings, broken by the marble rim, were continued farther on upon the flag-stones, like a many-coloured carpet. The broad daylight from without streamed into the church in three enormous rays from the three opened portals. From time to time at the upper end a sacristan passed, making the oblique genuflexion of devout persons in a hurry. The crystal lustres hung motionless. In the choir a silver lamp was burning, and from the side chapels and dark places of the church sometimes rose sounds like sighs, with the clang of a closing grating, its echo reverberating under the lofty vault. Leon with solemn steps walked along by the walls. Life had never seemed so good to him. She would come directly, charming, agitated, looking back at the glances that followed her, and with her flounced dress, her gold eyeglass, her thin shoes, with all sorts of elegant trifles that he had never enjoyed, and with the ineffable seduction of yielding virtue. The church like a huge boudoir spread around her; the arches bent down to gather in the shade the confession of her love; the windows shone resplendent to illumine her face, and the censers would burn that she might appear like an angel amid the fumes of the sweet-smelling odours. But she did not come. He sat down on a chair, and his eyes fell upon a blue stained window representing boatmen carrying baskets. He looked at it long, attentively, and he counted the scales of the fishes and the button-holes of the doublets, while his thoughts wandered off towards Emma. The beadle, standing aloof, was inwardly angry at this individual who took the liberty of admiring the cathedral by himself. He seemed to him to be conducting himself in a monstrous fashion, to be robbing him in a sort, and almost committing sacrilege. But a rustle of silk on the flags, the tip of a bonnet, a lined cloak--it was she! Leon rose and ran to meet her. Emma was pale. She walked fast. "Read!" she said, holding out a paper to him. "Oh, no!" And she abruptly withdrew her hand to enter the chapel of the Virgin, where, kneeling on a chair, she began to pray. The young man was irritated at this bigot fancy; then he nevertheless experienced a certain charm in seeing her, in the middle of a rendezvous, thus lost in her devotions, like an Andalusian marchioness; then he grew bored, for she seemed never coming to an end. Emma prayed, or rather strove to pray, hoping that some sudden resolution might descend to her from heaven; and to draw down divine aid she filled full her eyes with the splendours of the tabernacle. She breathed in the perfumes of the full-blown flowers in the large vases, and listened to the stillness of the church, that only heightened the tumult of her heart. She rose, and they were about to leave, when the beadle came forward, hurriedly saying-- "Madame, no doubt, does not belong to these parts? Madame would like to see the curiosities of the church?" "Oh, no!" cried the clerk. "Why not?" said she. For she clung with her expiring virtue to the Virgin, the sculptures, the tombs--anything. Then, in order to proceed "by rule," the beadle conducted them right to the entrance near the square, where, pointing out with his cane a large circle of block-stones without inscription or carving-- "This," he said majestically, "is the circumference of the beautiful bell of Ambroise. It weighed forty thousand pounds. There was not its equal in all Europe. The workman who cast it died of the joy--" "Let us go on," said Leon. The old fellow started off again; then, having got back to the chapel of the Virgin, he stretched forth his arm with an all-embracing gesture of demonstration, and, prouder than a country squire showing you his espaliers, went on-- "This simple stone covers Pierre de Breze, lord of Varenne and of Brissac, grand marshal of Poitou, and governor of Normandy, who died at the battle of Montlhery on the 16th of July, 1465." Leon bit his lips, fuming. "And on the right, this gentleman all encased in iron, on the prancing horse, is his grandson, Louis de Breze, lord of Breval and of Montchauvet, Count de Maulevrier, Baron de Mauny, chamberlain to the king, Knight of the Order, and also governor of Normandy; died on the 23rd of July, 1531--a Sunday, as the inscription specifies; and below, this figure, about to descend into the tomb, portrays the same person. It is not possible, is it, to see a more perfect representation of annihilation?" Madame Bovary put up her eyeglasses. Leon, motionless, looked at her, no longer even attempting to speak a single word, to make a gesture, so discouraged was he at this two-fold obstinacy of gossip and indifference. The everlasting guide went on-- "Near him, this kneeling woman who weeps is his spouse, Diane de Poitiers, Countess de Breze, Duchess de Valentinois, born in 1499, died in 1566, and to the left, the one with the child is the Holy Virgin. Now turn to this side; here are the tombs of the Ambroise. They were both cardinals and archbishops of Rouen. That one was minister under Louis thousand gold crowns for the poor." And without stopping, still talking, he pushed them into a chapel full of balustrades, some put away, and disclosed a kind of block that certainly might once have been an ill-made statue. "Truly," he said with a groan, "it adorned the tomb of Richard Coeur de Lion, King of England and Duke of Normandy. It was the Calvinists, sir, who reduced it to this condition. They had buried it for spite in the earth, under the episcopal seat of Monsignor. See! this is the door by which Monsignor passes to his house. Let us pass on quickly to see the gargoyle windows." But Leon hastily took some silver from his pocket and seized Emma's arm. The beadle stood dumfounded, not able to understand this untimely munificence when there were still so many things for the stranger to see. So calling him back, he cried-- "Sir! sir! The steeple! the steeple!" "No, thank you!" said Leon. "You are wrong, sir! It is four hundred and forty feet high, nine less than the great pyramid of Egypt. It is all cast; it--" Leon was fleeing, for it seemed to him that his love, that for nearly two hours now had become petrified in the church like the stones, would vanish like a vapour through that sort of truncated funnel, of oblong cage, of open chimney that rises so grotesquely from the cathedral like the extravagant attempt of some fantastic brazier. "But where are we going?" she said. Making no answer, he walked on with a rapid step; and Madame Bovary was already, dipping her finger in the holy water when behind them they heard a panting breath interrupted by the regular sound of a cane. Leon turned back. "Sir!" "What is it?" And he recognised the beadle, holding under his arms and balancing against his stomach some twenty large sewn volumes. They were works "which treated of the cathedral." "Idiot!" growled Leon, rushing out of the church. A lad was playing about the close. "Go and get me a cab!" The child bounded off like a ball by the Rue Quatre-Vents; then they were alone a few minutes, face to face, and a little embarrassed. "Ah! Leon! Really--I don't know--if I ought," she whispered. Then with a more serious air, "Do you know, it is very improper--" "How so?" replied the clerk. "It is done at Paris." And that, as an irresistible argument, decided her. Still the cab did not come. Leon was afraid she might go back into the church. At last the cab appeared. "At all events, go out by the north porch," cried the beadle, who was left alone on the threshold, "so as to see the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, Paradise, King David, and the Condemned in Hell-flames." "Where to, sir?" asked the coachman. "Where you like," said Leon, forcing Emma into the cab. And the lumbering machine set out. It went down the Rue Grand-Pont, crossed the Place des Arts, the Quai Napoleon, the Pont Neuf, and stopped short before the statue of Pierre Corneille. "Go on," cried a voice that came from within. The cab went on again, and as soon as it reached the Carrefour Lafayette, set off down-hill, and entered the station at a gallop. "No, straight on!" cried the same voice. The cab came out by the gate, and soon having reached the Cours, trotted quietly beneath the elm-trees. The coachman wiped his brow, put his leather hat between his knees, and drove his carriage beyond the side alley by the meadow to the margin of the waters. It went along by the river, along the towing-path paved with sharp pebbles, and for a long while in the direction of Oyssel, beyond the isles. But suddenly it turned with a dash across Quatremares, Sotteville, La Grande-Chaussee, the Rue d'Elbeuf, and made its third halt in front of the Jardin des Plantes. "Get on, will you?" cried the voice more furiously. And at once resuming its course, it passed by Saint-Sever, by the Quai'des Curandiers, the Quai aux Meules, once more over the bridge, by the Place du Champ de Mars, and behind the hospital gardens, where old men in black coats were walking in the sun along the terrace all green with ivy. It went up the Boulevard Bouvreuil, along the Boulevard Cauchoise, then the whole of Mont-Riboudet to the Deville hills. It came back; and then, without any fixed plan or direction, wandered about at hazard. The cab was seen at Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont Gargan, at La Rougue-Marc and Place du Gaillardbois; in the Rue Maladrerie, Rue Dinanderie, before Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien, Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise--in front of the Customs, at the "Vieille Tour," the "Trois Pipes," and the Monumental Cemetery. From time to time the coachman, on his box cast despairing eyes at the public-houses. He could not understand what furious desire for locomotion urged these individuals never to wish to stop. He tried to now and then, and at once exclamations of anger burst forth behind him. Then he lashed his perspiring jades afresh, but indifferent to their jolting, running up against things here and there, not caring if he did, demoralised, and almost weeping with thirst, fatigue, and depression. And on the harbour, in the midst of the drays and casks, and in the streets, at the corners, the good folk opened large wonder-stricken eyes at this sight, so extraordinary in the provinces, a cab with blinds drawn, and which appeared thus constantly shut more closely than a tomb, and tossing about like a vessel. Once in the middle of the day, in the open country, just as the sun beat most fiercely against the old plated lanterns, a bared hand passed beneath the small blinds of yellow canvas, and threw out some scraps of paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off lighted like white butterflies on a field of red clover all in bloom. At about six o'clock the carriage stopped in a back street of the Beauvoisine Quarter, and a woman got out, who walked with her veil down, and without turning her head.

part 3, Chapter 1

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter1-4

While in Paris, Lon had been popular with the working girls and had enjoyed going to the theater but he had also been a responsible student. He never forgot Emma, however, and seeing her in Rouen had convinced him that he must seduce her. Accordingly he follows Emma and Charles to their hotel and returns the next day. He is pleased to find that Emma has decided to stay for another night. After a long conversation about their problems and dreams Lon finally works up the courage to tell Emma that he loved her during their time in Yonville. She is pleased but claims that he is too young and she too old. The hour grows late and Lon rises to leave but he makes her promise to meet him the following day. She finally agrees and tells him that she will be at the cathedral at 11am. When he departs he says "Till tomorrow. Emma immediately writes a long letter to explain why they cannot be lovers but, not knowing how to send it, she elects to give it to him the following day. Lon arrives early the next day and to the verger's suppressed anger Lon walks about the cathedral unguided. Finally Emma arrives, shoves the letter into Lon's hand and immediately falls to her knees in the chapel of the Virgin and begins to pray for strength of will. Lon impatiently waits for her to finish and is further exasperated when, upon rising, she accepts the verger's offer of a tour. As the verger drones on about the details of the church Lon's impatience grows to the breaking point. Finally he shoves a silver piece into the man's hand, grabs Emma by the arm and pulls her from the church and into a cab. Lon orders the driver to go anywhere and all afternoon, despite several attempts by the weary driver to slow or come to a stop, the cab is seen repeating a circuitous course about the town and countryside. At one point a bare hand emerges from the window and throws bits of torn paper into the wind. At 6pm the carriage finally stops and Emma, covered in a veil emerges and walks quickly away

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/26.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_10_part_2.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 2

part 3, chapter 2

{"name": "part 3, Chapter 2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter1-4", "summary": "When Emma returns to Yonville she is told to go at once to the pharmacy where she finds the entire Homais family engaged in making jelly. She enters as Monsieur Homais is berating Justin for having taken a pan from his laboratory that was sitting next to a jar of arsenic. Although Emma senses that the apothecary has dire news for her she cannot get his attention. In his anger Homais shakes Justin and dislodges a tawdry book, Conjugal Love from the poor boy's clothing. Homais orders the kitchen cleared. As he lectures Justin, Emma interrupts and Homais quickly informs her that her father-in-law has died. She returns home to find Charles distraught and feigns compassion though she is disgusted by her husband and her life in Yonville. The elder Madame Bovary arrives and spends a great deal of time weeping with her son. Emma manages to see as little of both of them as possible and clings to the memory of her happy hours with Lon. Monsieur Lheureux arrives and Emma confers with him privately. He suggests that Monsieur Bovary should extend his promissory note with another and hints that it would be much easier if she had power of attorney. Over the following days he returns several times and drops comments about the complications of her father-in-law's inheritance and the importance of power of attorney. When Emma confronts Charles she already has a formal document giving her power of attorney for him to sign but admits that the local notary might have botched the job. Charles suggests that they consult Monsieur Lon and she volunteers to make the journey. She stays in Rouen for three days", "analysis": ""}

On reaching the inn, Madame Bovary was surprised not to see the diligence. Hivert, who had waited for her fifty-three minutes, had at last started. Yet nothing forced her to go; but she had given her word that she would return that same evening. Moreover, Charles expected her, and in her heart she felt already that cowardly docility that is for some women at once the chastisement and atonement of adultery. She packed her box quickly, paid her bill, took a cab in the yard, hurrying on the driver, urging him on, every moment inquiring about the time and the miles traversed. He succeeded in catching up the "Hirondelle" as it neared the first houses of Quincampoix. Hardly was she seated in her corner than she closed her eyes, and opened them at the foot of the hill, when from afar she recognised Felicite, who was on the lookout in front of the farrier's shop. Hivert pulled in his horses and, the servant, climbing up to the window, said mysteriously-- "Madame, you must go at once to Monsieur Homais. It's for something important." The village was silent as usual. At the corner of the streets were small pink heaps that smoked in the air, for this was the time for jam-making, and everyone at Yonville prepared his supply on the same day. But in front of the chemist's shop one might admire a far larger heap, and that surpassed the others with the superiority that a laboratory must have over ordinary stores, a general need over individual fancy. She went in. The large arm-chair was upset, and even the "Fanal de Rouen" lay on the ground, outspread between two pestles. She pushed open the lobby door, and in the middle of the kitchen, amid brown jars full of picked currants, of powdered sugar and lump sugar, of the scales on the table, and of the pans on the fire, she saw all the Homais, small and large, with aprons reaching to their chins, and with forks in their hands. Justin was standing up with bowed head, and the chemist was screaming-- "Who told you to go and fetch it in the Capharnaum." "What is it? What is the matter?" "What is it?" replied the druggist. "We are making preserves; they are simmering; but they were about to boil over, because there is too much juice, and I ordered another pan. Then he, from indolence, from laziness, went and took, hanging on its nail in my laboratory, the key of the Capharnaum." It was thus the druggist called a small room under the leads, full of the utensils and the goods of his trade. He often spent long hours there alone, labelling, decanting, and doing up again; and he looked upon it not as a simple store, but as a veritable sanctuary, whence there afterwards issued, elaborated by his hands, all sorts of pills, boluses, infusions, lotions, and potions, that would bear far and wide his celebrity. No one in the world set foot there, and he respected it so, that he swept it himself. Finally, if the pharmacy, open to all comers, was the spot where he displayed his pride, the Capharnaum was the refuge where, egoistically concentrating himself, Homais delighted in the exercise of his predilections, so that Justin's thoughtlessness seemed to him a monstrous piece of irreverence, and, redder than the currants, he repeated-- "Yes, from the Capharnaum! The key that locks up the acids and caustic alkalies! To go and get a spare pan! a pan with a lid! and that I shall perhaps never use! Everything is of importance in the delicate operations of our art! But, devil take it! one must make distinctions, and not employ for almost domestic purposes that which is meant for pharmaceutical! It is as if one were to carve a fowl with a scalpel; as if a magistrate--" "Now be calm," said Madame Homais. And Athalie, pulling at his coat, cried "Papa! papa!" "No, let me alone," went on the druggist "let me alone, hang it! My word! One might as well set up for a grocer. That's it! go it! respect nothing! break, smash, let loose the leeches, burn the mallow-paste, pickle the gherkins in the window jars, tear up the bandages!" "I thought you had--" said Emma. "Presently! Do you know to what you exposed yourself? Didn't you see anything in the corner, on the left, on the third shelf? Speak, answer, articulate something." "I--don't--know," stammered the young fellow. "Ah! you don't know! Well, then, I do know! You saw a bottle of blue glass, sealed with yellow wax, that contains a white powder, on which I have even written 'Dangerous!' And do you know what is in it? Arsenic! And you go and touch it! You take a pan that was next to it!" "Next to it!" cried Madame Homais, clasping her hands. "Arsenic! You might have poisoned us all." And the children began howling as if they already had frightful pains in their entrails. "Or poison a patient!" continued the druggist. "Do you want to see me in the prisoner's dock with criminals, in a court of justice? To see me dragged to the scaffold? Don't you know what care I take in managing things, although I am so thoroughly used to it? Often I am horrified myself when I think of my responsibility; for the Government persecutes us, and the absurd legislation that rules us is a veritable Damocles' sword over our heads." Emma no longer dreamed of asking what they wanted her for, and the druggist went on in breathless phrases-- "That is your return for all the kindness we have shown you! That is how you recompense me for the really paternal care that I lavish on you! For without me where would you be? What would you be doing? Who provides you with food, education, clothes, and all the means of figuring one day with honour in the ranks of society? But you must pull hard at the oar if you're to do that, and get, as, people say, callosities upon your hands. Fabricando fit faber, age quod agis.*" * The worker lives by working, do what he will. He was so exasperated he quoted Latin. He would have quoted Chinese or Greenlandish had he known those two languages, for he was in one of those crises in which the whole soul shows indistinctly what it contains, like the ocean, which, in the storm, opens itself from the seaweeds on its shores down to the sands of its abysses. And he went on-- "I am beginning to repent terribly of having taken you up! I should certainly have done better to have left you to rot in your poverty and the dirt in which you were born. Oh, you'll never be fit for anything but to herd animals with horns! You have no aptitude for science! You hardly know how to stick on a label! And there you are, dwelling with me snug as a parson, living in clover, taking your ease!" But Emma, turning to Madame Homais, "I was told to come here--" "Oh, dear me!" interrupted the good woman, with a sad air, "how am I to tell you? It is a misfortune!" She could not finish, the druggist was thundering--"Empty it! Clean it! Take it back! Be quick!" And seizing Justin by the collar of his blouse, he shook a book out of his pocket. The lad stooped, but Homais was the quicker, and, having picked up the volume, contemplated it with staring eyes and open mouth. "CONJUGAL--LOVE!" he said, slowly separating the two words. "Ah! very good! very good! very pretty! And illustrations! Oh, this is too much!" Madame Homais came forward. "No, do not touch it!" The children wanted to look at the pictures. "Leave the room," he said imperiously; and they went out. First he walked up and down with the open volume in his hand, rolling his eyes, choking, tumid, apoplectic. Then he came straight to his pupil, and, planting himself in front of him with crossed arms-- "Have you every vice, then, little wretch? Take care! you are on a downward path. Did not you reflect that this infamous book might fall in the hands of my children, kindle a spark in their minds, tarnish the purity of Athalie, corrupt Napoleon. He is already formed like a man. Are you quite sure, anyhow, that they have not read it? Can you certify to me--" "But really, sir," said Emma, "you wished to tell me--" "Ah, yes! madame. Your father-in-law is dead." In fact, Monsieur Bovary senior had expired the evening before suddenly from an attack of apoplexy as he got up from table, and by way of greater precaution, on account of Emma's sensibility, Charles had begged Homais to break the horrible news to her gradually. Homais had thought over his speech; he had rounded, polished it, made it rhythmical; it was a masterpiece of prudence and transitions, of subtle turns and delicacy; but anger had got the better of rhetoric. Emma, giving up all chance of hearing any details, left the pharmacy; for Monsieur Homais had taken up the thread of his vituperations. However, he was growing calmer, and was now grumbling in a paternal tone whilst he fanned himself with his skull-cap. "It is not that I entirely disapprove of the work. Its author was a doctor! There are certain scientific points in it that it is not ill a man should know, and I would even venture to say that a man must know. But later--later! At any rate, not till you are man yourself and your temperament is formed." When Emma knocked at the door. Charles, who was waiting for her, came forward with open arms and said to her with tears in his voice-- "Ah! my dear!" And he bent over her gently to kiss her. But at the contact of his lips the memory of the other seized her, and she passed her hand over her face shuddering. But she made answer, "Yes, I know, I know!" He showed her the letter in which his mother told the event without any sentimental hypocrisy. She only regretted her husband had not received the consolations of religion, as he had died at Daudeville, in the street, at the door of a cafe after a patriotic dinner with some ex-officers. Emma gave him back the letter; then at dinner, for appearance's sake, she affected a certain repugnance. But as he urged her to try, she resolutely began eating, while Charles opposite her sat motionless in a dejected attitude. Now and then he raised his head and gave her a long look full of distress. Once he sighed, "I should have liked to see him again!" She was silent. At last, understanding that she must say something, "How old was your father?" she asked. "Fifty-eight." "Ah!" And that was all. A quarter of an hour after he added, "My poor mother! what will become of her now?" She made a gesture that signified she did not know. Seeing her so taciturn, Charles imagined her much affected, and forced himself to say nothing, not to reawaken this sorrow which moved him. And, shaking off his own-- "Did you enjoy yourself yesterday?" he asked. "Yes." When the cloth was removed, Bovary did not rise, nor did Emma; and as she looked at him, the monotony of the spectacle drove little by little all pity from her heart. He seemed to her paltry, weak, a cipher--in a word, a poor thing in every way. How to get rid of him? What an interminable evening! Something stupefying like the fumes of opium seized her. They heard in the passage the sharp noise of a wooden leg on the boards. It was Hippolyte bringing back Emma's luggage. In order to put it down he described painfully a quarter of a circle with his stump. "He doesn't even remember any more about it," she thought, looking at the poor devil, whose coarse red hair was wet with perspiration. Bovary was searching at the bottom of his purse for a centime, and without appearing to understand all there was of humiliation for him in the mere presence of this man, who stood there like a personified reproach to his incurable incapacity. "Hallo! you've a pretty bouquet," he said, noticing Leon's violets on the chimney. "Yes," she replied indifferently; "it's a bouquet I bought just now from a beggar." Charles picked up the flowers, and freshening his eyes, red with tears, against them, smelt them delicately. She took them quickly from his hand and put them in a glass of water. The next day Madame Bovary senior arrived. She and her son wept much. Emma, on the pretext of giving orders, disappeared. The following day they had a talk over the mourning. They went and sat down with their workboxes by the waterside under the arbour. Charles was thinking of his father, and was surprised to feel so much affection for this man, whom till then he had thought he cared little about. Madame Bovary senior was thinking of her husband. The worst days of the past seemed enviable to her. All was forgotten beneath the instinctive regret of such a long habit, and from time to time whilst she sewed, a big tear rolled along her nose and hung suspended there a moment. Emma was thinking that it was scarcely forty-eight hours since they had been together, far from the world, all in a frenzy of joy, and not having eyes enough to gaze upon each other. She tried to recall the slightest details of that past day. But the presence of her husband and mother-in-law worried her. She would have liked to hear nothing, to see nothing, so as not to disturb the meditation on her love, that, do what she would, became lost in external sensations. She was unpicking the lining of a dress, and the strips were scattered around her. Madame Bovary senior was plying her scissor without looking up, and Charles, in his list slippers and his old brown surtout that he used as a dressing-gown, sat with both hands in his pockets, and did not speak either; near them Berthe, in a little white pinafore, was raking sand in the walks with her spade. Suddenly she saw Monsieur Lheureux, the linendraper, come in through the gate. He came to offer his services "under the sad circumstances." Emma answered that she thought she could do without. The shopkeeper was not to be beaten. "I beg your pardon," he said, "but I should like to have a private talk with you." Then in a low voice, "It's about that affair--you know." Charles crimsoned to his ears. "Oh, yes! certainly." And in his confusion, turning to his wife, "Couldn't you, my darling?" She seemed to understand him, for she rose; and Charles said to his mother, "It is nothing particular. No doubt, some household trifle." He did not want her to know the story of the bill, fearing her reproaches. As soon as they were alone, Monsieur Lheureux in sufficiently clear terms began to congratulate Emma on the inheritance, then to talk of indifferent matters, of the espaliers, of the harvest, and of his own health, which was always so-so, always having ups and downs. In fact, he had to work devilish hard, although he didn't make enough, in spite of all people said, to find butter for his bread. Emma let him talk on. She had bored herself so prodigiously the last two days. "And so you're quite well again?" he went on. "Ma foi! I saw your husband in a sad state. He's a good fellow, though we did have a little misunderstanding." She asked what misunderstanding, for Charles had said nothing of the dispute about the goods supplied to her. "Why, you know well enough," cried Lheureux. "It was about your little fancies--the travelling trunks." He had drawn his hat over his eyes, and, with his hands behind his back, smiling and whistling, he looked straight at her in an unbearable manner. Did he suspect anything? She was lost in all kinds of apprehensions. At last, however, he went on-- "We made it up, all the same, and I've come again to propose another arrangement." This was to renew the bill Bovary had signed. The doctor, of course, would do as he pleased; he was not to trouble himself, especially just now, when he would have a lot of worry. "And he would do better to give it over to someone else--to you, for example. With a power of attorney it could be easily managed, and then we (you and I) would have our little business transactions together." She did not understand. He was silent. Then, passing to his trade, Lheureux declared that madame must require something. He would send her a black barege, twelve yards, just enough to make a gown. "The one you've on is good enough for the house, but you want another for calls. I saw that the very moment that I came in. I've the eye of an American!" He did not send the stuff; he brought it. Then he came again to measure it; he came again on other pretexts, always trying to make himself agreeable, useful, "enfeoffing himself," as Homais would have said, and always dropping some hint to Emma about the power of attorney. He never mentioned the bill; she did not think of it. Charles, at the beginning of her convalescence, had certainly said something about it to her, but so many emotions had passed through her head that she no longer remembered it. Besides, she took care not to talk of any money questions. Madame Bovary seemed surprised at this, and attributed the change in her ways to the religious sentiments she had contracted during her illness. But as soon as she was gone, Emma greatly astounded Bovary by her practical good sense. It would be necessary to make inquiries, to look into mortgages, and see if there were any occasion for a sale by auction or a liquidation. She quoted technical terms casually, pronounced the grand words of order, the future, foresight, and constantly exaggerated the difficulties of settling his father's affairs so much, that at last one day she showed him the rough draft of a power of attorney to manage and administer his business, arrange all loans, sign and endorse all bills, pay all sums, etc. She had profited by Lheureux's lessons. Charles naively asked her where this paper came from. "Monsieur Guillaumin"; and with the utmost coolness she added, "I don't trust him overmuch. Notaries have such a bad reputation. Perhaps we ought to consult--we only know--no one." "Unless Leon--" replied Charles, who was reflecting. But it was difficult to explain matters by letter. Then she offered to make the journey, but he thanked her. She insisted. It was quite a contest of mutual consideration. At last she cried with affected waywardness-- "No, I will go!" "How good you are!" he said, kissing her forehead. The next morning she set out in the "Hirondelle" to go to Rouen to consult Monsieur Leon, and she stayed there three days.

part 3, Chapter 2

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter1-4

When Emma returns to Yonville she is told to go at once to the pharmacy where she finds the entire Homais family engaged in making jelly. She enters as Monsieur Homais is berating Justin for having taken a pan from his laboratory that was sitting next to a jar of arsenic. Although Emma senses that the apothecary has dire news for her she cannot get his attention. In his anger Homais shakes Justin and dislodges a tawdry book, Conjugal Love from the poor boy's clothing. Homais orders the kitchen cleared. As he lectures Justin, Emma interrupts and Homais quickly informs her that her father-in-law has died. She returns home to find Charles distraught and feigns compassion though she is disgusted by her husband and her life in Yonville. The elder Madame Bovary arrives and spends a great deal of time weeping with her son. Emma manages to see as little of both of them as possible and clings to the memory of her happy hours with Lon. Monsieur Lheureux arrives and Emma confers with him privately. He suggests that Monsieur Bovary should extend his promissory note with another and hints that it would be much easier if she had power of attorney. Over the following days he returns several times and drops comments about the complications of her father-in-law's inheritance and the importance of power of attorney. When Emma confronts Charles she already has a formal document giving her power of attorney for him to sign but admits that the local notary might have botched the job. Charles suggests that they consult Monsieur Lon and she volunteers to make the journey. She stays in Rouen for three days

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/27.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_10_part_3.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 3

part 3, chapter 3

{"name": "part 3, Chapter 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter1-4", "summary": "Emma and Lon enjoy an idyllic three days together. They stay at the Hotel Boulogne on the river in Rouen and they go boating and spend the afternoon on an island. Their return journey is suffused by moonlight and they are both carried away by the beauty of the evening and their love for one another. Lon finds a discarded red ribbon on the floor of the boat and the oarsmen remarks that it was probably left by a previous party of jolly men and women headed by a man he identifies as \"Adolphe\" or \"Dodolphe\". Emma knows he is speaking of Rodolphe and she shivers. When they part she gives Lon instructions to write to her care of the wet nurse Madame Rollet. After Emma has left Lon wonders why she is so set on having power of attorney", "analysis": ""}

They were three full, exquisite days--a true honeymoon. They were at the Hotel-de-Boulogne, on the harbour; and they lived there, with drawn blinds and closed doors, with flowers on the floor, and iced syrups were brought them early in the morning. Towards evening they took a covered boat and went to dine on one of the islands. It was the time when one hears by the side of the dockyard the caulking-mallets sounding against the hull of vessels. The smoke of the tar rose up between the trees; there were large fatty drops on the water, undulating in the purple colour of the sun, like floating plaques of Florentine bronze. They rowed down in the midst of moored boats, whose long oblique cables grazed lightly against the bottom of the boat. The din of the town gradually grew distant; the rolling of carriages, the tumult of voices, the yelping of dogs on the decks of vessels. She took off her bonnet, and they landed on their island. They sat down in the low-ceilinged room of a tavern, at whose door hung black nets. They ate fried smelts, cream and cherries. They lay down upon the grass; they kissed behind the poplars; and they would fain, like two Robinsons, have lived for ever in this little place, which seemed to them in their beatitude the most magnificent on earth. It was not the first time that they had seen trees, a blue sky, meadows; that they had heard the water flowing and the wind blowing in the leaves; but, no doubt, they had never admired all this, as if Nature had not existed before, or had only begun to be beautiful since the gratification of their desires. At night they returned. The boat glided along the shores of the islands. They sat at the bottom, both hidden by the shade, in silence. The square oars rang in the iron thwarts, and, in the stillness, seemed to mark time, like the beating of a metronome, while at the stern the rudder that trailed behind never ceased its gentle splash against the water. Once the moon rose; they did not fail to make fine phrases, finding the orb melancholy and full of poetry. She even began to sing-- "One night, do you remember, we were sailing," etc. Her musical but weak voice died away along the waves, and the winds carried off the trills that Leon heard pass like the flapping of wings about him. She was opposite him, leaning against the partition of the shallop, through one of whose raised blinds the moon streamed in. Her black dress, whose drapery spread out like a fan, made her seem more slender, taller. Her head was raised, her hands clasped, her eyes turned towards heaven. At times the shadow of the willows hid her completely; then she reappeared suddenly, like a vision in the moonlight. Leon, on the floor by her side, found under his hand a ribbon of scarlet silk. The boatman looked at it, and at last said-- "Perhaps it belongs to the party I took out the other day. A lot of jolly folk, gentlemen and ladies, with cakes, champagne, cornets--everything in style! There was one especially, a tall handsome man with small moustaches, who was that funny! And they all kept saying, 'Now tell us something, Adolphe--Dolpe,' I think." She shivered. "You are in pain?" asked Leon, coming closer to her. "Oh, it's nothing! No doubt, it is only the night air." "And who doesn't want for women, either," softly added the sailor, thinking he was paying the stranger a compliment. Then, spitting on his hands, he took the oars again. Yet they had to part. The adieux were sad. He was to send his letters to Mere Rollet, and she gave him such precise instructions about a double envelope that he admired greatly her amorous astuteness. "So you can assure me it is all right?" she said with her last kiss. "Yes, certainly." "But why," he thought afterwards as he came back through the streets alone, "is she so very anxious to get this power of attorney?"

part 3, Chapter 3

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter1-4

Emma and Lon enjoy an idyllic three days together. They stay at the Hotel Boulogne on the river in Rouen and they go boating and spend the afternoon on an island. Their return journey is suffused by moonlight and they are both carried away by the beauty of the evening and their love for one another. Lon finds a discarded red ribbon on the floor of the boat and the oarsmen remarks that it was probably left by a previous party of jolly men and women headed by a man he identifies as "Adolphe" or "Dodolphe". Emma knows he is speaking of Rodolphe and she shivers. When they part she gives Lon instructions to write to her care of the wet nurse Madame Rollet. After Emma has left Lon wonders why she is so set on having power of attorney

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/28.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_10_part_4.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 4

part 3, chapter 4

{"name": "part 3, Chapter 4", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter1-4", "summary": "Early one Saturday morning Lon travels to Yonville. As in the old days, he dines at the inn and afterward calls on the Bovary's but does not see Emma. Finally, late Sunday evening they meet in the lane and she promises to arrange things so that she can see him regularly. She is confident and hopeful for the future. On the strength of the imminent inheritance money she purchases more items from Lheureux and comes to increasingly rely on his services. She begins to take an interest in music again but pretends that she is rusty on the piano and needs expensive lessons. Charles eventually concedes that she should take weekly lessons in Rouen.", "analysis": "Leon's time in Paris has given him the confidence to pursue Emma. In this he is like Rodolphe whose experience had given him the ability to seduce Emma by strategy. In one of the many recurring phrases and images in the novel, Lon's parting \" Till tomorrow\" mirrors the final words that Rodolphe and Emma speak before he betrays her. The carriage-ride in which Emma and Lon consummate their love is one of the more famous passages in the book. Flaubert's indirect description of this event, which is not witnessed by the reader, is coupled to the coachman's exhaustion and the sexual connotations inherent to this description. Though Emma is determined to resist Lon's advances she succumbs to the force of his conviction and then, displaying her own experience at conducting an affair, orchestrates the details of their liaisons with cunning and skill. These chapters mark the zenith of her mental prowess. Not only does Emma succeed in conducting an affair with Lon she uses the occasion of her father-in-law's death to procure power-of-attorney over her husband's affairs. This is more of a victory for Lheureux, however, who now has unfettered access to a woman whose lifestyle he knows to be compromised by reckless spending and extra-marital affairs"}

Leon soon put on an air of superiority before his comrades, avoided their company, and completely neglected his work. He waited for her letters; he re-read them; he wrote to her. He called her to mind with all the strength of his desires and of his memories. Instead of lessening with absence, this longing to see her again grew, so that at last on Saturday morning he escaped from his office. When, from the summit of the hill, he saw in the valley below the church-spire with its tin flag swinging in the wind, he felt that delight mingled with triumphant vanity and egoistic tenderness that millionaires must experience when they come back to their native village. He went rambling round her house. A light was burning in the kitchen. He watched for her shadow behind the curtains, but nothing appeared. Mere Lefrancois, when she saw him, uttered many exclamations. She thought he "had grown and was thinner," while Artemise, on the contrary, thought him stouter and darker. He dined in the little room as of yore, but alone, without the tax-gatherer; for Binet, tired of waiting for the "Hirondelle," had definitely put forward his meal one hour, and now he dined punctually at five, and yet he declared usually the rickety old concern "was late." Leon, however, made up his mind, and knocked at the doctor's door. Madame was in her room, and did not come down for a quarter of an hour. The doctor seemed delighted to see him, but he never stirred out that evening, nor all the next day. He saw her alone in the evening, very late, behind the garden in the lane; in the lane, as she had the other one! It was a stormy night, and they talked under an umbrella by lightning flashes. Their separation was becoming intolerable. "I would rather die!" said Emma. She was writhing in his arms, weeping. "Adieu! adieu! When shall I see you again?" They came back again to embrace once more, and it was then that she promised him to find soon, by no matter what means, a regular opportunity for seeing one another in freedom at least once a week. Emma never doubted she should be able to do this. Besides, she was full of hope. Some money was coming to her. On the strength of it she bought a pair of yellow curtains with large stripes for her room, whose cheapness Monsieur Lheureux had commended; she dreamed of getting a carpet, and Lheureux, declaring that it wasn't "drinking the sea," politely undertook to supply her with one. She could no longer do without his services. Twenty times a day she sent for him, and he at once put by his business without a murmur. People could not understand either why Mere Rollet breakfasted with her every day, and even paid her private visits. It was about this time, that is to say, the beginning of winter, that she seemed seized with great musical fervour. One evening when Charles was listening to her, she began the same piece four times over, each time with much vexation, while he, not noticing any difference, cried-- "Bravo! very goodl You are wrong to stop. Go on!" "Oh, no; it is execrable! My fingers are quite rusty." The next day he begged her to play him something again. "Very well; to please you!" And Charles confessed she had gone off a little. She played wrong notes and blundered; then, stopping short-- "Ah! it is no use. I ought to take some lessons; but--" She bit her lips and added, "Twenty francs a lesson, that's too dear!" "Yes, so it is--rather," said Charles, giggling stupidly. "But it seems to me that one might be able to do it for less; for there are artists of no reputation, and who are often better than the celebrities." "Find them!" said Emma. The next day when he came home he looked at her shyly, and at last could no longer keep back the words. "How obstinate you are sometimes! I went to Barfucheres to-day. Well, Madame Liegard assured me that her three young ladies who are at La Misericorde have lessons at fifty sous apiece, and that from an excellent mistress!" She shrugged her shoulders and did not open her piano again. But when she passed by it (if Bovary were there), she sighed-- "Ah! my poor piano!" And when anyone came to see her, she did not fail to inform them she had given up music, and could not begin again now for important reasons. Then people commiserated her-- "What a pity! she had so much talent!" They even spoke to Bovary about it. They put him to shame, and especially the chemist. "You are wrong. One should never let any of the faculties of nature lie fallow. Besides, just think, my good friend, that by inducing madame to study; you are economising on the subsequent musical education of your child. For my own part, I think that mothers ought themselves to instruct their children. That is an idea of Rousseau's, still rather new perhaps, but that will end by triumphing, I am certain of it, like mothers nursing their own children and vaccination." So Charles returned once more to this question of the piano. Emma replied bitterly that it would be better to sell it. This poor piano, that had given her vanity so much satisfaction--to see it go was to Bovary like the indefinable suicide of a part of herself. "If you liked," he said, "a lesson from time to time, that wouldn't after all be very ruinous." "But lessons," she replied, "are only of use when followed up." And thus it was she set about obtaining her husband's permission to go to town once a week to see her lover. At the end of a month she was even considered to have made considerable progress.

part 3, Chapter 4

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter1-4

Early one Saturday morning Lon travels to Yonville. As in the old days, he dines at the inn and afterward calls on the Bovary's but does not see Emma. Finally, late Sunday evening they meet in the lane and she promises to arrange things so that she can see him regularly. She is confident and hopeful for the future. On the strength of the imminent inheritance money she purchases more items from Lheureux and comes to increasingly rely on his services. She begins to take an interest in music again but pretends that she is rusty on the piano and needs expensive lessons. Charles eventually concedes that she should take weekly lessons in Rouen.

Leon's time in Paris has given him the confidence to pursue Emma. In this he is like Rodolphe whose experience had given him the ability to seduce Emma by strategy. In one of the many recurring phrases and images in the novel, Lon's parting " Till tomorrow" mirrors the final words that Rodolphe and Emma speak before he betrays her. The carriage-ride in which Emma and Lon consummate their love is one of the more famous passages in the book. Flaubert's indirect description of this event, which is not witnessed by the reader, is coupled to the coachman's exhaustion and the sexual connotations inherent to this description. Though Emma is determined to resist Lon's advances she succumbs to the force of his conviction and then, displaying her own experience at conducting an affair, orchestrates the details of their liaisons with cunning and skill. These chapters mark the zenith of her mental prowess. Not only does Emma succeed in conducting an affair with Lon she uses the occasion of her father-in-law's death to procure power-of-attorney over her husband's affairs. This is more of a victory for Lheureux, however, who now has unfettered access to a woman whose lifestyle he knows to be compromised by reckless spending and extra-marital affairs

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/29.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_11_part_1.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 5

part 3, chapter 5

{"name": "part 3, Chapter 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter5-6", "summary": "Every Thursday morning Emma rises early and takes the Hirondelle to Rouen. The sight of the coastal town never fails to inspire her. Emma and Lon come to think of their hotel room as their own home. Emma enchants Lon and he imagines that she fulfills all the ideals of a mistress. Emma basks in the youthful ardor of his love. When it is time for her to leave they grow serious and say \"Till Thursday. Afterward she goes to a salon to have her hair arranged and then meets the Hirondelle for the sad journey back to Yonville. On the hill-road outside of Rouen there is a beggar whose face is deformed by disease leaving two bloody sockets in place of eyelids. He walks beside the coaches and sings a song that begins:. A clear day's warmth will often move. A lass to stray in dreams of love. The beggar terrifies Emma. At home she retreats to her room where Justin helps her arrange her things. She passes the rest of the week anticipating her weekly meeting with Lon. Sometimes she tells her lover that he will one day tire of her and even lets it slip that she loved another before him though she claims that nothing happened. This torments the young man and he desires to be more admirable in her eyes. At home she dotes on her husband who suspects nothing of her affair. One day, however, he tells her that he has seen Mademoiselle Lempereur, the woman she is supposedly taking lessons from and the teacher does not know her. Emma covers by saying that the woman probably doesn't remember her name and a few days later arranges for Charles to find a receipt for the lessons. She begins to lie often and with increasing zest. One day Monsieur Lheureux sees her walking on Lon's arm in Rouen and a few days later he visits and asks for some of the money due him. She has none but he convinces her that she could sell the run-down cottage left to them by Charles' father. He even offers to find a buyer and a week later produces a Monsieur Langlois who pays 4,000 francs. Lheureux brings Emma half the money immediately. When she tries to settle her debt with Lheureux he waves off her present obligation and tempts her by producing four promissory notes for 1,000 francs each and tells her that he will raise the remaining 2,000 francs through a banker in Rouen. After commission she receives only 1,800 but wisely puts aside 3,000 so she is able to pay the first three notes. When the fourth falls due, however, it is one of her Thursdays away and a confused Charles receives the note and waits for his wife. She explains away the debt and Charles works out an arrangement with Lheureux for two more notes and then writes to his mother for help. Instead of sending money the elder Madame Bovary comes and demands to see the bill. Emma has Lheureux fix up a false bill so that her husband and mother-in-law will not suspect that she has sold the cottage. The old woman criticizes her daughter's lavish spending and fine furnishings and tells her that she has arranged for Charles to cancel the power of attorney. Emma is hysterical and brings out the document and contemptuously throws it in the fire. Seeing his wife upset Charles upbraids his mother who leaves and promises that she will not return for a long time. After she leaves Charles begs Emma to once again take the power of attorney and they have a new document drawn up. She becomes reckless in her passion for Lon and dares to walk openly with him in the street. One Thursday night she does not return and Charles, crazed with worry, rides to Rouen in the middle of the night and eventually finds her on the street in morning. She excuses herself and criticizes him for overreacting. Before long she goes to Rouen with only the slightest excuse at any time that pleased her. She demands increasingly more of Lon's attention and he finds himself being steered by her passion. He wonders where she could have learned it", "analysis": ""}

She went on Thursdays. She got up and dressed silently, in order not to awaken Charles, who would have made remarks about her getting ready too early. Next she walked up and down, went to the windows, and looked out at the Place. The early dawn was broadening between the pillars of the market, and the chemist's shop, with the shutters still up, showed in the pale light of the dawn the large letters of his signboard. When the clock pointed to a quarter past seven, she went off to the "Lion d'Or," whose door Artemise opened yawning. The girl then made up the coals covered by the cinders, and Emma remained alone in the kitchen. Now and again she went out. Hivert was leisurely harnessing his horses, listening, moreover, to Mere Lefrancois, who, passing her head and nightcap through a grating, was charging him with commissions and giving him explanations that would have confused anyone else. Emma kept beating the soles of her boots against the pavement of the yard. At last, when he had eaten his soup, put on his cloak, lighted his pipe, and grasped his whip, he calmly installed himself on his seat. The "Hirondelle" started at a slow trot, and for about a mile stopped here and there to pick up passengers who waited for it, standing at the border of the road, in front of their yard gates. Those who had secured seats the evening before kept it waiting; some even were still in bed in their houses. Hivert called, shouted, swore; then he got down from his seat and went and knocked loudly at the doors. The wind blew through the cracked windows. The four seats, however, filled up. The carriage rolled off; rows of apple-trees followed one upon another, and the road between its two long ditches, full of yellow water, rose, constantly narrowing towards the horizon. Emma knew it from end to end; she knew that after a meadow there was a sign-post, next an elm, a barn, or the hut of a lime-kiln tender. Sometimes even, in the hope of getting some surprise, she shut her eyes, but she never lost the clear perception of the distance to be traversed. At last the brick houses began to follow one another more closely, the earth resounded beneath the wheels, the "Hirondelle" glided between the gardens, where through an opening one saw statues, a periwinkle plant, clipped yews, and a swing. Then on a sudden the town appeared. Sloping down like an amphitheatre, and drowned in the fog, it widened out beyond the bridges confusedly. Then the open country spread away with a monotonous movement till it touched in the distance the vague line of the pale sky. Seen thus from above, the whole landscape looked immovable as a picture; the anchored ships were massed in one corner, the river curved round the foot of the green hills, and the isles, oblique in shape, lay on the water, like large, motionless, black fishes. The factory chimneys belched forth immense brown fumes that were blown away at the top. One heard the rumbling of the foundries, together with the clear chimes of the churches that stood out in the mist. The leafless trees on the boulevards made violet thickets in the midst of the houses, and the roofs, all shining with the rain, threw back unequal reflections, according to the height of the quarters in which they were. Sometimes a gust of wind drove the clouds towards the Saint Catherine hills, like aerial waves that broke silently against a cliff. A giddiness seemed to her to detach itself from this mass of existence, and her heart swelled as if the hundred and twenty thousand souls that palpitated there had all at once sent into it the vapour of the passions she fancied theirs. Her love grew in the presence of this vastness, and expanded with tumult to the vague murmurings that rose towards her. She poured it out upon the square, on the walks, on the streets, and the old Norman city outspread before her eyes as an enormous capital, as a Babylon into which she was entering. She leant with both hands against the window, drinking in the breeze; the three horses galloped, the stones grated in the mud, the diligence rocked, and Hivert, from afar, hailed the carts on the road, while the bourgeois who had spent the night at the Guillaume woods came quietly down the hill in their little family carriages. They stopped at the barrier; Emma undid her overshoes, put on other gloves, rearranged her shawl, and some twenty paces farther she got down from the "Hirondelle." The town was then awakening. Shop-boys in caps were cleaning up the shop-fronts, and women with baskets against their hips, at intervals uttered sonorous cries at the corners of streets. She walked with downcast eyes, close to the walls, and smiling with pleasure under her lowered black veil. For fear of being seen, she did not usually take the most direct road. She plunged into dark alleys, and, all perspiring, reached the bottom of the Rue Nationale, near the fountain that stands there. It is the quarter for theatres, public-houses, and whores. Often a cart would pass near her, bearing some shaking scenery. Waiters in aprons were sprinkling sand on the flagstones between green shrubs. It all smelt of absinthe, cigars, and oysters. She turned down a street; she recognised him by his curling hair that escaped from beneath his hat. Leon walked along the pavement. She followed him to the hotel. He went up, opened the door, entered--What an embrace! Then, after the kisses, the words gushed forth. They told each other the sorrows of the week, the presentiments, the anxiety for the letters; but now everything was forgotten; they gazed into each other's faces with voluptuous laughs, and tender names. The bed was large, of mahogany, in the shape of a boat. The curtains were in red levantine, that hung from the ceiling and bulged out too much towards the bell-shaped bedside; and nothing in the world was so lovely as her brown head and white skin standing out against this purple colour, when, with a movement of shame, she crossed her bare arms, hiding her face in her hands. The warm room, with its discreet carpet, its gay ornaments, and its calm light, seemed made for the intimacies of passion. The curtain-rods, ending in arrows, their brass pegs, and the great balls of the fire-dogs shone suddenly when the sun came in. On the chimney between the candelabra there were two of those pink shells in which one hears the murmur of the sea if one holds them to the ear. How they loved that dear room, so full of gaiety, despite its rather faded splendour! They always found the furniture in the same place, and sometimes hairpins, that she had forgotten the Thursday before, under the pedestal of the clock. They lunched by the fireside on a little round table, inlaid with rosewood. Emma carved, put bits on his plate with all sorts of coquettish ways, and she laughed with a sonorous and libertine laugh when the froth of the champagne ran over from the glass to the rings on her fingers. They were so completely lost in the possession of each other that they thought themselves in their own house, and that they would live there till death, like two spouses eternally young. They said "our room," "our carpet," she even said "my slippers," a gift of Leon's, a whim she had had. They were pink satin, bordered with swansdown. When she sat on his knees, her leg, then too short, hung in the air, and the dainty shoe, that had no back to it, was held only by the toes to her bare foot. He for the first time enjoyed the inexpressible delicacy of feminine refinements. He had never met this grace of language, this reserve of clothing, these poses of the weary dove. He admired the exaltation of her soul and the lace on her petticoat. Besides, was she not "a lady" and a married woman--a real mistress, in fine? By the diversity of her humour, in turn mystical or mirthful, talkative, taciturn, passionate, careless, she awakened in him a thousand desires, called up instincts or memories. She was the mistress of all the novels, the heroine of all the dramas, the vague "she" of all the volumes of verse. He found again on her shoulder the amber colouring of the "Odalisque Bathing"; she had the long waist of feudal chatelaines, and she resembled the "Pale Woman of Barcelona." But above all she was the Angel! Often looking at her, it seemed to him that his soul, escaping towards her, spread like a wave about the outline of her head, and descended drawn down into the whiteness of her breast. He knelt on the ground before her, and with both elbows on her knees looked at her with a smile, his face upturned. She bent over him, and murmured, as if choking with intoxication-- "Oh, do not move! do not speak! look at me! Something so sweet comes from your eyes that helps me so much!" She called him "child." "Child, do you love me?" And she did not listen for his answer in the haste of her lips that fastened to his mouth. On the clock there was a bronze cupid, who smirked as he bent his arm beneath a golden garland. They had laughed at it many a time, but when they had to part everything seemed serious to them. Motionless in front of each other, they kept repeating, "Till Thursday, till Thursday." Suddenly she seized his head between her hands, kissed him hurriedly on the forehead, crying, "Adieu!" and rushed down the stairs. She went to a hairdresser's in the Rue de la Comedie to have her hair arranged. Night fell; the gas was lighted in the shop. She heard the bell at the theatre calling the mummers to the performance, and she saw, passing opposite, men with white faces and women in faded gowns going in at the stage-door. It was hot in the room, small, and too low where the stove was hissing in the midst of wigs and pomades. The smell of the tongs, together with the greasy hands that handled her head, soon stunned her, and she dozed a little in her wrapper. Often, as he did her hair, the man offered her tickets for a masked ball. Then she went away. She went up the streets; reached the Croix-Rouge, put on her overshoes, that she had hidden in the morning under the seat, and sank into her place among the impatient passengers. Some got out at the foot of the hill. She remained alone in the carriage. At every turning all the lights of the town were seen more and more completely, making a great luminous vapour about the dim houses. Emma knelt on the cushions and her eyes wandered over the dazzling light. She sobbed; called on Leon, sent him tender words and kisses lost in the wind. On the hillside a poor devil wandered about with his stick in the midst of the diligences. A mass of rags covered his shoulders, and an old staved-in beaver, turned out like a basin, hid his face; but when he took it off he discovered in the place of eyelids empty and bloody orbits. The flesh hung in red shreds, and there flowed from it liquids that congealed into green scale down to the nose, whose black nostrils sniffed convulsively. To speak to you he threw back his head with an idiotic laugh; then his bluish eyeballs, rolling constantly, at the temples beat against the edge of the open wound. He sang a little song as he followed the carriages-- "Maids an the warmth of a summer day Dream of love, and of love always" And all the rest was about birds and sunshine and green leaves. Sometimes he appeared suddenly behind Emma, bareheaded, and she drew back with a cry. Hivert made fun of him. He would advise him to get a booth at the Saint Romain fair, or else ask him, laughing, how his young woman was. Often they had started when, with a sudden movement, his hat entered the diligence through the small window, while he clung with his other arm to the footboard, between the wheels splashing mud. His voice, feeble at first and quavering, grew sharp; it resounded in the night like the indistinct moan of a vague distress; and through the ringing of the bells, the murmur of the trees, and the rumbling of the empty vehicle, it had a far-off sound that disturbed Emma. It went to the bottom of her soul, like a whirlwind in an abyss, and carried her away into the distances of a boundless melancholy. But Hivert, noticing a weight behind, gave the blind man sharp cuts with his whip. The thong lashed his wounds, and he fell back into the mud with a yell. Then the passengers in the "Hirondelle" ended by falling asleep, some with open mouths, others with lowered chins, leaning against their neighbour's shoulder, or with their arm passed through the strap, oscillating regularly with the jolting of the carriage; and the reflection of the lantern swinging without, on the crupper of the wheeler; penetrating into the interior through the chocolate calico curtains, threw sanguineous shadows over all these motionless people. Emma, drunk with grief, shivered in her clothes, feeling her feet grow colder and colder, and death in her soul. Charles at home was waiting for her; the "Hirondelle" was always late on Thursdays. Madame arrived at last, and scarcely kissed the child. The dinner was not ready. No matter! She excused the servant. This girl now seemed allowed to do just as she liked. Often her husband, noting her pallor, asked if she were unwell. "No," said Emma. "But," he replied, "you seem so strange this evening." "Oh, it's nothing! nothing!" There were even days when she had no sooner come in than she went up to her room; and Justin, happening to be there, moved about noiselessly, quicker at helping her than the best of maids. He put the matches ready, the candlestick, a book, arranged her nightgown, turned back the bedclothes. "Come!" said she, "that will do. Now you can go." For he stood there, his hands hanging down and his eyes wide open, as if enmeshed in the innumerable threads of a sudden reverie. The following day was frightful, and those that came after still more unbearable, because of her impatience to once again seize her happiness; an ardent lust, inflamed by the images of past experience, and that burst forth freely on the seventh day beneath Leon's caresses. His ardours were hidden beneath outbursts of wonder and gratitude. Emma tasted this love in a discreet, absorbed fashion, maintained it by all the artifices of her tenderness, and trembled a little lest it should be lost later on. She often said to him, with her sweet, melancholy voice-- "Ah! you too, you will leave me! You will marry! You will be like all the others." He asked, "What others?" "Why, like all men," she replied. Then added, repulsing him with a languid movement-- "You are all evil!" One day, as they were talking philosophically of earthly disillusions, to experiment on his jealousy, or yielding, perhaps, to an over-strong need to pour out her heart, she told him that formerly, before him, she had loved someone. "Not like you," she went on quickly, protesting by the head of her child that "nothing had passed between them." The young man believed her, but none the less questioned her to find out what he was. "He was a ship's captain, my dear." Was this not preventing any inquiry, and, at the same time, assuming a higher ground through this pretended fascination exercised over a man who must have been of warlike nature and accustomed to receive homage? The clerk then felt the lowliness of his position; he longed for epaulettes, crosses, titles. All that would please her--he gathered that from her spendthrift habits. Emma nevertheless concealed many of these extravagant fancies, such as her wish to have a blue tilbury to drive into Rouen, drawn by an English horse and driven by a groom in top-boots. It was Justin who had inspired her with this whim, by begging her to take him into her service as valet-de-chambre*, and if the privation of it did not lessen the pleasure of her arrival at each rendezvous, it certainly augmented the bitterness of the return. * Manservant. Often, when they talked together of Paris, she ended by murmuring, "Ah! how happy we should be there!" "Are we not happy?" gently answered the young man passing his hands over her hair. "Yes, that is true," she said. "I am mad. Kiss me!" To her husband she was more charming than ever. She made him pistachio-creams, and played him waltzes after dinner. So he thought himself the most fortunate of men and Emma was without uneasiness, when, one evening suddenly he said-- "It is Mademoiselle Lempereur, isn't it, who gives you lessons?" "Yes." "Well, I saw her just now," Charles went on, "at Madame Liegeard's. I spoke to her about you, and she doesn't know you." This was like a thunderclap. However, she replied quite naturally-- "Ah! no doubt she forgot my name." "But perhaps," said the doctor, "there are several Demoiselles Lempereur at Rouen who are music-mistresses." "Possibly!" Then quickly--"But I have my receipts here. See!" And she went to the writing-table, ransacked all the drawers, rummaged the papers, and at last lost her head so completely that Charles earnestly begged her not to take so much trouble about those wretched receipts. "Oh, I will find them," she said. And, in fact, on the following Friday, as Charles was putting on one of his boots in the dark cabinet where his clothes were kept, he felt a piece of paper between the leather and his sock. He took it out and read-- "Received, for three months' lessons and several pieces of music, the sum of sixty-three francs.--Felicie Lempereur, professor of music." "How the devil did it get into my boots?" "It must," she replied, "have fallen from the old box of bills that is on the edge of the shelf." From that moment her existence was but one long tissue of lies, in which she enveloped her love as in veils to hide it. It was a want, a mania, a pleasure carried to such an extent that if she said she had the day before walked on the right side of a road, one might know she had taken the left. One morning, when she had gone, as usual, rather lightly clothed, it suddenly began to snow, and as Charles was watching the weather from the window, he caught sight of Monsieur Bournisien in the chaise of Monsieur Tuvache, who was driving him to Rouen. Then he went down to give the priest a thick shawl that he was to hand over to Emma as soon as he reached the "Croix-Rouge." When he got to the inn, Monsieur Bournisien asked for the wife of the Yonville doctor. The landlady replied that she very rarely came to her establishment. So that evening, when he recognised Madame Bovary in the "Hirondelle," the cure told her his dilemma, without, however, appearing to attach much importance to it, for he began praising a preacher who was doing wonders at the Cathedral, and whom all the ladies were rushing to hear. Still, if he did not ask for any explanation, others, later on, might prove less discreet. So she thought well to get down each time at the "Croix-Rouge," so that the good folk of her village who saw her on the stairs should suspect nothing. One day, however, Monsieur Lheureux met her coming out of the Hotel de Boulogne on Leon's arm; and she was frightened, thinking he would gossip. He was not such a fool. But three days after he came to her room, shut the door, and said, "I must have some money." She declared she could not give him any. Lheureux burst into lamentations and reminded her of all the kindnesses he had shown her. In fact, of the two bills signed by Charles, Emma up to the present had paid only one. As to the second, the shopkeeper, at her request, had consented to replace it by another, which again had been renewed for a long date. Then he drew from his pocket a list of goods not paid for; to wit, the curtains, the carpet, the material for the armchairs, several dresses, and divers articles of dress, the bills for which amounted to about two thousand francs. She bowed her head. He went on-- "But if you haven't any ready money, you have an estate." And he reminded her of a miserable little hovel situated at Barneville, near Aumale, that brought in almost nothing. It had formerly been part of a small farm sold by Monsieur Bovary senior; for Lheureux knew everything, even to the number of acres and the names of the neighbours. "If I were in your place," he said, "I should clear myself of my debts, and have money left over." She pointed out the difficulty of getting a purchaser. He held out the hope of finding one; but she asked him how she should manage to sell it. "Haven't you your power of attorney?" he replied. The phrase came to her like a breath of fresh air. "Leave me the bill," said Emma. "Oh, it isn't worth while," answered Lheureux. He came back the following week and boasted of having, after much trouble, at last discovered a certain Langlois, who, for a long time, had had an eye on the property, but without mentioning his price. "Never mind the price!" she cried. But they would, on the contrary, have to wait, to sound the fellow. The thing was worth a journey, and, as she could not undertake it, he offered to go to the place to have an interview with Langlois. On his return he announced that the purchaser proposed four thousand francs. Emma was radiant at this news. "Frankly," he added, "that's a good price." She drew half the sum at once, and when she was about to pay her account the shopkeeper said-- "It really grieves me, on my word! to see you depriving yourself all at once of such a big sum as that." Then she looked at the bank-notes, and dreaming of the unlimited number of rendezvous represented by those two thousand francs, she stammered-- "What! what!" "Oh!" he went on, laughing good-naturedly, "one puts anything one likes on receipts. Don't you think I know what household affairs are?" And he looked at her fixedly, while in his hand he held two long papers that he slid between his nails. At last, opening his pocket-book, he spread out on the table four bills to order, each for a thousand francs. "Sign these," he said, "and keep it all!" She cried out, scandalised. "But if I give you the surplus," replied Monsieur Lheureux impudently, "is that not helping you?" And taking a pen he wrote at the bottom of the account, "Received of Madame Bovary four thousand francs." "Now who can trouble you, since in six months you'll draw the arrears for your cottage, and I don't make the last bill due till after you've been paid?" Emma grew rather confused in her calculations, and her ears tingled as if gold pieces, bursting from their bags, rang all round her on the floor. At last Lheureux explained that he had a very good friend, Vincart, a broker at Rouen, who would discount these four bills. Then he himself would hand over to madame the remainder after the actual debt was paid. But instead of two thousand francs he brought only eighteen hundred, for the friend Vincart (which was only fair) had deducted two hundred francs for commission and discount. Then he carelessly asked for a receipt. "You understand--in business--sometimes. And with the date, if you please, with the date." A horizon of realisable whims opened out before Emma. She was prudent enough to lay by a thousand crowns, with which the first three bills were paid when they fell due; but the fourth, by chance, came to the house on a Thursday, and Charles, quite upset, patiently awaited his wife's return for an explanation. If she had not told him about this bill, it was only to spare him such domestic worries; she sat on his knees, caressed him, cooed to him, gave him a long enumeration of all the indispensable things that had been got on credit. "Really, you must confess, considering the quantity, it isn't too dear." Charles, at his wit's end, soon had recourse to the eternal Lheureux, who swore he would arrange matters if the doctor would sign him two bills, one of which was for seven hundred francs, payable in three months. In order to arrange for this he wrote his mother a pathetic letter. Instead of sending a reply she came herself; and when Emma wanted to know whether he had got anything out of her, "Yes," he replied; "but she wants to see the account." The next morning at daybreak Emma ran to Lheureux to beg him to make out another account for not more than a thousand francs, for to show the one for four thousand it would be necessary to say that she had paid two-thirds, and confess, consequently, the sale of the estate--a negotiation admirably carried out by the shopkeeper, and which, in fact, was only actually known later on. Despite the low price of each article, Madame Bovary senior, of course, thought the expenditure extravagant. "Couldn't you do without a carpet? Why have recovered the arm-chairs? In my time there was a single arm-chair in a house, for elderly persons--at any rate it was so at my mother's, who was a good woman, I can tell you. Everybody can't be rich! No fortune can hold out against waste! I should be ashamed to coddle myself as you do! And yet I am old. I need looking after. And there! there! fitting up gowns! fallals! What! silk for lining at two francs, when you can get jaconet for ten sous, or even for eight, that would do well enough!" Emma, lying on a lounge, replied as quietly as possible--"Ah! Madame, enough! enough!" The other went on lecturing her, predicting they would end in the workhouse. But it was Bovary's fault. Luckily he had promised to destroy that power of attorney. "What?" "Ah! he swore he would," went on the good woman. Emma opened the window, called Charles, and the poor fellow was obliged to confess the promise torn from him by his mother. Emma disappeared, then came back quickly, and majestically handed her a thick piece of paper. "Thank you," said the old woman. And she threw the power of attorney into the fire. Emma began to laugh, a strident, piercing, continuous laugh; she had an attack of hysterics. "Oh, my God!" cried Charles. "Ah! you really are wrong! You come here and make scenes with her!" His mother, shrugging her shoulders, declared it was "all put on." But Charles, rebelling for the first time, took his wife's part, so that Madame Bovary, senior, said she would leave. She went the very next day, and on the threshold, as he was trying to detain her, she replied-- "No, no! You love her better than me, and you are right. It is natural. For the rest, so much the worse! You will see. Good day--for I am not likely to come soon again, as you say, to make scenes." Charles nevertheless was very crestfallen before Emma, who did not hide the resentment she still felt at his want of confidence, and it needed many prayers before she would consent to have another power of attorney. He even accompanied her to Monsieur Guillaumin to have a second one, just like the other, drawn up. "I understand," said the notary; "a man of science can't be worried with the practical details of life." And Charles felt relieved by this comfortable reflection, which gave his weakness the flattering appearance of higher pre-occupation. And what an outburst the next Thursday at the hotel in their room with Leon! She laughed, cried, sang, sent for sherbets, wanted to smoke cigarettes, seemed to him wild and extravagant, but adorable, superb. He did not know what recreation of her whole being drove her more and more to plunge into the pleasures of life. She was becoming irritable, greedy, voluptuous; and she walked about the streets with him carrying her head high, without fear, so she said, of compromising herself. At times, however, Emma shuddered at the sudden thought of meeting Rodolphe, for it seemed to her that, although they were separated forever, she was not completely free from her subjugation to him. One night she did not return to Yonville at all. Charles lost his head with anxiety, and little Berthe would not go to bed without her mamma, and sobbed enough to break her heart. Justin had gone out searching the road at random. Monsieur Homais even had left his pharmacy. At last, at eleven o'clock, able to bear it no longer, Charles harnessed his chaise, jumped in, whipped up his horse, and reached the "Croix-Rouge" about two o'clock in the morning. No one there! He thought that the clerk had perhaps seen her; but where did he live? Happily, Charles remembered his employer's address, and rushed off there. Day was breaking, and he could distinguish the escutcheons over the door, and knocked. Someone, without opening the door, shouted out the required information, adding a few insults to those who disturb people in the middle of the night. The house inhabited by the clerk had neither bell, knocker, nor porter. Charles knocked loudly at the shutters with his hands. A policeman happened to pass by. Then he was frightened, and went away. "I am mad," he said; "no doubt they kept her to dinner at Monsieur Lormeaux'." But the Lormeaux no longer lived at Rouen. "She probably stayed to look after Madame Dubreuil. Why, Madame Dubreuil has been dead these ten months! Where can she be?" An idea occurred to him. At a cafe he asked for a Directory, and hurriedly looked for the name of Mademoiselle Lempereur, who lived at No. 74 Rue de la Renelle-des-Maroquiniers. As he was turning into the street, Emma herself appeared at the other end of it. He threw himself upon her rather than embraced her, crying-- "What kept you yesterday?" "I was not well." "What was it? Where? How?" She passed her hand over her forehead and answered, "At Mademoiselle Lempereur's." "I was sure of it! I was going there." "Oh, it isn't worth while," said Emma. "She went out just now; but for the future don't worry. I do not feel free, you see, if I know that the least delay upsets you like this." This was a sort of permission that she gave herself, so as to get perfect freedom in her escapades. And she profited by it freely, fully. When she was seized with the desire to see Leon, she set out upon any pretext; and as he was not expecting her on that day, she went to fetch him at his office. It was a great delight at first, but soon he no longer concealed the truth, which was, that his master complained very much about these interruptions. "Pshaw! come along," she said. And he slipped out. She wanted him to dress all in black, and grow a pointed beard, to look like the portraits of Louis XIII. She wanted to see his lodgings; thought them poor. He blushed at them, but she did not notice this, then advised him to buy some curtains like hers, and as he objected to the expense-- "Ah! ah! you care for your money," she said laughing. Each time Leon had to tell her everything that he had done since their last meeting. She asked him for some verses--some verses "for herself," a "love poem" in honour of her. But he never succeeded in getting a rhyme for the second verse; and at last ended by copying a sonnet in a "Keepsake." This was less from vanity than from the one desire of pleasing her. He did not question her ideas; he accepted all her tastes; he was rather becoming her mistress than she his. She had tender words and kisses that thrilled his soul. Where could she have learnt this corruption almost incorporeal in the strength of its profanity and dissimulation?

part 3, Chapter 5

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter5-6

Every Thursday morning Emma rises early and takes the Hirondelle to Rouen. The sight of the coastal town never fails to inspire her. Emma and Lon come to think of their hotel room as their own home. Emma enchants Lon and he imagines that she fulfills all the ideals of a mistress. Emma basks in the youthful ardor of his love. When it is time for her to leave they grow serious and say "Till Thursday. Afterward she goes to a salon to have her hair arranged and then meets the Hirondelle for the sad journey back to Yonville. On the hill-road outside of Rouen there is a beggar whose face is deformed by disease leaving two bloody sockets in place of eyelids. He walks beside the coaches and sings a song that begins:. A clear day's warmth will often move. A lass to stray in dreams of love. The beggar terrifies Emma. At home she retreats to her room where Justin helps her arrange her things. She passes the rest of the week anticipating her weekly meeting with Lon. Sometimes she tells her lover that he will one day tire of her and even lets it slip that she loved another before him though she claims that nothing happened. This torments the young man and he desires to be more admirable in her eyes. At home she dotes on her husband who suspects nothing of her affair. One day, however, he tells her that he has seen Mademoiselle Lempereur, the woman she is supposedly taking lessons from and the teacher does not know her. Emma covers by saying that the woman probably doesn't remember her name and a few days later arranges for Charles to find a receipt for the lessons. She begins to lie often and with increasing zest. One day Monsieur Lheureux sees her walking on Lon's arm in Rouen and a few days later he visits and asks for some of the money due him. She has none but he convinces her that she could sell the run-down cottage left to them by Charles' father. He even offers to find a buyer and a week later produces a Monsieur Langlois who pays 4,000 francs. Lheureux brings Emma half the money immediately. When she tries to settle her debt with Lheureux he waves off her present obligation and tempts her by producing four promissory notes for 1,000 francs each and tells her that he will raise the remaining 2,000 francs through a banker in Rouen. After commission she receives only 1,800 but wisely puts aside 3,000 so she is able to pay the first three notes. When the fourth falls due, however, it is one of her Thursdays away and a confused Charles receives the note and waits for his wife. She explains away the debt and Charles works out an arrangement with Lheureux for two more notes and then writes to his mother for help. Instead of sending money the elder Madame Bovary comes and demands to see the bill. Emma has Lheureux fix up a false bill so that her husband and mother-in-law will not suspect that she has sold the cottage. The old woman criticizes her daughter's lavish spending and fine furnishings and tells her that she has arranged for Charles to cancel the power of attorney. Emma is hysterical and brings out the document and contemptuously throws it in the fire. Seeing his wife upset Charles upbraids his mother who leaves and promises that she will not return for a long time. After she leaves Charles begs Emma to once again take the power of attorney and they have a new document drawn up. She becomes reckless in her passion for Lon and dares to walk openly with him in the street. One Thursday night she does not return and Charles, crazed with worry, rides to Rouen in the middle of the night and eventually finds her on the street in morning. She excuses herself and criticizes him for overreacting. Before long she goes to Rouen with only the slightest excuse at any time that pleased her. She demands increasingly more of Lon's attention and he finds himself being steered by her passion. He wonders where she could have learned it

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/30.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_11_part_2.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 6

part 3, chapter 6

{"name": "part 3, Chapter 6", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter5-6", "summary": "Out of politeness Lon extends an invitation to Monsieur Homais to visit him in Rouen and the pharmacist, feeling something of a daredevil, decides to relive some of the glories of his youth. Emma and Lon are both surprised when Monsieur Homais accompanies Emma to Rouen one day and immediately drags the clerk off to dine. Emma is vexed and impatient and spends the afternoon waiting in their hotel room. Lon suffers through a long meal with the pharmacist who then insists on accompanying him on his business visits. Lon manages to steal a few minutes at the hotel where Emma, hysterical from waiting, fails to appreciate his predicament. Homais insists that Lon accompany him to another caf. Eventually Lon is able to return to the hotel but finds that Emma has left in a fury. In the coming weeks she tries to recapture some of her original passion for him by pushing herself to extremes. For his part, Lon grows to be somewhat frightened of her and begins to resent her. Still, he is beguiled by her beauty and her attention. One day, after leaving the hotel, she sees the walls of her old convent and sits on a nearby bench to ponder her childhood ardor and present feelings. She finds that she is totally devoted to her passions. One day a representative of Monsieur Vinart, the Rouen banker, arrives with a note for 500 francs due immediately. Emma sends him away with a promise to pay the following week. The next day, however, she receives an official protest of non-payment. She visits Lheureux in his office and he explains that he was forced to sign the note over to the banker and that Vinart will not be appeased. She is furious. He washes his hands at the whole matter and blames the banker. She pleads with him but to no avail. Finally he agrees to advance her four 250 franc notes against the balance of the cottage. Before she leaves he sells her some fine fabric on credit. Soon she finds that there is nothing to the inheritance except the cottage and 600 francs a year. She sends requests for payment to Charles' patients and selling her things in Rouen. Additionally she borrowed money from everyone she can. She signs more promissory notes. The household begins to fall into disarray and Emma becomes defensive when Charles asks about their financial troubles. Autumn arrives and she is alternatively morose and consumed by passion for Lon. She banishes Charles to sleeping in the attic while she stays awake, reading lurid novels. Lon, alarmed by the change in his mistress, wonders if he should break it off. He is about to be promoted to head clerk and he resolves to give up his romantic ideals and act sensibly. He is bored with her and her with him but she cannot give him up. She is tortured by an ideal bliss, an ideal man which she cannot grasp and she is tormented by countless official documents of debt that continue to arrive. On the night of the mid-Lenten festivities she accompanies Lon and his friends to a costume ball and in a caf afterward is disgusted by the company she is keeping. She swoons in a faint and revives thinking of her daughter. When she returns home Flicit shows her a recently arrived document that proclaims she must pay 8,000 francs the following day or suffer a public seizure of all her possessions. Lheureux refuses to help. She puts her hand on his knee but she acts insulted when he asks if she is trying to seduce him. He knowingly tells her that she has many friends and she had better raise the money through them.", "analysis": "These chapters chronicle the beginning of the end for Emma Bovary. She begins to lie compulsively - this indicates that she is beginning to live the fiction that she believes to be her destiny as depicted in the novels. She is revealed to be a creature entirely dependent upon a world of romantic ideals that does not exist. To compensate, she simply insists that the real world adhere to those ideals. Her hedonism knows no limits and culminates when she attends the masked party with Lon's working class friends. Her intricate web of deception begins to unravel and she perceives that, like Rodolphe, Lon's ardor is beginning to wane. Unable to admit the truth, however, she pursues him with recklessness that only serves to further distance the clerk. She emasculates him by assuming control of their relationship and subsuming his tastes with her own. Lheureux perceives that she is without further funds and uses his banker in Rouen to begin the process of seizing the Bovary's possessions. With her world collapsing about her, Emma finds that the romantic ideals that form her character serve only to torture her with their inaccessibility. Her day of reckoning is close at hand and succor is not to be found"}

During the journeys he made to see her, Leon had often dined at the chemist's, and he felt obliged from politeness to invite him in turn. "With pleasure!" Monsieur Homais replied; "besides, I must invigorate my mind, for I am getting rusty here. We'll go to the theatre, to the restaurant; we'll make a night of it." "Oh, my dear!" tenderly murmured Madame Homais, alarmed at the vague perils he was preparing to brave. "Well, what? Do you think I'm not sufficiently ruining my health living here amid the continual emanations of the pharmacy? But there! that is the way with women! They are jealous of science, and then are opposed to our taking the most legitimate distractions. No matter! Count upon me. One of these days I shall turn up at Rouen, and we'll go the pace together." The druggist would formerly have taken good care not to use such an expression, but he was cultivating a gay Parisian style, which he thought in the best taste; and, like his neighbour, Madame Bovary, he questioned the clerk curiously about the customs of the capital; he even talked slang to dazzle the bourgeois, saying bender, crummy, dandy, macaroni, the cheese, cut my stick and "I'll hook it," for "I am going." So one Thursday Emma was surprised to meet Monsieur Homais in the kitchen of the "Lion d'Or," wearing a traveller's costume, that is to say, wrapped in an old cloak which no one knew he had, while he carried a valise in one hand and the foot-warmer of his establishment in the other. He had confided his intentions to no one, for fear of causing the public anxiety by his absence. The idea of seeing again the place where his youth had been spent no doubt excited him, for during the whole journey he never ceased talking, and as soon as he had arrived, he jumped quickly out of the diligence to go in search of Leon. In vain the clerk tried to get rid of him. Monsieur Homais dragged him off to the large Cafe de la Normandie, which he entered majestically, not raising his hat, thinking it very provincial to uncover in any public place. Emma waited for Leon three quarters of an hour. At last she ran to his office; and, lost in all sorts of conjectures, accusing him of indifference, and reproaching herself for her weakness, she spent the afternoon, her face pressed against the window-panes. At two o'clock they were still at a table opposite each other. The large room was emptying; the stove-pipe, in the shape of a palm-tree, spread its gilt leaves over the white ceiling, and near them, outside the window, in the bright sunshine, a little fountain gurgled in a white basin, where; in the midst of watercress and asparagus, three torpid lobsters stretched across to some quails that lay heaped up in a pile on their sides. Homais was enjoying himself. Although he was even more intoxicated with the luxury than the rich fare, the Pommard wine all the same rather excited his faculties; and when the omelette au rhum* appeared, he began propounding immoral theories about women. What seduced him above all else was chic. He admired an elegant toilette in a well-furnished apartment, and as to bodily qualities, he didn't dislike a young girl. * In rum. Leon watched the clock in despair. The druggist went on drinking, eating, and talking. "You must be very lonely," he said suddenly, "here at Rouen. To be sure your lady-love doesn't live far away." And the other blushed-- "Come now, be frank. Can you deny that at Yonville--" The young man stammered something. "At Madame Bovary's, you're not making love to--" "To whom?" "The servant!" He was not joking; but vanity getting the better of all prudence, Leon, in spite of himself protested. Besides, he only liked dark women. "I approve of that," said the chemist; "they have more passion." And whispering into his friend's ear, he pointed out the symptoms by which one could find out if a woman had passion. He even launched into an ethnographic digression: the German was vapourish, the French woman licentious, the Italian passionate. "And negresses?" asked the clerk. "They are an artistic taste!" said Homais. "Waiter! two cups of coffee!" "Are we going?" at last asked Leon impatiently. "Ja!" But before leaving he wanted to see the proprietor of the establishment and made him a few compliments. Then the young man, to be alone, alleged he had some business engagement. "Ah! I will escort you," said Homais. And all the while he was walking through the streets with him he talked of his wife, his children; of their future, and of his business; told him in what a decayed condition it had formerly been, and to what a degree of perfection he had raised it. Arrived in front of the Hotel de Boulogne, Leon left him abruptly, ran up the stairs, and found his mistress in great excitement. At mention of the chemist she flew into a passion. He, however, piled up good reasons; it wasn't his fault; didn't she know Homais--did she believe that he would prefer his company? But she turned away; he drew her back, and, sinking on his knees, clasped her waist with his arms in a languorous pose, full of concupiscence and supplication. She was standing up, her large flashing eyes looked at him seriously, almost terribly. Then tears obscured them, her red eyelids were lowered, she gave him her hands, and Leon was pressing them to his lips when a servant appeared to tell the gentleman that he was wanted. "You will come back?" she said. "Yes." "But when?" "Immediately." "It's a trick," said the chemist, when he saw Leon. "I wanted to interrupt this visit, that seemed to me to annoy you. Let's go and have a glass of garus at Bridoux'." Leon vowed that he must get back to his office. Then the druggist joked him about quill-drivers and the law. "Leave Cujas and Barthole alone a bit. Who the devil prevents you? Be a man! Let's go to Bridoux'. You'll see his dog. It's very interesting." And as the clerk still insisted-- "I'll go with you. I'll read a paper while I wait for you, or turn over the leaves of a 'Code.'" Leon, bewildered by Emma's anger, Monsieur Homais' chatter, and, perhaps, by the heaviness of the luncheon, was undecided, and, as it were, fascinated by the chemist, who kept repeating-- "Let's go to Bridoux'. It's just by here, in the Rue Malpalu." Then, through cowardice, through stupidity, through that indefinable feeling that drags us into the most distasteful acts, he allowed himself to be led off to Bridoux', whom they found in his small yard, superintending three workmen, who panted as they turned the large wheel of a machine for making seltzer-water. Homais gave them some good advice. He embraced Bridoux; they took some garus. Twenty times Leon tried to escape, but the other seized him by the arm saying-- "Presently! I'm coming! We'll go to the 'Fanal de Rouen' to see the fellows there. I'll introduce you to Thornassin." At last he managed to get rid of him, and rushed straight to the hotel. Emma was no longer there. She had just gone in a fit of anger. She detested him now. This failing to keep their rendezvous seemed to her an insult, and she tried to rake up other reasons to separate herself from him. He was incapable of heroism, weak, banal, more spiritless than a woman, avaricious too, and cowardly. Then, growing calmer, she at length discovered that she had, no doubt, calumniated him. But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt sticks to our fingers. They gradually came to talking more frequently of matters outside their love, and in the letters that Emma wrote him she spoke of flowers, verses, the moon and the stars, naive resources of a waning passion striving to keep itself alive by all external aids. She was constantly promising herself a profound felicity on her next journey. Then she confessed to herself that she felt nothing extraordinary. This disappointment quickly gave way to a new hope, and Emma returned to him more inflamed, more eager than ever. She undressed brutally, tearing off the thin laces of her corset that nestled around her hips like a gliding snake. She went on tiptoe, barefooted, to see once more that the door was closed, then, pale, serious, and, without speaking, with one movement, she threw herself upon his breast with a long shudder. Yet there was upon that brow covered with cold drops, on those quivering lips, in those wild eyes, in the strain of those arms, something vague and dreary that seemed to Leon to glide between them subtly as if to separate them. He did not dare to question her; but, seeing her so skilled, she must have passed, he thought, through every experience of suffering and of pleasure. What had once charmed now frightened him a little. Besides, he rebelled against his absorption, daily more marked, by her personality. He begrudged Emma this constant victory. He even strove not to love her; then, when he heard the creaking of her boots, he turned coward, like drunkards at the sight of strong drinks. She did not fail, in truth, to lavish all sorts of attentions upon him, from the delicacies of food to the coquettries of dress and languishing looks. She brought roses to her breast from Yonville, which she threw into his face; was anxious about his health, gave him advice as to his conduct; and, in order the more surely to keep her hold on him, hoping perhaps that heaven would take her part, she tied a medal of the Virgin round his neck. She inquired like a virtuous mother about his companions. She said to him-- "Don't see them; don't go out; think only of ourselves; love me!" She would have liked to be able to watch over his life; and the idea occurred to her of having him followed in the streets. Near the hotel there was always a kind of loafer who accosted travellers, and who would not refuse. But her pride revolted at this. "Bah! so much the worse. Let him deceive me! What does it matter to me? As If I cared for him!" One day, when they had parted early and she was returning alone along the boulevard, she saw the walls of her convent; then she sat down on a form in the shade of the elm-trees. How calm that time had been! How she longed for the ineffable sentiments of love that she had tried to figure to herself out of books! The first month of her marriage, her rides in the wood, the viscount that waltzed, and Lagardy singing, all repassed before her eyes. And Leon suddenly appeared to her as far off as the others. "Yet I love him," she said to herself. No matter! She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leant? But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet's heart in an angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! how impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight. A metallic clang droned through the air, and four strokes were heard from the convent-clock. Four o'clock! And it seemed to her that she had been there on that form an eternity. But an infinity of passions may be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a small space. Emma lived all absorbed in hers, and troubled no more about money matters than an archduchess. Once, however, a wretched-looking man, rubicund and bald, came to her house, saying he had been sent by Monsieur Vincart of Rouen. He took out the pins that held together the side-pockets of his long green overcoat, stuck them into his sleeve, and politely handed her a paper. It was a bill for seven hundred francs, signed by her, and which Lheureux, in spite of all his professions, had paid away to Vincart. She sent her servant for him. He could not come. Then the stranger, who had remained standing, casting right and left curious glances, that his thick, fair eyebrows hid, asked with a naive air-- "What answer am I to take Monsieur Vincart?" "Oh," said Emma, "tell him that I haven't it. I will send next week; he must wait; yes, till next week." And the fellow went without another word. But the next day at twelve o'clock she received a summons, and the sight of the stamped paper, on which appeared several times in large letters, "Maitre Hareng, bailiff at Buchy," so frightened her that she rushed in hot haste to the linendraper's. She found him in his shop, doing up a parcel. "Your obedient!" he said; "I am at your service." But Lheureux, all the same, went on with his work, helped by a young girl of about thirteen, somewhat hunch-backed, who was at once his clerk and his servant. Then, his clogs clattering on the shop-boards, he went up in front of Madame Bovary to the first door, and introduced her into a narrow closet, where, in a large bureau in sapon-wood, lay some ledgers, protected by a horizontal padlocked iron bar. Against the wall, under some remnants of calico, one glimpsed a safe, but of such dimensions that it must contain something besides bills and money. Monsieur Lheureux, in fact, went in for pawnbroking, and it was there that he had put Madame Bovary's gold chain, together with the earrings of poor old Tellier, who, at last forced to sell out, had bought a meagre store of grocery at Quincampoix, where he was dying of catarrh amongst his candles, that were less yellow than his face. Lheureux sat down in a large cane arm-chair, saying: "What news?" "See!" And she showed him the paper. "Well how can I help it?" Then she grew angry, reminding him of the promise he had given not to pay away her bills. He acknowledged it. "But I was pressed myself; the knife was at my own throat." "And what will happen now?" she went on. "Oh, it's very simple; a judgment and then a distraint--that's about it!" Emma kept down a desire to strike him, and asked gently if there was no way of quieting Monsieur Vincart. "I dare say! Quiet Vincart! You don't know him; he's more ferocious than an Arab!" Still Monsieur Lheureux must interfere. "Well, listen. It seems to me so far I've been very good to you." And opening one of his ledgers, "See," he said. Then running up the page with his finger, "Let's see! let's see! August 3d, two hundred francs; June 17th, a hundred and fifty; March 23d, forty-six. In April--" He stopped, as if afraid of making some mistake. "Not to speak of the bills signed by Monsieur Bovary, one for seven hundred francs, and another for three hundred. As to your little installments, with the interest, why, there's no end to 'em; one gets quite muddled over 'em. I'll have nothing more to do with it." She wept; she even called him "her good Monsieur Lheureux." But he always fell back upon "that rascal Vincart." Besides, he hadn't a brass farthing; no one was paying him now-a-days; they were eating his coat off his back; a poor shopkeeper like him couldn't advance money. Emma was silent, and Monsieur Lheureux, who was biting the feathers of a quill, no doubt became uneasy at her silence, for he went on-- "Unless one of these days I have something coming in, I might--" "Besides," said she, "as soon as the balance of Barneville--" "What!" And on hearing that Langlois had not yet paid he seemed much surprised. Then in a honied voice-- "And we agree, you say?" "Oh! to anything you like." On this he closed his eyes to reflect, wrote down a few figures, and declaring it would be very difficult for him, that the affair was shady, and that he was being bled, he wrote out four bills for two hundred and fifty francs each, to fall due month by month. "Provided that Vincart will listen to me! However, it's settled. I don't play the fool; I'm straight enough." Next he carelessly showed her several new goods, not one of which, however, was in his opinion worthy of madame. "When I think that there's a dress at threepence-halfpenny a yard, and warranted fast colours! And yet they actually swallow it! Of course you understand one doesn't tell them what it really is!" He hoped by this confession of dishonesty to others to quite convince her of his probity to her. Then he called her back to show her three yards of guipure that he had lately picked up "at a sale." "Isn't it lovely?" said Lheureux. "It is very much used now for the backs of arm-chairs. It's quite the rage." And, more ready than a juggler, he wrapped up the guipure in some blue paper and put it in Emma's hands. "But at least let me know--" "Yes, another time," he replied, turning on his heel. That same evening she urged Bovary to write to his mother, to ask her to send as quickly as possible the whole of the balance due from the father's estate. The mother-in-law replied that she had nothing more, the winding up was over, and there was due to them besides Barneville an income of six hundred francs, that she would pay them punctually. Then Madame Bovary sent in accounts to two or three patients, and she made large use of this method, which was very successful. She was always careful to add a postscript: "Do not mention this to my husband; you know how proud he is. Excuse me. Yours obediently." There were some complaints; she intercepted them. To get money she began selling her old gloves, her old hats, the old odds and ends, and she bargained rapaciously, her peasant blood standing her in good stead. Then on her journey to town she picked up nick-nacks secondhand, that, in default of anyone else, Monsieur Lheureux would certainly take off her hands. She bought ostrich feathers, Chinese porcelain, and trunks; she borrowed from Felicite, from Madame Lefrancois, from the landlady at the Croix-Rouge, from everybody, no matter where. With the money she at last received from Barneville she paid two bills; the other fifteen hundred francs fell due. She renewed the bills, and thus it was continually. Sometimes, it is true, she tried to make a calculation, but she discovered things so exorbitant that she could not believe them possible. Then she recommenced, soon got confused, gave it all up, and thought no more about it. The house was very dreary now. Tradesmen were seen leaving it with angry faces. Handkerchiefs were lying about on the stoves, and little Berthe, to the great scandal of Madame Homais, wore stockings with holes in them. If Charles timidly ventured a remark, she answered roughly that it wasn't her fault. What was the meaning of all these fits of temper? He explained everything through her old nervous illness, and reproaching himself with having taken her infirmities for faults, accused himself of egotism, and longed to go and take her in his arms. "Ah, no!" he said to himself; "I should worry her." And he did not stir. After dinner he walked about alone in the garden; he took little Berthe on his knees, and unfolding his medical journal, tried to teach her to read. But the child, who never had any lessons, soon looked up with large, sad eyes and began to cry. Then he comforted her; went to fetch water in her can to make rivers on the sand path, or broke off branches from the privet hedges to plant trees in the beds. This did not spoil the garden much, all choked now with long weeds. They owed Lestiboudois for so many days. Then the child grew cold and asked for her mother. "Call the servant," said Charles. "You know, dearie, that mamma does not like to be disturbed." Autumn was setting in, and the leaves were already falling, as they did two years ago when she was ill. Where would it all end? And he walked up and down, his hands behind his back. Madame was in her room, which no one entered. She stayed there all day long, torpid, half dressed, and from time to time burning Turkish pastilles which she had bought at Rouen in an Algerian's shop. In order not to have at night this sleeping man stretched at her side, by dint of manoeuvring, she at last succeeded in banishing him to the second floor, while she read till morning extravagant books, full of pictures of orgies and thrilling situations. Often, seized with fear, she cried out, and Charles hurried to her. "Oh, go away!" she would say. Or at other times, consumed more ardently than ever by that inner flame to which adultery added fuel, panting, tremulous, all desire, she threw open her window, breathed in the cold air, shook loose in the wind her masses of hair, too heavy, and, gazing upon the stars, longed for some princely love. She thought of him, of Leon. She would then have given anything for a single one of those meetings that surfeited her. These were her gala days. She wanted them to be sumptuous, and when he alone could not pay the expenses, she made up the deficit liberally, which happened pretty well every time. He tried to make her understand that they would be quite as comfortable somewhere else, in a smaller hotel, but she always found some objection. One day she drew six small silver-gilt spoons from her bag (they were old Roualt's wedding present), begging him to pawn them at once for her, and Leon obeyed, though the proceeding annoyed him. He was afraid of compromising himself. Then, on, reflection, he began to think his mistress's ways were growing odd, and that they were perhaps not wrong in wishing to separate him from her. In fact someone had sent his mother a long anonymous letter to warn her that he was "ruining himself with a married woman," and the good lady at once conjuring up the eternal bugbear of families, the vague pernicious creature, the siren, the monster, who dwells fantastically in depths of love, wrote to Lawyer Dubocage, his employer, who behaved perfectly in the affair. He kept him for three quarters of an hour trying to open his eyes, to warn him of the abyss into which he was falling. Such an intrigue would damage him later on, when he set up for himself. He implored him to break with her, and, if he would not make this sacrifice in his own interest, to do it at least for his, Dubocage's sake. At last Leon swore he would not see Emma again, and he reproached himself with not having kept his word, considering all the worry and lectures this woman might still draw down upon him, without reckoning the jokes made by his companions as they sat round the stove in the morning. Besides, he was soon to be head clerk; it was time to settle down. So he gave up his flute, exalted sentiments, and poetry; for every bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were it but for a day, a moment, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of lofty enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet. He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast, and his heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music, dozed to the sound of a love whose delicacies he no longer noted. They knew one another too well for any of those surprises of possession that increase its joys a hundred-fold. She was as sick of him as he was weary of her. Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage. But how to get rid of him? Then, though she might feel humiliated at the baseness of such enjoyment, she clung to it from habit or from corruption, and each day she hungered after them the more, exhausting all felicity in wishing for too much of it. She accused Leon of her baffled hopes, as if he had betrayed her; and she even longed for some catastrophe that would bring about their separation, since she had not the courage to make up her mind to it herself. She none the less went on writing him love letters, in virtue of the notion that a woman must write to her lover. But whilst she wrote it was another man she saw, a phantom fashioned out of her most ardent memories, of her finest reading, her strongest lusts, and at last he became so real, so tangible, that she palpitated wondering, without, however, the power to imagine him clearly, so lost was he, like a god, beneath the abundance of his attributes. He dwelt in that azure land where silk ladders hang from balconies under the breath of flowers, in the light of the moon. She felt him near her; he was coming, and would carry her right away in a kiss. Then she fell back exhausted, for these transports of vague love wearied her more than great debauchery. She now felt constant ache all over her. Often she even received summonses, stamped paper that she barely looked at. She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep. On Mid-Lent she did not return to Yonville, but in the evening went to a masked ball. She wore velvet breeches, red stockings, a club wig, and three-cornered hat cocked on one side. She danced all night to the wild tones of the trombones; people gathered round her, and in the morning she found herself on the steps of the theatre together with five or six masks, debardeuses* and sailors, Leon's comrades, who were talking about having supper. * People dressed as longshoremen. The neighbouring cafes were full. They caught sight of one on the harbour, a very indifferent restaurant, whose proprietor showed them to a little room on the fourth floor. The men were whispering in a corner, no doubt consorting about expenses. There were a clerk, two medical students, and a shopman--what company for her! As to the women, Emma soon perceived from the tone of their voices that they must almost belong to the lowest class. Then she was frightened, pushed back her chair, and cast down her eyes. The others began to eat; she ate nothing. Her head was on fire, her eyes smarted, and her skin was ice-cold. In her head she seemed to feel the floor of the ball-room rebounding again beneath the rhythmical pulsation of the thousands of dancing feet. And now the smell of the punch, the smoke of the cigars, made her giddy. She fainted, and they carried her to the window. Day was breaking, and a great stain of purple colour broadened out in the pale horizon over the St. Catherine hills. The livid river was shivering in the wind; there was no one on the bridges; the street lamps were going out. She revived, and began thinking of Berthe asleep yonder in the servant's room. Then a cart filled with long strips of iron passed by, and made a deafening metallic vibration against the walls of the houses. She slipped away suddenly, threw off her costume, told Leon she must get back, and at last was alone at the Hotel de Boulogne. Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again. She went out, crossed the Boulevard, the Place Cauchoise, and the Faubourg, as far as an open street that overlooked some gardens. She walked rapidly; the fresh air calming her; and, little by little, the faces of the crowd, the masks, the quadrilles, the lights, the supper, those women, all disappeared like mists fading away. Then, reaching the "Croix-Rouge," she threw herself on the bed in her little room on the second floor, where there were pictures of the "Tour de Nesle." At four o'clock Hivert awoke her. When she got home, Felicite showed her behind the clock a grey paper. She read-- "In virtue of the seizure in execution of a judgment." What judgment? As a matter of fact, the evening before another paper had been brought that she had not yet seen, and she was stunned by these words-- "By order of the king, law, and justice, to Madame Bovary." Then, skipping several lines, she read, "Within twenty-four hours, without fail--" But what? "To pay the sum of eight thousand francs." And there was even at the bottom, "She will be constrained thereto by every form of law, and notably by a writ of distraint on her furniture and effects." What was to be done? In twenty-four hours--tomorrow. Lheureux, she thought, wanted to frighten her again; for she saw through all his devices, the object of his kindnesses. What reassured her was the very magnitude of the sum. However, by dint of buying and not paying, of borrowing, signing bills, and renewing these bills that grew at each new falling-in, she had ended by preparing a capital for Monsieur Lheureux which he was impatiently awaiting for his speculations. She presented herself at his place with an offhand air. "You know what has happened to me? No doubt it's a joke!" "How so?" He turned away slowly, and, folding his arms, said to her-- "My good lady, did you think I should go on to all eternity being your purveyor and banker, for the love of God? Now be just. I must get back what I've laid out. Now be just." She cried out against the debt. "Ah! so much the worse. The court has admitted it. There's a judgment. It's been notified to you. Besides, it isn't my fault. It's Vincart's." "Could you not--?" "Oh, nothing whatever." "But still, now talk it over." And she began beating about the bush; she had known nothing about it; it was a surprise. "Whose fault is that?" said Lheureux, bowing ironically. "While I'm slaving like a nigger, you go gallivanting about." "Ah! no lecturing." "It never does any harm," he replied. She turned coward; she implored him; she even pressed her pretty white and slender hand against the shopkeeper's knee. "There, that'll do! Anyone'd think you wanted to seduce me!" "You are a wretch!" she cried. "Oh, oh! go it! go it!" "I will show you up. I shall tell my husband." "All right! I too. I'll show your husband something." And Lheureux drew from his strong box the receipt for eighteen hundred francs that she had given him when Vincart had discounted the bills. "Do you think," he added, "that he'll not understand your little theft, the poor dear man?" She collapsed, more overcome than if felled by the blow of a pole-axe. He was walking up and down from the window to the bureau, repeating all the while-- "Ah! I'll show him! I'll show him!" Then he approached her, and in a soft voice said-- "It isn't pleasant, I know; but, after all, no bones are broken, and, since that is the only way that is left for you paying back my money--" "But where am I to get any?" said Emma, wringing her hands. "Bah! when one has friends like you!" And he looked at her in so keen, so terrible a fashion, that she shuddered to her very heart. "I promise you," she said, "to sign--" "I've enough of your signatures." "I will sell something." "Get along!" he said, shrugging his shoulders; "you've not got anything." And he called through the peep-hole that looked down into the shop-- "Annette, don't forget the three coupons of No. 14." The servant appeared. Emma understood, and asked how much money would be wanted to put a stop to the proceedings. "It is too late." "But if I brought you several thousand francs--a quarter of the sum--a third--perhaps the whole?" "No; it's no use!" And he pushed her gently towards the staircase. "I implore you, Monsieur Lheureux, just a few days more!" She was sobbing. "There! tears now!" "You are driving me to despair!" "What do I care?" said he, shutting the door.

part 3, Chapter 6

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Out of politeness Lon extends an invitation to Monsieur Homais to visit him in Rouen and the pharmacist, feeling something of a daredevil, decides to relive some of the glories of his youth. Emma and Lon are both surprised when Monsieur Homais accompanies Emma to Rouen one day and immediately drags the clerk off to dine. Emma is vexed and impatient and spends the afternoon waiting in their hotel room. Lon suffers through a long meal with the pharmacist who then insists on accompanying him on his business visits. Lon manages to steal a few minutes at the hotel where Emma, hysterical from waiting, fails to appreciate his predicament. Homais insists that Lon accompany him to another caf. Eventually Lon is able to return to the hotel but finds that Emma has left in a fury. In the coming weeks she tries to recapture some of her original passion for him by pushing herself to extremes. For his part, Lon grows to be somewhat frightened of her and begins to resent her. Still, he is beguiled by her beauty and her attention. One day, after leaving the hotel, she sees the walls of her old convent and sits on a nearby bench to ponder her childhood ardor and present feelings. She finds that she is totally devoted to her passions. One day a representative of Monsieur Vinart, the Rouen banker, arrives with a note for 500 francs due immediately. Emma sends him away with a promise to pay the following week. The next day, however, she receives an official protest of non-payment. She visits Lheureux in his office and he explains that he was forced to sign the note over to the banker and that Vinart will not be appeased. She is furious. He washes his hands at the whole matter and blames the banker. She pleads with him but to no avail. Finally he agrees to advance her four 250 franc notes against the balance of the cottage. Before she leaves he sells her some fine fabric on credit. Soon she finds that there is nothing to the inheritance except the cottage and 600 francs a year. She sends requests for payment to Charles' patients and selling her things in Rouen. Additionally she borrowed money from everyone she can. She signs more promissory notes. The household begins to fall into disarray and Emma becomes defensive when Charles asks about their financial troubles. Autumn arrives and she is alternatively morose and consumed by passion for Lon. She banishes Charles to sleeping in the attic while she stays awake, reading lurid novels. Lon, alarmed by the change in his mistress, wonders if he should break it off. He is about to be promoted to head clerk and he resolves to give up his romantic ideals and act sensibly. He is bored with her and her with him but she cannot give him up. She is tortured by an ideal bliss, an ideal man which she cannot grasp and she is tormented by countless official documents of debt that continue to arrive. On the night of the mid-Lenten festivities she accompanies Lon and his friends to a costume ball and in a caf afterward is disgusted by the company she is keeping. She swoons in a faint and revives thinking of her daughter. When she returns home Flicit shows her a recently arrived document that proclaims she must pay 8,000 francs the following day or suffer a public seizure of all her possessions. Lheureux refuses to help. She puts her hand on his knee but she acts insulted when he asks if she is trying to seduce him. He knowingly tells her that she has many friends and she had better raise the money through them.

These chapters chronicle the beginning of the end for Emma Bovary. She begins to lie compulsively - this indicates that she is beginning to live the fiction that she believes to be her destiny as depicted in the novels. She is revealed to be a creature entirely dependent upon a world of romantic ideals that does not exist. To compensate, she simply insists that the real world adhere to those ideals. Her hedonism knows no limits and culminates when she attends the masked party with Lon's working class friends. Her intricate web of deception begins to unravel and she perceives that, like Rodolphe, Lon's ardor is beginning to wane. Unable to admit the truth, however, she pursues him with recklessness that only serves to further distance the clerk. She emasculates him by assuming control of their relationship and subsuming his tastes with her own. Lheureux perceives that she is without further funds and uses his banker in Rouen to begin the process of seizing the Bovary's possessions. With her world collapsing about her, Emma finds that the romantic ideals that form her character serve only to torture her with their inaccessibility. Her day of reckoning is close at hand and succor is not to be found

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Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 7

part 3, chapter 7

{"name": "part 3, Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter7-9", "summary": "The following day three officials arrive and inventory all the goods in the house. That evening she feels regret as she looks over all the expensive items in the house she used to temper her frustrated passion. The following day, a Sunday, she travels to Rouen to look for money but the bankers either refuse or simply laugh at her. Leon calls her crazy when he hears how much money she needs. He agrees to try to raise 3,000 francs but returns from his mission empty handed. She hints that he should steal the money from his office and the frightened clerk promises to borrow the money from a friend who is returning that night. Leon tells Emma that he will bring the money the following day but she is not to wait for him past 3 o'clock. On her way to the Hirondelle she passes the cathedral and remembers how full of hope she had been when she first met Leon there. She sees a man in a carriage that she believes is the vicomte and the sight depresses her. Monsieur Homais is also returning to Yonville and when the blind beggar accosts the carriage in his usual manner Homais lectures the man and tells him that he can heal him with a salve of his own invention. Emma gives the beggar a five franc piece - the last money she has in the world. She collapses into her bed that night resigned to let come what may. In the morning a notice in the square explains that the contents of the Bovary's house are subject to sale. Felicite, who is romantically involved with the notary Guillaumin's manservant, advises her mistress to seek funds from the notary. Guillaumin knows of her predicament through his secret business associations with Lheureux. He initially refuses to give her money but, abandoning his decorum, begins to caress her and falls on his knees and tells her that he loves her. Disgusted, Emma flees the house. She returns home where she waits for Charles, enraged that he should be in a position to be condescending to her. As he enters the front door, however, she flees out the back and the mayor's wife, Madame Tuvache sees her enter the tax collector Binet's house. Madame Tuvache and Madame Caron watch through a window and see her confront Binet and then seemingly make romantic advances to the man who recoils in horror. Emma flees to Madame Rollet's cottage and collapses sobbing on the bed. She comes to her senses and, realizing it is nearly 3 o'clock, orders the confused wet nurse to go to her house to meet Leon. Emma waits a long time but when Madame Rollet returns she tells her that he was not there. Furthermore she explains that Madame Bovary's anguished husband is calling for her and everyone is looking for her. Emma suddenly thinks of Rodolphe and sets out for La Huchette certain of help from that quarter", "analysis": ""}

She was stoical the next day when Maitre Hareng, the bailiff, with two assistants, presented himself at her house to draw up the inventory for the distraint. They began with Bovary's consulting-room, and did not write down the phrenological head, which was considered an "instrument of his profession"; but in the kitchen they counted the plates; the saucepans, the chairs, the candlesticks, and in the bedroom all the nick-nacks on the whatnot. They examined her dresses, the linen, the dressing-room; and her whole existence to its most intimate details, was, like a corpse on whom a post-mortem is made, outspread before the eyes of these three men. Maitre Hareng, buttoned up in his thin black coat, wearing a white choker and very tight foot-straps, repeated from time to time--"Allow me, madame. You allow me?" Often he uttered exclamations. "Charming! very pretty." Then he began writing again, dipping his pen into the horn inkstand in his left hand. When they had done with the rooms they went up to the attic. She kept a desk there in which Rodolphe's letters were locked. It had to be opened. "Ah! a correspondence," said Maitre Hareng, with a discreet smile. "But allow me, for I must make sure the box contains nothing else." And he tipped up the papers lightly, as if to shake out napoleons. Then she grew angered to see this coarse hand, with fingers red and pulpy like slugs, touching these pages against which her heart had beaten. They went at last. Felicite came back. Emma had sent her out to watch for Bovary in order to keep him off, and they hurriedly installed the man in possession under the roof, where he swore he would remain. During the evening Charles seemed to her careworn. Emma watched him with a look of anguish, fancying she saw an accusation in every line of his face. Then, when her eyes wandered over the chimney-piece ornamented with Chinese screens, over the large curtains, the armchairs, all those things, in a word, that had, softened the bitterness of her life, remorse seized her or rather an immense regret, that, far from crushing, irritated her passion. Charles placidly poked the fire, both his feet on the fire-dogs. Once the man, no doubt bored in his hiding-place, made a slight noise. "Is anyone walking upstairs?" said Charles. "No," she replied; "it is a window that has been left open, and is rattling in the wind." The next day, Sunday, she went to Rouen to call on all the brokers whose names she knew. They were at their country-places or on journeys. She was not discouraged; and those whom she did manage to see she asked for money, declaring she must have some, and that she would pay it back. Some laughed in her face; all refused. At two o'clock she hurried to Leon, and knocked at the door. No one answered. At length he appeared. "What brings you here?" "Do I disturb you?" "No; but--" And he admitted that his landlord didn't like his having "women" there. "I must speak to you," she went on. Then he took down the key, but she stopped him. "No, no! Down there, in our home!" And they went to their room at the Hotel de Boulogne. On arriving she drank off a large glass of water. She was very pale. She said to him-- "Leon, you will do me a service?" And, shaking him by both hands that she grasped tightly, she added-- "Listen, I want eight thousand francs." "But you are mad!" "Not yet." And thereupon, telling him the story of the distraint, she explained her distress to him; for Charles knew nothing of it; her mother-in-law detested her; old Rouault could do nothing; but he, Leon, he would set about finding this indispensable sum. "How on earth can I?" "What a coward you are!" she cried. Then he said stupidly, "You are exaggerating the difficulty. Perhaps, with a thousand crowns or so the fellow could be stopped." All the greater reason to try and do something; it was impossible that they could not find three thousand francs. Besides, Leon, could be security instead of her. "Go, try, try! I will love you so!" He went out, and came back at the end of an hour, saying, with solemn face-- "I have been to three people with no success." Then they remained sitting face to face at the two chimney corners, motionless, in silence. Emma shrugged her shoulders as she stamped her feet. He heard her murmuring-- "If I were in your place _I_ should soon get some." "But where?" "At your office." And she looked at him. An infernal boldness looked out from her burning eyes, and their lids drew close together with a lascivious and encouraging look, so that the young man felt himself growing weak beneath the mute will of this woman who was urging him to a crime. Then he was afraid, and to avoid any explanation he smote his forehead, crying-- "Morel is to come back to-night; he will not refuse me, I hope" (this was one of his friends, the son of a very rich merchant); "and I will bring it you to-morrow," he added. Emma did not seem to welcome this hope with all the joy he had expected. Did she suspect the lie? He went on, blushing-- "However, if you don't see me by three o'clock do not wait for me, my darling. I must be off now; forgive me! Goodbye!" He pressed her hand, but it felt quite lifeless. Emma had no strength left for any sentiment. Four o'clock struck, and she rose to return to Yonville, mechanically obeying the force of old habits. The weather was fine. It was one of those March days, clear and sharp, when the sun shines in a perfectly white sky. The Rouen folk, in Sunday-clothes, were walking about with happy looks. She reached the Place du Parvis. People were coming out after vespers; the crowd flowed out through the three doors like a stream through the three arches of a bridge, and in the middle one, more motionless than a rock, stood the beadle. Then she remembered the day when, all anxious and full of hope, she had entered beneath this large nave, that had opened out before her, less profound than her love; and she walked on weeping beneath her veil, giddy, staggering, almost fainting. "Take care!" cried a voice issuing from the gate of a courtyard that was thrown open. She stopped to let pass a black horse, pawing the ground between the shafts of a tilbury, driven by a gentleman in sable furs. Who was it? She knew him. The carriage darted by and disappeared. Why, it was he--the Viscount. She turned away; the street was empty. She was so overwhelmed, so sad, that she had to lean against a wall to keep herself from falling. Then she thought she had been mistaken. Anyhow, she did not know. All within her and around her was abandoning her. She felt lost, sinking at random into indefinable abysses, and it was almost with joy that, on reaching the "Croix-Rouge," she saw the good Homais, who was watching a large box full of pharmaceutical stores being hoisted on to the "Hirondelle." In his hand he held tied in a silk handkerchief six cheminots for his wife. Madame Homais was very fond of these small, heavy turban-shaped loaves, that are eaten in Lent with salt butter; a last vestige of Gothic food that goes back, perhaps, to the time of the Crusades, and with which the robust Normans gorged themselves of yore, fancying they saw on the table, in the light of the yellow torches, between tankards of hippocras and huge boars' heads, the heads of Saracens to be devoured. The druggist's wife crunched them up as they had done--heroically, despite her wretched teeth. And so whenever Homais journeyed to town, he never failed to bring her home some that he bought at the great baker's in the Rue Massacre. "Charmed to see you," he said, offering Emma a hand to help her into the "Hirondelle." Then he hung up his cheminots to the cords of the netting, and remained bare-headed in an attitude pensive and Napoleonic. But when the blind man appeared as usual at the foot of the hill he exclaimed-- "I can't understand why the authorities tolerate such culpable industries. Such unfortunates should be locked up and forced to work. Progress, my word! creeps at a snail's pace. We are floundering about in mere barbarism." The blind man held out his hat, that flapped about at the door, as if it were a bag in the lining that had come unnailed. "This," said the chemist, "is a scrofulous affection." And though he knew the poor devil, he pretended to see him for the first time, murmured something about "cornea," "opaque cornea," "sclerotic," "facies," then asked him in a paternal tone-- "My friend, have you long had this terrible infirmity? Instead of getting drunk at the public, you'd do better to die yourself." He advised him to take good wine, good beer, and good joints. The blind man went on with his song; he seemed, moreover, almost idiotic. At last Monsieur Homais opened his purse-- "Now there's a sou; give me back two lairds, and don't forget my advice: you'll be the better for it." Hivert openly cast some doubt on the efficacy of it. But the druggist said that he would cure himself with an antiphlogistic pomade of his own composition, and he gave his address--"Monsieur Homais, near the market, pretty well known." "Now," said Hivert, "for all this trouble you'll give us your performance." The blind man sank down on his haunches, with his head thrown back, whilst he rolled his greenish eyes, lolled out his tongue, and rubbed his stomach with both hands as he uttered a kind of hollow yell like a famished dog. Emma, filled with disgust, threw him over her shoulder a five-franc piece. It was all her fortune. It seemed to her very fine thus to throw it away. The coach had gone on again when suddenly Monsieur Homais leant out through the window, crying-- "No farinaceous or milk food, wear wool next the skin, and expose the diseased parts to the smoke of juniper berries." The sight of the well-known objects that defiled before her eyes gradually diverted Emma from her present trouble. An intolerable fatigue overwhelmed her, and she reached her home stupefied, discouraged, almost asleep. "Come what may come!" she said to herself. "And then, who knows? Why, at any moment could not some extraordinary event occur? Lheureux even might die!" At nine o'clock in the morning she was awakened by the sound of voices in the Place. There was a crowd round the market reading a large bill fixed to one of the posts, and she saw Justin, who was climbing on to a stone and tearing down the bill. But at this moment the rural guard seized him by the collar. Monsieur Homais came out of his shop, and Mere Lefrangois, in the midst of the crowd, seemed to be perorating. "Madame! madame!" cried Felicite, running in, "it's abominable!" And the poor girl, deeply moved, handed her a yellow paper that she had just torn off the door. Emma read with a glance that all her furniture was for sale. Then they looked at one another silently. The servant and mistress had no secret one from the other. At last Felicite sighed-- "If I were you, madame, I should go to Monsieur Guillaumin." "Do you think--" And this question meant to say-- "You who know the house through the servant, has the master spoken sometimes of me?" "Yes, you'd do well to go there." She dressed, put on her black gown, and her hood with jet beads, and that she might not be seen (there was still a crowd on the Place), she took the path by the river, outside the village. She reached the notary's gate quite breathless. The sky was sombre, and a little snow was falling. At the sound of the bell, Theodore in a red waistcoat appeared on the steps; he came to open the door almost familiarly, as to an acquaintance, and showed her into the dining-room. A large porcelain stove crackled beneath a cactus that filled up the niche in the wall, and in black wood frames against the oak-stained paper hung Steuben's "Esmeralda" and Schopin's "Potiphar." The ready-laid table, the two silver chafing-dishes, the crystal door-knobs, the parquet and the furniture, all shone with a scrupulous, English cleanliness; the windows were ornamented at each corner with stained glass. "Now this," thought Emma, "is the dining-room I ought to have." The notary came in pressing his palm-leaf dressing-gown to his breast with his left arm, while with the other hand he raised and quickly put on again his brown velvet cap, pretentiously cocked on the right side, whence looked out the ends of three fair curls drawn from the back of the head, following the line of his bald skull. After he had offered her a seat he sat down to breakfast, apologising profusely for his rudeness. "I have come," she said, "to beg you, sir--" "What, madame? I am listening." And she began explaining her position to him. Monsieur Guillaumin knew it, being secretly associated with the linendraper, from whom he always got capital for the loans on mortgages that he was asked to make. So he knew (and better than she herself) the long story of the bills, small at first, bearing different names as endorsers, made out at long dates, and constantly renewed up to the day, when, gathering together all the protested bills, the shopkeeper had bidden his friend Vincart take in his own name all the necessary proceedings, not wishing to pass for a tiger with his fellow-citizens. She mingled her story with recriminations against Lheureux, to which the notary replied from time to time with some insignificant word. Eating his cutlet and drinking his tea, he buried his chin in his sky-blue cravat, into which were thrust two diamond pins, held together by a small gold chain; and he smiled a singular smile, in a sugary, ambiguous fashion. But noticing that her feet were damp, he said-- "Do get closer to the stove; put your feet up against the porcelain." She was afraid of dirtying it. The notary replied in a gallant tone-- "Beautiful things spoil nothing." Then she tried to move him, and, growing moved herself, she began telling him about the poorness of her home, her worries, her wants. He could understand that; an elegant woman! and, without leaving off eating, he had turned completely round towards her, so that his knee brushed against her boot, whose sole curled round as it smoked against the stove. But when she asked for a thousand sous, he closed his lips, and declared he was very sorry he had not had the management of her fortune before, for there were hundreds of ways very convenient, even for a lady, of turning her money to account. They might, either in the turf-peats of Grumesnil or building-ground at Havre, almost without risk, have ventured on some excellent speculations; and he let her consume herself with rage at the thought of the fabulous sums that she would certainly have made. "How was it," he went on, "that you didn't come to me?" "I hardly know," she said. "Why, hey? Did I frighten you so much? It is I, on the contrary, who ought to complain. We hardly know one another; yet I am very devoted to you. You do not doubt that, I hope?" He held out his hand, took hers, covered it with a greedy kiss, then held it on his knee; and he played delicately with her fingers whilst he murmured a thousand blandishments. His insipid voice murmured like a running brook; a light shone in his eyes through the glimmering of his spectacles, and his hand was advancing up Emma's sleeve to press her arm. She felt against her cheek his panting breath. This man oppressed her horribly. She sprang up and said to him-- "Sir, I am waiting." "For what?" said the notary, who suddenly became very pale. "This money." "But--" Then, yielding to the outburst of too powerful a desire, "Well, yes!" He dragged himself towards her on his knees, regardless of his dressing-gown. "For pity's sake, stay. I love you!" He seized her by her waist. Madame Bovary's face flushed purple. She recoiled with a terrible look, crying-- "You are taking a shameless advantage of my distress, sir! I am to be pitied--not to be sold." And she went out. The notary remained quite stupefied, his eyes fixed on his fine embroidered slippers. They were a love gift, and the sight of them at last consoled him. Besides, he reflected that such an adventure might have carried him too far. "What a wretch! what a scoundrel! what an infamy!" she said to herself, as she fled with nervous steps beneath the aspens of the path. The disappointment of her failure increased the indignation of her outraged modesty; it seemed to her that Providence pursued her implacably, and, strengthening herself in her pride, she had never felt so much esteem for herself nor so much contempt for others. A spirit of warfare transformed her. She would have liked to strike all men, to spit in their faces, to crush them, and she walked rapidly straight on, pale, quivering, maddened, searching the empty horizon with tear-dimmed eyes, and as it were rejoicing in the hate that was choking her. When she saw her house a numbness came over her. She could not go on; and yet she must. Besides, whither could she flee? Felicite was waiting for her at the door. "Well?" "No!" said Emma. And for a quarter of an hour the two of them went over the various persons in Yonville who might perhaps be inclined to help her. But each time that Felicite named someone Emma replied-- "Impossible! they will not!" "And the master'll soon be in." "I know that well enough. Leave me alone." She had tried everything; there was nothing more to be done now; and when Charles came in she would have to say to him-- "Go away! This carpet on which you are walking is no longer ours. In your own house you do not possess a chair, a pin, a straw, and it is I, poor man, who have ruined you." Then there would be a great sob; next he would weep abundantly, and at last, the surprise past, he would forgive her. "Yes," she murmured, grinding her teeth, "he will forgive me, he who would give a million if I would forgive him for having known me! Never! never!" This thought of Bovary's superiority to her exasperated her. Then, whether she confessed or did not confess, presently, immediately, to-morrow, he would know the catastrophe all the same; so she must wait for this horrible scene, and bear the weight of his magnanimity. The desire to return to Lheureux's seized her--what would be the use? To write to her father--it was too late; and perhaps, she began to repent now that she had not yielded to that other, when she heard the trot of a horse in the alley. It was he; he was opening the gate; he was whiter than the plaster wall. Rushing to the stairs, she ran out quickly to the square; and the wife of the mayor, who was talking to Lestiboudois in front of the church, saw her go in to the tax-collector's. She hurried off to tell Madame Caron, and the two ladies went up to the attic, and, hidden by some linen spread across props, stationed themselves comfortably for overlooking the whole of Binet's room. He was alone in his garret, busy imitating in wood one of those indescribable bits of ivory, composed of crescents, of spheres hollowed out one within the other, the whole as straight as an obelisk, and of no use whatever; and he was beginning on the last piece--he was nearing his goal. In the twilight of the workshop the white dust was flying from his tools like a shower of sparks under the hoofs of a galloping horse; the two wheels were turning, droning; Binet smiled, his chin lowered, his nostrils distended, and, in a word, seemed lost in one of those complete happinesses that, no doubt, belong only to commonplace occupations, which amuse the mind with facile difficulties, and satisfy by a realisation of that beyond which such minds have not a dream. "Ah! there she is!" exclaimed Madame Tuvache. But it was impossible because of the lathe to hear what she was saying. At last these ladies thought they made out the word "francs," and Madame Tuvache whispered in a low voice-- "She is begging him to give her time for paying her taxes." "Apparently!" replied the other. They saw her walking up and down, examining the napkin-rings, the candlesticks, the banister rails against the walls, while Binet stroked his beard with satisfaction. "Do you think she wants to order something of him?" said Madame Tuvache. "Why, he doesn't sell anything," objected her neighbour. The tax-collector seemed to be listening with wide-open eyes, as if he did not understand. She went on in a tender, suppliant manner. She came nearer to him, her breast heaving; they no longer spoke. "Is she making him advances?" said Madame Tuvache. Binet was scarlet to his very ears. She took hold of his hands. "Oh, it's too much!" And no doubt she was suggesting something abominable to him; for the tax-collector--yet he was brave, had fought at Bautzen and at Lutzen, had been through the French campaign, and had even been recommended for the cross--suddenly, as at the sight of a serpent, recoiled as far as he could from her, crying-- "Madame! what do you mean?" "Women like that ought to be whipped," said Madame Tuvache. "But where is she?" continued Madame Caron, for she had disappeared whilst they spoke; then catching sight of her going up the Grande Rue, and turning to the right as if making for the cemetery, they were lost in conjectures. "Nurse Rollet," she said on reaching the nurse's, "I am choking; unlace me!" She fell on the bed sobbing. Nurse Rollet covered her with a petticoat and remained standing by her side. Then, as she did not answer, the good woman withdrew, took her wheel and began spinning flax. "Oh, leave off!" she murmured, fancying she heard Binet's lathe. "What's bothering her?" said the nurse to herself. "Why has she come here?" She had rushed thither; impelled by a kind of horror that drove her from her home. Lying on her back, motionless, and with staring eyes, she saw things but vaguely, although she tried to with idiotic persistence. She looked at the scales on the walls, two brands smoking end to end, and a long spider crawling over her head in a rent in the beam. At last she began to collect her thoughts. She remembered--one day--Leon--Oh! how long ago that was--the sun was shining on the river, and the clematis were perfuming the air. Then, carried away as by a rushing torrent, she soon began to recall the day before. "What time is it?" she asked. Mere Rollet went out, raised the fingers of her right hand to that side of the sky that was brightest, and came back slowly, saying-- "Nearly three." "Ah! thanks, thanks!" For he would come; he would have found some money. But he would, perhaps, go down yonder, not guessing she was here, and she told the nurse to run to her house to fetch him. "Be quick!" "But, my dear lady, I'm going, I'm going!" She wondered now that she had not thought of him from the first. Yesterday he had given his word; he would not break it. And she already saw herself at Lheureux's spreading out her three bank-notes on his bureau. Then she would have to invent some story to explain matters to Bovary. What should it be? The nurse, however, was a long while gone. But, as there was no clock in the cot, Emma feared she was perhaps exaggerating the length of time. She began walking round the garden, step by step; she went into the path by the hedge, and returned quickly, hoping that the woman would have come back by another road. At last, weary of waiting, assailed by fears that she thrust from her, no longer conscious whether she had been here a century or a moment, she sat down in a corner, closed her eyes, and stopped her ears. The gate grated; she sprang up. Before she had spoken Mere Rollet said to her-- "There is no one at your house!" "What?" "Oh, no one! And the doctor is crying. He is calling for you; they're looking for you." Emma answered nothing. She gasped as she turned her eyes about her, while the peasant woman, frightened at her face, drew back instinctively, thinking her mad. Suddenly she struck her brow and uttered a cry; for the thought of Rodolphe, like a flash of lightning in a dark night, had passed into her soul. He was so good, so delicate, so generous! And besides, should he hesitate to do her this service, she would know well enough how to constrain him to it by re-waking, in a single moment, their lost love. So she set out towards La Huchette, not seeing that she was hastening to offer herself to that which but a while ago had so angered her, not in the least conscious of her prostitution.

part 3, Chapter 7

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter7-9

The following day three officials arrive and inventory all the goods in the house. That evening she feels regret as she looks over all the expensive items in the house she used to temper her frustrated passion. The following day, a Sunday, she travels to Rouen to look for money but the bankers either refuse or simply laugh at her. Leon calls her crazy when he hears how much money she needs. He agrees to try to raise 3,000 francs but returns from his mission empty handed. She hints that he should steal the money from his office and the frightened clerk promises to borrow the money from a friend who is returning that night. Leon tells Emma that he will bring the money the following day but she is not to wait for him past 3 o'clock. On her way to the Hirondelle she passes the cathedral and remembers how full of hope she had been when she first met Leon there. She sees a man in a carriage that she believes is the vicomte and the sight depresses her. Monsieur Homais is also returning to Yonville and when the blind beggar accosts the carriage in his usual manner Homais lectures the man and tells him that he can heal him with a salve of his own invention. Emma gives the beggar a five franc piece - the last money she has in the world. She collapses into her bed that night resigned to let come what may. In the morning a notice in the square explains that the contents of the Bovary's house are subject to sale. Felicite, who is romantically involved with the notary Guillaumin's manservant, advises her mistress to seek funds from the notary. Guillaumin knows of her predicament through his secret business associations with Lheureux. He initially refuses to give her money but, abandoning his decorum, begins to caress her and falls on his knees and tells her that he loves her. Disgusted, Emma flees the house. She returns home where she waits for Charles, enraged that he should be in a position to be condescending to her. As he enters the front door, however, she flees out the back and the mayor's wife, Madame Tuvache sees her enter the tax collector Binet's house. Madame Tuvache and Madame Caron watch through a window and see her confront Binet and then seemingly make romantic advances to the man who recoils in horror. Emma flees to Madame Rollet's cottage and collapses sobbing on the bed. She comes to her senses and, realizing it is nearly 3 o'clock, orders the confused wet nurse to go to her house to meet Leon. Emma waits a long time but when Madame Rollet returns she tells her that he was not there. Furthermore she explains that Madame Bovary's anguished husband is calling for her and everyone is looking for her. Emma suddenly thinks of Rodolphe and sets out for La Huchette certain of help from that quarter

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/32.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_12_part_2.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 8

part 3, chapter 8

{"name": "part 3, Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter7-9", "summary": "She finds Rodolphe alone in the mansion. He apologizes for his past treatment of her and she tells him that she has suffered a great deal. He sees her sorrow and he caresses her. He reaffirms his love and begs to know what is wrong. She explains that a notary has absconded with all of her husband's money and they are to be ruined. She asks him to loan her 3,000 francs. Rodolphe turns pale and explains that he doesn't have the money. She accuses him of destroying her and mocks the richness of his supposed poverty by pointing out the expensive items in the room. He persists in his refusal and she staggers away. Night is falling and she feels herself slipping into madness. She sees the lights of her house and then, acquiring a new resolve, goes instead to the pharmacy and convinces Justin to let her into the lab where Homais keeps his arsenic. Justin is horrified when Madame Bovary seizes a great handful of the white powder and swallows it. She swears him to silence and then returns home", "analysis": ""}

She asked herself as she walked along, "What am I going to say? How shall I begin?" And as she went on she recognised the thickets, the trees, the sea-rushes on the hill, the chateau yonder. All the sensations of her first tenderness came back to her, and her poor aching heart opened out amorously. A warm wind blew in her face; the melting snow fell drop by drop from the buds to the grass. She entered, as she used to, through the small park-gate. She reached the avenue bordered by a double row of dense lime-trees. They were swaying their long whispering branches to and fro. The dogs in their kennels all barked, and the noise of their voices resounded, but brought out no one. She went up the large straight staircase with wooden balusters that led to the corridor paved with dusty flags, into which several doors in a row opened, as in a monastery or an inn. His was at the top, right at the end, on the left. When she placed her fingers on the lock her strength suddenly deserted her. She was afraid, almost wished he would not be there, though this was her only hope, her last chance of salvation. She collected her thoughts for one moment, and, strengthening herself by the feeling of present necessity, went in. He was in front of the fire, both his feet on the mantelpiece, smoking a pipe. "What! it is you!" he said, getting up hurriedly. "Yes, it is I, Rodolphe. I should like to ask your advice." And, despite all her efforts, it was impossible for her to open her lips. "You have not changed; you are charming as ever!" "Oh," she replied bitterly, "they are poor charms since you disdained them." Then he began a long explanation of his conduct, excusing himself in vague terms, in default of being able to invent better. She yielded to his words, still more to his voice and the sight of him, so that, she pretended to believe, or perhaps believed; in the pretext he gave for their rupture; this was a secret on which depended the honour, the very life of a third person. "No matter!" she said, looking at him sadly. "I have suffered much." He replied philosophically-- "Such is life!" "Has life," Emma went on, "been good to you at least, since our separation?" "Oh, neither good nor bad." "Perhaps it would have been better never to have parted." "Yes, perhaps." "You think so?" she said, drawing nearer, and she sighed. "Oh, Rodolphe! if you but knew! I loved you so!" It was then that she took his hand, and they remained some time, their fingers intertwined, like that first day at the Show. With a gesture of pride he struggled against this emotion. But sinking upon his breast she said to him-- "How did you think I could live without you? One cannot lose the habit of happiness. I was desolate. I thought I should die. I will tell you about all that and you will see. And you--you fled from me!" For, all the three years, he had carefully avoided her in consequence of that natural cowardice that characterises the stronger sex. Emma went on, with dainty little nods, more coaxing than an amorous kitten-- "You love others, confess it! Oh, I understand them, dear! I excuse them. You probably seduced them as you seduced me. You are indeed a man; you have everything to make one love you. But we'll begin again, won't we? We will love one another. See! I am laughing; I am happy! Oh, speak!" And she was charming to see, with her eyes, in which trembled a tear, like the rain of a storm in a blue corolla. He had drawn her upon his knees, and with the back of his hand was caressing her smooth hair, where in the twilight was mirrored like a golden arrow one last ray of the sun. She bent down her brow; at last he kissed her on the eyelids quite gently with the tips of his lips. "Why, you have been crying! What for?" She burst into tears. Rodolphe thought this was an outburst of her love. As she did not speak, he took this silence for a last remnant of resistance, and then he cried out-- "Oh, forgive me! You are the only one who pleases me. I was imbecile and cruel. I love you. I will love you always. What is it. Tell me!" He was kneeling by her. "Well, I am ruined, Rodolphe! You must lend me three thousand francs." "But--but--" said he, getting up slowly, while his face assumed a grave expression. "You know," she went on quickly, "that my husband had placed his whole fortune at a notary's. He ran away. So we borrowed; the patients don't pay us. Moreover, the settling of the estate is not yet done; we shall have the money later on. But to-day, for want of three thousand francs, we are to be sold up. It is to be at once, this very moment, and, counting upon your friendship, I have come to you." "Ah!" thought Rodolphe, turning very pale, "that was what she came for." At last he said with a calm air-- "Dear madame, I have not got them." He did not lie. If he had had them, he would, no doubt, have given them, although it is generally disagreeable to do such fine things: a demand for money being, of all the winds that blow upon love, the coldest and most destructive. First she looked at him for some moments. "You have not got them!" she repeated several times. "You have not got them! I ought to have spared myself this last shame. You never loved me. You are no better than the others." She was betraying, ruining herself. Rodolphe interrupted her, declaring he was "hard up" himself. "Ah! I pity you," said Emma. "Yes--very much." And fixing her eyes upon an embossed carabine, that shone against its panoply, "But when one is so poor one doesn't have silver on the butt of one's gun. One doesn't buy a clock inlaid with tortoise shell," she went on, pointing to a buhl timepiece, "nor silver-gilt whistles for one's whips," and she touched them, "nor charms for one's watch. Oh, he wants for nothing! even to a liqueur-stand in his room! For you love yourself; you live well. You have a chateau, farms, woods; you go hunting; you travel to Paris. Why, if it were but that," she cried, taking up two studs from the mantelpiece, "but the least of these trifles, one can get money for them. Oh, I do not want them, keep them!" And she threw the two links away from her, their gold chain breaking as it struck against the wall. "But I! I would have given you everything. I would have sold all, worked for you with my hands, I would have begged on the highroads for a smile, for a look, to hear you say 'Thanks!' And you sit there quietly in your arm-chair, as if you had not made me suffer enough already! But for you, and you know it, I might have lived happily. What made you do it? Was it a bet? Yet you loved me--you said so. And but a moment since--Ah! it would have been better to have driven me away. My hands are hot with your kisses, and there is the spot on the carpet where at my knees you swore an eternity of love! You made me believe you; for two years you held me in the most magnificent, the sweetest dream! Eh! Our plans for the journey, do you remember? Oh, your letter! your letter! it tore my heart! And then when I come back to him--to him, rich, happy, free--to implore the help the first stranger would give, a suppliant, and bringing back to him all my tenderness, he repulses me because it would cost him three thousand francs!" "I haven't got them," replied Rodolphe, with that perfect calm with which resigned rage covers itself as with a shield. She went out. The walls trembled, the ceiling was crushing her, and she passed back through the long alley, stumbling against the heaps of dead leaves scattered by the wind. At last she reached the ha-ha hedge in front of the gate; she broke her nails against the lock in her haste to open it. Then a hundred steps farther on, breathless, almost falling, she stopped. And now turning round, she once more saw the impassive chateau, with the park, the gardens, the three courts, and all the windows of the facade. She remained lost in stupor, and having no more consciousness of herself than through the beating of her arteries, that she seemed to hear bursting forth like a deafening music filling all the fields. The earth beneath her feet was more yielding than the sea, and the furrows seemed to her immense brown waves breaking into foam. Everything in her head, of memories, ideas, went off at once like a thousand pieces of fireworks. She saw her father, Lheureux's closet, their room at home, another landscape. Madness was coming upon her; she grew afraid, and managed to recover herself, in a confused way, it is true, for she did not in the least remember the cause of the terrible condition she was in, that is to say, the question of money. She suffered only in her love, and felt her soul passing from her in this memory; as wounded men, dying, feel their life ebb from their bleeding wounds. Night was falling, crows were flying about. Suddenly it seemed to her that fiery spheres were exploding in the air like fulminating balls when they strike, and were whirling, whirling, to melt at last upon the snow between the branches of the trees. In the midst of each of them appeared the face of Rodolphe. They multiplied and drew near her, penetrating, her. It all disappeared; she recognised the lights of the houses that shone through the fog. Now her situation, like an abyss, rose up before her. She was panting as if her heart would burst. Then in an ecstasy of heroism, that made her almost joyous, she ran down the hill, crossed the cow-plank, the foot-path, the alley, the market, and reached the chemist's shop. She was about to enter, but at the sound of the bell someone might come, and slipping in by the gate, holding her breath, feeling her way along the walls, she went as far as the door of the kitchen, where a candle stuck on the stove was burning. Justin in his shirt-sleeves was carrying out a dish. "Ah! they are dining; I will wait." He returned; she tapped at the window. He went out. "The key! the one for upstairs where he keeps the--" "What?" And he looked at her, astonished at the pallor of her face, that stood out white against the black background of the night. She seemed to him extraordinarily beautiful and majestic as a phantom. Without understanding what she wanted, he had the presentiment of something terrible. But she went on quickly in a love voice; in a sweet, melting voice, "I want it; give it to me." As the partition wall was thin, they could hear the clatter of the forks on the plates in the dining-room. She pretended that she wanted to kill the rats that kept her from sleeping. "I must tell master." "No, stay!" Then with an indifferent air, "Oh, it's not worth while; I'll tell him presently. Come, light me upstairs." She entered the corridor into which the laboratory door opened. Against the wall was a key labelled Capharnaum. "Justin!" called the druggist impatiently. "Let us go up." And he followed her. The key turned in the lock, and she went straight to the third shelf, so well did her memory guide her, seized the blue jar, tore out the cork, plunged in her hand, and withdrawing it full of a white powder, she began eating it. "Stop!" he cried, rushing at her. "Hush! someone will come." He was in despair, was calling out. "Say nothing, or all the blame will fall on your master." Then she went home, suddenly calmed, and with something of the serenity of one that had performed a duty. When Charles, distracted by the news of the distraint, returned home, Emma had just gone out. He cried aloud, wept, fainted, but she did not return. Where could she be? He sent Felicite to Homais, to Monsieur Tuvache, to Lheureux, to the "Lion d'Or," everywhere, and in the intervals of his agony he saw his reputation destroyed, their fortune lost, Berthe's future ruined. By what?--Not a word! He waited till six in the evening. At last, unable to bear it any longer, and fancying she had gone to Rouen, he set out along the highroad, walked a mile, met no one, again waited, and returned home. She had come back. "What was the matter? Why? Explain to me." She sat down at her writing-table and wrote a letter, which she sealed slowly, adding the date and the hour. Then she said in a solemn tone: "You are to read it to-morrow; till then, I pray you, do not ask me a single question. No, not one!" "But--" "Oh, leave me!" She lay down full length on her bed. A bitter taste that she felt in her mouth awakened her. She saw Charles, and again closed her eyes. She was studying herself curiously, to see if she were not suffering. But no! nothing as yet. She heard the ticking of the clock, the crackling of the fire, and Charles breathing as he stood upright by her bed. "Ah! it is but a little thing, death!" she thought. "I shall fall asleep and all will be over." She drank a mouthful of water and turned to the wall. The frightful taste of ink continued. "I am thirsty; oh! so thirsty," she sighed. "What is it?" said Charles, who was handing her a glass. "It is nothing! Open the window; I am choking." She was seized with a sickness so sudden that she had hardly time to draw out her handkerchief from under the pillow. "Take it away," she said quickly; "throw it away." He spoke to her; she did not answer. She lay motionless, afraid that the slightest movement might make her vomit. But she felt an icy cold creeping from her feet to her heart. "Ah! it is beginning," she murmured. "What did you say?" She turned her head from side to side with a gentle movement full of agony, while constantly opening her mouth as if something very heavy were weighing upon her tongue. At eight o'clock the vomiting began again. Charles noticed that at the bottom of the basin there was a sort of white sediment sticking to the sides of the porcelain. "This is extraordinary--very singular," he repeated. But she said in a firm voice, "No, you are mistaken." Then gently, and almost as caressing her, he passed his hand over her stomach. She uttered a sharp cry. He fell back terror-stricken. Then she began to groan, faintly at first. Her shoulders were shaken by a strong shuddering, and she was growing paler than the sheets in which her clenched fingers buried themselves. Her unequal pulse was now almost imperceptible. Drops of sweat oozed from her bluish face, that seemed as if rigid in the exhalations of a metallic vapour. Her teeth chattered, her dilated eyes looked vaguely about her, and to all questions she replied only with a shake of the head; she even smiled once or twice. Gradually, her moaning grew louder; a hollow shriek burst from her; she pretended she was better and that she would get up presently. But she was seized with convulsions and cried out-- "Ah! my God! It is horrible!" He threw himself on his knees by her bed. "Tell me! what have you eaten? Answer, for heaven's sake!" And he looked at her with a tenderness in his eyes such as she had never seen. "Well, there--there!" she said in a faint voice. He flew to the writing-table, tore open the seal, and read aloud: "Accuse no one." He stopped, passed his hands across his eyes, and read it over again. "What! help--help!" He could only keep repeating the word: "Poisoned! poisoned!" Felicite ran to Homais, who proclaimed it in the market-place; Madame Lefrancois heard it at the "Lion d'Or"; some got up to go and tell their neighbours, and all night the village was on the alert. Distraught, faltering, reeling, Charles wandered about the room. He knocked against the furniture, tore his hair, and the chemist had never believed that there could be so terrible a sight. He went home to write to Monsieur Canivet and to Doctor Lariviere. He lost his head, and made more than fifteen rough copies. Hippolyte went to Neufchatel, and Justin so spurred Bovary's horse that he left it foundered and three parts dead by the hill at Bois-Guillaume. Charles tried to look up his medical dictionary, but could not read it; the lines were dancing. "Be calm," said the druggist; "we have only to administer a powerful antidote. What is the poison?" Charles showed him the letter. It was arsenic. "Very well," said Homais, "we must make an analysis." For he knew that in cases of poisoning an analysis must be made; and the other, who did not understand, answered-- "Oh, do anything! save her!" Then going back to her, he sank upon the carpet, and lay there with his head leaning against the edge of her bed, sobbing. "Don't cry," she said to him. "Soon I shall not trouble you any more." "Why was it? Who drove you to it?" She replied. "It had to be, my dear!" "Weren't you happy? Is it my fault? I did all I could!" "Yes, that is true--you are good--you." And she passed her hand slowly over his hair. The sweetness of this sensation deepened his sadness; he felt his whole being dissolving in despair at the thought that he must lose her, just when she was confessing more love for him than ever. And he could think of nothing; he did not know, he did not dare; the urgent need for some immediate resolution gave the finishing stroke to the turmoil of his mind. So she had done, she thought, with all the treachery; and meanness, and numberless desires that had tortured her. She hated no one now; a twilight dimness was settling upon her thoughts, and, of all earthly noises, Emma heard none but the intermittent lamentations of this poor heart, sweet and indistinct like the echo of a symphony dying away. "Bring me the child," she said, raising herself on her elbow. "You are not worse, are you?" asked Charles. "No, no!" The child, serious, and still half-asleep, was carried in on the servant's arm in her long white nightgown, from which her bare feet peeped out. She looked wonderingly at the disordered room, and half-closed her eyes, dazzled by the candles burning on the table. They reminded her, no doubt, of the morning of New Year's day and Mid-Lent, when thus awakened early by candle-light she came to her mother's bed to fetch her presents, for she began saying-- "But where is it, mamma?" And as everybody was silent, "But I can't see my little stocking." Felicite held her over the bed while she still kept looking towards the mantelpiece. "Has nurse taken it?" she asked. And at this name, that carried her back to the memory of her adulteries and her calamities, Madame Bovary turned away her head, as at the loathing of another bitterer poison that rose to her mouth. But Berthe remained perched on the bed. "Oh, how big your eyes are, mamma! How pale you are! how hot you are!" Her mother looked at her. "I am frightened!" cried the child, recoiling. Emma took her hand to kiss it; the child struggled. "That will do. Take her away," cried Charles, who was sobbing in the alcove. Then the symptoms ceased for a moment; she seemed less agitated; and at every insignificant word, at every respiration a little more easy, he regained hope. At last, when Canivet came in, he threw himself into his arms. "Ah! it is you. Thanks! You are good! But she is better. See! look at her." His colleague was by no means of this opinion, and, as he said of himself, "never beating about the bush," he prescribed, an emetic in order to empty the stomach completely. She soon began vomiting blood. Her lips became drawn. Her limbs were convulsed, her whole body covered with brown spots, and her pulse slipped beneath the fingers like a stretched thread, like a harp-string nearly breaking. After this she began to scream horribly. She cursed the poison, railed at it, and implored it to be quick, and thrust away with her stiffened arms everything that Charles, in more agony than herself, tried to make her drink. He stood up, his handkerchief to his lips, with a rattling sound in his throat, weeping, and choked by sobs that shook his whole body. Felicite was running hither and thither in the room. Homais, motionless, uttered great sighs; and Monsieur Canivet, always retaining his self-command, nevertheless began to feel uneasy. "The devil! yet she has been purged, and from the moment that the cause ceases--" "The effect must cease," said Homais, "that is evident." "Oh, save her!" cried Bovary. And, without listening to the chemist, who was still venturing the hypothesis, "It is perhaps a salutary paroxysm," Canivet was about to administer some theriac, when they heard the cracking of a whip; all the windows rattled, and a post-chaise drawn by three horses abreast, up to their ears in mud, drove at a gallop round the corner of the market. It was Doctor Lariviere. The apparition of a god would not have caused more commotion. Bovary raised his hands; Canivet stopped short; and Homais pulled off his skull-cap long before the doctor had come in. He belonged to that great school of surgery begotten of Bichat, to that generation, now extinct, of philosophical practitioners, who, loving their art with a fanatical love, exercised it with enthusiasm and wisdom. Everyone in his hospital trembled when he was angry; and his students so revered him that they tried, as soon as they were themselves in practice, to imitate him as much as possible. So that in all the towns about they were found wearing his long wadded merino overcoat and black frock-coat, whose buttoned cuffs slightly covered his brawny hands--very beautiful hands, and that never knew gloves, as though to be more ready to plunge into suffering. Disdainful of honours, of titles, and of academies, like one of the old Knight-Hospitallers, generous, fatherly to the poor, and practising virtue without believing in it, he would almost have passed for a saint if the keenness of his intellect had not caused him to be feared as a demon. His glance, more penetrating than his bistouries, looked straight into your soul, and dissected every lie athwart all assertions and all reticences. And thus he went along, full of that debonair majesty that is given by the consciousness of great talent, of fortune, and of forty years of a labourious and irreproachable life. He frowned as soon as he had passed the door when he saw the cadaverous face of Emma stretched out on her back with her mouth open. Then, while apparently listening to Canivet, he rubbed his fingers up and down beneath his nostrils, and repeated-- "Good! good!" But he made a slow gesture with his shoulders. Bovary watched him; they looked at one another; and this man, accustomed as he was to the sight of pain, could not keep back a tear that fell on his shirt-frill. He tried to take Canivet into the next room. Charles followed him. "She is very ill, isn't she? If we put on sinapisms? Anything! Oh, think of something, you who have saved so many!" Charles caught him in both his arms, and gazed at him wildly, imploringly, half-fainting against his breast. "Come, my poor fellow, courage! There is nothing more to be done." And Doctor Lariviere turned away. "You are going?" "I will come back." He went out only to give an order to the coachman, with Monsieur Canivet, who did not care either to have Emma die under his hands. The chemist rejoined them on the Place. He could not by temperament keep away from celebrities, so he begged Monsieur Lariviere to do him the signal honour of accepting some breakfast. He sent quickly to the "Lion d'Or" for some pigeons; to the butcher's for all the cutlets that were to be had; to Tuvache for cream; and to Lestiboudois for eggs; and the druggist himself aided in the preparations, while Madame Homais was saying as she pulled together the strings of her jacket-- "You must excuse us, sir, for in this poor place, when one hasn't been told the night before--" "Wine glasses!" whispered Homais. "If only we were in town, we could fall back upon stuffed trotters." "Be quiet! Sit down, doctor!" He thought fit, after the first few mouthfuls, to give some details as to the catastrophe. "We first had a feeling of siccity in the pharynx, then intolerable pains at the epigastrium, super purgation, coma." "But how did she poison herself?" "I don't know, doctor, and I don't even know where she can have procured the arsenious acid." Justin, who was just bringing in a pile of plates, began to tremble. "What's the matter?" said the chemist. At this question the young man dropped the whole lot on the ground with a crash. "Imbecile!" cried Homais, "awkward lout! block-head! confounded ass!" But suddenly controlling himself-- "I wished, doctor, to make an analysis, and primo I delicately introduced a tube--" "You would have done better," said the physician, "to introduce your fingers into her throat." His colleague was silent, having just before privately received a severe lecture about his emetic, so that this good Canivet, so arrogant and so verbose at the time of the clubfoot, was to-day very modest. He smiled without ceasing in an approving manner. Homais dilated in Amphytrionic pride, and the affecting thought of Bovary vaguely contributed to his pleasure by a kind of egotistic reflex upon himself. Then the presence of the doctor transported him. He displayed his erudition, cited pell-mell cantharides, upas, the manchineel, vipers. "I have even read that various persons have found themselves under toxicological symptoms, and, as it were, thunderstricken by black-pudding that had been subjected to a too vehement fumigation. At least, this was stated in a very fine report drawn up by one of our pharmaceutical chiefs, one of our masters, the illustrious Cadet de Gassicourt!" Madame Homais reappeared, carrying one of those shaky machines that are heated with spirits of wine; for Homais liked to make his coffee at table, having, moreover, torrefied it, pulverised it, and mixed it himself. "Saccharum, doctor?" said he, offering the sugar. Then he had all his children brought down, anxious to have the physician's opinion on their constitutions. At last Monsieur Lariviere was about to leave, when Madame Homais asked for a consultation about her husband. He was making his blood too thick by going to sleep every evening after dinner. "Oh, it isn't his blood that's too thick," said the physician. And, smiling a little at his unnoticed joke, the doctor opened the door. But the chemist's shop was full of people; he had the greatest difficulty in getting rid of Monsieur Tuvache, who feared his spouse would get inflammation of the lungs, because she was in the habit of spitting on the ashes; then of Monsieur Binet, who sometimes experienced sudden attacks of great hunger; and of Madame Caron, who suffered from tinglings; of Lheureux, who had vertigo; of Lestiboudois, who had rheumatism; and of Madame Lefrancois, who had heartburn. At last the three horses started; and it was the general opinion that he had not shown himself at all obliging. Public attention was distracted by the appearance of Monsieur Bournisien, who was going across the market with the holy oil. Homais, as was due to his principles, compared priests to ravens attracted by the odour of death. The sight of an ecclesiastic was personally disagreeable to him, for the cassock made him think of the shroud, and he detested the one from some fear of the other. Nevertheless, not shrinking from what he called his mission, he returned to Bovary's in company with Canivet whom Monsieur Lariviere, before leaving, had strongly urged to make this visit; and he would, but for his wife's objections, have taken his two sons with him, in order to accustom them to great occasions; that this might be a lesson, an example, a solemn picture, that should remain in their heads later on. The room when they went in was full of mournful solemnity. On the work-table, covered over with a white cloth, there were five or six small balls of cotton in a silver dish, near a large crucifix between two lighted candles. Emma, her chin sunken upon her breast, had her eyes inordinately wide open, and her poor hands wandered over the sheets with that hideous and soft movement of the dying, that seems as if they wanted already to cover themselves with the shroud. Pale as a statue and with eyes red as fire, Charles, not weeping, stood opposite her at the foot of the bed, while the priest, bending one knee, was muttering words in a low voice. She turned her face slowly, and seemed filled with joy on seeing suddenly the violet stole, no doubt finding again, in the midst of a temporary lull in her pain, the lost voluptuousness of her first mystical transports, with the visions of eternal beatitude that were beginning. The priest rose to take the crucifix; then she stretched forward her neck as one who is athirst, and glueing her lips to the body of the Man-God, she pressed upon it with all her expiring strength the fullest kiss of love that she had ever given. Then he recited the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began to give extreme unction. First upon the eyes, that had so coveted all worldly pomp; then upon the nostrils, that had been greedy of the warm breeze and amorous odours; then upon the mouth, that had uttered lies, that had curled with pride and cried out in lewdness; then upon the hands that had delighted in sensual touches; and finally upon the soles of the feet, so swift of yore, when she was running to satisfy her desires, and that would now walk no more. The cure wiped his fingers, threw the bit of cotton dipped in oil into the fire, and came and sat down by the dying woman, to tell her that she must now blend her sufferings with those of Jesus Christ and abandon herself to the divine mercy. Finishing his exhortations, he tried to place in her hand a blessed candle, symbol of the celestial glory with which she was soon to be surrounded. Emma, too weak, could not close her fingers, and the taper, but for Monsieur Bournisien would have fallen to the ground. However, she was not quite so pale, and her face had an expression of serenity as if the sacrament had cured her. The priest did not fail to point this out; he even explained to Bovary that the Lord sometimes prolonged the life of persons when he thought it meet for their salvation; and Charles remembered the day when, so near death, she had received the communion. Perhaps there was no need to despair, he thought. In fact, she looked around her slowly, as one awakening from a dream; then in a distinct voice she asked for her looking-glass, and remained some time bending over it, until the big tears fell from her eyes. Then she turned away her head with a sigh and fell back upon the pillows. Her chest soon began panting rapidly; the whole of her tongue protruded from her mouth; her eyes, as they rolled, grew paler, like the two globes of a lamp that is going out, so that one might have thought her already dead but for the fearful labouring of her ribs, shaken by violent breathing, as if the soul were struggling to free itself. Felicite knelt down before the crucifix, and the druggist himself slightly bent his knees, while Monsieur Canivet looked out vaguely at the Place. Bournisien had again begun to pray, his face bowed against the edge of the bed, his long black cassock trailing behind him in the room. Charles was on the other side, on his knees, his arms outstretched towards Emma. He had taken her hands and pressed them, shuddering at every beat of her heart, as at the shaking of a falling ruin. As the death-rattle became stronger the priest prayed faster; his prayers mingled with the stifled sobs of Bovary, and sometimes all seemed lost in the muffled murmur of the Latin syllables that tolled like a passing bell. Suddenly on the pavement was heard a loud noise of clogs and the clattering of a stick; and a voice rose--a raucous voice--that sang-- "Maids in the warmth of a summer day Dream of love and of love always" Emma raised herself like a galvanised corpse, her hair undone, her eyes fixed, staring. "Where the sickle blades have been, Nannette, gathering ears of corn, Passes bending down, my queen, To the earth where they were born." "The blind man!" she cried. And Emma began to laugh, an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh, thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor wretch that stood out against the eternal night like a menace. "The wind is strong this summer day, Her petticoat has flown away." She fell back upon the mattress in a convulsion. They all drew near. She was dead.

part 3, Chapter 8

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter7-9

She finds Rodolphe alone in the mansion. He apologizes for his past treatment of her and she tells him that she has suffered a great deal. He sees her sorrow and he caresses her. He reaffirms his love and begs to know what is wrong. She explains that a notary has absconded with all of her husband's money and they are to be ruined. She asks him to loan her 3,000 francs. Rodolphe turns pale and explains that he doesn't have the money. She accuses him of destroying her and mocks the richness of his supposed poverty by pointing out the expensive items in the room. He persists in his refusal and she staggers away. Night is falling and she feels herself slipping into madness. She sees the lights of her house and then, acquiring a new resolve, goes instead to the pharmacy and convinces Justin to let her into the lab where Homais keeps his arsenic. Justin is horrified when Madame Bovary seizes a great handful of the white powder and swallows it. She swears him to silence and then returns home

novelguide

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finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_12_part_3.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 9

part 3, chapter 9

{"name": "part 3, Chapter 9", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter7-9", "summary": "She arrives to find Charles worried for her safety and depressed about their financial ruin. Ignoring his questions she writes a letter, seals it and, telling him not to read it until the following day, lies down upon her bed and waits to die. She vomits, feels chills and experiences sharp pains. Charles pleads with her to tell him what she's eaten and seeing the love in his eyes she finally points to the letter. When Charles reads that she has poisoned herself he becomes wild with anguish. He sends for Homais who arrives to find Bovary out of his mind with worry. Homais writes letters to Monsieur Cavinet and Doctor Lariviere. Emma calls for her little girl who is frightened by the sight of her sick mother. Cavinet arrives and Charles begs him to save his wife. He prescribes an emetic and soon she is vomiting blood. Soon the celebrated Doctor Lariviere arrives and seeing Emma pulls Charles aside tells him that nothing can be done. Not wishing to see Emma die, Cavinet and Lariviere leave the room and Homais hurries after them in order to invite them to lunch. Before he can leave the town Lariviere is forced to suffer through a meal with Homais and then he is besieged by the townspeople and their complaints of illness. Homais and Cavinet, seeing the priest enter the Bovary house, return to witness the end. In her delirium Emma is pleased to see the priest and implants a passionate kiss on the crucifix. The abbs performs communion and Emma's face acquires a peaceful countenance. Suddenly she begins to breathe rapidly in the throes of death. As she suffers Emma hears the sound of the beggar from Rouen, who has come to Yonville seeking Homais' cure, singing a song that ends with the couplet:. The wind blew very hard that day. And snatched her petticoat away. Emma sits upright and calls out \"The blind man. before collapsing dead.", "analysis": "Although Emma is disgusted by the notary's advances and the suggestion that he would give her money in exchange for sexual favors as her desperation rises she does not balk at making advances to Binet and then expecting certain help from Rodolphe in exchange for sex. Her interior world of idealized romance has been corrupted to prostitution by the demands of the real. Significantly, her downfall is predicated not by her extra-marital affairs but by her reckless spending and lack of bourgeois discipline with money. While she is dying, Emma shows genuine affection for Charles. She is able to do this because, by taking the poison she is simply able to perceive his devotion free of her own desires. The blind man arrives on the scene in time for Emma's death. His presence in the novel is something of a homage to the romantic novels of the early nineteenth century and the medieval wisdom of his song - in which love and death coexist - is appropriate for Emma's departure. The figure of Doctor Lariviere is modeled after Flaubert's father who was a physician in Rouen"}

There is always after the death of anyone a kind of stupefaction; so difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign ourselves to believe in it. But still, when he saw that she did not move, Charles threw himself upon her, crying-- "Farewell! farewell!" Homais and Canivet dragged him from the room. "Restrain yourself!" "Yes." said he, struggling, "I'll be quiet. I'll not do anything. But leave me alone. I want to see her. She is my wife!" And he wept. "Cry," said the chemist; "let nature take her course; that will solace you." Weaker than a child, Charles let himself be led downstairs into the sitting-room, and Monsieur Homais soon went home. On the Place he was accosted by the blind man, who, having dragged himself as far as Yonville, in the hope of getting the antiphlogistic pomade, was asking every passer-by where the druggist lived. "There now! as if I hadn't got other fish to fry. Well, so much the worse; you must come later on." And he entered the shop hurriedly. He had to write two letters, to prepare a soothing potion for Bovary, to invent some lie that would conceal the poisoning, and work it up into an article for the "Fanal," without counting the people who were waiting to get the news from him; and when the Yonvillers had all heard his story of the arsenic that she had mistaken for sugar in making a vanilla cream. Homais once more returned to Bovary's. He found him alone (Monsieur Canivet had left), sitting in an arm-chair near the window, staring with an idiotic look at the flags of the floor. "Now," said the chemist, "you ought yourself to fix the hour for the ceremony." "Why? What ceremony?" Then, in a stammering, frightened voice, "Oh, no! not that. No! I want to see her here." Homais, to keep himself in countenance, took up a water-bottle on the whatnot to water the geraniums. "Ah! thanks," said Charles; "you are good." But he did not finish, choking beneath the crowd of memories that this action of the druggist recalled to him. Then to distract him, Homais thought fit to talk a little horticulture: plants wanted humidity. Charles bowed his head in sign of approbation. "Besides, the fine days will soon be here again." "Ah!" said Bovary. The druggist, at his wit's end, began softly to draw aside the small window-curtain. "Hallo! there's Monsieur Tuvache passing." Charles repeated like a machine--- "Monsieur Tuvache passing!" Homais did not dare to speak to him again about the funeral arrangements; it was the priest who succeeded in reconciling him to them. He shut himself up in his consulting-room, took a pen, and after sobbing for some time, wrote-- "I wish her to be buried in her wedding-dress, with white shoes, and a wreath. Her hair is to be spread out over her shoulders. Three coffins, one of oak, one of mahogany, one of lead. Let no one say anything to me. I shall have strength. Over all there is to be placed a large piece of green velvet. This is my wish; see that it is done." The two men were much surprised at Bovary's romantic ideas. The chemist at once went to him and said-- "This velvet seems to me a superfetation. Besides, the expense--" "What's that to you?" cried Charles. "Leave me! You did not love her. Go!" The priest took him by the arm for a turn in the garden. He discoursed on the vanity of earthly things. God was very great, was very good: one must submit to his decrees without a murmur; nay, must even thank him. Charles burst out into blasphemies: "I hate your God!" "The spirit of rebellion is still upon you," sighed the ecclesiastic. Bovary was far away. He was walking with great strides along by the wall, near the espalier, and he ground his teeth; he raised to heaven looks of malediction, but not so much as a leaf stirred. A fine rain was falling: Charles, whose chest was bare, at last began to shiver; he went in and sat down in the kitchen. At six o'clock a noise like a clatter of old iron was heard on the Place; it was the "Hirondelle" coming in, and he remained with his forehead against the windowpane, watching all the passengers get out, one after the other. Felicite put down a mattress for him in the drawing-room. He threw himself upon it and fell asleep. Although a philosopher, Monsieur Homais respected the dead. So bearing no grudge to poor Charles, he came back again in the evening to sit up with the body; bringing with him three volumes and a pocket-book for taking notes. Monsieur Bournisien was there, and two large candles were burning at the head of the bed, that had been taken out of the alcove. The druggist, on whom the silence weighed, was not long before he began formulating some regrets about this "unfortunate young woman." and the priest replied that there was nothing to do now but pray for her. "Yet," Homais went on, "one of two things; either she died in a state of grace (as the Church has it), and then she has no need of our prayers; or else she departed impertinent (that is, I believe, the ecclesiastical expression), and then--" Bournisien interrupted him, replying testily that it was none the less necessary to pray. "But," objected the chemist, "since God knows all our needs, what can be the good of prayer?" "What!" cried the ecclesiastic, "prayer! Why, aren't you a Christian?" "Excuse me," said Homais; "I admire Christianity. To begin with, it enfranchised the slaves, introduced into the world a morality--" "That isn't the question. All the texts-" "Oh! oh! As to texts, look at history; it, is known that all the texts have been falsified by the Jesuits." Charles came in, and advancing towards the bed, slowly drew the curtains. Emma's head was turned towards her right shoulder, the corner of her mouth, which was open, seemed like a black hole at the lower part of her face; her two thumbs were bent into the palms of her hands; a kind of white dust besprinkled her lashes, and her eyes were beginning to disappear in that viscous pallor that looks like a thin web, as if spiders had spun it over. The sheet sunk in from her breast to her knees, and then rose at the tips of her toes, and it seemed to Charles that infinite masses, an enormous load, were weighing upon her. The church clock struck two. They could hear the loud murmur of the river flowing in the darkness at the foot of the terrace. Monsieur Bournisien from time to time blew his nose noisily, and Homais' pen was scratching over the paper. "Come, my good friend," he said, "withdraw; this spectacle is tearing you to pieces." Charles once gone, the chemist and the cure recommenced their discussions. "Read Voltaire," said the one, "read D'Holbach, read the 'Encyclopaedia'!" "Read the 'Letters of some Portuguese Jews,'" said the other; "read 'The Meaning of Christianity,' by Nicolas, formerly a magistrate." They grew warm, they grew red, they both talked at once without listening to each other. Bournisien was scandalized at such audacity; Homais marvelled at such stupidity; and they were on the point of insulting one another when Charles suddenly reappeared. A fascination drew him. He was continually coming upstairs. He stood opposite her, the better to see her, and he lost himself in a contemplation so deep that it was no longer painful. He recalled stories of catalepsy, the marvels of magnetism, and he said to himself that by willing it with all his force he might perhaps succeed in reviving her. Once he even bent towards he, and cried in a low voice, "Emma! Emma!" His strong breathing made the flames of the candles tremble against the wall. At daybreak Madame Bovary senior arrived. Charles as he embraced her burst into another flood of tears. She tried, as the chemist had done, to make some remarks to him on the expenses of the funeral. He became so angry that she was silent, and he even commissioned her to go to town at once and buy what was necessary. Charles remained alone the whole afternoon; they had taken Berthe to Madame Homais'; Felicite was in the room upstairs with Madame Lefrancois. In the evening he had some visitors. He rose, pressed their hands, unable to speak. Then they sat down near one another, and formed a large semicircle in front of the fire. With lowered faces, and swinging one leg crossed over the other knee, they uttered deep sighs at intervals; each one was inordinately bored, and yet none would be the first to go. Homais, when he returned at nine o'clock (for the last two days only Homais seemed to have been on the Place), was laden with a stock of camphor, of benzine, and aromatic herbs. He also carried a large jar full of chlorine water, to keep off all miasmata. Just then the servant, Madame Lefrancois, and Madame Bovary senior were busy about Emma, finishing dressing her, and they were drawing down the long stiff veil that covered her to her satin shoes. Felicite was sobbing--"Ah! my poor mistress! my poor mistress!" "Look at her," said the landlady, sighing; "how pretty she still is! Now, couldn't you swear she was going to get up in a minute?" Then they bent over her to put on her wreath. They had to raise the head a little, and a rush of black liquid issued, as if she were vomiting, from her mouth. "Oh, goodness! The dress; take care!" cried Madame Lefrancois. "Now, just come and help," she said to the chemist. "Perhaps you're afraid?" "I afraid?" replied he, shrugging his shoulders. "I dare say! I've seen all sorts of things at the hospital when I was studying pharmacy. We used to make punch in the dissecting room! Nothingness does not terrify a philosopher; and, as I often say, I even intend to leave my body to the hospitals, in order, later on, to serve science." The cure on his arrival inquired how Monsieur Bovary was, and, on the reply of the druggist, went on--"The blow, you see, is still too recent." Then Homais congratulated him on not being exposed, like other people, to the loss of a beloved companion; whence there followed a discussion on the celibacy of priests. "For," said the chemist, "it is unnatural that a man should do without women! There have been crimes--" "But, good heaven!" cried the ecclesiastic, "how do you expect an individual who is married to keep the secrets of the confessional, for example?" Homais fell foul of the confessional. Bournisien defended it; he enlarged on the acts of restitution that it brought about. He cited various anecdotes about thieves who had suddenly become honest. Military men on approaching the tribunal of penitence had felt the scales fall from their eyes. At Fribourg there was a minister-- His companion was asleep. Then he felt somewhat stifled by the over-heavy atmosphere of the room; he opened the window; this awoke the chemist. "Come, take a pinch of snuff," he said to him. "Take it; it'll relieve you." A continual barking was heard in the distance. "Do you hear that dog howling?" said the chemist. "They smell the dead," replied the priest. "It's like bees; they leave their hives on the decease of any person." Homais made no remark upon these prejudices, for he had again dropped asleep. Monsieur Bournisien, stronger than he, went on moving his lips gently for some time, then insensibly his chin sank down, he let fall his big black boot, and began to snore. They sat opposite one another, with protruding stomachs, puffed-up faces, and frowning looks, after so much disagreement uniting at last in the same human weakness, and they moved no more than the corpse by their side, that seemed to be sleeping. Charles coming in did not wake them. It was the last time; he came to bid her farewell. The aromatic herbs were still smoking, and spirals of bluish vapour blended at the window-sash with the fog that was coming in. There were few stars, and the night was warm. The wax of the candles fell in great drops upon the sheets of the bed. Charles watched them burn, tiring his eyes against the glare of their yellow flame. The watering on the satin gown shimmered white as moonlight. Emma was lost beneath it; and it seemed to him that, spreading beyond her own self, she blended confusedly with everything around her--the silence, the night, the passing wind, the damp odours rising from the ground. Then suddenly he saw her in the garden at Tostes, on a bench against the thorn hedge, or else at Rouen in the streets, on the threshold of their house, in the yard at Bertaux. He again heard the laughter of the happy boys beneath the apple-trees: the room was filled with the perfume of her hair; and her dress rustled in his arms with a noise like electricity. The dress was still the same. For a long while he thus recalled all his lost joys, her attitudes, her movements, the sound of her voice. Upon one fit of despair followed another, and even others, inexhaustible as the waves of an overflowing sea. A terrible curiosity seized him. Slowly, with the tips of his fingers, palpitating, he lifted her veil. But he uttered a cry of horror that awoke the other two. They dragged him down into the sitting-room. Then Felicite came up to say that he wanted some of her hair. "Cut some off," replied the druggist. And as she did not dare to, he himself stepped forward, scissors in hand. He trembled so that he pierced the skin of the temple in several places. At last, stiffening himself against emotion, Homais gave two or three great cuts at random that left white patches amongst that beautiful black hair. The chemist and the cure plunged anew into their occupations, not without sleeping from time to time, of which they accused each other reciprocally at each fresh awakening. Then Monsieur Bournisien sprinkled the room with holy water and Homais threw a little chlorine water on the floor. Felicite had taken care to put on the chest of drawers, for each of them, a bottle of brandy, some cheese, and a large roll. And the druggist, who could not hold out any longer, about four in the morning sighed-- "My word! I should like to take some sustenance." The priest did not need any persuading; he went out to go and say mass, came back, and then they ate and hobnobbed, giggling a little without knowing why, stimulated by that vague gaiety that comes upon us after times of sadness, and at the last glass the priest said to the druggist, as he clapped him on the shoulder-- "We shall end by understanding one another." In the passage downstairs they met the undertaker's men, who were coming in. Then Charles for two hours had to suffer the torture of hearing the hammer resound against the wood. Next day they lowered her into her oak coffin, that was fitted into the other two; but as the bier was too large, they had to fill up the gaps with the wool of a mattress. At last, when the three lids had been planed down, nailed, soldered, it was placed outside in front of the door; the house was thrown open, and the people of Yonville began to flock round. Old Rouault arrived, and fainted on the Place when he saw the black cloth!

part 3, Chapter 9

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter7-9

She arrives to find Charles worried for her safety and depressed about their financial ruin. Ignoring his questions she writes a letter, seals it and, telling him not to read it until the following day, lies down upon her bed and waits to die. She vomits, feels chills and experiences sharp pains. Charles pleads with her to tell him what she's eaten and seeing the love in his eyes she finally points to the letter. When Charles reads that she has poisoned herself he becomes wild with anguish. He sends for Homais who arrives to find Bovary out of his mind with worry. Homais writes letters to Monsieur Cavinet and Doctor Lariviere. Emma calls for her little girl who is frightened by the sight of her sick mother. Cavinet arrives and Charles begs him to save his wife. He prescribes an emetic and soon she is vomiting blood. Soon the celebrated Doctor Lariviere arrives and seeing Emma pulls Charles aside tells him that nothing can be done. Not wishing to see Emma die, Cavinet and Lariviere leave the room and Homais hurries after them in order to invite them to lunch. Before he can leave the town Lariviere is forced to suffer through a meal with Homais and then he is besieged by the townspeople and their complaints of illness. Homais and Cavinet, seeing the priest enter the Bovary house, return to witness the end. In her delirium Emma is pleased to see the priest and implants a passionate kiss on the crucifix. The abbs performs communion and Emma's face acquires a peaceful countenance. Suddenly she begins to breathe rapidly in the throes of death. As she suffers Emma hears the sound of the beggar from Rouen, who has come to Yonville seeking Homais' cure, singing a song that ends with the couplet:. The wind blew very hard that day. And snatched her petticoat away. Emma sits upright and calls out "The blind man. before collapsing dead.

Although Emma is disgusted by the notary's advances and the suggestion that he would give her money in exchange for sexual favors as her desperation rises she does not balk at making advances to Binet and then expecting certain help from Rodolphe in exchange for sex. Her interior world of idealized romance has been corrupted to prostitution by the demands of the real. Significantly, her downfall is predicated not by her extra-marital affairs but by her reckless spending and lack of bourgeois discipline with money. While she is dying, Emma shows genuine affection for Charles. She is able to do this because, by taking the poison she is simply able to perceive his devotion free of her own desires. The blind man arrives on the scene in time for Emma's death. His presence in the novel is something of a homage to the romantic novels of the early nineteenth century and the medieval wisdom of his song - in which love and death coexist - is appropriate for Emma's departure. The figure of Doctor Lariviere is modeled after Flaubert's father who was a physician in Rouen

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/34.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_13_part_1.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 10

part 3, chapter 10

{"name": "part 3, Chapter 10", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter10-12", "summary": "Charles dissolves into tears. Homais returns to the pharmacy, puts off the blind man and tells the gathered crowd that Madame Bovary died of accidental poisoning. Initially resistant, Charles finally agrees to order the funeral arrangements. Against the advice of Homais and his mother, he insists that Emma be buried expensively in three coffins and with a velvet cover. That night Monsieur Homais and Monsieur Bournisien sit with the corpse and engage in a spirited argument concerning the efficacy of religion. Charles, who cannot stay away from his dead wife, interrupts them. The next night the townfolk call on Monsieur Bovary to offer condolences and Madame Lefranois and the elder Madame Bovary prepare the body for burial. That night Homais and the priest continue their vigil and their argument but eventually both men fall peacefully asleep. Charles comes to look upon his wife and screams when he lifts the veil. The priest and the pharmacist decide to partake of the brandy, cheese and bread left for them by Flicit and soon they are friendly. The coffin makers arrive and once Emma is secure inside the three coffins the doors of the house are opened to the town. Monsieur Rouault arrives and faints at the sight of the black cloth", "analysis": ""}

He had only received the chemist's letter thirty-six hours after the event; and, from consideration for his feelings, Homais had so worded it that it was impossible to make out what it was all about. First, the old fellow had fallen as if struck by apoplexy. Next, he understood that she was not dead, but she might be. At last, he had put on his blouse, taken his hat, fastened his spurs to his boots, and set out at full speed; and the whole of the way old Rouault, panting, was torn by anguish. Once even he was obliged to dismount. He was dizzy; he heard voices round about him; he felt himself going mad. Day broke. He saw three black hens asleep in a tree. He shuddered, horrified at this omen. Then he promised the Holy Virgin three chasubles for the church, and that he would go barefooted from the cemetery at Bertaux to the chapel of Vassonville. He entered Maromme shouting for the people of the inn, burst open the door with a thrust of his shoulder, made for a sack of oats, emptied a bottle of sweet cider into the manger, and again mounted his nag, whose feet struck fire as it dashed along. He said to himself that no doubt they would save her; the doctors would discover some remedy surely. He remembered all the miraculous cures he had been told about. Then she appeared to him dead. She was there; before his eyes, lying on her back in the middle of the road. He reined up, and the hallucination disappeared. At Quincampoix, to give himself heart, he drank three cups of coffee one after the other. He fancied they had made a mistake in the name in writing. He looked for the letter in his pocket, felt it there, but did not dare to open it. At last he began to think it was all a joke; someone's spite, the jest of some wag; and besides, if she were dead, one would have known it. But no! There was nothing extraordinary about the country; the sky was blue, the trees swayed; a flock of sheep passed. He saw the village; he was seen coming bending forward upon his horse, belabouring it with great blows, the girths dripping with blood. When he had recovered consciousness, he fell, weeping, into Bovary's arms: "My girl! Emma! my child! tell me--" The other replied, sobbing, "I don't know! I don't know! It's a curse!" The druggist separated them. "These horrible details are useless. I will tell this gentleman all about it. Here are the people coming. Dignity! Come now! Philosophy!" The poor fellow tried to show himself brave, and repeated several times. "Yes! courage!" "Oh," cried the old man, "so I will have, by God! I'll go along o' her to the end!" The bell began tolling. All was ready; they had to start. And seated in a stall of the choir, side by side, they saw pass and repass in front of them continually the three chanting choristers. The serpent-player was blowing with all his might. Monsieur Bournisien, in full vestments, was singing in a shrill voice. He bowed before the tabernacle, raising his hands, stretched out his arms. Lestiboudois went about the church with his whalebone stick. The bier stood near the lectern, between four rows of candles. Charles felt inclined to get up and put them out. Yet he tried to stir himself to a feeling of devotion, to throw himself into the hope of a future life in which he should see her again. He imagined to himself she had gone on a long journey, far away, for a long time. But when he thought of her lying there, and that all was over, that they would lay her in the earth, he was seized with a fierce, gloomy, despairful rage. At times he thought he felt nothing more, and he enjoyed this lull in his pain, whilst at the same time he reproached himself for being a wretch. The sharp noise of an iron-ferruled stick was heard on the stones, striking them at irregular intervals. It came from the end of the church, and stopped short at the lower aisles. A man in a coarse brown jacket knelt down painfully. It was Hippolyte, the stable-boy at the "Lion d'Or." He had put on his new leg. One of the choristers went round the nave making a collection, and the coppers chinked one after the other on the silver plate. "Oh, make haste! I am in pain!" cried Bovary, angrily throwing him a five-franc piece. The churchman thanked him with a deep bow. They sang, they knelt, they stood up; it was endless! He remembered that once, in the early times, they had been to mass together, and they had sat down on the other side, on the right, by the wall. The bell began again. There was a great moving of chairs; the bearers slipped their three staves under the coffin, and everyone left the church. Then Justin appeared at the door of the shop. He suddenly went in again, pale, staggering. People were at the windows to see the procession pass. Charles at the head walked erect. He affected a brave air, and saluted with a nod those who, coming out from the lanes or from their doors, stood amidst the crowd. The six men, three on either side, walked slowly, panting a little. The priests, the choristers, and the two choirboys recited the De profundis*, and their voices echoed over the fields, rising and falling with their undulations. Sometimes they disappeared in the windings of the path; but the great silver cross rose always before the trees. *Psalm CXXX. The women followed in black cloaks with turned-down hoods; each of them carried in her hands a large lighted candle, and Charles felt himself growing weaker at this continual repetition of prayers and torches, beneath this oppressive odour of wax and of cassocks. A fresh breeze was blowing; the rye and colza were sprouting, little dewdrops trembled at the roadsides and on the hawthorn hedges. All sorts of joyous sounds filled the air; the jolting of a cart rolling afar off in the ruts, the crowing of a cock, repeated again and again, or the gambling of a foal running away under the apple-trees: The pure sky was fretted with rosy clouds; a bluish haze rested upon the cots covered with iris. Charles as he passed recognised each courtyard. He remembered mornings like this, when, after visiting some patient, he came out from one and returned to her. The black cloth bestrewn with white beads blew up from time to time, laying bare the coffin. The tired bearers walked more slowly, and it advanced with constant jerks, like a boat that pitches with every wave. They reached the cemetery. The men went right down to a place in the grass where a grave was dug. They ranged themselves all round; and while the priest spoke, the red soil thrown up at the sides kept noiselessly slipping down at the corners. Then when the four ropes were arranged the coffin was placed upon them. He watched it descend; it seemed descending for ever. At last a thud was heard; the ropes creaked as they were drawn up. Then Bournisien took the spade handed to him by Lestiboudois; with his left hand all the time sprinkling water, with the right he vigorously threw in a large spadeful; and the wood of the coffin, struck by the pebbles, gave forth that dread sound that seems to us the reverberation of eternity. The ecclesiastic passed the holy water sprinkler to his neighbour. This was Homais. He swung it gravely, then handed it to Charles, who sank to his knees in the earth and threw in handfuls of it, crying, "Adieu!" He sent her kisses; he dragged himself towards the grave, to engulf himself with her. They led him away, and he soon grew calmer, feeling perhaps, like the others, a vague satisfaction that it was all over. Old Rouault on his way back began quietly smoking a pipe, which Homais in his innermost conscience thought not quite the thing. He also noticed that Monsieur Binet had not been present, and that Tuvache had "made off" after mass, and that Theodore, the notary's servant wore a blue coat, "as if one could not have got a black coat, since that is the custom, by Jove!" And to share his observations with others he went from group to group. They were deploring Emma's death, especially Lheureux, who had not failed to come to the funeral. "Poor little woman! What a trouble for her husband!" The druggist continued, "Do you know that but for me he would have committed some fatal attempt upon himself?" "Such a good woman! To think that I saw her only last Saturday in my shop." "I haven't had leisure," said Homais, "to prepare a few words that I would have cast upon her tomb." Charles on getting home undressed, and old Rouault put on his blue blouse. It was a new one, and as he had often during the journey wiped his eyes on the sleeves, the dye had stained his face, and the traces of tears made lines in the layer of dust that covered it. Madame Bovary senior was with them. All three were silent. At last the old fellow sighed-- "Do you remember, my friend, that I went to Tostes once when you had just lost your first deceased? I consoled you at that time. I thought of something to say then, but now--" Then, with a loud groan that shook his whole chest, "Ah! this is the end for me, do you see! I saw my wife go, then my son, and now to-day it's my daughter." He wanted to go back at once to Bertaux, saying that he could not sleep in this house. He even refused to see his granddaughter. "No, no! It would grieve me too much. Only you'll kiss her many times for me. Good-bye! you're a good fellow! And then I shall never forget that," he said, slapping his thigh. "Never fear, you shall always have your turkey." But when he reached the top of the hill he turned back, as he had turned once before on the road of Saint-Victor when he had parted from her. The windows of the village were all on fire beneath the slanting rays of the sun sinking behind the field. He put his hand over his eyes, and saw in the horizon an enclosure of walls, where trees here and there formed black clusters between white stones; then he went on his way at a gentle trot, for his nag had gone lame. Despite their fatigue, Charles and his mother stayed very long that evening talking together. They spoke of the days of the past and of the future. She would come to live at Yonville; she would keep house for him; they would never part again. She was ingenious and caressing, rejoicing in her heart at gaining once more an affection that had wandered from her for so many years. Midnight struck. The village as usual was silent, and Charles, awake, thought always of her. Rodolphe, who, to distract himself, had been rambling about the wood all day, was sleeping quietly in his chateau, and Leon, down yonder, always slept. There was another who at that hour was not asleep. On the grave between the pine-trees a child was on his knees weeping, and his heart, rent by sobs, was beating in the shadow beneath the load of an immense regret, sweeter than the moon and fathomless as the night. The gate suddenly grated. It was Lestiboudois; he came to fetch his spade, that he had forgotten. He recognised Justin climbing over the wall, and at last knew who was the culprit who stole his potatoes.

part 3, Chapter 10

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter10-12

Charles dissolves into tears. Homais returns to the pharmacy, puts off the blind man and tells the gathered crowd that Madame Bovary died of accidental poisoning. Initially resistant, Charles finally agrees to order the funeral arrangements. Against the advice of Homais and his mother, he insists that Emma be buried expensively in three coffins and with a velvet cover. That night Monsieur Homais and Monsieur Bournisien sit with the corpse and engage in a spirited argument concerning the efficacy of religion. Charles, who cannot stay away from his dead wife, interrupts them. The next night the townfolk call on Monsieur Bovary to offer condolences and Madame Lefranois and the elder Madame Bovary prepare the body for burial. That night Homais and the priest continue their vigil and their argument but eventually both men fall peacefully asleep. Charles comes to look upon his wife and screams when he lifts the veil. The priest and the pharmacist decide to partake of the brandy, cheese and bread left for them by Flicit and soon they are friendly. The coffin makers arrive and once Emma is secure inside the three coffins the doors of the house are opened to the town. Monsieur Rouault arrives and faints at the sight of the black cloth

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/35.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Madame Bovary/section_13_part_2.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 11

part 3, chapter 11

{"name": "part 3, Chapter 11", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter10-12", "summary": "Homais' letter to Monsieur Rouault had been too vague and the poor man had made the trip not knowing whether his daughter was alive or dead. When he regains consciousness he and Charles fall weeping into each other's arms and Homais tells them to pull themselves together for the funeral. Hippolyte attends wearing his good leg and Justin stands outside the church visibly pale and trembling. The congregation processes to the cemetery where the coffin is lowered into the ground and Charles must be restrained from pursuing his dead wife into the ground. Lheureux attends the funeral. Everyone seems visibly relieved when it is over. Monsieur Rouault immediately leaves for home. The narrator relates that Charles and his mother stayed awake late that night while the elder Madame Bovary made plans to come live with her son. Rodolphe slept well that night as did Lon but Justin was awake and weeping by Emma's grave", "analysis": ""}

The next day Charles had the child brought back. She asked for her mamma. They told her she was away; that she would bring her back some playthings. Berthe spoke of her again several times, then at last thought no more of her. The child's gaiety broke Bovary's heart, and he had to bear besides the intolerable consolations of the chemist. Money troubles soon began again, Monsieur Lheureux urging on anew his friend Vincart, and Charles pledged himself for exorbitant sums; for he would never consent to let the smallest of the things that had belonged to HER be sold. His mother was exasperated with him; he grew even more angry than she did. He had altogether changed. She left the house. Then everyone began "taking advantage" of him. Mademoiselle Lempereur presented a bill for six months' teaching, although Emma had never taken a lesson (despite the receipted bill she had shown Bovary); it was an arrangement between the two women. The man at the circulating library demanded three years' subscriptions; Mere Rollet claimed the postage due for some twenty letters, and when Charles asked for an explanation, she had the delicacy to reply-- "Oh, I don't know. It was for her business affairs." With every debt he paid Charles thought he had come to the end of them. But others followed ceaselessly. He sent in accounts for professional attendance. He was shown the letters his wife had written. Then he had to apologise. Felicite now wore Madame Bovary's gowns; not all, for he had kept some of them, and he went to look at them in her dressing-room, locking himself up there; she was about her height, and often Charles, seeing her from behind, was seized with an illusion, and cried out-- "Oh, stay, stay!" But at Whitsuntide she ran away from Yonville, carried off by Theodore, stealing all that was left of the wardrobe. It was about this time that the widow Dupuis had the honour to inform him of the "marriage of Monsieur Leon Dupuis her son, notary at Yvetot, to Mademoiselle Leocadie Leboeuf of Bondeville." Charles, among the other congratulations he sent him, wrote this sentence-- "How glad my poor wife would have been!" One day when, wandering aimlessly about the house, he had gone up to the attic, he felt a pellet of fine paper under his slipper. He opened it and read: "Courage, Emma, courage. I would not bring misery into your life." It was Rodolphe's letter, fallen to the ground between the boxes, where it had remained, and that the wind from the dormer window had just blown towards the door. And Charles stood, motionless and staring, in the very same place where, long ago, Emma, in despair, and paler even than he, had thought of dying. At last he discovered a small R at the bottom of the second page. What did this mean? He remembered Rodolphe's attentions, his sudden, disappearance, his constrained air when they had met two or three times since. But the respectful tone of the letter deceived him. "Perhaps they loved one another platonically," he said to himself. Besides, Charles was not of those who go to the bottom of things; he shrank from the proofs, and his vague jealousy was lost in the immensity of his woe. Everyone, he thought, must have adored her; all men assuredly must have coveted her. She seemed but the more beautiful to him for this; he was seized with a lasting, furious desire for her, that inflamed his despair, and that was boundless, because it was now unrealisable. To please her, as if she were still living, he adopted her predilections, her ideas; he bought patent leather boots and took to wearing white cravats. He put cosmetics on his moustache, and, like her, signed notes of hand. She corrupted him from beyond the grave. He was obliged to sell his silver piece by piece; next he sold the drawing-room furniture. All the rooms were stripped; but the bedroom, her own room, remained as before. After his dinner Charles went up there. He pushed the round table in front of the fire, and drew up her armchair. He sat down opposite it. A candle burnt in one of the gilt candlesticks. Berthe by his side was painting prints. He suffered, poor man, at seeing her so badly dressed, with laceless boots, and the arm-holes of her pinafore torn down to the hips; for the charwoman took no care of her. But she was so sweet, so pretty, and her little head bent forward so gracefully, letting the dear fair hair fall over her rosy cheeks, that an infinite joy came upon him, a happiness mingled with bitterness, like those ill-made wines that taste of resin. He mended her toys, made her puppets from cardboard, or sewed up half-torn dolls. Then, if his eyes fell upon the workbox, a ribbon lying about, or even a pin left in a crack of the table, he began to dream, and looked so sad that she became as sad as he. No one now came to see them, for Justin had run away to Rouen, where he was a grocer's assistant, and the druggist's children saw less and less of the child, Monsieur Homais not caring, seeing the difference of their social position, to continue the intimacy. The blind man, whom he had not been able to cure with the pomade, had gone back to the hill of Bois-Guillaume, where he told the travellers of the vain attempt of the druggist, to such an extent, that Homais when he went to town hid himself behind the curtains of the "Hirondelle" to avoid meeting him. He detested him, and wishing, in the interests of his own reputation, to get rid of him at all costs, he directed against him a secret battery, that betrayed the depth of his intellect and the baseness of his vanity. Thus, for six consecutive months, one could read in the "Fanal de Rouen" editorials such as these-- "All who bend their steps towards the fertile plains of Picardy have, no doubt, remarked, by the Bois-Guillaume hill, a wretch suffering from a horrible facial wound. He importunes, persecutes one, and levies a regular tax on all travellers. Are we still living in the monstrous times of the Middle Ages, when vagabonds were permitted to display in our public places leprosy and scrofulas they had brought back from the Crusades?" Or-- "In spite of the laws against vagabondage, the approaches to our great towns continue to be infected by bands of beggars. Some are seen going about alone, and these are not, perhaps, the least dangerous. What are our ediles about?" Then Homais invented anecdotes-- "Yesterday, by the Bois-Guillaume hill, a skittish horse--" And then followed the story of an accident caused by the presence of the blind man. He managed so well that the fellow was locked up. But he was released. He began again, and Homais began again. It was a struggle. Homais won it, for his foe was condemned to life-long confinement in an asylum. This success emboldened him, and henceforth there was no longer a dog run over, a barn burnt down, a woman beaten in the parish, of which he did not immediately inform the public, guided always by the love of progress and the hate of priests. He instituted comparisons between the elementary and clerical schools to the detriment of the latter; called to mind the massacre of St. Bartholomew a propos of a grant of one hundred francs to the church, and denounced abuses, aired new views. That was his phrase. Homais was digging and delving; he was becoming dangerous. However, he was stifling in the narrow limits of journalism, and soon a book, a work was necessary to him. Then he composed "General Statistics of the Canton of Yonville, followed by Climatological Remarks." The statistics drove him to philosophy. He busied himself with great questions: the social problem, moralisation of the poorer classes, pisciculture, caoutchouc, railways, etc. He even began to blush at being a bourgeois. He affected the artistic style, he smoked. He bought two chic Pompadour statuettes to adorn his drawing-room. He by no means gave up his shop. On the contrary, he kept well abreast of new discoveries. He followed the great movement of chocolates; he was the first to introduce "cocoa" and "revalenta" into the Seine-Inferieure. He was enthusiastic about the hydro-electric Pulvermacher chains; he wore one himself, and when at night he took off his flannel vest, Madame Homais stood quite dazzled before the golden spiral beneath which he was hidden, and felt her ardour redouble for this man more bandaged than a Scythian, and splendid as one of the Magi. He had fine ideas about Emma's tomb. First he proposed a broken column with some drapery, next a pyramid, then a Temple of Vesta, a sort of rotunda, or else a "mass of ruins." And in all his plans Homais always stuck to the weeping willow, which he looked upon as the indispensable symbol of sorrow. Charles and he made a journey to Rouen together to look at some tombs at a funeral furnisher's, accompanied by an artist, one Vaufrylard, a friend of Bridoux's, who made puns all the time. At last, after having examined some hundred designs, having ordered an estimate and made another journey to Rouen, Charles decided in favour of a mausoleum, which on the two principal sides was to have a "spirit bearing an extinguished torch." As to the inscription, Homais could think of nothing so fine as Sta viator*, and he got no further; he racked his brain, he constantly repeated Sta viator. At last he hit upon Amabilen conjugem calcas**, which was adopted. * Rest traveler. ** Tread upon a loving wife. A strange thing was that Bovary, while continually thinking of Emma, was forgetting her. He grew desperate as he felt this image fading from his memory in spite of all efforts to retain it. Yet every night he dreamt of her; it was always the same dream. He drew near her, but when he was about to clasp her she fell into decay in his arms. For a week he was seen going to church in the evening. Monsieur Bournisien even paid him two or three visits, then gave him up. Moreover, the old fellow was growing intolerant, fanatic, said Homais. He thundered against the spirit of the age, and never failed, every other week, in his sermon, to recount the death agony of Voltaire, who died devouring his excrements, as everyone knows. In spite of the economy with which Bovary lived, he was far from being able to pay off his old debts. Lheureux refused to renew any more bills. A distraint became imminent. Then he appealed to his mother, who consented to let him take a mortgage on her property, but with a great many recriminations against Emma; and in return for her sacrifice she asked for a shawl that had escaped the depredations of Felicite. Charles refused to give it her; they quarrelled. She made the first overtures of reconciliation by offering to have the little girl, who could help her in the house, to live with her. Charles consented to this, but when the time for parting came, all his courage failed him. Then there was a final, complete rupture. As his affections vanished, he clung more closely to the love of his child. She made him anxious, however, for she coughed sometimes, and had red spots on her cheeks. Opposite his house, flourishing and merry, was the family of the chemist, with whom everything was prospering. Napoleon helped him in the laboratory, Athalie embroidered him a skullcap, Irma cut out rounds of paper to cover the preserves, and Franklin recited Pythagoras' table in a breath. He was the happiest of fathers, the most fortunate of men. Not so! A secret ambition devoured him. Homais hankered after the cross of the Legion of Honour. He had plenty of claims to it. "First, having at the time of the cholera distinguished myself by a boundless devotion; second, by having published, at my expense, various works of public utility, such as" (and he recalled his pamphlet entitled, "Cider, its manufacture and effects," besides observation on the lanigerous plant-louse, sent to the Academy; his volume of statistics, and down to his pharmaceutical thesis); "without counting that I am a member of several learned societies" (he was member of a single one). "In short!" he cried, making a pirouette, "if it were only for distinguishing myself at fires!" Then Homais inclined towards the Government. He secretly did the prefect great service during the elections. He sold himself--in a word, prostituted himself. He even addressed a petition to the sovereign in which he implored him to "do him justice"; he called him "our good king," and compared him to Henri IV. And every morning the druggist rushed for the paper to see if his nomination were in it. It was never there. At last, unable to bear it any longer, he had a grass plot in his garden designed to represent the Star of the Cross of Honour with two little strips of grass running from the top to imitate the ribband. He walked round it with folded arms, meditating on the folly of the Government and the ingratitude of men. From respect, or from a sort of sensuality that made him carry on his investigations slowly, Charles had not yet opened the secret drawer of a rosewood desk which Emma had generally used. One day, however, he sat down before it, turned the key, and pressed the spring. All Leon's letters were there. There could be no doubt this time. He devoured them to the very last, ransacked every corner, all the furniture, all the drawers, behind the walls, sobbing, crying aloud, distraught, mad. He found a box and broke it open with a kick. Rodolphe's portrait flew full in his face in the midst of the overturned love-letters. People wondered at his despondency. He never went out, saw no one, refused even to visit his patients. Then they said "he shut himself up to drink." Sometimes, however, some curious person climbed on to the garden hedge, and saw with amazement this long-bearded, shabbily clothed, wild man, who wept aloud as he walked up and down. In the evening in summer he took his little girl with him and led her to the cemetery. They came back at nightfall, when the only light left in the Place was that in Binet's window. The voluptuousness of his grief was, however, incomplete, for he had no one near him to share it, and he paid visits to Madame Lefrancois to be able to speak of her. But the landlady only listened with half an ear, having troubles like himself. For Lheureux had at last established the "Favorites du Commerce," and Hivert, who enjoyed a great reputation for doing errands, insisted on a rise of wages, and was threatening to go over "to the opposition shop." One day when he had gone to the market at Argueil to sell his horse--his last resource--he met Rodolphe. They both turned pale when they caught sight of one another. Rodolphe, who had only sent his card, first stammered some apologies, then grew bolder, and even pushed his assurance (it was in the month of August and very hot) to the length of inviting him to have a bottle of beer at the public-house. Leaning on the table opposite him, he chewed his cigar as he talked, and Charles was lost in reverie at this face that she had loved. He seemed to see again something of her in it. It was a marvel to him. He would have liked to have been this man. The other went on talking agriculture, cattle, pasturage, filling out with banal phrases all the gaps where an allusion might slip in. Charles was not listening to him; Rodolphe noticed it, and he followed the succession of memories that crossed his face. This gradually grew redder; the nostrils throbbed fast, the lips quivered. There was at last a moment when Charles, full of a sombre fury, fixed his eyes on Rodolphe, who, in something of fear, stopped talking. But soon the same look of weary lassitude came back to his face. "I don't blame you," he said. Rodolphe was dumb. And Charles, his head in his hands, went on in a broken voice, and with the resigned accent of infinite sorrow-- "No, I don't blame you now." He even added a fine phrase, the only one he ever made-- "It is the fault of fatality!" Rodolphe, who had managed the fatality, thought the remark very offhand from a man in his position, comic even, and a little mean. The next day Charles went to sit down on the seat in the arbour. Rays of light were straying through the trellis, the vine leaves threw their shadows on the sand, the jasmines perfumed the air, the heavens were blue, Spanish flies buzzed round the lilies in bloom, and Charles was suffocating like a youth beneath the vague love influences that filled his aching heart. At seven o'clock little Berthe, who had not seen him all the afternoon, went to fetch him to dinner. His head was thrown back against the wall, his eyes closed, his mouth open, and in his hand was a long tress of black hair. "Come along, papa," she said. And thinking he wanted to play; she pushed him gently. He fell to the ground. He was dead. Thirty-six hours after, at the druggist's request, Monsieur Canivet came thither. He made a post-mortem and found nothing. When everything had been sold, twelve francs seventy-five centimes remained, that served to pay for Mademoiselle Bovary's going to her grandmother. The good woman died the same year; old Rouault was paralysed, and it was an aunt who took charge of her. She is poor, and sends her to a cotton-factory to earn a living. Since Bovary's death three doctors have followed one another at Yonville without any success, so severely did Homais attack them. He has an enormous practice; the authorities treat him with consideration, and public opinion protects him. He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.

part 3, Chapter 11

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214143140/https://www.novelguide.com/madame-bovary/summaries/partiii-chapter10-12

Homais' letter to Monsieur Rouault had been too vague and the poor man had made the trip not knowing whether his daughter was alive or dead. When he regains consciousness he and Charles fall weeping into each other's arms and Homais tells them to pull themselves together for the funeral. Hippolyte attends wearing his good leg and Justin stands outside the church visibly pale and trembling. The congregation processes to the cemetery where the coffin is lowered into the ground and Charles must be restrained from pursuing his dead wife into the ground. Lheureux attends the funeral. Everyone seems visibly relieved when it is over. Monsieur Rouault immediately leaves for home. The narrator relates that Charles and his mother stayed awake late that night while the elder Madame Bovary made plans to come live with her son. Rodolphe slept well that night as did Lon but Justin was awake and weeping by Emma's grave

gradesaver

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_viii.txt

finished_summaries/gradesaver/The Aeneid/section_7_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book viii

book viii

{"name": "Book VIII", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-viii", "summary": "Book VIII opens with Latin warriors pledging their support to Turnus. Aeneas is greatly troubled by this turn of events, and particularly by the fact that the dangerous Diomedes has been asked to support the Latin troops. That night, the river god Tiberinus appears to Aeneas in a dream and tells him that he will see an omen of a white sow with thirty white suckling pigs to signify the location of Alba, the city that Ascanius will found. Tiberinus also tells Aeneas to seek help from King Evander and to pray to Juno in order to assuage her anger. The next day, in the woods, Aeneas comes upon the very sight that Tiberinus has prophesied: the white cow with her sucklings. He takes this as incontrovertible proof that he and his companions are destined to build a great city in Latium, and he sacrifices all the animals to Juno. Aeneas and his men then take off for Evander's city, where they find the residents engaged in a ceremony honoring Hercules, who saved them from the horrible monster Cacus. Although Evander's son, Pallas, instantly thinks that they are invaders and demonstrates his hotheadedness by snatching up his weapons to meet them, Aeneas extends an olive branch and is welcomed warmly by Evander, who remembers King Priam and Anchises fondly. Evander pledges to support the Trojans and asks them to join in the celebrations. After the ceremony, King Evander takes Aeneas on a walk and tells him about the origins of Latium: once the lawless home of fauns and nymphs, order was established by Saturn, who was fleeing the wrath of Jove. On their walk, Evander points out a number of sights that would have been recognizable to Virgil's readers as important future locations. Evander takes them to his poor household and tells them not to feel bad about his poverty. Meanwhile, Venus notices the Latin uprising with alarm and asks her husband, Vulcan, to fashion Aeneas a set of weapons. Vulcan agrees to do what he can to help her son, so he orders the Cyclops, who work for him, to stop what they are doing and focus on Aeneas's weapons. At the same time, Evander is telling Aeneas that he has slim means by which to help the Trojans himself, but that he should seek aid from the Etruscans. For years, the Etruscans suffered under the rule of the evil Mezentius, who is one of Turnus's allies, so they would welcome the opportunity to rise up against their former oppressor and bring him back to their land to be punished. Evander also entrusts his son Pallas to Aeneas, since Evander himself is too old and infirm to go to battle. Aeneas is initially wary of Evander's advice, but Venus sends crashing thunder and an image of weapons hanging in the sky as a sign that he is to seek the help of the Etruscans. Aeneas picks the bravest of his men to travel with him to Agylla, sending the rest back to the camp with a message for Ascanius. With Pallas by his side, he meets with the Etruscans, who are led by King Tarchon. At their camp, Venus appears to him with Vulcan's weapons. Aeneas marvels over the extraordinary craftsmanship of the shield, which depicts Rome's brilliant future. The shield contains images of Romulus and Remus suckling at the teats of a wolf and Augustus Caesar leading his men into battle, among others. The chapter ends with a promising image, as Aeneas dons his new armor: \"Upon his shoulder he/ lifts up the fame and fate of his sons' sons\" .", "analysis": "The primary function of Book VIII is to set up the readers' sympathies - in essence, to let them know who to root for. Parallels are drawn between Aeneas, Hercules, and Evander, cementing the men as heroes in their own time. Evander demonstrates remarkable piety, with his annual commemoration of Hercules' great feat; Hercules is an extraordinary warrior; and Aeneas is both courageous and pious, serving as a link between the two great men. The positive qualities displayed by Aeneas and his comrades - including the Etruscans, whose oppression under Mezentius's rule immediately arouses sympathy - stands in sharp contrast to the hotheadedness and antagonistic tendencies of their opponents, the Rutulians. The second primary goal of Book VIII is to demonstrate, once again, that the great future of Rome was destined even in Aeneas's time. As they walk around Pallanteum, King Evander points out a number of sites that were still in existence during Virgil's time, thereby underscoring the fact that Rome's greatness was preordained. The shield that Vulcan presents to Aeneas is an even more concrete example of this theme, containing images of the heroes to come. Even though Aeneas is unaware of the meaning of the images, he is nevertheless awestruck by them, and their positive portents fill him with a sense of hope for the future and determination to see his son fulfill his destiny. Many of Virgil's critics argue that the Aeneid is little more than a giant piece of propaganda intended primarily to please his patron, Caesar Augustus. Indeed, elements such as the images on Aeneas's shield and Anchises's tour of the Underworld certainly support the contention that Virgil hoped to present the Romans as a people so favored by the gods that their rise to power was inevitable. In the scenes depicting Rome's future, the only characters described in any detail are the Greeks, the Trojans, and the gods ; all others are mere filler, standing on the periphery of the world stage. Virgil's supporters, however, point to the fact that he repeatedly emphasizes the uncountable sacrifices in the pursuit of Rome's destiny; he attends to both the positive and negative aspects of the rise of the empire. One interesting element found in this Book is King Evander's infirmity, which recalls both King Priam and King Latinus. While all three men are unquestionably moral, pious individuals, King Evander is \"heavy/ with age\" , King Priam is \"tottering with age\" , and King Latinus is \"an old man now\" . Why does Virgil create such weak characters to rule over these lands? One possibility is that these rulers are meant to represent specific aspects of Aeneas's personality - his determination, his piety, his wisdom - and to provide a prototype for the ideal leader late in life. They may also be intended to contrast with the new generation of leaders; since the older generation is unable to lead their subjects as they once could, a new generation awaits, ready to take over the reins of power. An interesting moment occurs when Tiberinus orders Aeneas to make offerings to Juno . When Aeneas finds the white cow and thirty white sucklings that mark the future location of Rome, he sacrifices all of the animals to Juno. This is a curious gesture, considering that omens such as these are what anger Juno the most, but by doing this Aeneas demonstrates that he is above the petty quarrels of the gods. He is entirely assured of his destiny, and he will not lower himself to treat Juno with the disrespect that she has shown to him."}

BOOK VIII When Turnus had assembled all his pow'rs, His standard planted on Laurentum's tow'rs; When now the sprightly trumpet, from afar, Had giv'n the signal of approaching war, Had rous'd the neighing steeds to scour the fields, While the fierce riders clatter'd on their shields; Trembling with rage, the Latian youth prepare To join th' allies, and headlong rush to war. Fierce Ufens, and Messapus, led the crowd, With bold Mezentius, who blasphem'd aloud. These thro' the country took their wasteful course, The fields to forage, and to gather force. Then Venulus to Diomede they send, To beg his aid Ausonia to defend, Declare the common danger, and inform The Grecian leader of the growing storm: Aeneas, landed on the Latian coast, With banish'd gods, and with a baffled host, Yet now aspir'd to conquest of the state, And claim'd a title from the gods and fate; What num'rous nations in his quarrel came, And how they spread his formidable name. What he design'd, what mischief might arise, If fortune favor'd his first enterprise, Was left for him to weigh, whose equal fears, And common interest, was involv'd in theirs. While Turnus and th' allies thus urge the war, The Trojan, floating in a flood of care, Beholds the tempest which his foes prepare. This way and that he turns his anxious mind; Thinks, and rejects the counsels he design'd; Explores himself in vain, in ev'ry part, And gives no rest to his distracted heart. So, when the sun by day, or moon by night, Strike on the polish'd brass their trembling light, The glitt'ring species here and there divide, And cast their dubious beams from side to side; Now on the walls, now on the pavement play, And to the ceiling flash the glaring day. 'T was night; and weary nature lull'd asleep The birds of air, and fishes of the deep, And beasts, and mortal men. The Trojan chief Was laid on Tiber's banks, oppress'd with grief, And found in silent slumber late relief. Then, thro' the shadows of the poplar wood, Arose the father of the Roman flood; An azure robe was o'er his body spread, A wreath of shady reeds adorn'd his head: Thus, manifest to sight, the god appear'd, And with these pleasing words his sorrow cheer'd: "Undoubted offspring of ethereal race, O long expected in this promis'd place! Who thro' the foes hast borne thy banish'd gods, Restor'd them to their hearths, and old abodes; This is thy happy home, the clime where fate Ordains thee to restore the Trojan state. Fear not! The war shall end in lasting peace, And all the rage of haughty Juno cease. And that this nightly vision may not seem Th' effect of fancy, or an idle dream, A sow beneath an oak shall lie along, All white herself, and white her thirty young. When thirty rolling years have run their race, Thy son Ascanius, on this empty space, Shall build a royal town, of lasting fame, Which from this omen shall receive the name. Time shall approve the truth. For what remains, And how with sure success to crown thy pains, With patience next attend. A banish'd band, Driv'n with Evander from th' Arcadian land, Have planted here, and plac'd on high their walls; Their town the founder Pallanteum calls, Deriv'd from Pallas, his great-grandsire's name: But the fierce Latians old possession claim, With war infesting the new colony. These make thy friends, and on their aid rely. To thy free passage I submit my streams. Wake, son of Venus, from thy pleasing dreams; And, when the setting stars are lost in day, To Juno's pow'r thy just devotion pay; With sacrifice the wrathful queen appease: Her pride at length shall fall, her fury cease. When thou return'st victorious from the war, Perform thy vows to me with grateful care. The god am I, whose yellow water flows Around these fields, and fattens as it goes: Tiber my name; among the rolling floods Renown'd on earth, esteem'd among the gods. This is my certain seat. In times to come, My waves shall wash the walls of mighty Rome." He said, and plung'd below. While yet he spoke, His dream Aeneas and his sleep forsook. He rose, and looking up, beheld the skies With purple blushing, and the day arise. Then water in his hollow palm he took From Tiber's flood, and thus the pow'rs bespoke: "Laurentian nymphs, by whom the streams are fed, And Father Tiber, in thy sacred bed Receive Aeneas, and from danger keep. Whatever fount, whatever holy deep, Conceals thy wat'ry stores; where'er they rise, And, bubbling from below, salute the skies; Thou, king of horned floods, whose plenteous urn Suffices fatness to the fruitful corn, For this thy kind compassion of our woes, Shalt share my morning song and ev'ning vows. But, O be present to thy people's aid, And firm the gracious promise thou hast made!" Thus having said, two galleys from his stores, With care he chooses, mans, and fits with oars. Now on the shore the fatal swine is found. Wondrous to tell!- She lay along the ground: Her well-fed offspring at her udders hung; She white herself, and white her thirty young. Aeneas takes the mother and her brood, And all on Juno's altar are bestow'd. The foll'wing night, and the succeeding day, Propitious Tiber smooth'd his wat'ry way: He roll'd his river back, and pois'd he stood, A gentle swelling, and a peaceful flood. The Trojans mount their ships; they put from shore, Borne on the waves, and scarcely dip an oar. Shouts from the land give omen to their course, And the pitch'd vessels glide with easy force. The woods and waters wonder at the gleam Of shields, and painted ships that stem the stream. One summer's night and one whole day they pass Betwixt the greenwood shades, and cut the liquid glass. The fiery sun had finish'd half his race, Look'd back, and doubted in the middle space, When they from far beheld the rising tow'rs, The tops of sheds, and shepherds' lowly bow'rs, Thin as they stood, which, then of homely clay, Now rise in marble, from the Roman sway. These cots (Evander's kingdom, mean and poor) The Trojan saw, and turn'd his ships to shore. 'T was on a solemn day: th' Arcadian states, The king and prince, without the city gates, Then paid their off'rings in a sacred grove To Hercules, the warrior son of Jove. Thick clouds of rolling smoke involve the skies, And fat of entrails on his altar fries. But, when they saw the ships that stemm'd the flood, And glitter'd thro' the covert of the wood, They rose with fear, and left th' unfinish'd feast, Till dauntless Pallas reassur'd the rest To pay the rites. Himself without delay A jav'lin seiz'd, and singly took his way; Then gain'd a rising ground, and call'd from far: "Resolve me, strangers, whence, and what you are; Your bus'ness here; and bring you peace or war?" High on the stern Aeneas his stand, And held a branch of olive in his hand, While thus he spoke: "The Phrygians' arms you see, Expell'd from Troy, provok'd in Italy By Latian foes, with war unjustly made; At first affianc'd, and at last betray'd. This message bear: 'The Trojans and their chief Bring holy peace, and beg the king's relief.' Struck with so great a name, and all on fire, The youth replies: "Whatever you require, Your fame exacts. Upon our shores descend. A welcome guest, and, what you wish, a friend." He said, and, downward hasting to the strand, Embrac'd the stranger prince, and join'd his hand. Conducted to the grove, Aeneas broke The silence first, and thus the king bespoke: "Best of the Greeks, to whom, by fate's command, I bear these peaceful branches in my hand, Undaunted I approach you, tho' I know Your birth is Grecian, and your land my foe; From Atreus tho' your ancient lineage came, And both the brother kings your kindred claim; Yet, my self-conscious worth, your high renown, Your virtue, thro' the neighb'ring nations blown, Our fathers' mingled blood, Apollo's voice, Have led me hither, less by need than choice. Our founder Dardanus, as fame has sung, And Greeks acknowledge, from Electra sprung: Electra from the loins of Atlas came; Atlas, whose head sustains the starry frame. Your sire is Mercury, whom long before On cold Cyllene's top fair Maia bore. Maia the fair, on fame if we rely, Was Atlas' daughter, who sustains the sky. Thus from one common source our streams divide; Ours is the Trojan, yours th' Arcadian side. Rais'd by these hopes, I sent no news before, Nor ask'd your leave, nor did your faith implore; But come, without a pledge, my own ambassador. The same Rutulians, who with arms pursue The Trojan race, are equal foes to you. Our host expell'd, what farther force can stay The victor troops from universal sway? Then will they stretch their pow'r athwart the land, And either sea from side to side command. Receive our offer'd faith, and give us thine; Ours is a gen'rous and experienc'd line: We want not hearts nor bodies for the war; In council cautious, and in fields we dare." He said; and while spoke, with piercing eyes Evander view'd the man with vast surprise, Pleas'd with his action, ravish'd with his face: Then answer'd briefly, with a royal grace: "O valiant leader of the Trojan line, In whom the features of thy father shine, How I recall Anchises! how I see His motions, mien, and all my friend, in thee! Long tho' it be, 't is fresh within my mind, When Priam to his sister's court design'd A welcome visit, with a friendly stay, And thro' th' Arcadian kingdom took his way. Then, past a boy, the callow down began To shade my chin, and call me first a man. I saw the shining train with vast delight, And Priam's goodly person pleas'd my sight: But great Anchises, far above the rest, With awful wonder fir'd my youthful breast. I long'd to join in friendship's holy bands Our mutual hearts, and plight our mutual hands. I first accosted him: I sued, I sought, And, with a loving force, to Pheneus brought. He gave me, when at length constrain'd to go, A Lycian quiver and a Gnossian bow, A vest embroider'd, glorious to behold, And two rich bridles, with their bits of gold, Which my son's coursers in obedience hold. The league you ask, I offer, as your right; And, when to-morrow's sun reveals the light, With swift supplies you shall be sent away. Now celebrate with us this solemn day, Whose holy rites admit no long delay. Honor our annual feast; and take your seat, With friendly welcome, at a homely treat." Thus having said, the bowls (remov'd for fear) The youths replac'd, and soon restor'd the cheer. On sods of turf he set the soldiers round: A maple throne, rais'd higher from the ground, Receiv'd the Trojan chief; and, o'er the bed, A lion's shaggy hide for ornament they spread. The loaves were serv'd in canisters; the wine In bowls; the priest renew'd the rites divine: Broil'd entrails are their food, and beef's continued chine. But when the rage of hunger was repress'd, Thus spoke Evander to his royal guest: "These rites, these altars, and this feast, O king, From no vain fears or superstition spring, Or blind devotion, or from blinder chance, Or heady zeal, or brutal ignorance; But, sav'd from danger, with a grateful sense, The labors of a god we recompense. See, from afar, yon rock that mates the sky, About whose feet such heaps of rubbish lie; Such indigested ruin; bleak and bare, How desart now it stands, expos'd in air! 'T was once a robber's den, inclos'd around With living stone, and deep beneath the ground. The monster Cacus, more than half a beast, This hold, impervious to the sun, possess'd. The pavement ever foul with human gore; Heads, and their mangled members, hung the door. Vulcan this plague begot; and, like his sire, Black clouds he belch'd, and flakes of livid fire. Time, long expected, eas'd us of our load, And brought the needful presence of a god. Th' avenging force of Hercules, from Spain, Arriv'd in triumph, from Geryon slain: Thrice liv'd the giant, and thrice liv'd in vain. His prize, the lowing herds, Alcides drove Near Tiber's bank, to graze the shady grove. Allur'd with hope of plunder, and intent By force to rob, by fraud to circumvent, The brutal Cacus, as by chance they stray'd, Four oxen thence, and four fair kine convey'd; And, lest the printed footsteps might be seen, He dragg'd 'em backwards to his rocky den. The tracks averse a lying notice gave, And led the searcher backward from the cave. "Meantime the herdsman hero shifts his place, To find fresh pasture and untrodden grass. The beasts, who miss'd their mates, fill'd all around With bellowings, and the rocks restor'd the sound. One heifer, who had heard her love complain, Roar'd from the cave, and made the project vain. Alcides found the fraud; with rage he shook, And toss'd about his head his knotted oak. Swift as the winds, or Scythian arrows' flight, He clomb, with eager haste, th' aerial height. Then first we saw the monster mend his pace; Fear his eyes, and paleness in his face, Confess'd the god's approach. Trembling he springs, As terror had increas'd his feet with wings; Nor stay'd for stairs; but down the depth he threw His body, on his back the door he drew (The door, a rib of living rock; with pains His father hew'd it out, and bound with iron chains): He broke the heavy links, the mountain clos'd, And bars and levers to his foe oppos'd. The wretch had hardly made his dungeon fast; The fierce avenger came with bounding haste; Survey'd the mouth of the forbidden hold, And here and there his raging eyes he roll'd. He gnash'd his teeth; and thrice he compass'd round With winged speed the circuit of the ground. Thrice at the cavern's mouth he pull'd in vain, And, panting, thrice desisted from his pain. A pointed flinty rock, all bare and black, Grew gibbous from behind the mountain's back; Owls, ravens, all ill omens of the night, Here built their nests, and hither wing'd their flight. The leaning head hung threat'ning o'er the flood, And nodded to the left. The hero stood Adverse, with planted feet, and, from the right, Tugg'd at the solid stone with all his might. Thus heav'd, the fix'd foundations of the rock Gave way; heav'n echo'd at the rattling shock. Tumbling, it chok'd the flood: on either side The banks leap backward, and the streams divide; The sky shrunk upward with unusual dread, And trembling Tiber div'd beneath his bed. The court of Cacus stands reveal'd to sight; The cavern glares with new-admitted light. So the pent vapors, with a rumbling sound, Heave from below, and rend the hollow ground; A sounding flaw succeeds; and, from on high, The gods with hate beheld the nether sky: The ghosts repine at violated night, And curse th' invading sun, and sicken at the sight. The graceless monster, caught in open day, Inclos'd, and in despair to fly away, Howls horrible from underneath, and fills His hollow palace with unmanly yells. The hero stands above, and from afar Plies him with darts, and stones, and distant war. He, from his nostrils huge mouth, expires Black clouds of smoke, amidst his father's fires, Gath'ring, with each repeated blast, the night, To make uncertain aim, and erring sight. The wrathful god then plunges from above, And, where in thickest waves the sparkles drove, There lights; and wades thro' fumes, and gropes his way, Half sing'd, half stifled, till he grasps his prey. The monster, spewing fruitless flames, he found; He squeez'd his throat; he writh'd his neck around, And in a knot his crippled members bound; Then from their sockets tore his burning eyes: Roll'd on a heap, the breathless robber lies. The doors, unbarr'd, receive the rushing day, And thoro' lights disclose the ravish'd prey. The bulls, redeem'd, breathe open air again. Next, by the feet, they drag him from his den. The wond'ring neighborhood, with glad surprise, Behold his shagged breast, his giant size, His mouth that flames no more, and his extinguish'd eyes. From that auspicious day, with rites divine, We worship at the hero's holy shrine. Potitius first ordain'd these annual vows: As priests, were added the Pinarian house, Who rais'd this altar in the sacred shade, Where honors, ever due, for ever shall be paid. For these deserts, and this high virtue shown, Ye warlike youths, your heads with garlands crown: Fill high the goblets with a sparkling flood, And with deep draughts invoke our common god." This said, a double wreath Evander twin'd, And poplars black and white his temples bind. Then brims his ample bowl. With like design The rest invoke the gods, with sprinkled wine. Meantime the sun descended from the skies, And the bright evening star began to rise. And now the priests, Potitius at their head, In skins of beasts involv'd, the long procession led; Held high the flaming tapers in their hands, As custom had prescrib'd their holy bands; Then with a second course the tables load, And with full chargers offer to the god. The Salii sing, and cense his altars round With Saban smoke, their heads with poplar bound- One choir of old, another of the young, To dance, and bear the burthen of the song. The lay records the labors, and the praise, And all th' immortal acts of Hercules: First, how the mighty babe, when swath'd in bands, The serpents strangled with his infant hands; Then, as in years and matchless force he grew, Th' Oechalian walls, and Trojan, overthrew. Besides, a thousand hazards they relate, Procur'd by Juno's and Eurystheus' hate: "Thy hands, unconquer'd hero, could subdue The cloud-born Centaurs, and the monster crew: Nor thy resistless arm the bull withstood, Nor he, the roaring terror of the wood. The triple porter of the Stygian seat, With lolling tongue, lay fawning at thy feet, And, seiz'd with fear, forgot his mangled meat. Th' infernal waters trembled at thy sight; Thee, god, no face of danger could affright; Not huge Typhoeus, nor th' unnumber'd snake, Increas'd with hissing heads, in Lerna's lake. Hail, Jove's undoubted son! an added grace To heav'n and the great author of thy race! Receive the grateful off'rings which we pay, And smile propitious on thy solemn day!" In numbers thus they sung; above the rest, The den and death of Cacus crown the feast. The woods to hollow vales convey the sound, The vales to hills, and hills the notes rebound. The rites perform'd, the cheerful train retire. Betwixt young Pallas and his aged sire, The Trojan pass'd, the city to survey, And pleasing talk beguil'd the tedious way. The stranger cast around his curious eyes, New objects viewing still, with new surprise; With greedy joy enquires of various things, And acts and monuments of ancient kings. Then thus the founder of the Roman tow'rs: "These woods were first the seat of sylvan pow'rs, Of Nymphs and Fauns, and salvage men, who took Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn oak. Nor laws they knew, nor manners, nor the care Of lab'ring oxen, or the shining share, Nor arts of gain, nor what they gain'd to spare. Their exercise the chase; the running flood Supplied their thirst, the trees supplied their food. Then Saturn came, who fled the pow'r of Jove, Robb'd of his realms, and banish'd from above. The men, dispers'd on hills, to towns he brought, And laws ordain'd, and civil customs taught, And Latium call'd the land where safe he lay From his unduteous son, and his usurping sway. With his mild empire, peace and plenty came; And hence the golden times deriv'd their name. A more degenerate and discolor'd age Succeeded this, with avarice and rage. Th' Ausonians then, and bold Sicanians came; And Saturn's empire often chang'd the name. Then kings, gigantic Tybris, and the rest, With arbitrary sway the land oppress'd: For Tiber's flood was Albula before, Till, from the tyrant's fate, his name it bore. I last arriv'd, driv'n from my native home By fortune's pow'r, and fate's resistless doom. Long toss'd on seas, I sought this happy land, Warn'd by my mother nymph, and call'd by Heav'n's command." Thus, walking on, he spoke, and shew'd the gate, Since call'd Carmental by the Roman state; Where stood an altar, sacred to the name Of old Carmenta, the prophetic dame, Who to her son foretold th' Aenean race, Sublime in fame, and Rome's imperial place: Then shews the forest, which, in after times, Fierce Romulus for perpetrated crimes A sacred refuge made; with this, the shrine Where Pan below the rock had rites divine: Then tells of Argus' death, his murder'd guest, Whose grave and tomb his innocence attest. Thence, to the steep Tarpeian rock he leads; Now roof'd with gold, then thatch'd with homely reeds. A reverent fear (such superstition reigns Among the rude) ev'n then possess'd the swains. Some god, they knew- what god, they could not tell- Did there amidst the sacred horror dwell. Th' Arcadians thought him Jove; and said they saw The mighty Thund'rer with majestic awe, Who took his shield, and dealt his bolts around, And scatter'd tempests on the teeming ground. Then saw two heaps of ruins, (once they stood Two stately towns, on either side the flood,) Saturnia's and Janicula's remains; And either place the founder's name retains. Discoursing thus together, they resort Where poor Evander kept his country court. They view'd the ground of Rome's litigious hall; (Once oxen low'd, where now the lawyers bawl;) Then, stooping, thro' the narrow gate they press'd, When thus the king bespoke his Trojan guest: "Mean as it is, this palace, and this door, Receiv'd Alcides, then a conqueror. Dare to be poor; accept our homely food, Which feasted him, and emulate a god." Then underneath a lowly roof he led The weary prince, and laid him on a bed; The stuffing leaves, with hides of bears o'erspread. Now Night had shed her silver dews around, And with her sable wings embrac'd the ground, When love's fair goddess, anxious for her son, (New tumults rising, and new wars begun,) Couch'd with her husband in his golden bed, With these alluring words invokes his aid; And, that her pleasing speech his mind may move, Inspires each accent with the charms of love: "While cruel fate conspir'd with Grecian pow'rs, To level with the ground the Trojan tow'rs, I ask'd not aid th' unhappy to restore, Nor did the succor of thy skill implore; Nor urg'd the labors of my lord in vain, A sinking empire longer to sustain, Tho'much I ow'd to Priam's house, and more The dangers of Aeneas did deplore. But now, by Jove's command, and fate's decree, His race is doom'd to reign in Italy: With humble suit I beg thy needful art, O still propitious pow'r, that rules my heart! A mother kneels a suppliant for her son. By Thetis and Aurora thou wert won To forge impenetrable shields, and grace With fated arms a less illustrious race. Behold, what haughty nations are combin'd Against the relics of the Phrygian kind, With fire and sword my people to destroy, And conquer Venus twice, in conqu'ring Troy." She said; and straight her arms, of snowy hue, About her unresolving husband threw. Her soft embraces soon infuse desire; His bones and marrow sudden warmth inspire; And all the godhead feels the wonted fire. Not half so swift the rattling thunder flies, Or forky lightnings flash along the skies. The goddess, proud of her successful wiles, And conscious of her form, in secret smiles. Then thus the pow'r, obnoxious to her charms, Panting, and half dissolving in her arms: "Why seek you reasons for a cause so just, Or your own beauties or my love distrust? Long since, had you requir'd my helpful hand, Th' artificer and art you might command, To labor arms for Troy: nor Jove, nor fate, Confin'd their empire to so short a date. And, if you now desire new wars to wage, My skill I promise, and my pains engage. Whatever melting metals can conspire, Or breathing bellows, or the forming fire, Is freely yours: your anxious fears remove, And think no task is difficult to love." Trembling he spoke; and, eager of her charms, He snatch'd the willing goddess to his arms; Till in her lap infus'd, he lay possess'd Of full desire, and sunk to pleasing rest. Now when the Night her middle race had rode, And his first slumber had refresh'd the god- The time when early housewives leave the bed; When living embers on the hearth they spread, Supply the lamp, and call the maids to rise- With yawning mouths, and with half-open'd eyes, They ply the distaff by the winking light, And to their daily labor add the night: Thus frugally they earn their children's bread, And uncorrupted keep the nuptial bed- Not less concern'd, nor at a later hour, Rose from his downy couch the forging pow'r. Sacred to Vulcan's name, an isle there lay, Betwixt Sicilia's coasts and Lipare, Rais'd high on smoking rocks; and, deep below, In hollow caves the fires of Aetna glow. The Cyclops here their heavy hammers deal; Loud strokes, and hissings of tormented steel, Are heard around; the boiling waters roar, And smoky flames thro' fuming tunnels soar. Hether the Father of the Fire, by night, Thro' the brown air precipitates his flight. On their eternal anvils here he found The brethren beating, and the blows go round. A load of pointless thunder now there lies Before their hands, to ripen for the skies: These darts, for angry Jove, they daily cast; Consum'd on mortals with prodigious waste. Three rays of writhen rain, of fire three more, Of winged southern winds and cloudy store As many parts, the dreadful mixture frame; And fears are added, and avenging flame. Inferior ministers, for Mars, repair His broken axletrees and blunted war, And send him forth again with furbish'd arms, To wake the lazy war with trumpets' loud alarms. The rest refresh the scaly snakes that fold The shield of Pallas, and renew their gold. Full on the crest the Gorgon's head they place, With eyes that roll in death, and with distorted face. "My sons," said Vulcan, "set your tasks aside; Your strength and master-skill must now be tried. Arms for a hero forge; arms that require Your force, your speed, and all your forming fire." He said. They set their former work aside, And their new toils with eager haste divide. A flood of molten silver, brass, and gold, And deadly steel, in the large furnace roll'd; Of this, their artful hands a shield prepare, Alone sufficient to sustain the war. Sev'n orbs within a spacious round they close: One stirs the fire, and one the bellows blows. The hissing steel is in the smithy drown'd; The grot with beaten anvils groans around. By turns their arms advance, in equal time; By turns their hands descend, and hammers chime. They turn the glowing mass with crooked tongs; The fiery work proceeds, with rustic songs. While, at the Lemnian god's command, they urge Their labors thus, and ply th' Aeolian forge, The cheerful morn salutes Evander's eyes, And songs of chirping birds invite to rise. He leaves his lowly bed: his buskins meet Above his ankles; sandals sheathe his feet: He sets his trusty sword upon his side, And o'er his shoulder throws a panther's hide. Two menial dogs before their master press'd. Thus clad, and guarded thus, he seeks his kingly guest. Mindful of promis'd aid, he mends his pace, But meets Aeneas in the middle space. Young Pallas did his father's steps attend, And true Achates waited on his friend. They join their hands; a secret seat they choose; Th' Arcadian first their former talk renews: "Undaunted prince, I never can believe The Trojan empire lost, while you survive. Command th' assistance of a faithful friend; But feeble are the succors I can send. Our narrow kingdom here the Tiber bounds; That other side the Latian state surrounds, Insults our walls, and wastes our fruitful grounds. But mighty nations I prepare, to join Their arms with yours, and aid your just design. You come, as by your better genius sent, And fortune seems to favor your intent. Not far from hence there stands a hilly town, Of ancient building, and of high renown, Torn from the Tuscans by the Lydian race, Who gave the name of Caere to the place, Once Agyllina call'd. It flourish'd long, In pride of wealth and warlike people strong, Till curs'd Mezentius, in a fatal hour, Assum'd the crown, with arbitrary pow'r. What words can paint those execrable times, The subjects' suff'rings, and the tyrant's crimes! That blood, those murthers, O ye gods, replace On his own head, and on his impious race! The living and the dead at his command Were coupled, face to face, and hand to hand, Till, chok'd with stench, in loath'd embraces tied, The ling'ring wretches pin'd away and died. Thus plung'd in ills, and meditating more- The people's patience, tir'd, no longer bore The raging monster; but with arms beset His house, and vengeance and destruction threat. They fire his palace: while the flame ascends, They force his guards, and execute his friends. He cleaves the crowd, and, favor'd by the night, To Turnus' friendly court directs his flight. By just revenge the Tuscans set on fire, With arms, their king to punishment require: Their num'rous troops, now muster'd on the strand, My counsel shall submit to your command. Their navy swarms upon the coasts; they cry To hoist their anchors, but the gods deny. An ancient augur, skill'd in future fate, With these foreboding words restrains their hate: 'Ye brave in arms, ye Lydian blood, the flow'r Of Tuscan youth, and choice of all their pow'r, Whom just revenge against Mezentius arms, To seek your tyrant's death by lawful arms; Know this: no native of our land may lead This pow'rful people; seek a foreign head.' Aw'd with these words, in camps they still abide, And wait with longing looks their promis'd guide. Tarchon, the Tuscan chief, to me has sent Their crown, and ev'ry regal ornament: The people join their own with his desire; And all my conduct, as their king, require. But the chill blood that creeps within my veins, And age, and listless limbs unfit for pains, And a soul conscious of its own decay, Have forc'd me to refuse imperial sway. My Pallas were more fit to mount the throne, And should, but he's a Sabine mother's son, And half a native; but, in you, combine A manly vigor, and a foreign line. Where Fate and smiling Fortune shew the way, Pursue the ready path to sov'reign sway. The staff of my declining days, my son, Shall make your good or ill success his own; In fighting fields from you shall learn to dare, And serve the hard apprenticeship of war; Your matchless courage and your conduct view, And early shall begin t' admire and copy you. Besides, two hundred horse he shall command; Tho' few, a warlike and well-chosen band. These in my name are listed; and my son As many more has added in his own." Scarce had he said; Achates and his guest, With downcast eyes, their silent grief express'd; Who, short of succors, and in deep despair, Shook at the dismal prospect of the war. But his bright mother, from a breaking cloud, To cheer her issue, thunder'd thrice aloud; Thrice forky lightning flash'd along the sky, And Tyrrhene trumpets thrice were heard on high. Then, gazing up, repeated peals they hear; And, in a heav'n serene, refulgent arms appear: Redd'ning the skies, and glitt'ring all around, The temper'd metals clash, and yield a silver sound. The rest stood trembling, struck with awe divine; Aeneas only, conscious to the sign, Presag'd th' event, and joyful view'd, above, Th' accomplish'd promise of the Queen of Love. Then, to th' Arcadian king: "This prodigy (Dismiss your fear) belongs alone to me. Heav'n calls me to the war: th' expected sign Is giv'n of promis'd aid, and arms divine. My goddess mother, whose indulgent care Foresaw the dangers of the growing war, This omen gave, when bright Vulcanian arms, Fated from force of steel by Stygian charms, Suspended, shone on high: she then foreshow'd Approaching fights, and fields to float in blood. Turnus shall dearly pay for faith forsworn; And corps, and swords, and shields, on Tiber borne, Shall choke his flood: now sound the loud alarms; And, Latian troops, prepare your perjur'd arms." He said, and, rising from his homely throne, The solemn rites of Hercules begun, And on his altars wak'd the sleeping fires; Then cheerful to his household gods retires; There offers chosen sheep. Th' Arcadian king And Trojan youth the same oblations bring. Next, of his men and ships he makes review; Draws out the best and ablest of the crew. Down with the falling stream the refuse run, To raise with joyful news his drooping son. Steeds are prepar'd to mount the Trojan band, Who wait their leader to the Tyrrhene land. A sprightly courser, fairer than the rest, The king himself presents his royal guest: A lion's hide his back and limbs infold, Precious with studded work, and paws of gold. Fame thro' the little city spreads aloud Th' intended march, amid the fearful crowd: The matrons beat their breasts, dissolve in tears, And double their devotion in their fears. The war at hand appears with more affright, And rises ev'ry moment to the sight. Then old Evander, with a close embrace, Strain'd his departing friend; and tears o'erflow his face. "Would Heav'n," said he, "my strength and youth recall, Such as I was beneath Praeneste's wall; Then when I made the foremost foes retire, And set whole heaps of conquer'd shields on fire; When Herilus in single fight I slew, Whom with three lives Feronia did endue; And thrice I sent him to the Stygian shore, Till the last ebbing soul return'd no more- Such if I stood renew'd, not these alarms, Nor death, should rend me from my Pallas' arms; Nor proud Mezentius, thus unpunish'd, boast His rapes and murthers on the Tuscan coast. Ye gods, and mighty Jove, in pity bring Relief, and hear a father and a king! If fate and you reserve these eyes, to see My son return with peace and victory; If the lov'd boy shall bless his father's sight; If we shall meet again with more delight; Then draw my life in length; let me sustain, In hopes of his embrace, the worst of pain. But if your hard decrees- which, O! I dread- Have doom'd to death his undeserving head; This, O this very moment, let me die! While hopes and fears in equal balance lie; While, yet possess'd of all his youthful charms, I strain him close within these aged arms; Before that fatal news my soul shall wound!" He said, and, swooning, sunk upon the ground. His servants bore him off, and softly laid His languish'd limbs upon his homely bed. The horsemen march; the gates are open'd wide; Aeneas at their head, Achates by his side. Next these, the Trojan leaders rode along; Last follows in the rear th' Arcadian throng. Young Pallas shone conspicuous o'er the rest; Gilded his arms, embroider'd was his vest. So, from the seas, exerts his radiant head The star by whom the lights of heav'n are led; Shakes from his rosy locks the pearly dews, Dispels the darkness, and the day renews. The trembling wives the walls and turrets crowd, And follow, with their eyes, the dusty cloud, Which winds disperse by fits, and shew from far The blaze of arms, and shields, and shining war. The troops, drawn up in beautiful array, O'er heathy plains pursue the ready way. Repeated peals of shouts are heard around; The neighing coursers answer to the sound, And shake with horny hoofs the solid ground. A greenwood shade, for long religion known, Stands by the streams that wash the Tuscan town, Incompass'd round with gloomy hills above, Which add a holy horror to the grove. The first inhabitants of Grecian blood, That sacred forest to Silvanus vow'd, The guardian of their flocks and fields; and pay Their due devotions on his annual day. Not far from hence, along the river's side, In tents secure, the Tuscan troops abide, By Tarchon led. Now, from a rising ground, Aeneas cast his wond'ring eyes around, And all the Tyrrhene army had in sight, Stretch'd on the spacious plain from left to right. Thether his warlike train the Trojan led, Refresh'd his men, and wearied horses fed. Meantime the mother goddess, crown'd with charms, Breaks thro' the clouds, and brings the fated arms. Within a winding vale she finds her son, On the cool river's banks, retir'd alone. She shews her heav'nly form without disguise, And gives herself to his desiring eyes. "Behold," she said, "perform'd in ev'ry part, My promise made, and Vulcan's labor'd art. Now seek, secure, the Latian enemy, And haughty Turnus to the field defy." She said; and, having first her son embrac'd, The radiant arms beneath an oak she plac'd, Proud of the gift, he roll'd his greedy sight Around the work, and gaz'd with vast delight. He lifts, he turns, he poises, and admires The crested helm, that vomits radiant fires: His hands the fatal sword and corslet hold, One keen with temper'd steel, one stiff with gold: Both ample, flaming both, and beamy bright; So shines a cloud, when edg'd with adverse light. He shakes the pointed spear, and longs to try The plated cuishes on his manly thigh; But most admires the shield's mysterious mold, And Roman triumphs rising on the gold: For these, emboss'd, the heav'nly smith had wrought (Not in the rolls of future fate untaught) The wars in order, and the race divine Of warriors issuing from the Julian line. The cave of Mars was dress'd with mossy greens: There, by the wolf, were laid the martial twins. Intrepid on her swelling dugs they hung; The foster dam loll'd out her fawning tongue: They suck'd secure, while, bending back her head, She lick'd their tender limbs, and form'd them as they fed. Not far from thence new Rome appears, with games Projected for the rape of Sabine dames. The pit resounds with shrieks; a war succeeds, For breach of public faith, and unexampled deeds. Here for revenge the Sabine troops contend; The Romans there with arms the prey defend. Wearied with tedious war, at length they cease; And both the kings and kingdoms plight the peace. The friendly chiefs before Jove's altar stand, Both arm'd, with each a charger in his hand: A fatted sow for sacrifice is led, With imprecations on the perjur'd head. Near this, the traitor Metius, stretch'd between Four fiery steeds, is dragg'd along the green, By Tullus' doom: the brambles drink his blood, And his torn limbs are left the vulture's food. There, Porsena to Rome proud Tarquin brings, And would by force restore the banish'd kings. One tyrant for his fellow-tyrant fights; The Roman youth assert their native rights. Before the town the Tuscan army lies, To win by famine, or by fraud surprise. Their king, half-threat'ning, half-disdaining stood, While Cocles broke the bridge, and stemm'd the flood. The captive maids there tempt the raging tide, Scap'd from their chains, with Cloelia for their guide. High on a rock heroic Manlius stood, To guard the temple, and the temple's god. Then Rome was poor; and there you might behold The palace thatch'd with straw, now roof'd with gold. The silver goose before the shining gate There flew, and, by her cackle, sav'd the state. She told the Gauls' approach; th' approaching Gauls, Obscure in night, ascend, and seize the walls. The gold dissembled well their yellow hair, And golden chains on their white necks they wear. Gold are their vests; long Alpine spears they wield, And their left arm sustains a length of shield. Hard by, the leaping Salian priests advance; And naked thro' the streets the mad Luperci dance, In caps of wool; the targets dropp'd from heav'n. Here modest matrons, in soft litters driv'n, To pay their vows in solemn pomp appear, And odorous gums in their chaste hands they bear. Far hence remov'd, the Stygian seats are seen; Pains of the damn'd, and punish'd Catiline Hung on a rock- the traitor; and, around, The Furies hissing from the nether ground. Apart from these, the happy souls he draws, And Cato's holy ghost dispensing laws. Betwixt the quarters flows a golden sea; But foaming surges there in silver play. The dancing dolphins with their tails divide The glitt'ring waves, and cut the precious tide. Amid the main, two mighty fleets engage Their brazen beaks, oppos'd with equal rage. Actium surveys the well-disputed prize; Leucate's wat'ry plain with foamy billows fries. Young Caesar, on the stern, in armor bright, Here leads the Romans and their gods to fight: His beamy temples shoot their flames afar, And o'er his head is hung the Julian star. Agrippa seconds him, with prosp'rous gales, And, with propitious gods, his foes assails: A naval crown, that binds his manly brows, The happy fortune of the fight foreshows. Rang'd on the line oppos'd, Antonius brings Barbarian aids, and troops of Eastern kings; Th' Arabians near, and Bactrians from afar, Of tongues discordant, and a mingled war: And, rich in gaudy robes, amidst the strife, His ill fate follows him- th' Egyptian wife. Moving they fight; with oars and forky prows The froth is gather'd, and the water glows. It seems, as if the Cyclades again Were rooted up, and justled in the main; Or floating mountains floating mountains meet; Such is the fierce encounter of the fleet. Fireballs are thrown, and pointed jav'lins fly; The fields of Neptune take a purple dye. The queen herself, amidst the loud alarms, With cymbals toss'd her fainting soldiers warms- Fool as she was! who had not yet divin'd Her cruel fate, nor saw the snakes behind. Her country gods, the monsters of the sky, Great Neptune, Pallas, and Love's Queen defy: The dog Anubis barks, but barks in vain, Nor longer dares oppose th' ethereal train. Mars in the middle of the shining shield Is grav'd, and strides along the liquid field. The Dirae souse from heav'n with swift descent; And Discord, dyed in blood, with garments rent, Divides the prease: her steps Bellona treads, And shakes her iron rod above their heads. This seen, Apollo, from his Actian height, Pours down his arrows; at whose winged flight The trembling Indians and Egyptians yield, And soft Sabaeans quit the wat'ry field. The fatal mistress hoists her silken sails, And, shrinking from the fight, invokes the gales. Aghast she looks, and heaves her breast for breath, Panting, and pale with fear of future death. The god had figur'd her as driv'n along By winds and waves, and scudding thro' the throng. Just opposite, sad Nilus opens wide His arms and ample bosom to the tide, And spreads his mantle o'er the winding coast, In which he wraps his queen, and hides the flying host. The victor to the gods his thanks express'd, And Rome, triumphant, with his presence bless'd. Three hundred temples in the town he plac'd; With spoils and altars ev'ry temple grac'd. Three shining nights, and three succeeding days, The fields resound with shouts, the streets with praise, The domes with songs, the theaters with plays. All altars flame: before each altar lies, Drench'd in his gore, the destin'd sacrifice. Great Caesar sits sublime upon his throne, Before Apollo's porch of Parian stone; Accepts the presents vow'd for victory, And hangs the monumental crowns on high. Vast crowds of vanquish'd nations march along, Various in arms, in habit, and in tongue. Here, Mulciber assigns the proper place For Carians, and th' ungirt Numidian race; Then ranks the Thracians in the second row, With Scythians, expert in the dart and bow. And here the tam'd Euphrates humbly glides, And there the Rhine submits her swelling tides, And proud Araxes, whom no bridge could bind; The Danes' unconquer'd offspring march behind, And Morini, the last of humankind. These figures, on the shield divinely wrought, By Vulcan labor'd, and by Venus brought, With joy and wonder fill the hero's thought. Unknown the names, he yet admires the grace, And bears aloft the fame and fortune of his race.

Book VIII

https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-viii

Book VIII opens with Latin warriors pledging their support to Turnus. Aeneas is greatly troubled by this turn of events, and particularly by the fact that the dangerous Diomedes has been asked to support the Latin troops. That night, the river god Tiberinus appears to Aeneas in a dream and tells him that he will see an omen of a white sow with thirty white suckling pigs to signify the location of Alba, the city that Ascanius will found. Tiberinus also tells Aeneas to seek help from King Evander and to pray to Juno in order to assuage her anger. The next day, in the woods, Aeneas comes upon the very sight that Tiberinus has prophesied: the white cow with her sucklings. He takes this as incontrovertible proof that he and his companions are destined to build a great city in Latium, and he sacrifices all the animals to Juno. Aeneas and his men then take off for Evander's city, where they find the residents engaged in a ceremony honoring Hercules, who saved them from the horrible monster Cacus. Although Evander's son, Pallas, instantly thinks that they are invaders and demonstrates his hotheadedness by snatching up his weapons to meet them, Aeneas extends an olive branch and is welcomed warmly by Evander, who remembers King Priam and Anchises fondly. Evander pledges to support the Trojans and asks them to join in the celebrations. After the ceremony, King Evander takes Aeneas on a walk and tells him about the origins of Latium: once the lawless home of fauns and nymphs, order was established by Saturn, who was fleeing the wrath of Jove. On their walk, Evander points out a number of sights that would have been recognizable to Virgil's readers as important future locations. Evander takes them to his poor household and tells them not to feel bad about his poverty. Meanwhile, Venus notices the Latin uprising with alarm and asks her husband, Vulcan, to fashion Aeneas a set of weapons. Vulcan agrees to do what he can to help her son, so he orders the Cyclops, who work for him, to stop what they are doing and focus on Aeneas's weapons. At the same time, Evander is telling Aeneas that he has slim means by which to help the Trojans himself, but that he should seek aid from the Etruscans. For years, the Etruscans suffered under the rule of the evil Mezentius, who is one of Turnus's allies, so they would welcome the opportunity to rise up against their former oppressor and bring him back to their land to be punished. Evander also entrusts his son Pallas to Aeneas, since Evander himself is too old and infirm to go to battle. Aeneas is initially wary of Evander's advice, but Venus sends crashing thunder and an image of weapons hanging in the sky as a sign that he is to seek the help of the Etruscans. Aeneas picks the bravest of his men to travel with him to Agylla, sending the rest back to the camp with a message for Ascanius. With Pallas by his side, he meets with the Etruscans, who are led by King Tarchon. At their camp, Venus appears to him with Vulcan's weapons. Aeneas marvels over the extraordinary craftsmanship of the shield, which depicts Rome's brilliant future. The shield contains images of Romulus and Remus suckling at the teats of a wolf and Augustus Caesar leading his men into battle, among others. The chapter ends with a promising image, as Aeneas dons his new armor: "Upon his shoulder he/ lifts up the fame and fate of his sons' sons" .

The primary function of Book VIII is to set up the readers' sympathies - in essence, to let them know who to root for. Parallels are drawn between Aeneas, Hercules, and Evander, cementing the men as heroes in their own time. Evander demonstrates remarkable piety, with his annual commemoration of Hercules' great feat; Hercules is an extraordinary warrior; and Aeneas is both courageous and pious, serving as a link between the two great men. The positive qualities displayed by Aeneas and his comrades - including the Etruscans, whose oppression under Mezentius's rule immediately arouses sympathy - stands in sharp contrast to the hotheadedness and antagonistic tendencies of their opponents, the Rutulians. The second primary goal of Book VIII is to demonstrate, once again, that the great future of Rome was destined even in Aeneas's time. As they walk around Pallanteum, King Evander points out a number of sites that were still in existence during Virgil's time, thereby underscoring the fact that Rome's greatness was preordained. The shield that Vulcan presents to Aeneas is an even more concrete example of this theme, containing images of the heroes to come. Even though Aeneas is unaware of the meaning of the images, he is nevertheless awestruck by them, and their positive portents fill him with a sense of hope for the future and determination to see his son fulfill his destiny. Many of Virgil's critics argue that the Aeneid is little more than a giant piece of propaganda intended primarily to please his patron, Caesar Augustus. Indeed, elements such as the images on Aeneas's shield and Anchises's tour of the Underworld certainly support the contention that Virgil hoped to present the Romans as a people so favored by the gods that their rise to power was inevitable. In the scenes depicting Rome's future, the only characters described in any detail are the Greeks, the Trojans, and the gods ; all others are mere filler, standing on the periphery of the world stage. Virgil's supporters, however, point to the fact that he repeatedly emphasizes the uncountable sacrifices in the pursuit of Rome's destiny; he attends to both the positive and negative aspects of the rise of the empire. One interesting element found in this Book is King Evander's infirmity, which recalls both King Priam and King Latinus. While all three men are unquestionably moral, pious individuals, King Evander is "heavy/ with age" , King Priam is "tottering with age" , and King Latinus is "an old man now" . Why does Virgil create such weak characters to rule over these lands? One possibility is that these rulers are meant to represent specific aspects of Aeneas's personality - his determination, his piety, his wisdom - and to provide a prototype for the ideal leader late in life. They may also be intended to contrast with the new generation of leaders; since the older generation is unable to lead their subjects as they once could, a new generation awaits, ready to take over the reins of power. An interesting moment occurs when Tiberinus orders Aeneas to make offerings to Juno . When Aeneas finds the white cow and thirty white sucklings that mark the future location of Rome, he sacrifices all of the animals to Juno. This is a curious gesture, considering that omens such as these are what anger Juno the most, but by doing this Aeneas demonstrates that he is above the petty quarrels of the gods. He is entirely assured of his destiny, and he will not lower himself to treat Juno with the disrespect that she has shown to him.

gradesaver

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_ix.txt

finished_summaries/gradesaver/The Aeneid/section_8_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book ix

book ix

{"name": "Book IX", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-ix", "summary": "Juno, determined to see the war between the Trojans and the Latins begin in earnest, sends Iris to tell Turnus to attack the Trojan camp. The Rutulians surprise the Trojans, who react in fear to the approaching \"mass ... of gloom and darkness\" . Since Aeneas is not present , the Trojans do as he had instructed, retreating behind their ramparts even though they feel ashamed to do so. Turnus searches desperately for an entrance to the Trojan camp but, unable to find one, decides to set fire to the Trojan fleet. The attack is unsuccessful: years before, Jupiter's mother had given her pine grove to Aeneas for wood to build his fleet, and in return she had asked Jupiter to promise that no harm would ever come to her precious timbers. Although he questions whether mortals should be given immortals' privileges, Jupiter keeps his promise to his mother and transforms the burning ships into sea nymphs, who flee into the ocean's depths. The Rutulians are struck by fear at this sight, but Turnus maintains total confidence in his ability to defeat Aeneas. He will not, he states, hide himself in the belly of a wooden horse to prove his superiority to the Trojans; he will meet them \"in broad daylight\" . Nisus and Euryalus, who had engaged in the footrace, now bravely volunteer to carry word of the attack to Aeneas, who is still in Pallanteum. Although Nisus initially tries to dissuade Euryalus from accompanying him, not wanting to put his friend in danger, Euryalus insists that he will have it no other way. Ascanius, struck by their courage, says that he will reward them richly upon their return, even though all that Euryalus asks is that his mother be provided for. On the road, Nisus and Euryalus slay a number of Rutulians. Finally, however, they are spotted, and the Rutulian horsemen give chase through the forest. Euryalus, laden with spoils from those he slaughtered, falls behind, and he is captured by Volcens, a Rutulian warrior. Nisus makes a brave effort to save his friend, hurling spears at Euryalus's captors. In revenge for the deaths, Volcens kills Euryalus. Nisus rushes at Volcens in a rage and thrusts his sword through Volcens's mouth, but is then quickly slain by the other Rutulians. The bereaved Latin men carry Volcens back to their camp, and then they place the heads of Nisus and Euryalus on pikes and parade them before the Trojans, who are deeply grieved by the sight. Rumor carries word of Euryalus's death to his mother, who weeps so piteously that the Trojans take her into their arms and carry her home. Angered by the deaths of their friends, the Trojans return the Latins' attack, and the battle begins in earnest. The next few pages describe great brutality: a wall collapses, killing many Trojans, and Ascanius makes his first kill in battle. He slays Turnus's brother-in-law, Remulus, because he had been mocking the Trojans. Apollo appears to Ascanius and tells him that while he has done well, he should never again engage in war, but instead must work to maintain peace. Finally, the Latins manage to beat down the gate to the Trojan camp, although the Trojans are able to keep them out, and Pandarus, with superhuman effort, swings the gates shut once again. Several Trojans are left outside to battle the Latins, but Turnus had made it through the gate with the Trojans. He begins running rampant, killing all whom he encounters. Finally, Serestus and Mnestheus shame their companions for allowing one man to create such discord. The Trojans finally get the upper hand and begin to close in on Turnus, but Juno sends word to him that he must flee. He escapes by jumping into the Tiber River and allowing the current to carry him back to the Latin camp.", "analysis": "In Book IX, the Rutulians - and Turnus in particular - demonstrate remarkable strength. Even though the outcome of the battle is certain, the Rutulians nevertheless reveal that they are extremely resourceful, courageous, able fighters, and they inflict a great deal of harm on the Trojan camp. Turnus is especially remarkable on the battlefield, holding his own even when he is the only Latin warrior locked inside the Trojan camp. Indeed, Turnus's character, like Dido's, derives its complexity from the fact that he is fated to lose, but is so confident in his abilities that he continues to battle destiny. He is clearly intended to be an antagonist, but Virgil allows readers to feel a measure of sympathy for this man, who is so certain in his convictions that he fights - almost heroically - to the very end. Some of Virgil's critics even argue that Turnus appears almost more heroic than Aeneas, particularly in this Book. Throughout the Aeneid, Aeneas certainly demonstrates skill and valor, but is it truly heroic to fight when one is assured of success? Courageous, but heroic? It is a foregone conclusion that Aeneas will win the battle; the only suspense that Virgil can offer his audience lies in Turnus's remarkable abilities on the battlefield. This man is such a brilliant warrior that he has the ability to keep the inevitable victors at bay for far longer than they expected. By investing Turnus with exceptional abilities, Virgil heightens the suspense of the Aeneid and keeps readers' attention even though they know what the ultimate outcome will be. One of the most poignant episodes here is the death of Nisus and Euryalus. These two men, who display a deep and enduring friendship , reveal the great reverence Virgil placed on such relationships. Nisus is a wholly self-sacrificing individual, willing to go on a highly treacherous journey by himself, so that he will not place his friend in danger, and later willing to sacrifice his own life to avenge the death of his friend. Euryalus is slightly less heroic; he appears to want to accompany Nisus largely so that he can share in the glory, but is caught by the Rutulians because he is so laden down with spoils taken from the bodies of his Latin conquests that he falls behind during a chase through the forest. Nevertheless, the connection that these two men share is admirable, and their shared death is undoubtably one of the most poignant, emotionally affecting moments in the tale. Book IX is the only one in the Aeneid in which Aeneas is not directly present. Virgil does, however, indicate that Aeneas is such a strong character that his men continue to obey him - and even take on his characteristics - in his absence. Before leaving for the Etruscan camp, Aeneas instructed his comrades to retreat behind the battlements should the Latins attack, and even though it goes against their instincts as warriors to flee from battle, the Trojans do as their leader requested. Aeneas's influence is underscored by the fact that many of the warriors display their leader's most notable traits during the battle: heroism, morality, and courage. Ascanius, in particular, is able to take over for Aeneas in his absence: as Aeneas might have done, he promises Nisus and Euryalus that they will be rewarded richly for their bravery, and he is struck by the piety of Euryalus's request that his mother be looked after. Furthermore, he makes his first - and only - kill out of a desire to protect the honor of his comrades, and he does so in a humble, relatively moral manner."}

BOOK IX While these affairs in distant places pass'd, The various Iris Juno sends with haste, To find bold Turnus, who, with anxious thought, The secret shade of his great grandsire sought. Retir'd alone she found the daring man, And op'd her rosy lips, and thus began: "What none of all the gods could grant thy vows, That, Turnus, this auspicious day bestows. Aeneas, gone to seek th' Arcadian prince, Has left the Trojan camp without defense; And, short of succors there, employs his pains In parts remote to raise the Tuscan swains. Now snatch an hour that favors thy designs; Unite thy forces, and attack their lines." This said, on equal wings she pois'd her weight, And form'd a radiant rainbow in her flight. The Daunian hero lifts his hands eyes, And thus invokes the goddess as she flies: "Iris, the grace of heav'n, what pow'r divine Has sent thee down, thro' dusky clouds to shine? See, they divide; immortal day appears, And glitt'ring planets dancing in their spheres! With joy, these happy omens I obey, And follow to the war the god that leads the way." Thus having said, as by the brook he stood, He scoop'd the water from the crystal flood; Then with his hands the drops to heav'n he throws, And loads the pow'rs above with offer'd vows. Now march the bold confed'rates thro' the plain, Well hors'd, well clad; a rich and shining train. Messapus leads the van; and, in the rear, The sons of Tyrrheus in bright arms appear. In the main battle, with his flaming crest, The mighty Turnus tow'rs above the rest. Silent they move, majestically slow, Like ebbing Nile, or Ganges in his flow. The Trojans view the dusty cloud from far, And the dark menace of the distant war. Caicus from the rampire saw it rise, Black'ning the fields, and thick'ning thro' the skies. Then to his fellows thus aloud he calls: "What rolling clouds, my friends, approach the walls? Arm! arm! and man the works! prepare your spears And pointed darts! the Latian host appears." Thus warn'd, they shut their gates; with shouts ascend The bulwarks, and, secure, their foes attend: For their wise gen'ral, with foreseeing care, Had charg'd them not to tempt the doubtful war, Nor, tho' provok'd, in open fields advance, But close within their lines attend their chance. Unwilling, yet they keep the strict command, And sourly wait in arms the hostile band. The fiery Turnus flew before the rest: A piebald steed of Thracian strain he press'd; His helm of massy gold, and crimson was his crest. With twenty horse to second his designs, An unexpected foe, he fac'd the lines. "Is there," he said, "in arms, who bravely dare His leader's honor and his danger share?" Then spurring on, his brandish'd dart he threw, In sign of war: applauding shouts ensue. Amaz'd to find a dastard race, that run Behind the rampires and the battle shun, He rides around the camp, with rolling eyes, And stops at ev'ry post, and ev'ry passage tries. So roams the nightly wolf about the fold: Wet with descending show'rs, and stiff with cold, He howls for hunger, and he grins for pain, (His gnashing teeth are exercis'd in vain,) And, impotent of anger, finds no way In his distended paws to grasp the prey. The mothers listen; but the bleating lambs Securely swig the dug, beneath the dams. Thus ranges eager Turnus o'er the plain. Sharp with desire, and furious with disdain; Surveys each passage with a piercing sight, To force his foes in equal field to fight. Thus while he gazes round, at length he spies, Where, fenc'd with strong redoubts, their navy lies, Close underneath the walls; the washing tide Secures from all approach this weaker side. He takes the wish'd occasion, fills his hand With ready fires, and shakes a flaming brand. Urg'd by his presence, ev'ry soul is warm'd, And ev'ry hand with kindled firs is arm'd. From the fir'd pines the scatt'ring sparkles fly; Fat vapors, mix'd with flames, involve the sky. What pow'r, O Muses, could avert the flame Which threaten'd, in the fleet, the Trojan name? Tell: for the fact, thro' length of time obscure, Is hard to faith; yet shall the fame endure. 'T is said that, when the chief prepar'd his flight, And fell'd his timber from Mount Ida's height, The grandam goddess then approach'd her son, And with a mother's majesty begun: "Grant me," she said, "the sole request I bring, Since conquer'd heav'n has own'd you for its king. On Ida's brows, for ages past, there stood, With firs and maples fill'd, a shady wood; And on the summit rose a sacred grove, Where I was worship'd with religious love. Those woods, that holy grove, my long delight, I gave the Trojan prince, to speed his flight. Now, fill'd with fear, on their behalf I come; Let neither winds o'erset, nor waves intomb The floating forests of the sacred pine; But let it be their safety to be mine." Then thus replied her awful son, who rolls The radiant stars, and heav'n and earth controls: "How dare you, mother, endless date demand For vessels molded by a mortal hand? What then is fate? Shall bold Aeneas ride, Of safety certain, on th' uncertain tide? Yet, what I can, I grant; when, wafted o'er, The chief is landed on the Latian shore, Whatever ships escape the raging storms, At my command shall change their fading forms To nymphs divine, and plow the wat'ry way, Like Dotis and the daughters of the sea." To seal his sacred vow, by Styx he swore, The lake of liquid pitch, the dreary shore, And Phlegethon's innavigable flood, And the black regions of his brother god. He said; and shook the skies with his imperial nod. And now at length the number'd hours were come, Prefix'd by fate's irrevocable doom, When the great Mother of the Gods was free To save her ships, and finish Jove's decree. First, from the quarter of the morn, there sprung A light that sign'd the heav'ns, and shot along; Then from a cloud, fring'd round with golden fires, Were timbrels heard, and Berecynthian choirs; And, last, a voice, with more than mortal sounds, Both hosts, in arms oppos'd, with equal horror wounds: "O Trojan race, your needless aid forbear, And know, my ships are my peculiar care. With greater ease the bold Rutulian may, With hissing brands, attempt to burn the sea, Than singe my sacred pines. But you, my charge, Loos'd from your crooked anchors, launch at large, Exalted each a nymph: forsake the sand, And swim the seas, at Cybele's command." No sooner had the goddess ceas'd to speak, When, lo! th' obedient ships their haulsers break; And, strange to tell, like dolphins, in the main They plunge their prows, and dive, and spring again: As many beauteous maids the billows sweep, As rode before tall vessels on the deep. The foes, surpris'd with wonder, stood aghast; Messapus curb'd his fiery courser's haste; Old Tiber roar'd, and, raising up his head, Call'd back his waters to their oozy bed. Turnus alone, undaunted, bore the shock, And with these words his trembling troops bespoke: "These monsters for the Trojans' fate are meant, And are by Jove for black presages sent. He takes the cowards' last relief away; For fly they cannot, and, constrain'd to stay, Must yield unfought, a base inglorious prey. The liquid half of all the globe is lost; Heav'n shuts the seas, and we secure the coast. Theirs is no more than that small spot of ground Which myriads of our martial men surround. Their fates I fear not, or vain oracles. 'T was giv'n to Venus they should cross the seas, And land secure upon the Latian plains: Their promis'd hour is pass'd, and mine remains. 'T is in the fate of Turnus to destroy, With sword and fire, the faithless race of Troy. Shall such affronts as these alone inflame The Grecian brothers, and the Grecian name? My cause and theirs is one; a fatal strife, And final ruin, for a ravish'd wife. Was 't not enough, that, punish'd for the crime, They fell; but will they fall a second time? One would have thought they paid enough before, To curse the costly sex, and durst offend no more. Can they securely trust their feeble wall, A slight partition, a thin interval, Betwixt their fate and them; when Troy, tho' built By hands divine, yet perish'd by their guilt? Lend me, for once, my friends, your valiant hands, To force from out their lines these dastard bands. Less than a thousand ships will end this war, Nor Vulcan needs his fated arms prepare. Let all the Tuscans, all th' Arcadians, join! Nor these, nor those, shall frustrate my design. Let them not fear the treasons of the night, The robb'd Palladium, the pretended flight: Our onset shall be made in open light. No wooden engine shall their town betray; Fires they shall have around, but fires by day. No Grecian babes before their camp appear, Whom Hector's arms detain'd to the tenth tardy year. Now, since the sun is rolling to the west, Give we the silent night to needful rest: Refresh your bodies, and your arms prepare; The morn shall end the small remains of war." The post of honor to Messapus falls, To keep the nightly guard, to watch the walls, To pitch the fires at distances around, And close the Trojans in their scanty ground. Twice seven Rutulian captains ready stand, And twice seven hundred horse these chiefs command; All clad in shining arms the works invest, Each with a radiant helm and waving crest. Stretch'd at their length, they press the grassy ground; They laugh, they sing, (the jolly bowls go round,) With lights and cheerful fires renew the day, And pass the wakeful night in feasts and play. The Trojans, from above, their foes beheld, And with arm'd legions all the rampires fill'd. Seiz'd with affright, their gates they first explore; Join works to works with bridges, tow'r to tow'r: Thus all things needful for defense abound. Mnestheus and brave Seresthus walk the round, Commission'd by their absent prince to share The common danger, and divide the care. The soldiers draw their lots, and, as they fall, By turns relieve each other on the wall. Nigh where the foes their utmost guards advance, To watch the gate was warlike Nisus' chance. His father Hyrtacus of noble blood; His mother was a huntress of the wood, And sent him to the wars. Well could he bear His lance in fight, and dart the flying spear, But better skill'd unerring shafts to send. Beside him stood Euryalus, his friend: Euryalus, than whom the Trojan host No fairer face, or sweeter air, could boast- Scarce had the down to shade his cheeks begun. One was their care, and their delight was one: One common hazard in the war they shar'd, And now were both by choice upon the guard. Then Nisus thus: "Or do the gods inspire This warmth, or make we gods of our desire? A gen'rous ardor boils within my breast, Eager of action, enemy to rest: This urges me to fight, and fires my mind To leave a memorable name behind. Thou see'st the foe secure; how faintly shine Their scatter'd fires! the most, in sleep supine Along the ground, an easy conquest lie: The wakeful few the fuming flagon ply; All hush'd around. Now hear what I revolve- A thought unripe- and scarcely yet resolve. Our absent prince both camp and council mourn; By message both would hasten his return: If they confer what I demand on thee, (For fame is recompense enough for me,) Methinks, beneath yon hill, I have espied A way that safely will my passage guide." Euryalus stood list'ning while he spoke, With love of praise and noble envy struck; Then to his ardent friend expos'd his mind: "All this, alone, and leaving me behind! Am I unworthy, Nisus, to be join'd? Thinkist thou I can my share of glory yield, Or send thee unassisted to the field? Not so my father taught my childhood arms; Born in a siege, and bred among alarms! Nor is my youth unworthy of my friend, Nor of the heav'n-born hero I attend. The thing call'd life, with ease I can disclaim, And think it over-sold to purchase fame." Then Nisus thus: "Alas! thy tender years Would minister new matter to my fears. So may the gods, who view this friendly strife, Restore me to thy lov'd embrace with life, Condemn'd to pay my vows, (as sure I trust,) This thy request is cruel and unjust. But if some chance- as many chances are, And doubtful hazards, in the deeds of war- If one should reach my head, there let it fall, And spare thy life; I would not perish all. Thy bloomy youth deserves a longer date: Live thou to mourn thy love's unhappy fate; To bear my mangled body from the foe, Or buy it back, and fun'ral rites bestow. Or, if hard fortune shall those dues deny, Thou canst at least an empty tomb supply. O let not me the widow's tears renew! Nor let a mother's curse my name pursue: Thy pious parent, who, for love of thee, Forsook the coasts of friendly Sicily, Her age committing to the seas and wind, When ev'ry weary matron stay'd behind." To this, Euryalus: "You plead in vain, And but protract the cause you cannot gain. No more delays, but haste!" With that, he wakes The nodding watch; each to his office takes. The guard reliev'd, the gen'rous couple went To find the council at the royal tent. All creatures else forgot their daily care, And sleep, the common gift of nature, share; Except the Trojan peers, who wakeful sate In nightly council for th' indanger'd state. They vote a message to their absent chief, Shew their distress, and beg a swift relief. Amid the camp a silent seat they chose, Remote from clamor, and secure from foes. On their left arms their ample shields they bear, The right reclin'd upon the bending spear. Now Nisus and his friend approach the guard, And beg admission, eager to be heard: Th' affair important, not to be deferr'd. Ascanius bids 'em be conducted in, Ord'ring the more experienc'd to begin. Then Nisus thus: "Ye fathers, lend your ears; Nor judge our bold attempt beyond our years. The foe, securely drench'd in sleep and wine, Neglect their watch; the fires but thinly shine; And where the smoke in cloudy vapors flies, Cov'ring the plain, and curling to the skies, Betwixt two paths, which at the gate divide, Close by the sea, a passage we have spied, Which will our way to great Aeneas guide. Expect each hour to see him safe again, Loaded with spoils of foes in battle slain. Snatch we the lucky minute while we may; Nor can we be mistaken in the way; For, hunting in the vale, we both have seen The rising turrets, and the stream between, And know the winding course, with ev'ry ford." He ceas'd; and old Alethes took the word: "Our country gods, in whom our trust we place, Will yet from ruin save the Trojan race, While we behold such dauntless worth appear In dawning youth, and souls so void of fear." Then into tears of joy the father broke; Each in his longing arms by turns he took; Panted and paus'd; and thus again he spoke: "Ye brave young men, what equal gifts can we, In recompense of such desert, decree? The greatest, sure, and best you can receive, The gods and your own conscious worth will give. The rest our grateful gen'ral will bestow, And young Ascanius till his manhood owe." "And I, whose welfare in my father lies," Ascanius adds, "by the great deities, By my dear country, by my household gods, By hoary Vesta's rites and dark abodes, Adjure you both, (on you my fortune stands; That and my faith I plight into your hands,) Make me but happy in his safe return, Whose wanted presence I can only mourn; Your common gift shall two large goblets be Of silver, wrought with curious imagery, And high emboss'd, which, when old Priam reign'd, My conqu'ring sire at sack'd Arisba gain'd; And more, two tripods cast in antic mold, With two great talents of the finest gold; Beside a costly bowl, ingrav'd with art, Which Dido gave, when first she gave her heart. But, if in conquer'd Italy we reign, When spoils by lot the victor shall obtain- Thou saw'st the courser by proud Turnus press'd: That, Nisus, and his arms, and nodding crest, And shield, from chance exempt, shall be thy share: Twelve lab'ring slaves, twelve handmaids young and fair All clad in rich attire, and train'd with care; And, last, a Latian field with fruitful plains, And a large portion of the king's domains. But thou, whose years are more to mine allied- No fate my vow'd affection shall divide From thee, heroic youth! Be wholly mine; Take full possession; all my soul is thine. One faith, one fame, one fate, shall both attend; My life's companion, and my bosom friend: My peace shall be committed to thy care, And to thy conduct my concerns in war." Then thus the young Euryalus replied: "Whatever fortune, good or bad, betide, The same shall be my age, as now my youth; No time shall find me wanting to my truth. This only from your goodness let me gain (And, this ungranted, all rewards are vain) Of Priam's royal race my mother came- And sure the best that ever bore the name- Whom neither Troy nor Sicily could hold From me departing, but, o'erspent and old, My fate she follow'd. Ignorant of this (Whatever) danger, neither parting kiss, Nor pious blessing taken, her I leave, And in this only act of all my life deceive. By this right hand and conscious Night I swear, My soul so sad a farewell could not bear. Be you her comfort; fill my vacant place (Permit me to presume so great a grace) Support her age, forsaken and distress'd. That hope alone will fortify my breast Against the worst of fortunes, and of fears." He said. The mov'd assistants melt in tears. Then thus Ascanius, wonderstruck to see That image of his filial piety: "So great beginnings, in so green an age, Exact the faith which I again ingage. Thy mother all the dues shall justly claim, Creusa had, and only want the name. Whate'er event thy bold attempt shall have, 'T is merit to have borne a son so brave. Now by my head, a sacred oath, I swear, (My father us'd it,) what, returning here Crown'd with success, I for thyself prepare, That, if thou fail, shall thy lov'd mother share." He said, and weeping, while he spoke the word, From his broad belt he drew a shining sword, Magnificent with gold. Lycaon made, And in an ivory scabbard sheath'd the blade. This was his gift. Great Mnestheus gave his friend A lion's hide, his body to defend; And good Alethes furnish'd him, beside, With his own trusty helm, of temper tried. Thus arm'd they went. The noble Trojans wait Their issuing forth, and follow to the gate With prayers and vows. Above the rest appears Ascanius, manly far beyond his years, And messages committed to their care, Which all in winds were lost, and flitting air. The trenches first they pass'd; then took their way Where their proud foes in pitch'd pavilions lay; To many fatal, ere themselves were slain. They found the careless host dispers'd upon the plain, Who, gorg'd, and drunk with wine, supinely snore. Unharness'd chariots stand along the shore: Amidst the wheels and reins, the goblet by, A medley of debauch and war, they lie. Observing Nisus shew'd his friend the sight: "Behold a conquest gain'd without a fight. Occasion offers, and I stand prepar'd; There lies our way; be thou upon the guard, And look around, while I securely go, And hew a passage thro' the sleeping foe." Softly he spoke; then striding took his way, With his drawn sword, where haughty Rhamnes lay; His head rais'd high on tapestry beneath, And heaving from his breast, he drew his breath; A king and prophet, by King Turnus lov'd: But fate by prescience cannot be remov'd. Him and his sleeping slaves he slew; then spies Where Remus, with his rich retinue, lies. His armor-bearer first, and next he kills His charioteer, intrench'd betwixt the wheels And his lov'd horses; last invades their lord; Full on his neck he drives the fatal sword: The gasping head flies off; a purple flood Flows from the trunk, that welters in the blood, Which, by the spurning heels dispers'd around, The bed besprinkles and bedews the ground. Lamus the bold, and Lamyrus the strong, He slew, and then Serranus fair and young. From dice and wine the youth retir'd to rest, And puff'd the fumy god from out his breast: Ev'n then he dreamt of drink and lucky play- More lucky, had it lasted till the day. The famish'd lion thus, with hunger bold, O'erleaps the fences of the nightly fold, And tears the peaceful flocks: with silent awe Trembling they lie, and pant beneath his paw. Nor with less rage Euryalus employs The wrathful sword, or fewer foes destroys; But on th' ignoble crowd his fury flew; He Fadus, Hebesus, and Rhoetus slew. Oppress'd with heavy sleep the former fell, But Rhoetus wakeful, and observing all: Behind a spacious jar he slink'd for fear; The fatal iron found and reach'd him there; For, as he rose, it pierc'd his naked side, And, reeking, thence return'd in crimson dyed. The wound pours out a stream of wine and blood; The purple soul comes floating in the flood. Now, where Messapus quarter'd, they arrive. The fires were fainting there, and just alive; The warrior-horses, tied in order, fed. Nisus observ'd the discipline, and said: "Our eager thirst of blood may both betray; And see the scatter'd streaks of dawning day, Foe to nocturnal thefts. No more, my friend; Here let our glutted execution end. A lane thro' slaughter'd bodies we have made." The bold Euryalus, tho' loth, obey'd. Of arms, and arras, and of plate, they find A precious load; but these they leave behind. Yet, fond of gaudy spoils, the boy would stay To make the rich caparison his prey, Which on the steed of conquer'd Rhamnes lay. Nor did his eyes less longingly behold The girdle-belt, with nails of burnish'd gold. This present Caedicus the rich bestow'd On Remulus, when friendship first they vow'd, And, absent, join'd in hospitable ties: He, dying, to his heir bequeath'd the prize; Till, by the conqu'ring Ardean troops oppress'd, He fell; and they the glorious gift possess'd. These glitt'ring spoils (now made the victor's gain) He to his body suits, but suits in vain: Messapus' helm he finds among the rest, And laces on, and wears the waving crest. Proud of their conquest, prouder of their prey, They leave the camp, and take the ready way. But far they had not pass'd, before they spied Three hundred horse, with Volscens for their guide. The queen a legion to King Turnus sent; But the swift horse the slower foot prevent, And now, advancing, sought the leader's tent. They saw the pair; for, thro' the doubtful shade, His shining helm Euryalus betray'd, On which the moon with full reflection play'd. "'T is not for naught," cried Volscens from the crowd, "These men go there;" then rais'd his voice aloud: "Stand! stand! why thus in arms? And whither bent? From whence, to whom, and on what errand sent?" Silent they scud away, and haste their flight To neighb'ring woods, and trust themselves to night. The speedy horse all passages belay, And spur their smoking steeds to cross their way, And watch each entrance of the winding wood. Black was the forest: thick with beech it stood, Horrid with fern, and intricate with thorn; Few paths of human feet, or tracks of beasts, were worn. The darkness of the shades, his heavy prey, And fear, misled the younger from his way. But Nisus hit the turns with happier haste, And, thoughtless of his friend, the forest pass'd, And Alban plains, from Alba's name so call'd, Where King Latinus then his oxen stall'd; Till, turning at the length, he stood his ground, And miss'd his friend, and cast his eyes around: "Ah wretch!" he cried, "where have I left behind Th' unhappy youth? where shall I hope to find? Or what way take?" Again he ventures back, And treads the mazes of his former track. He winds the wood, and, list'ning, hears the noise Of tramping coursers, and the riders' voice. The sound approach'd; and suddenly he view'd The foes inclosing, and his friend pursued, Forelaid and taken, while he strove in vain The shelter of the friendly shades to gain. What should he next attempt? what arms employ, What fruitless force, to free the captive boy? Or desperate should he rush and lose his life, With odds oppress'd, in such unequal strife? Resolv'd at length, his pointed spear he shook; And, casting on the moon a mournful look: "Guardian of groves, and goddess of the night, Fair queen," he said, "direct my dart aright. If e'er my pious father, for my sake, Did grateful off'rings on thy altars make, Or I increas'd them with my sylvan toils, And hung thy holy roofs with savage spoils, Give me to scatter these." Then from his ear He pois'd, and aim'd, and launch'd the trembling spear. The deadly weapon, hissing from the grove, Impetuous on the back of Sulmo drove; Pierc'd his thin armor, drank his vital blood, And in his body left the broken wood. He staggers round; his eyeballs roll in death, And with short sobs he gasps away his breath. All stand amaz'd- a second jav'lin flies With equal strength, and quivers thro' the skies. This thro' thy temples, Tagus, forc'd the way, And in the brainpan warmly buried lay. Fierce Volscens foams with rage, and, gazing round, Descried not him who gave the fatal wound, Nor knew to fix revenge: "But thou," he cries, "Shalt pay for both," and at the pris'ner flies With his drawn sword. Then, struck with deep despair, That cruel sight the lover could not bear; But from his covert rush'd in open view, And sent his voice before him as he flew: "Me! me!" he cried- "turn all your swords alone On me- the fact confess'd, the fault my own. He neither could nor durst, the guiltless youth: Ye moon and stars, bear witness to the truth! His only crime (if friendship can offend) Is too much love to his unhappy friend." Too late he speaks: the sword, which fury guides, Driv'n with full force, had pierc'd his tender sides. Down fell the beauteous youth: the yawning wound Gush'd out a purple stream, and stain'd the ground. His snowy neck reclines upon his breast, Like a fair flow'r by the keen share oppress'd; Like a white poppy sinking on the plain, Whose heavy head is overcharg'd with rain. Despair, and rage, and vengeance justly vow'd, Drove Nisus headlong on the hostile crowd. Volscens he seeks; on him alone he bends: Borne back and bor'd by his surrounding friends, Onward he press'd, and kept him still in sight; Then whirl'd aloft his sword with all his might: Th' unerring steel descended while he spoke, Piered his wide mouth, and thro' his weazon broke. Dying, he slew; and, stagg'ring on the plain, With swimming eyes he sought his lover slain; Then quiet on his bleeding bosom fell, Content, in death, to be reveng'd so well. O happy friends! for, if my verse can give Immortal life, your fame shall ever live, Fix'd as the Capitol's foundation lies, And spread, where'er the Roman eagle flies! The conqu'ring party first divide the prey, Then their slain leader to the camp convey. With wonder, as they went, the troops were fill'd, To see such numbers whom so few had kill'd. Serranus, Rhamnes, and the rest, they found: Vast crowds the dying and the dead surround; And the yet reeking blood o'erflows the ground. All knew the helmet which Messapus lost, But mourn'd a purchase that so dear had cost. Now rose the ruddy morn from Tithon's bed, And with the dawn of day the skies o'erspread; Nor long the sun his daily course withheld, But added colors to the world reveal'd: When early Turnus, wak'ning with the light, All clad in armor, calls his troops to fight. His martial men with fierce harangue he fir'd, And his own ardor in their souls inspir'd. This done- to give new terror to his foes, The heads of Nisus and his friend he shows, Rais'd high on pointed spears- a ghastly sight: Loud peals of shouts ensue, and barbarous delight. Meantime the Trojans run, where danger calls; They line their trenches, and they man their walls. In front extended to the left they stood; Safe was the right, surrounded by the flood. But, casting from their tow'rs a frightful view, They saw the faces, which too well they knew, Tho' then disguis'd in death, and smear'd all o'er With filth obscene, and dropping putrid gore. Soon hasty fame thro' the sad city bears The mournful message to the mother's ears. An icy cold benumbs her limbs; she shakes; Her cheeks the blood, her hand the web forsakes. She runs the rampires round amidst the war, Nor fears the flying darts; she rends her hair, And fills with loud laments the liquid air. "Thus, then, my lov'd Euryalus appears! Thus looks the prop my declining years! Was't on this face my famish'd eyes I fed? Ah! how unlike the living is the dead! And could'st thou leave me, cruel, thus alone? Not one kind kiss from a departing son! No look, no last adieu before he went, In an ill-boding hour to slaughter sent! Cold on the ground, and pressing foreign clay, To Latian dogs and fowls he lies a prey! Nor was I near to close his dying eyes, To wash his wounds, to weep his obsequies, To call about his corpse his crying friends, Or spread the mantle (made for other ends) On his dear body, which I wove with care, Nor did my daily pains or nightly labor spare. Where shall I find his corpse? what earth sustains His trunk dismember'd, and his cold remains? For this, alas! I left my needful ease, Expos'd my life to winds and winter seas! If any pity touch Rutulian hearts, Here empty all your quivers, all your darts; Or, if they fail, thou, Jove, conclude my woe, And send me thunderstruck to shades below!" Her shrieks and clamors pierce the Trojans' ears, Unman their courage, and augment their fears; Nor young Ascanius could the sight sustain, Nor old Ilioneus his tears restrain, But Actor and Idaeus jointly sent, To bear the madding mother to her tent. And now the trumpets terribly, from far, With rattling clangor, rouse the sleepy war. The soldiers' shouts succeed the brazen sounds; And heav'n, from pole to pole, the noise rebounds. The Volscians bear their shields upon their head, And, rushing forward, form a moving shed. These fill the ditch; those pull the bulwarks down: Some raise the ladders; others scale the town. But, where void spaces on the walls appear, Or thin defense, they pour their forces there. With poles and missive weapons, from afar, The Trojans keep aloof the rising war. Taught, by their ten years' siege, defensive fight, They roll down ribs of rocks, an unresisted weight, To break the penthouse with the pond'rous blow, Which yet the patient Volscians undergo: But could not bear th' unequal combat long; For, where the Trojans find the thickest throng, The ruin falls: their shatter'd shields give way, And their crush'd heads become an easy prey. They shrink for fear, abated of their rage, Nor longer dare in a blind fight engage; Contented now to gall them from below With darts and slings, and with the distant bow. Elsewhere Mezentius, terrible to view, A blazing pine within the trenches threw. But brave Messapus, Neptune's warlike son, Broke down the palisades, the trenches won, And loud for ladders calls, to scale the town. Calliope, begin! Ye sacred Nine, Inspire your poet in his high design, To sing what slaughter manly Turnus made, What souls he sent below the Stygian shade, What fame the soldiers with their captain share, And the vast circuit of the fatal war; For you in singing martial facts excel; You best remember, and alone can tell. There stood a tow'r, amazing to the sight, Built up of beams, and of stupendous height: Art, and the nature of the place, conspir'd To furnish all the strength that war requir'd. To level this, the bold Italians join; The wary Trojans obviate their design; With weighty stones o'erwhelm their troops below, Shoot thro' the loopholes, and sharp jav'lins throw. Turnus, the chief, toss'd from his thund'ring hand Against the wooden walls, a flaming brand: It stuck, the fiery plague; the winds were high; The planks were season'd, and the timber dry. Contagion caught the posts; it spread along, Scorch'd, and to distance drove the scatter'd throng. The Trojans fled; the fire pursued amain, Still gath'ring fast upon the trembling train; Till, crowding to the corners of the wall, Down the defense and the defenders fall. The mighty flaw makes heav'n itself resound: The dead and dying Trojans strew the ground. The tow'r, that follow'd on the fallen crew, Whelm'd o'er their heads, and buried whom it slew: Some stuck upon the darts themselves had sent; All the same equal ruin underwent. Young Lycus and Helenor only scape; Sav'd- how, they know not- from the steepy leap. Helenor, elder of the two: by birth, On one side royal, one a son of earth, Whom to the Lydian king Licymnia bare, And sent her boasted bastard to the war (A privilege which none but freemen share). Slight were his arms, a sword and silver shield: No marks of honor charg'd its empty field. Light as he fell, so light the youth arose, And rising, found himself amidst his foes; Nor flight was left, nor hopes to force his way. Embolden'd by despair, he stood at bay; And- like a stag, whom all the troop surrounds Of eager huntsmen and invading hounds- Resolv'd on death, he dissipates his fears, And bounds aloft against the pointed spears: So dares the youth, secure of death; and throws His dying body on his thickest foes. But Lycus, swifter of his feet by far, Runs, doubles, winds and turns, amidst the war; Springs to the walls, and leaves his foes behind, And snatches at the beam he first can find; Looks up, and leaps aloft at all the stretch, In hopes the helping hand of some kind friend to reach. But Turnus follow'd hard his hunted prey (His spear had almost reach'd him in the way, Short of his reins, and scarce a span behind) "Fool!" said the chief, "tho' fleeter than the wind, Couldst thou presume to scape, when I pursue?" He said, and downward by the feet he drew The trembling dastard; at the tug he falls; Vast ruins come along, rent from the smoking walls. Thus on some silver swan, or tim'rous hare, Jove's bird comes sousing down from upper air; Her crooked talons truss the fearful prey: Then out of sight she soars, and wings her way. So seizes the grim wolf the tender lamb, In vain lamented by the bleating dam. Then rushing onward with a barb'rous cry, The troops of Turnus to the combat fly. The ditch with fagots fill'd, the daring foe Toss'd firebrands to the steepy turrets throw. Ilioneus, as bold Lucetius came To force the gate, and feed the kindling flame, Roll'd down the fragment of a rock so right, It crush'd him double underneath the weight. Two more young Liger and Asylas slew: To bend the bow young Liger better knew; Asylas best the pointed jav'lin threw. Brave Caeneus laid Ortygius on the plain; The victor Caeneus was by Turnus slain. By the same hand, Clonius and Itys fall, Sagar, and Ida, standing on the wall. From Capys' arms his fate Privernus found: Hurt by Themilla first-but slight the wound- His shield thrown by, to mitigate the smart, He clapp'd his hand upon the wounded part: The second shaft came swift and unespied, And pierc'd his hand, and nail'd it to his side, Transfix'd his breathing lungs and beating heart: The soul came issuing out, and hiss'd against the dart. The son of Arcens shone amid the rest, In glitt'ring armor and a purple vest, (Fair was his face, his eyes inspiring love,) Bred by his father in the Martian grove, Where the fat altars of Palicus flame, And send in arms to purchase early fame. Him when he spied from far, the Tuscan king Laid by the lance, and took him to the sling, Thrice whirl'd the thong around his head, and threw: The heated lead half melted as it flew; It pierc'd his hollow temples and his brain; The youth came tumbling down, and spurn'd the plain. Then young Ascanius, who, before this day, Was wont in woods to shoot the savage prey, First bent in martial strife the twanging bow, And exercis'd against a human foe- With this bereft Numanus of his life, Who Turnus' younger sister took to wife. Proud of his realm, and of his royal bride, Vaunting before his troops, and lengthen'd with a stride, In these insulting terms the Trojans he defied: "Twice-conquer'd cowards, now your shame is shown- Coop'd up a second time within your town! Who dare not issue forth in open field, But hold your walls before you for a shield. Thus threat you war? thus our alliance force? What gods, what madness, hether steer'd your course? You shall not find the sons of Atreus here, Nor need the frauds of sly Ulysses fear. Strong from the cradle, of a sturdy brood, We bear our newborn infants to the flood; There bath'd amid the stream, our boys we hold, With winter harden'd, and inur'd to cold. They wake before the day to range the wood, Kill ere they eat, nor taste unconquer'd food. No sports, but what belong to war, they know: To break the stubborn colt, to bend the bow. Our youth, of labor patient, earn their bread; Hardly they work, with frugal diet fed. From plows and harrows sent to seek renown, They fight in fields, and storm the shaken town. No part of life from toils of war is free, No change in age, or diff'rence in degree. We plow and till in arms; our oxen feel, Instead of goads, the spur and pointed steel; Th' inverted lance makes furrows in the plain. Ev'n time, that changes all, yet changes us in vain: The body, not the mind; nor can control Th' immortal vigor, or abate the soul. Our helms defend the young, disguise the gray: We live by plunder, and delight in prey. Your vests embroider'd with rich purple shine; In sloth you glory, and in dances join. Your vests have sweeping sleeves; with female pride Your turbants underneath your chins are tied. Go, Phrygians, to your Dindymus again! Go, less than women, in the shapes of men! Go, mix'd with eunuchs, in the Mother's rites, Where with unequal sound the flute invites; Sing, dance, and howl, by turns, in Ida's shade: Resign the war to men, who know the martial trade!" This foul reproach Ascanius could not hear With patience, or a vow'd revenge forbear. At the full stretch of both his hands he drew, And almost join'd the horns of the tough yew. But, first, before the throne of Jove he stood, And thus with lifted hands invok'd the god: "My first attempt, great Jupiter, succeed! An annual off'ring in thy grove shall bleed; A snow-white steer, before thy altar led, Who, like his mother, bears aloft his head, Butts with his threat'ning brows, and bellowing stands, And dares the fight, and spurns the yellow sands." Jove bow'd the heav'ns, and lent a gracious ear, And thunder'd on the left, amidst the clear. Sounded at once the bow; and swiftly flies The feather'd death, and hisses thro' the skies. The steel thro' both his temples forc'd the way: Extended on the ground, Numanus lay. "Go now, vain boaster, and true valor scorn! The Phrygians, twice subdued, yet make this third return." Ascanius said no more. The Trojans shake The heav'ns with shouting, and new vigor take. Apollo then bestrode a golden cloud, To view the feats of arms, and fighting crowd; And thus the beardless victor he bespoke aloud: "Advance, illustrious youth, increase in fame, And wide from east to west extend thy name; Offspring of gods thyself; and Rome shall owe To thee a race of demigods below. This is the way to heav'n: the pow'rs divine From this beginning date the Julian line. To thee, to them, and their victorious heirs, The conquer'd war is due, and the vast world is theirs. Troy is too narrow for thy name." He said, And plunging downward shot his radiant head; Dispell'd the breathing air, that broke his flight: Shorn of his beams, a man to mortal sight. Old Butes' form he took, Anchises' squire, Now left, to rule Ascanius, by his sire: His wrinkled visage, and his hoary hairs, His mien, his habit, and his arms, he wears, And thus salutes the boy, too forward for his years: "Suffice it thee, thy father's worthy son, The warlike prize thou hast already won. The god of archers gives thy youth a part Of his own praise, nor envies equal art. Now tempt the war no more." He said, and flew Obscure in air, and vanish'd from their view. The Trojans, by his arms, their patron know, And hear the twanging of his heav'nly bow. Then duteous force they use, and Phoebus' name, To keep from fight the youth too fond of fame. Undaunted, they themselves no danger shun; From wall to wall the shouts and clamors run. They bend their bows; they whirl their slings around; Heaps of spent arrows fall, and strew the ground; And helms, and shields, and rattling arms resound. The combat thickens, like the storm that flies From westward, when the show'ry Kids arise; Or patt'ring hail comes pouring on the main, When Jupiter descends in harden'd rain, Or bellowing clouds burst with a stormy sound, And with an armed winter strew the ground. Pand'rus and Bitias, thunderbolts of war, Whom Hiera to bold Alcanor bare On Ida's top, two youths of height and size Like firs that on their mother mountain rise, Presuming on their force, the gates unbar, And of their own accord invite the war. With fates averse, against their king's command, Arm'd, on the right and on the left they stand, And flank the passage: shining steel they wear, And waving crests above their heads appear. Thus two tall oaks, that Padus' banks adorn, Lift up to heav'n their leafy heads unshorn, And, overpress'd with nature's heavy load, Dance to the whistling winds, and at each other nod. In flows a tide of Latians, when they see The gate set open, and the passage free; Bold Quercens, with rash Tmarus, rushing on, Equicolus, that in bright armor shone, And Haemon first; but soon repuls'd they fly, Or in the well-defended pass they die. These with success are fir'd, and those with rage, And each on equal terms at length ingage. Drawn from their lines, and issuing on the plain, The Trojans hand to hand the fight maintain. Fierce Turnus in another quarter fought, When suddenly th' unhop'd-for news was brought, The foes had left the fastness of their place, Prevail'd in fight, and had his men in chase. He quits th' attack, and, to prevent their fate, Runs where the giant brothers guard the gate. The first he met, Antiphates the brave, But base-begotten on a Theban slave, Sarpedon's son, he slew: the deadly dart Found passage thro' his breast, and pierc'd his heart. Fix'd in the wound th' Italian cornel stood, Warm'd in his lungs, and in his vital blood. Aphidnus next, and Erymanthus dies, And Meropes, and the gigantic size Of Bitias, threat'ning with his ardent eyes. Not by the feeble dart he fell oppress'd (A dart were lost within that roomy breast), But from a knotted lance, large, heavy, strong, Which roar'd like thunder as it whirl'd along: Not two bull hides th' impetuous force withhold, Nor coat of double mail, with scales of gold. Down sunk the monster bulk and press'd the ground; His arms and clatt'ring shield on the vast body sound, Not with less ruin than the Bajan mole, Rais'd on the seas, the surges to control- At once comes tumbling down the rocky wall; Prone to the deep, the stones disjointed fall Of the vast pile; the scatter'd ocean flies; Black sands, discolor'd froth, and mingled mud arise: The frighted billows roll, and seek the shores; Then trembles Prochyta, then Ischia roars: Typhoeus, thrown beneath, by Jove's command, Astonish'd at the flaw that shakes the land, Soon shifts his weary side, and, scarce awake, With wonder feels the weight press lighter on his back. The warrior god the Latian troops inspir'd, New strung their sinews, and their courage fir'd, But chills the Trojan hearts with cold affright: Then black despair precipitates their flight. When Pandarus beheld his brother kill'd, The town with fear and wild confusion fill'd, He turns the hinges of the heavy gate With both his hands, and adds his shoulders to the weight Some happier friends within the walls inclos'd; The rest shut out, to certain death expos'd: Fool as he was, and frantic in his care, T' admit young Turnus, and include the war! He thrust amid the crowd, securely bold, Like a fierce tiger pent amid the fold. Too late his blazing buckler they descry, And sparkling fires that shot from either eye, His mighty members, and his ample breast, His rattling armor, and his crimson crest. Far from that hated face the Trojans fly, All but the fool who sought his destiny. Mad Pandarus steps forth, with vengeance vow'd For Bitias' death, and threatens thus aloud: "These are not Ardea's walls, nor this the town Amata proffers with Lavinia's crown: 'T is hostile earth you tread. Of hope bereft, No means of safe return by flight are left." To whom, with count'nance calm, and soul sedate, Thus Turnus: "Then begin, and try thy fate: My message to the ghost of Priam bear; Tell him a new Achilles sent thee there." A lance of tough ground ash the Trojan threw, Rough in the rind, and knotted as it grew: With his full force he whirl'd it first around; But the soft yielding air receiv'd the wound: Imperial Juno turn'd the course before, And fix'd the wand'ring weapon in the door. "But hope not thou," said Turnus, "when I strike, To shun thy fate: our force is not alike, Nor thy steel temper'd by the Lemnian god." Then rising, on his utmost stretch he stood, And aim'd from high: the full descending blow Cleaves the broad front and beardless cheeks in two. Down sinks the giant with a thund'ring sound: His pond'rous limbs oppress the trembling ground; Blood, brains, and foam gush from the gaping wound: Scalp, face, and shoulders the keen steel divides, And the shar'd visage hangs on equal sides. The Trojans fly from their approaching fate; And, had the victor then secur'd the gate, And to his troops without unclos'd the bars, One lucky day had ended all his wars. But boiling youth, and blind desire of blood, Push'd on his fury, to pursue the crowd. Hamstring'd behind, unhappy Gyges died; Then Phalaris is added to his side. The pointed jav'lins from the dead he drew, And their friends' arms against their fellows threw. Strong Halys stands in vain; weak Phlegys flies; Saturnia, still at hand, new force and fire supplies. Then Halius, Prytanis, Alcander fall- Ingag'd against the foes who scal'd the wall: But, whom they fear'd without, they found within. At last, tho' late, by Lynceus he was seen. He calls new succors, and assaults the prince: But weak his force, and vain is their defense. Turn'd to the right, his sword the hero drew, And at one blow the bold aggressor slew. He joints the neck; and, with a stroke so strong, The helm flies off, and bears the head along. Next him, the huntsman Amycus he kill'd, In darts invenom'd and in poison skill'd. Then Clytius fell beneath his fatal spear, And Creteus, whom the Muses held so dear: He fought with courage, and he sung the fight; Arms were his bus'ness, verses his delight. The Trojan chiefs behold, with rage and grief, Their slaughter'd friends, and hasten their relief. Bold Mnestheus rallies first the broken train, Whom brave Seresthus and his troop sustain. To save the living, and revenge the dead, Against one warrior's arms all Troy they led. "O, void of sense and courage!" Mnestheus cried, "Where can you hope your coward heads to hide? Ah! where beyond these rampires can you run? One man, and in your camp inclos'd, you shun! Shall then a single sword such slaughter boast, And pass unpunish'd from a num'rous host? Forsaking honor, and renouncing fame, Your gods, your country, and your king you shame!" This just reproach their virtue does excite: They stand, they join, they thicken to the fight. Now Turnus doubts, and yet disdains to yield, But with slow paces measures back the field, And inches to the walls, where Tiber's tide, Washing the camp, defends the weaker side. The more he loses, they advance the more, And tread in ev'ry step he trod before. They shout: they bear him back; and, whom by might They cannot conquer, they oppress with weight. As, compass'd with a wood of spears around, The lordly lion still maintains his ground; Grins horrible, retires, and turns again; Threats his distended paws, and shakes his mane; He loses while in vain he presses on, Nor will his courage let him dare to run: So Turnus fares, and, unresolved of flight, Moves tardy back, and just recedes from fight. Yet twice, inrag'd, the combat he renews, Twice breaks, and twice his broken foes pursues. But now they swarm, and, with fresh troops supplied, Come rolling on, and rush from ev'ry side: Nor Juno, who sustain'd his arms before, Dares with new strength suffice th' exhausted store; For Jove, with sour commands, sent Iris down, To force th' invader from the frighted town. With labor spent, no longer can he wield The heavy fanchion, or sustain the shield, O'erwhelm'd with darts, which from afar they fling: The weapons round his hollow temples ring; His golden helm gives way, with stony blows Batter'd, and flat, and beaten to his brows. His crest is rash'd away; his ample shield Is falsified, and round with jav'lins fill'd. The foe, now faint, the Trojans overwhelm; And Mnestheus lays hard load upon his helm. Sick sweat succeeds; he drops at ev'ry pore; With driving dust his cheeks are pasted o'er; Shorter and shorter ev'ry gasp he takes; And vain efforts and hurtless blows he makes. Plung'd in the flood, and made the waters fly. The yellow god the welcome burthen bore, And wip'd the sweat, and wash'd away the gore; Then gently wafts him to the farther coast, And sends him safe to cheer his anxious host.

Book IX

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Juno, determined to see the war between the Trojans and the Latins begin in earnest, sends Iris to tell Turnus to attack the Trojan camp. The Rutulians surprise the Trojans, who react in fear to the approaching "mass ... of gloom and darkness" . Since Aeneas is not present , the Trojans do as he had instructed, retreating behind their ramparts even though they feel ashamed to do so. Turnus searches desperately for an entrance to the Trojan camp but, unable to find one, decides to set fire to the Trojan fleet. The attack is unsuccessful: years before, Jupiter's mother had given her pine grove to Aeneas for wood to build his fleet, and in return she had asked Jupiter to promise that no harm would ever come to her precious timbers. Although he questions whether mortals should be given immortals' privileges, Jupiter keeps his promise to his mother and transforms the burning ships into sea nymphs, who flee into the ocean's depths. The Rutulians are struck by fear at this sight, but Turnus maintains total confidence in his ability to defeat Aeneas. He will not, he states, hide himself in the belly of a wooden horse to prove his superiority to the Trojans; he will meet them "in broad daylight" . Nisus and Euryalus, who had engaged in the footrace, now bravely volunteer to carry word of the attack to Aeneas, who is still in Pallanteum. Although Nisus initially tries to dissuade Euryalus from accompanying him, not wanting to put his friend in danger, Euryalus insists that he will have it no other way. Ascanius, struck by their courage, says that he will reward them richly upon their return, even though all that Euryalus asks is that his mother be provided for. On the road, Nisus and Euryalus slay a number of Rutulians. Finally, however, they are spotted, and the Rutulian horsemen give chase through the forest. Euryalus, laden with spoils from those he slaughtered, falls behind, and he is captured by Volcens, a Rutulian warrior. Nisus makes a brave effort to save his friend, hurling spears at Euryalus's captors. In revenge for the deaths, Volcens kills Euryalus. Nisus rushes at Volcens in a rage and thrusts his sword through Volcens's mouth, but is then quickly slain by the other Rutulians. The bereaved Latin men carry Volcens back to their camp, and then they place the heads of Nisus and Euryalus on pikes and parade them before the Trojans, who are deeply grieved by the sight. Rumor carries word of Euryalus's death to his mother, who weeps so piteously that the Trojans take her into their arms and carry her home. Angered by the deaths of their friends, the Trojans return the Latins' attack, and the battle begins in earnest. The next few pages describe great brutality: a wall collapses, killing many Trojans, and Ascanius makes his first kill in battle. He slays Turnus's brother-in-law, Remulus, because he had been mocking the Trojans. Apollo appears to Ascanius and tells him that while he has done well, he should never again engage in war, but instead must work to maintain peace. Finally, the Latins manage to beat down the gate to the Trojan camp, although the Trojans are able to keep them out, and Pandarus, with superhuman effort, swings the gates shut once again. Several Trojans are left outside to battle the Latins, but Turnus had made it through the gate with the Trojans. He begins running rampant, killing all whom he encounters. Finally, Serestus and Mnestheus shame their companions for allowing one man to create such discord. The Trojans finally get the upper hand and begin to close in on Turnus, but Juno sends word to him that he must flee. He escapes by jumping into the Tiber River and allowing the current to carry him back to the Latin camp.

In Book IX, the Rutulians - and Turnus in particular - demonstrate remarkable strength. Even though the outcome of the battle is certain, the Rutulians nevertheless reveal that they are extremely resourceful, courageous, able fighters, and they inflict a great deal of harm on the Trojan camp. Turnus is especially remarkable on the battlefield, holding his own even when he is the only Latin warrior locked inside the Trojan camp. Indeed, Turnus's character, like Dido's, derives its complexity from the fact that he is fated to lose, but is so confident in his abilities that he continues to battle destiny. He is clearly intended to be an antagonist, but Virgil allows readers to feel a measure of sympathy for this man, who is so certain in his convictions that he fights - almost heroically - to the very end. Some of Virgil's critics even argue that Turnus appears almost more heroic than Aeneas, particularly in this Book. Throughout the Aeneid, Aeneas certainly demonstrates skill and valor, but is it truly heroic to fight when one is assured of success? Courageous, but heroic? It is a foregone conclusion that Aeneas will win the battle; the only suspense that Virgil can offer his audience lies in Turnus's remarkable abilities on the battlefield. This man is such a brilliant warrior that he has the ability to keep the inevitable victors at bay for far longer than they expected. By investing Turnus with exceptional abilities, Virgil heightens the suspense of the Aeneid and keeps readers' attention even though they know what the ultimate outcome will be. One of the most poignant episodes here is the death of Nisus and Euryalus. These two men, who display a deep and enduring friendship , reveal the great reverence Virgil placed on such relationships. Nisus is a wholly self-sacrificing individual, willing to go on a highly treacherous journey by himself, so that he will not place his friend in danger, and later willing to sacrifice his own life to avenge the death of his friend. Euryalus is slightly less heroic; he appears to want to accompany Nisus largely so that he can share in the glory, but is caught by the Rutulians because he is so laden down with spoils taken from the bodies of his Latin conquests that he falls behind during a chase through the forest. Nevertheless, the connection that these two men share is admirable, and their shared death is undoubtably one of the most poignant, emotionally affecting moments in the tale. Book IX is the only one in the Aeneid in which Aeneas is not directly present. Virgil does, however, indicate that Aeneas is such a strong character that his men continue to obey him - and even take on his characteristics - in his absence. Before leaving for the Etruscan camp, Aeneas instructed his comrades to retreat behind the battlements should the Latins attack, and even though it goes against their instincts as warriors to flee from battle, the Trojans do as their leader requested. Aeneas's influence is underscored by the fact that many of the warriors display their leader's most notable traits during the battle: heroism, morality, and courage. Ascanius, in particular, is able to take over for Aeneas in his absence: as Aeneas might have done, he promises Nisus and Euryalus that they will be rewarded richly for their bravery, and he is struck by the piety of Euryalus's request that his mother be looked after. Furthermore, he makes his first - and only - kill out of a desire to protect the honor of his comrades, and he does so in a humble, relatively moral manner.

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book x

{"name": "Book X", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-x", "summary": "Book X begins with a council of the gods. Jupiter calls the gods to Mount Olympus, where he berates them for having meddled with fate. Although Venus and Juno attempt to argue the cases of, respectively, the Trojans and the Latins, Jupiter asserts that there is to be no further divine intervention in the battle: \"what each man does will shape his trial and fortune\" . While the gods hold their council, the fighting on earth continues: the Trojans are still trapped inside their battlements as the Latins storm their gates. Aeneas, with Pallas at his side, travels back to the Trojan camp from his meeting with the Etruscans after securing their pledge of assistance. With him aboard the ships are a number of notable chiefs and warriors, all of whom are described in considerable detail. On the voyage, Aeneas is met by the sea nymphs who were once his ships, and the leader of the nymphs, Cymodoce, warns him of the siege taking place on the Trojan camp. She also predicts that the next day will see a great many Rutulian casualities. When the Trojans see Aeneas approaching, his shield held high, their hope is renewed. Immediately upon docking, however, Aeneas and his men are attacked by the Latins. Horrific fighting ensues, during which many lives are lost on both sides. Aeneas, Turnus, and Pallas are each responsible for an amazing number of deaths. Pallas, invoking his father's name, enters into battle with Lausus, Mezentius's son, but is slain by Turnus. Turnus callously slings Pallas's belt across his shoulders - a decision that he will come to regret in the last moments of his own life. Pallas's friends carry him back to camp, where Aeneas is spurred into fury at the sight of the dead body of the boy entrusted to him by his friend for safekeeping. In a rage, Aeneas cuts a wide, bloody swath through the Rutulian army - like a \"torrent/ or black whirlwind\" - in search of Turnus. Juno, fearing for Turnus's life, asks Jupiter to help her protect her favorite, and he consents to this one favor. In an effort to send Turnus away from the battlefield, she conjures a mist in Aeneas's shape and allows Turnus to catch sight of it. Turnus pursues the phantom as it boards a ship, which then sets out to sea. Upon realizing that he has been tricked, Turnus is deeply angered; he wonders whether he should save himself from the disgrace of having seemed to abandon his troops by falling upon his sword, or whether he should try to swim back to shore. Three times he tries to jump into the water, but three times Juno restrains him. In Turnus's absence, Aeneas and Mezentius meet on the battlefield. Although Mezentius is harmed, he is able to escape Aeneas. His son Lausus, upset at the sight of his father's wound, confronts Aeneas. Aeneas warns the young boy not to engage with him in battle - \"Why are you rushing to sure death?\" - but Lausus refuses to back down, and Aeneas slays him easily. As the boy dies, however, Aeneas is filled with thoughts of his own father, and feels dismayed by what he has done. When Mezentius hears of the death of his son, he is grief-stricken and sets out to avenge Lausus's death or to die himself. He engages in battle with Aeneas but is finally cast from his horse. As Aeneas holds his sword poised above Mezentius's body, the old man bares his throat willingly, his final words a plea to be buried alongside his beloved son.", "analysis": "The question of the inevitability of destiny is answered once and for all at the outset of Book X, when Jupiter addresses the council of the gods. He chides Juno and Venus for having attempted to alter the course of fate, refusing to allow any further meddling: \"Jupiter is king of all alike/ the Fates will find their way\" . Although he agrees that Juno may help Turnus live a little longer, he tells her that Turnus's fate remains set in stone: \"If you ask respite from impending death,/ a breathing space for that doomed youth ... then let your Turnus flee\" . He will allow her to sway the course of events slightly, but she can do nothing to alter the eventual outcome. Book X portrays Aeneas in a far different light than what we have seen thus far. Here we see a vengeful, impassioned Aeneas, wreaking havoc on the battlefield. Even though certain elements of his behavior recall Turnus's rage earlier, Aeneas's actions stem from the far nobler desire to avenge the death of the blameless youth, Pallas, who was entrusted to his care. Furthermore, he displays a morality on the battlefield far different than that of Turnus: when he is forced to kill Lausus, he is filled with pity and perhaps even regret. Aeneas had wounded Lausus's father, and his own close relationship with Anchises helps him to see why the young Latin might have been driven to seek battle with him. Turnus is not, however, wholly without redeeming qualities here. Once again, one could admire his passion and determination to abide by his convictions while fighting a losing battle. After Juno, in a last-ditch attempt to save his life, tricks him into boarding a boat that takes him away from certain death, Turnus tries to throw himself overboard three times: he will either return to the battlefield and fight Aeneas, despite the inevitably hopeless outcome, or he will die at sea - he will not be regarded as a coward who abandoned his men and his beliefs. The level of passion that Turnus displays in this chapter is almost unparalleled in the Aeneid. The only other character with a comparable display of emotion is Dido. The moment when Aeneas goes raging through the battlefield after learning of Pallas's death is one of the few times in the epic when his emotionality rivals that of Dido and Turnus. Interestingly, both Dido and Turnus are driven to such a state by love ; Aeneas, however, is flung into the throes of near-madness by the loss of a boy who was like a son. Once again, Virgil underscores his belief that the relationship between sons and fathers is of utmost importance - so important, in fact, that it can push a relatively calm and moderate man to impassioned fury. Virgil's ability to create antagonists as complex as his protagonists is exemplified in the death of Mezentius. The previous chapter displayed his many misdeeds, and his evil nature has been emphasized repeatedly. Yet Virgil arouses sympathy during Mezentius's final battle against Aeneas. Mezentius is acting out of a paternal love similar to the bond between Aeneas and Ascanius, and when he finally dies, he does it bravely, turning his throat up to meet Aeneas's sword. If he cannot avenge the death of his son, he wishes to die on the battlefield and join him in the afterlife. Even though Mezentius is a \"bad guy,\" he is no stock evil character, deprived of redeeming characteristics; he is a complex, multilayered character who stands as a testament to Virgil's extraordinary craftsmanship."}

BOOK X The gates of heav'n unfold: Jove summons all The gods to council in the common hall. Sublimely seated, he surveys from far The fields, the camp, the fortune of the war, And all th' inferior world. From first to last, The sov'reign senate in degrees are plac'd. Then thus th' almighty sire began: "Ye gods, Natives or denizens of blest abodes, From whence these murmurs, and this change of mind, This backward fate from what was first design'd? Why this protracted war, when my commands Pronounc'd a peace, and gave the Latian lands? What fear or hope on either part divides Our heav'ns, and arms our powers on diff'rent sides? A lawful time of war at length will come, (Nor need your haste anticipate the doom), When Carthage shall contend the world with Rome, Shall force the rigid rocks and Alpine chains, And, like a flood, come pouring on the plains. Then is your time for faction and debate, For partial favor, and permitted hate. Let now your immature dissension cease; Sit quiet, and compose your souls to peace." Thus Jupiter in few unfolds the charge; But lovely Venus thus replies at large: "O pow'r immense, eternal energy, (For to what else protection can we fly?) Seest thou the proud Rutulians, how they dare In fields, unpunish'd, and insult my care? How lofty Turnus vaunts amidst his train, In shining arms, triumphant on the plain? Ev'n in their lines and trenches they contend, And scarce their walls the Trojan troops defend: The town is fill'd with slaughter, and o'erfloats, With a red deluge, their increasing moats. Aeneas, ignorant, and far from thence, Has left a camp expos'd, without defense. This endless outrage shall they still sustain? Shall Troy renew'd be forc'd and fir'd again? A second siege my banish'd issue fears, And a new Diomede in arms appears. One more audacious mortal will be found; And I, thy daughter, wait another wound. Yet, if with fates averse, without thy leave, The Latian lands my progeny receive, Bear they the pains of violated law, And thy protection from their aid withdraw. But, if the gods their sure success foretell; If those of heav'n consent with those of hell, To promise Italy; who dare debate The pow'r of Jove, or fix another fate? What should I tell of tempests on the main, Of Aeolus usurping Neptune's reign? Of Iris sent, with Bacchanalian heat T' inspire the matrons, and destroy the fleet? Now Juno to the Stygian sky descends, Solicits hell for aid, and arms the fiends. That new example wanted yet above: An act that well became the wife of Jove! Alecto, rais'd by her, with rage inflames The peaceful bosoms of the Latian dames. Imperial sway no more exalts my mind; (Such hopes I had indeed, while Heav'n was kind;) Now let my happier foes possess my place, Whom Jove prefers before the Trojan race; And conquer they, whom you with conquest grace. Since you can spare, from all your wide command, No spot of earth, no hospitable land, Which may my wand'ring fugitives receive; (Since haughty Juno will not give you leave;) Then, father, (if I still may use that name,) By ruin'd Troy, yet smoking from the flame, I beg you, let Ascanius, by my care, Be freed from danger, and dismiss'd the war: Inglorious let him live, without a crown. The father may be cast on coasts unknown, Struggling with fate; but let me save the son. Mine is Cythera, mine the Cyprian tow'rs: In those recesses, and those sacred bow'rs, Obscurely let him rest; his right resign To promis'd empire, and his Julian line. Then Carthage may th' Ausonian towns destroy, Nor fear the race of a rejected boy. What profits it my son to scape the fire, Arm'd with his gods, and loaded with his sire; To pass the perils of the seas and wind; Evade the Greeks, and leave the war behind; To reach th' Italian shores; if, after all, Our second Pergamus is doom'd to fall? Much better had he curb'd his high desires, And hover'd o'er his ill-extinguish'd fires. To Simois' banks the fugitives restore, And give them back to war, and all the woes before." Deep indignation swell'd Saturnia's heart: "And must I own," she said, "my secret smart- What with more decence were in silence kept, And, but for this unjust reproach, had slept? Did god or man your fav'rite son advise, With war unhop'd the Latians to surprise? By fate, you boast, and by the gods' decree, He left his native land for Italy! Confess the truth; by mad Cassandra, more Than Heav'n inspir'd, he sought a foreign shore! Did I persuade to trust his second Troy To the raw conduct of a beardless boy, With walls unfinish'd, which himself forsakes, And thro' the waves a wand'ring voyage takes? When have I urg'd him meanly to demand The Tuscan aid, and arm a quiet land? Did I or Iris give this mad advice, Or made the fool himself the fatal choice? You think it hard, the Latians should destroy With swords your Trojans, and with fires your Troy! Hard and unjust indeed, for men to draw Their native air, nor take a foreign law! That Turnus is permitted still to live, To whom his birth a god and goddess give! But yet is just and lawful for your line To drive their fields, and force with fraud to join; Realms, not your own, among your clans divide, And from the bridegroom tear the promis'd bride; Petition, while you public arms prepare; Pretend a peace, and yet provoke a war! 'T was giv'n to you, your darling son to shroud, To draw the dastard from the fighting crowd, And, for a man, obtend an empty cloud. From flaming fleets you turn'd the fire away, And chang'd the ships to daughters of the sea. But is my crime- the Queen of Heav'n offends, If she presume to save her suff'ring friends! Your son, not knowing what his foes decree, You say, is absent: absent let him be. Yours is Cythera, yours the Cyprian tow'rs, The soft recesses, and the sacred bow'rs. Why do you then these needless arms prepare, And thus provoke a people prone to war? Did I with fire the Trojan town deface, Or hinder from return your exil'd race? Was I the cause of mischief, or the man Whose lawless lust the fatal war began? Think on whose faith th' adult'rous youth relied; Who promis'd, who procur'd, the Spartan bride? When all th' united states of Greece combin'd, To purge the world of the perfidious kind, Then was your time to fear the Trojan fate: Your quarrels and complaints are now too late." Thus Juno. Murmurs rise, with mix'd applause, Just as they favor or dislike the cause. So winds, when yet unfledg'd in woods they lie, In whispers first their tender voices try, Then issue on the main with bellowing rage, And storms to trembling mariners presage. Then thus to both replied th' imperial god, Who shakes heav'n's axles with his awful nod. (When he begins, the silent senate stand With rev'rence, list'ning to the dread command: The clouds dispel; the winds their breath restrain; And the hush'd waves lie flatted on the main.) "Celestials, your attentive ears incline! Since," said the god, "the Trojans must not join In wish'd alliance with the Latian line; Since endless jarrings and immortal hate Tend but to discompose our happy state; The war henceforward be resign'd to fate: Each to his proper fortune stand or fall; Equal and unconcern'd I look on all. Rutulians, Trojans, are the same to me; And both shall draw the lots their fates decree. Let these assault, if Fortune be their friend; And, if she favors those, let those defend: The Fates will find their way." The Thund'rer said, And shook the sacred honors of his head, Attesting Styx, th' inviolable flood, And the black regions of his brother god. Trembled the poles of heav'n, and earth confess'd the nod. This end the sessions had: the senate rise, And to his palace wait their sov'reign thro' the skies. Meantime, intent upon their siege, the foes Within their walls the Trojan host inclose: They wound, they kill, they watch at ev'ry gate; Renew the fires, and urge their happy fate. Th' Aeneans wish in vain their wanted chief, Hopeless of flight, more hopeless of relief. Thin on the tow'rs they stand; and ev'n those few A feeble, fainting, and dejected crew. Yet in the face of danger some there stood: The two bold brothers of Sarpedon's blood, Asius and Acmon; both th' Assaraci; Young Haemon, and tho' young, resolv'd to die. With these were Clarus and Thymoetes join'd; Tibris and Castor, both of Lycian kind. From Acmon's hands a rolling stone there came, So large, it half deserv'd a mountain's name: Strong-sinew'd was the youth, and big of bone; His brother Mnestheus could not more have done, Or the great father of th' intrepid son. Some firebrands throw, some flights of arrows send; And some with darts, and some with stones defend. Amid the press appears the beauteous boy, The care of Venus, and the hope of Troy. His lovely face unarm'd, his head was bare; In ringlets o'er his shoulders hung his hair. His forehead circled with a diadem; Distinguish'd from the crowd, he shines a gem, Enchas'd in gold, or polish'd iv'ry set, Amidst the meaner foil of sable jet. Nor Ismarus was wanting to the war, Directing pointed arrows from afar, And death with poison arm'd- in Lydia born, Where plenteous harvests the fat fields adorn; Where proud Pactolus floats the fruitful lands, And leaves a rich manure of golden sands. There Capys, author of the Capuan name, And there was Mnestheus too, increas'd in fame, Since Turnus from the camp he cast with shame. Thus mortal war was wag'd on either side. Meantime the hero cuts the nightly tide: For, anxious, from Evander when he went, He sought the Tyrrhene camp, and Tarchon's tent; Expos'd the cause of coming to the chief; His name and country told, and ask'd relief; Propos'd the terms; his own small strength declar'd; What vengeance proud Mezentius had prepar'd: What Turnus, bold and violent, design'd; Then shew'd the slipp'ry state of humankind, And fickle fortune; warn'd him to beware, And to his wholesome counsel added pray'r. Tarchon, without delay, the treaty signs, And to the Trojan troops the Tuscan joins. They soon set sail; nor now the fates withstand; Their forces trusted with a foreign hand. Aeneas leads; upon his stern appear Two lions carv'd, which rising Ida bear- Ida, to wand'ring Trojans ever dear. Under their grateful shade Aeneas sate, Revolving war's events, and various fate. His left young Pallas kept, fix'd to his side, And oft of winds enquir'd, and of the tide; Oft of the stars, and of their wat'ry way; And what he suffer'd both by land and sea. Now, sacred sisters, open all your spring! The Tuscan leaders, and their army sing, Which follow'd great Aeneas to the war: Their arms, their numbers, and their names declare. A thousand youths brave Massicus obey, Borne in the Tiger thro' the foaming sea; From Asium brought, and Cosa, by his care: For arms, light quivers, bows and shafts, they bear. Fierce Abas next: his men bright armor wore; His stern Apollo's golden statue bore. Six hundred Populonia sent along, All skill'd in martial exercise, and strong. Three hundred more for battle Ilva joins, An isle renown'd for steel, and unexhausted mines. Asylas on his prow the third appears, Who heav'n interprets, and the wand'ring stars; From offer'd entrails prodigies expounds, And peals of thunder, with presaging sounds. A thousand spears in warlike order stand, Sent by the Pisans under his command. Fair Astur follows in the wat'ry field, Proud of his manag'd horse and painted shield. Gravisca, noisome from the neighb'ring fen, And his own Caere, sent three hundred men; With those which Minio's fields and Pyrgi gave, All bred in arms, unanimous, and brave. Thou, Muse, the name of Cinyras renew, And brave Cupavo follow'd but by few; Whose helm confess'd the lineage of the man, And bore, with wings display'd, a silver swan. Love was the fault of his fam'd ancestry, Whose forms and fortunes in his ensigns fly. For Cycnus lov'd unhappy Phaeton, And sung his loss in poplar groves, alone, Beneath the sister shades, to soothe his grief. Heav'n heard his song, and hasten'd his relief, And chang'd to snowy plumes his hoary hair, And wing'd his flight, to chant aloft in air. His son Cupavo brush'd the briny flood: Upon his stern a brawny Centaur stood, Who heav'd a rock, and, threat'ning still to throw, With lifted hands alarm'd the seas below: They seem'd to fear the formidable sight, And roll'd their billows on, to speed his flight. Ocnus was next, who led his native train Of hardy warriors thro' the wat'ry plain: The son of Manto by the Tuscan stream, From whence the Mantuan town derives the name- An ancient city, but of mix'd descent: Three sev'ral tribes compose the government; Four towns are under each; but all obey The Mantuan laws, and own the Tuscan sway. Hate to Mezentius arm'd five hundred more, Whom Mincius from his sire Benacus bore: Mincius, with wreaths of reeds his forehead cover'd o'er. These grave Auletes leads: a hundred sweep With stretching oars at once the glassy deep. Him and his martial train the Triton bears; High on his poop the sea-green god appears: Frowning he seems his crooked shell to sound, And at the blast the billows dance around. A hairy man above the waist he shows; A porpoise tail beneath his belly grows; And ends a fish: his breast the waves divides, And froth and foam augment the murm'ring tides. Full thirty ships transport the chosen train For Troy's relief, and scour the briny main. Now was the world forsaken by the sun, And Phoebe half her nightly race had run. The careful chief, who never clos'd his eyes, Himself the rudder holds, the sails supplies. A choir of Nereids meet him on the flood, Once his own galleys, hewn from Ida's wood; But now, as many nymphs, the sea they sweep, As rode, before, tall vessels on the deep. They know him from afar; and in a ring Inclose the ship that bore the Trojan king. Cymodoce, whose voice excell'd the rest, Above the waves advanc'd her snowy breast; Her right hand stops the stern; her left divides The curling ocean, and corrects the tides. She spoke for all the choir, and thus began With pleasing words to warn th' unknowing man: "Sleeps our lov'd lord? O goddess-born, awake! Spread ev'ry sail, pursue your wat'ry track, And haste your course. Your navy once were we, From Ida's height descending to the sea; Till Turnus, as at anchor fix'd we stood, Presum'd to violate our holy wood. Then, loos'd from shore, we fled his fires profane (Unwillingly we broke our master's chain), And since have sought you thro' the Tuscan main. The mighty Mother chang'd our forms to these, And gave us life immortal in the seas. But young Ascanius, in his camp distress'd, By your insulting foes is hardly press'd. Th' Arcadian horsemen, and Etrurian host, Advance in order on the Latian coast: To cut their way the Daunian chief designs, Before their troops can reach the Trojan lines. Thou, when the rosy morn restores the light, First arm thy soldiers for th' ensuing fight: Thyself the fated sword of Vulcan wield, And bear aloft th' impenetrable shield. To-morrow's sun, unless my skill be vain, Shall see huge heaps of foes in battle slain." Parting, she spoke; and with immortal force Push'd on the vessel in her wat'ry course; For well she knew the way. Impell'd behind, The ship flew forward, and outstripp'd the wind. The rest make up. Unknowing of the cause, The chief admires their speed, and happy omens draws. Then thus he pray'd, and fix'd on heav'n his eyes: "Hear thou, great Mother of the deities. With turrets crown'd! (on Ida's holy hill Fierce tigers, rein'd and curb'd, obey thy will.) Firm thy own omens; lead us on to fight; And let thy Phrygians conquer in thy right." He said no more. And now renewing day Had chas'd the shadows of the night away. He charg'd the soldiers, with preventing care, Their flags to follow, and their arms prepare; Warn'd of th' ensuing fight, and bade 'em hope the war. Now, his lofty poop, he view'd below His camp incompass'd, and th' inclosing foe. His blazing shield, imbrac'd, he held on high; The camp receive the sign, and with loud shouts reply. Hope arms their courage: from their tow'rs they throw Their darts with double force, and drive the foe. Thus, at the signal giv'n, the cranes arise Before the stormy south, and blacken all the skies. King Turnus wonder'd at the fight renew'd, Till, looking back, the Trojan fleet he view'd, The seas with swelling canvas cover'd o'er, And the swift ships descending on the shore. The Latians saw from far, with dazzled eyes, The radiant crest that seem'd in flames to rise, And dart diffusive fires around the field, And the keen glitt'ring of the golden shield. Thus threat'ning comets, when by night they rise, Shoot sanguine streams, and sadden all the skies: So Sirius, flashing forth sinister lights, Pale humankind with plagues and with dry famine fright: Yet Turnus with undaunted mind is bent To man the shores, and hinder their descent, And thus awakes the courage of his friends: "What you so long have wish'd, kind Fortune sends; In ardent arms to meet th' invading foe: You find, and find him at advantage now. Yours is the day: you need but only dare; Your swords will make you masters of the war. Your sires, your sons, your houses, and your lands, And dearest wifes, are all within your hands. Be mindful of the race from whence you came, And emulate in arms your fathers' fame. Now take the time, while stagg'ring yet they stand With feet unfirm, and prepossess the strand: Fortune befriends the bold." Nor more he said, But balanc'd whom to leave, and whom to lead; Then these elects, the landing to prevent; And those he leaves, to keep the city pent. Meantime the Trojan sends his troops ashore: Some are by boats expos'd, by bridges more. With lab'ring oars they bear along the strand, Where the tide languishes, and leap aland. Tarchon observes the coast with careful eyes, And, where no ford he finds, no water fries, Nor billows with unequal murmurs roar, But smoothly slide along, and swell the shore, That course he steer'd, and thus he gave command: "Here ply your oars, and at all hazard land: Force on the vessel, that her keel may wound This hated soil, and furrow hostile ground. Let me securely land- I ask no more; Then sink my ships, or shatter on the shore." This fiery speech inflames his fearful friends: They tug at ev'ry oar, and ev'ry stretcher bends; They run their ships aground; the vessels knock, (Thus forc'd ashore,) and tremble with the shock. Tarchon's alone was lost, that stranded stood, Stuck on a bank, and beaten by the flood: She breaks her back; the loosen'd sides give way, And plunge the Tuscan soldiers in the sea. Their broken oars and floating planks withstand Their passage, while they labor to the land, And ebbing tides bear back upon th' uncertain sand. Now Turnus leads his troops without delay, Advancing to the margin of the sea. The trumpets sound: Aeneas first assail'd The clowns new-rais'd and raw, and soon prevail'd. Great Theron fell, an omen of the fight; Great Theron, large of limbs, of giant height. He first in open field defied the prince: But armor scal'd with gold was no defense Against the fated sword, which open'd wide His plated shield, and pierc'd his naked side. Next, Lichas fell, who, not like others born, Was from his wretched mother ripp'd and torn; Sacred, O Phoebus, from his birth to thee; For his beginning life from biting steel was free. Not far from him was Gyas laid along, Of monstrous bulk; with Cisseus fierce and strong: Vain bulk and strength! for, when the chief assail'd, Nor valor nor Herculean arms avail'd, Nor their fam'd father, wont in war to go With great Alcides, while he toil'd below. The noisy Pharos next receiv'd his death: Aeneas writh'd his dart, and stopp'd his bawling breath. Then wretched Cydon had receiv'd his doom, Who courted Clytius in his beardless bloom, And sought with lust obscene polluted joys: The Trojan sword had curd his love of boys, Had not his sev'n bold brethren stopp'd the course Of the fierce champions, with united force. Sev'n darts were thrown at once; and some rebound From his bright shield, some on his helmet sound: The rest had reach'd him; but his mother's care Prevented those, and turn'd aside in air. The prince then call'd Achates, to supply The spears that knew the way to victory- "Those fatal weapons, which, inur'd to blood, In Grecian bodies under Ilium stood: Not one of those my hand shall toss in vain Against our foes, on this contended plain." He said; then seiz'd a mighty spear, and threw; Which, wing'd with fate, thro' Maeon's buckler flew, Pierc'd all the brazen plates, and reach'd his heart: He stagger'd with intolerable smart. Alcanor saw; and reach'd, but reach'd in vain, His helping hand, his brother to sustain. A second spear, which kept the former course, From the same hand, and sent with equal force, His right arm pierc'd, and holding on, bereft His use of both, and pinion'd down his left. Then Numitor from his dead brother drew Th' ill-omen'd spear, and at the Trojan threw: Preventing fate directs the lance awry, Which, glancing, only mark'd Achates' thigh. In pride of youth the Sabine Clausus came, And, from afar, at Dryops took his aim. The spear flew hissing thro' the middle space, And pierc'd his throat, directed at his face; It stopp'd at once the passage of his wind, And the free soul to flitting air resign'd: His forehead was the first that struck the ground; Lifeblood and life rush'd mingled thro' the wound. He slew three brothers of the Borean race, And three, whom Ismarus, their native place, Had sent to war, but all the sons of Thrace. Halesus, next, the bold Aurunci leads: The son of Neptune to his aid succeeds, Conspicuous on his horse. On either hand, These fight to keep, and those to win, the land. With mutual blood th' Ausonian soil is dyed, While on its borders each their claim decide. As wintry winds, contending in the sky, With equal force of lungs their titles try: They rage, they roar; the doubtful rack of heav'n Stands without motion, and the tide undriv'n: Each bent to conquer, neither side to yield, They long suspend the fortune of the field. Both armies thus perform what courage can; Foot set to foot, and mingled man to man. But, in another part, th' Arcadian horse With ill success ingage the Latin force: For, where th' impetuous torrent, rushing down, Huge craggy stones and rooted trees had thrown, They left their coursers, and, unus'd to fight On foot, were scatter'd in a shameful flight. Pallas, who with disdain and grief had view'd His foes pursuing, and his friends pursued, Us'd threat'nings mix'd with pray'rs, his last resource, With these to move their minds, with those to fire their force "Which way, companions? whether would you run? By you yourselves, and mighty battles won, By my great sire, by his establish'd name, And early promise of my future fame; By my youth, emulous of equal right To share his honors- shun ignoble flight! Trust not your feet: your hands must hew way Thro' yon black body, and that thick array: 'T is thro' that forward path that we must come; There lies our way, and that our passage home. Nor pow'rs above, nor destinies below Oppress our arms: with equal strength we go, With mortal hands to meet a mortal foe. See on what foot we stand: a scanty shore, The sea behind, our enemies before; No passage left, unless we swim the main; Or, forcing these, the Trojan trenches gain." This said, he strode with eager haste along, And bore amidst the thickest of the throng. Lagus, the first he met, with fate to foe, Had heav'd a stone of mighty weight, to throw: Stooping, the spear descended on his chine, Just where the bone distinguished either loin: It stuck so fast, so deeply buried lay, That scarce the victor forc'd the steel away. Hisbon came on: but, while he mov'd too slow To wish'd revenge, the prince prevents his blow; For, warding his at once, at once he press'd, And plung'd the fatal weapon in his breast. Then lewd Anchemolus he laid in dust, Who stain'd his stepdam's bed with impious lust. And, after him, the Daucian twins were slain, Laris and Thymbrus, on the Latian plain; So wondrous like in feature, shape, and size, As caus'd an error in their parents' eyes- Grateful mistake! but soon the sword decides The nice distinction, and their fate divides: For Thymbrus' head was lopp'd; and Laris' hand, Dismember'd, sought its owner on the strand: The trembling fingers yet the fauchion strain, And threaten still th' intended stroke in vain. Now, to renew the charge, th' Arcadians came: Sight of such acts, and sense of honest shame, And grief, with anger mix'd, their minds inflame. Then, with a casual blow was Rhoeteus slain, Who chanc'd, as Pallas threw, to cross the plain: The flying spear was after Ilus sent; But Rhoeteus happen'd on a death unmeant: From Teuthras and from Tyres while he fled, The lance, athwart his body, laid him dead: Roll'd from his chariot with a mortal wound, And intercepted fate, he spurn'd the ground. As when, in summer, welcome winds arise, The watchful shepherd to the forest flies, And fires the midmost plants; contagion spreads, And catching flames infect the neighb'ring heads; Around the forest flies the furious blast, And all the leafy nation sinks at last, And Vulcan rides in triumph o'er the waste; The pastor, pleas'd with his dire victory, Beholds the satiate flames in sheets ascend the sky: So Pallas' troops their scatter'd strength unite, And, pouring on their foes, their prince delight. Halesus came, fierce with desire of blood; But first collected in his arms he stood: Advancing then, he plied the spear so well, Ladon, Demodocus, and Pheres fell. Around his head he toss'd his glitt'ring brand, And from Strymonius hew'd his better hand, Held up to guard his throat; then hurl'd a stone At Thoas' ample front, and pierc'd the bone: It struck beneath the space of either eye; And blood, and mingled brains, together fly. Deep skill'd in future fates, Halesus' sire Did with the youth to lonely groves retire: But, when the father's mortal race was run, Dire destiny laid hold upon the son, And haul'd him to the war, to find, beneath Th' Evandrian spear, a memorable death. Pallas th' encounter seeks, but, ere he throws, To Tuscan Tiber thus address'd his vows: "O sacred stream, direct my flying dart, And give to pass the proud Halesus' heart! His arms and spoils thy holy oak shall bear." Pleas'd with the bribe, the god receiv'd his pray'r: For, while his shield protects a friend distress'd, The dart came driving on, and pierc'd his breast. But Lausus, no small portion of the war, Permits not panic fear to reign too far, Caus'd by the death of so renown'd a knight; But by his own example cheers the fight. Fierce Abas first he slew; Abas, the stay Of Trojan hopes, and hindrance of the day. The Phrygian troops escap'd the Greeks in vain: They, and their mix'd allies, now load the plain. To the rude shock of war both armies came; Their leaders equal, and their strength the same. The rear so press'd the front, they could not wield Their angry weapons, to dispute the field. Here Pallas urges on, and Lausus there: Of equal youth and beauty both appear, But both by fate forbid to breathe their native air. Their congress in the field great Jove withstands: Both doom'd to fall, but fall by greater hands. Meantime Juturna warns the Daunian chief Of Lausus' danger, urging swift relief. With his driv'n chariot he divides the crowd, And, making to his friends, thus calls aloud: "Let none presume his needless aid to join; Retire, and clear the field; the fight is mine: To this right hand is Pallas only due; O were his father here, my just revenge to view!" From the forbidden space his men retir'd. Pallas their awe, and his stern words, admir'd; Survey'd him o'er and o'er with wond'ring sight, Struck with his haughty mien, and tow'ring height. Then to the king: "Your empty vaunts forbear; Success I hope, and fate I cannot fear; Alive or dead, I shall deserve a name; Jove is impartial, and to both the same." He said, and to the void advanc'd his pace: Pale horror sate on each Arcadian face. Then Turnus, from his chariot leaping light, Address'd himself on foot to single fight. And, as a lion- when he spies from far A bull that seems to meditate the war, Bending his neck, and spurning back the sand- Runs roaring downward from his hilly stand: Imagine eager Turnus not more slow, To rush from high on his unequal foe. Young Pallas, when he saw the chief advance Within due distance of his flying lance, Prepares to charge him first, resolv'd to try If fortune would his want of force supply; And thus to Heav'n and Hercules address'd: "Alcides, once on earth Evander's guest, His son adjures you by those holy rites, That hospitable board, those genial nights; Assist my great attempt to gain this prize, And let proud Turnus view, with dying eyes, His ravish'd spoils." 'T was heard, the vain request; Alcides mourn'd, and stifled sighs within his breast. Then Jove, to soothe his sorrow, thus began: "Short bounds of life are set to mortal man. 'T is virtue's work alone to stretch the narrow span. So many sons of gods, in bloody fight, Around the walls of Troy, have lost the light: My own Sarpedon fell beneath his foe; Nor I, his mighty sire, could ward the blow. Ev'n Turnus shortly shall resign his breath, And stands already on the verge of death." This said, the god permits the fatal fight, But from the Latian fields averts his sight. Now with full force his spear young Pallas threw, And, having thrown, his shining fauchion drew The steel just graz'd along the shoulder joint, And mark'd it slightly with the glancing point, Fierce Turnus first to nearer distance drew, And pois'd his pointed spear, before he threw: Then, as the winged weapon whizz'd along, "See now," said he, "whose arm is better strung." The spear kept on the fatal course, unstay'd By plates of ir'n, which o'er the shield were laid: Thro' folded brass and tough bull hides it pass'd, His corslet pierc'd, and reach'd his heart at last. In vain the youth tugs at the broken wood; The soul comes issuing with the vital blood: He falls; his arms upon his body sound; And with his bloody teeth he bites the ground. Turnus bestrode the corpse: "Arcadians, hear," Said he; "my message to your master bear: Such as the sire deserv'd, the son I send; It costs him dear to be the Phrygians' friend. The lifeless body, tell him, I bestow, Unask'd, to rest his wand'ring ghost below." He said, and trampled down with all the force Of his left foot, and spurn'd the wretched corse; Then snatch'd the shining belt, with gold inlaid; The belt Eurytion's artful hands had made, Where fifty fatal brides, express'd to sight, All in the compass of one mournful night, Depriv'd their bridegrooms of returning light. In an ill hour insulting Turnus tore Those golden spoils, and in a worse he wore. O mortals, blind in fate, who never know To bear high fortune, or endure the low! The time shall come, when Turnus, but in vain, Shall wish untouch'd the trophies of the slain; Shall wish the fatal belt were far away, And curse the dire remembrance of the day. The sad Arcadians, from th' unhappy field, Bear back the breathless body on a shield. O grace and grief of war! at once restor'd, With praises, to thy sire, at once deplor'd! One day first sent thee to the fighting field, Beheld whole heaps of foes in battle kill'd; One day beheld thee dead, and borne upon thy shield. This dismal news, not from uncertain fame, But sad spectators, to the hero came: His friends upon the brink of ruin stand, Unless reliev'd by his victorious hand. He whirls his sword around, without delay, And hews thro' adverse foes an ample way, To find fierce Turnus, of his conquest proud: Evander, Pallas, all that friendship ow'd To large deserts, are present to his eyes; His plighted hand, and hospitable ties. Four sons of Sulmo, four whom Ufens bred, He took in fight, and living victims led, To please the ghost of Pallas, and expire, In sacrifice, before his fun'ral fire. At Magus next he threw: he stoop'd below The flying spear, and shunn'd the promis'd blow; Then, creeping, clasp'd the hero's knees, and pray'd: "By young Iulus, by thy father's shade, O spare my life, and send me back to see My longing sire, and tender progeny! A lofty house I have, and wealth untold, In silver ingots, and in bars of gold: All these, and sums besides, which see no day, The ransom of this one poor life shall pay. If I survive, will Troy the less prevail? A single soul's too light to turn the scale." He said. The hero sternly thus replied: "Thy bars and ingots, and the sums beside, Leave for thy children's lot. Thy Turnus broke All rules of war by one relentless stroke, When Pallas fell: so deems, nor deems alone My father's shadow, but my living son." Thus having said, of kind remorse bereft, He seiz'd his helm, and dragg'd him with his left; Then with his right hand, while his neck he wreath'd, Up to the hilts his shining fauchion sheath'd. Apollo's priest, Emonides, was near; His holy fillets on his front appear; Glitt'ring in arms, he shone amidst the crowd; Much of his god, more of his purple, proud. Him the fierce Trojan follow'd thro' the field: The holy coward fell; and, forc'd to yield, The prince stood o'er the priest, and, at one blow, Sent him an off'ring to the shades below. His arms Seresthus on his shoulders bears, Design'd a trophy to the God of Wars. Vulcanian Caeculus renews the fight, And Umbro, born upon the mountains' height. The champion cheers his troops t' encounter those, And seeks revenge himself on other foes. At Anxur's shield he drove; and, at the blow, Both shield and arm to ground together go. Anxur had boasted much of magic charms, And thought he wore impenetrable arms, So made by mutter'd spells; and, from the spheres, Had life secur'd, in vain, for length of years. Then Tarquitus the field in triumph trod; A nymph his mother, his sire a god. Exulting in bright arms, he braves the prince: With his protended lance he makes defense; Bears back his feeble foe; then, pressing on, Arrests his better hand, and drags him down; Stands o'er the prostrate wretch, and, as he lay, Vain tales inventing, and prepar'd to pray, Mows off his head: the trunk a moment stood, Then sunk, and roll'd along the sand in blood. The vengeful victor thus upbraids the slain: "Lie there, proud man, unpitied, on the plain; Lie there, inglorious, and without a tomb, Far from thy mother and thy native home, Exposed to savage beasts, and birds of prey, Or thrown for food to monsters of the sea." On Lycas and Antaeus next he ran, Two chiefs of Turnus, and who led his van. They fled for fear; with these, he chas'd along Camers the yellow-lock'd, and Numa strong; Both great in arms, and both were fair and young. Camers was son to Volscens lately slain, In wealth surpassing all the Latian train, And in Amycla fix'd his silent easy reign. And, as Aegaeon, when with heav'n he strove, Stood opposite in arms to mighty Jove; Mov'd all his hundred hands, provok'd the war, Defied the forky lightning from afar; At fifty mouths his flaming breath expires, And flash for flash returns, and fires for fires; In his right hand as many swords he wields, And takes the thunder on as many shields: With strength like his, the Trojan hero stood; And soon the fields with falling corps were strow'd, When once his fauchion found the taste of blood. With fury scarce to be conceiv'd, he flew Against Niphaeus, whom four coursers drew. They, when they see the fiery chief advance, And pushing at their chests his pointed lance, Wheel'd with so swift a motion, mad with fear, They threw their master headlong from the chair. They stare, they start, nor stop their course, before They bear the bounding chariot to the shore. Now Lucagus and Liger scour the plains, With two white steeds; but Liger holds the reins, And Lucagus the lofty seat maintains: Bold brethren both. The former wav'd in air His flaming sword: Aeneas couch'd his spear, Unus'd to threats, and more unus'd to fear. Then Liger thus: "Thy confidence is vain To scape from hence, as from the Trojan plain: Nor these the steeds which Diomede bestrode, Nor this the chariot where Achilles rode; Nor Venus' veil is here, near Neptune's shield; Thy fatal hour is come, and this the field." Thus Liger vainly vaunts: the Trojan peer Return'd his answer with his flying spear. As Lucagus, to lash his horses, bends, Prone to the wheels, and his left foot protends, Prepar'd for fight; the fatal dart arrives, And thro' the borders of his buckler drives; Pass'd thro' and pierc'd his groin: the deadly wound, Cast from his chariot, roll'd him on the ground. Whom thus the chief upbraids with scornful spite: "Blame not the slowness of your steeds in flight; Vain shadows did not force their swift retreat; But you yourself forsake your empty seat." He said, and seiz'd at once the loosen'd rein; For Liger lay already on the plain, By the same shock: then, stretching out his hands, The recreant thus his wretched life demands: "Now, by thyself, O more than mortal man! By her and him from whom thy breath began, Who form'd thee thus divine, I beg thee, spare This forfeit life, and hear thy suppliant's pray'r." Thus much he spoke, and more he would have said; But the stern hero turn'd aside his head, And cut him short: "I hear another man; You talk'd not thus before the fight began. Now take your turn; and, as a brother should, Attend your brother to the Stygian flood." Then thro' his breast his fatal sword he sent, And the soul issued at the gaping vent. As storms the skies, and torrents tear the ground, Thus rag'd the prince, and scatter'd deaths around. At length Ascanius and the Trojan train Broke from the camp, so long besieg'd in vain. Meantime the King of Gods and Mortal Man Held conference with his queen, and thus began: "My sister goddess, and well-pleasing wife, Still think you Venus' aid supports the strife- Sustains her Trojans- or themselves, alone, With inborn valor force their fortune on? How fierce in fight, with courage undecay'd! Judge if such warriors want immortal aid." To whom the goddess with the charming eyes, Soft in her tone, submissively replies: "Why, O my sov'reign lord, whose frown I fear, And cannot, unconcern'd, your anger bear; Why urge you thus my grief? when, if I still (As once I was) were mistress of your will, From your almighty pow'r your pleasing wife Might gain the grace of length'ning Turnus' life, Securely snatch him from the fatal fight, And give him to his aged father's sight. Now let him perish, since you hold it good, And glut the Trojans with his pious blood. Yet from our lineage he derives his name, And, in the fourth degree, from god Pilumnus came; Yet he devoutly pays you rites divine, And offers daily incense at your shrine." Then shortly thus the sov'reign god replied: "Since in my pow'r and goodness you confide, If for a little space, a lengthen'd span, You beg reprieve for this expiring man, I grant you leave to take your Turnus hence From instant fate, and can so far dispense. But, if some secret meaning lies beneath, To save the short-liv'd youth from destin'd death, Or if a farther thought you entertain, To change the fates; you feed your hopes in vain." To whom the goddess thus, with weeping eyes: "And what if that request, your tongue denies, Your heart should grant; and not a short reprieve, But length of certain life, to Turnus give? Now speedy death attends the guiltless youth, If my presaging soul divines with truth; Which, O! I wish, might err thro' causeless fears, And you (for you have pow'r) prolong his years!" Thus having said, involv'd in clouds, she flies, And drives a storm before her thro' the skies. Swift she descends, alighting on the plain, Where the fierce foes a dubious fight maintain. Of air condens'd a specter soon she made; And, what Aeneas was, such seem'd the shade. Adorn'd with Dardan arms, the phantom bore His head aloft; a plumy crest he wore; This hand appear'd a shining sword to wield, And that sustain'd an imitated shield. With manly mien he stalk'd along the ground, Nor wanted voice belied, nor vaunting sound. (Thus haunting ghosts appear to waking sight, Or dreadful visions in our dreams by night.) The specter seems the Daunian chief to dare, And flourishes his empty sword in air. At this, advancing, Turnus hurl'd his spear: The phantom wheel'd, and seem'd to fly for fear. Deluded Turnus thought the Trojan fled, And with vain hopes his haughty fancy fed. "Whether, O coward?" (thus he calls aloud, Nor found he spoke to wind, and chas'd a cloud,) "Why thus forsake your bride! Receive from me The fated land you sought so long by sea." He said, and, brandishing at once his blade, With eager pace pursued the flying shade. By chance a ship was fasten'd to the shore, Which from old Clusium King Osinius bore: The plank was ready laid for safe ascent; For shelter there the trembling shadow bent, And skipp't and skulk'd, and under hatches went. Exulting Turnus, with regardless haste, Ascends the plank, and to the galley pass'd. Scarce had he reach'd the prow: Saturnia's hand The haulsers cuts, and shoots the ship from land. With wind in poop, the vessel plows the sea, And measures back with speed her former way. Meantime Aeneas seeks his absent foe, And sends his slaughter'd troops to shades below. The guileful phantom now forsook the shroud, And flew sublime, and vanish'd in a cloud. Too late young Turnus the delusion found, Far on the sea, still making from the ground. Then, thankless for a life redeem'd by shame, With sense of honor stung, and forfeit fame, Fearful besides of what in fight had pass'd, His hands and haggard eyes to heav'n he cast; "O Jove!" he cried, "for what offense have Deserv'd to bear this endless infamy? Whence am I forc'd, and whether am I borne? How, and with what reproach, shall I return? Shall ever I behold the Latian plain, Or see Laurentum's lofty tow'rs again? What will they say of their deserting chief The war was mine: I fly from their relief; I led to slaughter, and in slaughter leave; And ev'n from hence their dying groans receive. Here, overmatch'd in fight, in heaps they lie; There, scatter'd o'er the fields, ignobly fly. Gape wide, O earth, and draw me down alive! Or, O ye pitying winds, a wretch relieve! On sands or shelves the splitting vessel drive; Or set me shipwrack'd on some desart shore, Where no Rutulian eyes may see me more, Unknown to friends, or foes, or conscious Fame, Lest she should follow, and my flight proclaim." Thus Turnus rav'd, and various fates revolv'd: The choice was doubtful, but the death resolv'd. And now the sword, and now the sea took place, That to revenge, and this to purge disgrace. Sometimes he thought to swim the stormy main, By stretch of arms the distant shore to gain. Thrice he the sword assay'd, and thrice the flood; But Juno, mov'd with pity, both withstood. And thrice repress'd his rage; strong gales supplied, And push'd the vessel o'er the swelling tide. At length she lands him on his native shores, And to his father's longing arms restores. Meantime, by Jove's impulse, Mezentius arm'd, Succeeding Turnus, with his ardor warm'd His fainting friends, reproach'd their shameful flight, Repell'd the victors, and renew'd the fight. Against their king the Tuscan troops conspire; Such is their hate, and such their fierce desire Of wish'd revenge: on him, and him alone, All hands employ'd, and all their darts are thrown. He, like a solid rock by seas inclos'd, To raging winds and roaring waves oppos'd, From his proud summit looking down, disdains Their empty menace, and unmov'd remains. Beneath his feet fell haughty Hebrus dead, Then Latagus, and Palmus as he fled. At Latagus a weighty stone he flung: His face was flatted, and his helmet rung. But Palmus from behind receives his wound; Hamstring'd he falls, and grovels on the ground: His crest and armor, from his body torn, Thy shoulders, Lausus, and thy head adorn. Evas and Mimas, both of Troy, he slew. Mimas his birth from fair Theano drew, Born on that fatal night, when, big with fire, The queen produc'd young Paris to his sire: But Paris in the Phrygian fields was slain, Unthinking Mimas on the Latian plain. And, as a savage boar, on mountains bred, With forest mast and fatt'ning marshes fed, When once he sees himself in toils inclos'd, By huntsmen and their eager hounds oppos'd- He whets his tusks, and turns, and dares the war; Th' invaders dart their jav'lins from afar: All keep aloof, and safely shout around; But none presumes to give a nearer wound: He frets and froths, erects his bristled hide, And shakes a grove of lances from his side: Not otherwise the troops, with hate inspir'd, And just revenge against the tyrant fir'd, Their darts with clamor at a distance drive, And only keep the languish'd war alive. From Coritus came Acron to the fight, Who left his spouse betroth'd, and unconsummate night. Mezentius sees him thro' the squadrons ride, Proud of the purple favors of his bride. Then, as a hungry lion, who beholds A gamesome goat, who frisks about the folds, Or beamy stag, that grazes on the plain- He runs, he roars, he shakes his rising mane, He grins, and opens wide his greedy jaws; The prey lies panting underneath his paws: He fills his famish'd maw; his mouth runs o'er With unchew'd morsels, while he churns the gore: So proud Mezentius rushes on his foes, And first unhappy Acron overthrows: Stretch'd at his length, he spurns the swarthy ground; The lance, besmear'd with blood, lies broken in the wound. Then with disdain the haughty victor view'd Orodes flying, nor the wretch pursued, Nor thought the dastard's back deserv'd a wound, But, running, gain'd th' advantage of the ground: Then turning short, he met him face to face, To give his victor the better grace. Orodes falls, in equal fight oppress'd: Mezentius fix'd his foot upon his breast, And rested lance; and thus aloud he cries: "Lo! here the champion of my rebels lies!" The fields around with Io Paean! ring; And peals of shouts applaud the conqu'ring king. At this the vanquish'd, with his dying breath, Thus faintly spoke, and prophesied in death: "Nor thou, proud man, unpunish'd shalt remain: Like death attends thee on this fatal plain." Then, sourly smiling, thus the king replied: "For what belongs to me, let Jove provide; But die thou first, whatever chance ensue." He said, and from the wound the weapon drew. A hov'ring mist came swimming o'er his sight, And seal'd his eyes in everlasting night. By Caedicus, Alcathous was slain; Sacrator laid Hydaspes on the plain; Orses the strong to greater strength must yield; He, with Parthenius, were by Rapo kill'd. Then brave Messapus Ericetes slew, Who from Lycaon's blood his lineage drew. But from his headstrong horse his fate he found, Who threw his master, as he made a bound: The chief, alighting, stuck him to the ground; Then Clonius, hand to hand, on foot assails: The Trojan sinks, and Neptune's son prevails. Agis the Lycian, stepping forth with pride, To single fight the boldest foe defied; Whom Tuscan Valerus by force o'ercame, And not belied his mighty father's fame. Salius to death the great Antronius sent: But the same fate the victor underwent, Slain by Nealces' hand, well-skill'd to throw The flying dart, and draw the far-deceiving bow. Thus equal deaths are dealt with equal chance; By turns they quit their ground, by turns advance: Victors and vanquish'd, in the various field, Nor wholly overcome, nor wholly yield. The gods from heav'n survey the fatal strife, And mourn the miseries of human life. Above the rest, two goddesses appear Concern'd for each: here Venus, Juno there. Amidst the crowd, infernal Ate shakes Her scourge aloft, and crest of hissing snakes. Once more the proud Mezentius, with disdain, Brandish'd his spear, and rush'd into the plain, Where tow'ring in the midmost rank she stood, Like tall Orion stalking o'er the flood. (When with his brawny breast he cuts the waves, His shoulders scarce the topmost billow laves), Or like a mountain ash, whose roots are spread, Deep fix'd in earth; in clouds he hides his head. The Trojan prince beheld him from afar, And dauntless undertook the doubtful war. Collected in his strength, and like a rock, Pois'd on his base, Mezentius stood the shock. He stood, and, measuring first with careful eyes The space his spear could reach, aloud he cries: "My strong right hand, and sword, assist my stroke! (Those only gods Mezentius will invoke.) His armor, from the Trojan pirate torn, By my triumphant Lausus shall be worn." He said; and with his utmost force he threw The massy spear, which, hissing as it flew, Reach'd the celestial shield, that stopp'd the course; But, glancing thence, the yet unbroken force Took a new bent obliquely, and betwixt The side and bowels fam'd Anthores fix'd. Anthores had from Argos travel'd far, Alcides' friend, and brother of the war; Till, tir'd with toils, fair Italy he chose, And in Evander's palace sought repose. Now, falling by another's wound, his eyes He cast to heav'n, on Argos thinks, and dies. The pious Trojan then his jav'lin sent; The shield gave way; thro' treble plates it went Of solid brass, of linen trebly roll'd, And three bull hides which round the buckler fold. All these it pass'd, resistless in the course, Transpierc'd his thigh, and spent its dying force. The gaping wound gush'd out a crimson flood. The Trojan, glad with sight of hostile blood, His faunchion drew, to closer fight address'd, And with new force his fainting foe oppress'd. His father's peril Lausus view'd with grief; He sigh'd, he wept, he ran to his relief. And here, heroic youth, 't is here I must To thy immortal memory be just, And sing an act so noble and so new, Posterity will scarce believe 't is true. Pain'd with his wound, and useless for the fight, The father sought to save himself by flight: Incumber'd, slow he dragg'd the spear along, Which pierc'd his thigh, and in his buckler hung. The pious youth, resolv'd on death, below The lifted sword springs forth to face the foe; Protects his parent, and prevents the blow. Shouts of applause ran ringing thro' the field, To see the son the vanquish'd father shield. All, fir'd with gen'rous indignation, strive, And with a storm of darts to distance drive The Trojan chief, who, held at bay from far, On his Vulcanian orb sustain'd the war. As, when thick hail comes rattling in the wind, The plowman, passenger, and lab'ring hind For shelter to the neighb'ring covert fly, Or hous'd, or safe in hollow caverns lie; But, that o'erblown, when heav'n above 'em smiles, Return to travel, and renew their toils: Aeneas thus, o'erwhelmed on ev'ry side, The storm of darts, undaunted, did abide; And thus to Lausus loud with friendly threat'ning cried: "Why wilt thou rush to certain death, and rage In rash attempts, beyond thy tender age, Betray'd by pious love?" Nor, thus forborne, The youth desists, but with insulting scorn Provokes the ling'ring prince, whose patience, tir'd, Gave place; and all his breast with fury fir'd. For now the Fates prepar'd their sharpen'd shears; And lifted high the flaming sword appears, Which, full descending with a frightful sway, Thro' shield and corslet forc'd th' impetuous way, And buried deep in his fair bosom lay. The purple streams thro' the thin armor strove, And drench'd th' imbroider'd coat his mother wove; And life at length forsook his heaving heart, Loth from so sweet a mansion to depart. But when, with blood and paleness all o'erspread, The pious prince beheld young Lausus dead, He griev'd; he wept; the sight an image brought Of his own filial love, a sadly pleasing thought: Then stretch'd his hand to hold him up, and said: "Poor hapless youth! what praises can be paid To love so great, to such transcendent store Of early worth, and sure presage of more? Accept whate'er Aeneas can afford; Untouch'd thy arms, untaken be thy sword; And all that pleas'd thee living, still remain Inviolate, and sacred to the slain. Thy body on thy parents I bestow, To rest thy soul, at least, if shadows know, Or have a sense of human things below. There to thy fellow ghosts with glory tell: ''T was by the great Aeneas hand I fell.'" With this, his distant friends he beckons near, Provokes their duty, and prevents their fear: Himself assists to lift him from the ground, With clotted locks, and blood that well'd from out the wound. Meantime, his father, now no father, stood, And wash'd his wounds by Tiber's yellow flood: Oppress'd with anguish, panting, and o'erspent, His fainting limbs against an oak he leant. A bough his brazen helmet did sustain; His heavier arms lay scatter'd on the plain: A chosen train of youth around him stand; His drooping head was rested on his hand: His grisly beard his pensive bosom sought; And all on Lausus ran his restless thought. Careful, concern'd his danger to prevent, He much enquir'd, and many a message sent To warn him from the field- alas! in vain! Behold, his mournful followers bear him slain! O'er his broad shield still gush'd the yawning wound, And drew a bloody trail along the ground. Far off he heard their cries, far off divin'd The dire event, with a foreboding mind. With dust he sprinkled first his hoary head; Then both his lifted hands to heav'n he spread; Last, the dear corpse embracing, thus he said: "What joys, alas! could this frail being give, That I have been so covetous to live? To see my son, and such a son, resign His life, a ransom for preserving mine! And am I then preserv'd, and art thou lost? How much too dear has that redemption cost! 'T is now my bitter banishment I feel: This is a wound too deep for time to heal. My guilt thy growing virtues did defame; My blackness blotted thy unblemish'd name. Chas'd from a throne, abandon'd, and exil'd For foul misdeeds, were punishments too mild: I ow'd my people these, and, from their hate, With less resentment could have borne my fate. And yet I live, and yet sustain the sight Of hated men, and of more hated light: But will not long." With that he rais'd from ground His fainting limbs, that stagger'd with his wound; Yet, with a mind resolv'd, and unappall'd With pains or perils, for his courser call'd Well-mouth'd, well-manag'd, whom himself did dress With daily care, and mounted with success; His aid in arms, his ornament in peace. Soothing his courage with a gentle stroke, The steed seem'd sensible, while thus he spoke: "O Rhoebus, we have liv'd too long for me- If life and long were terms that could agree! This day thou either shalt bring back the head And bloody trophies of the Trojan dead; This day thou either shalt revenge my woe, For murther'd Lausus, on his cruel foe; Or, if inexorable fate deny Our conquest, with thy conquer'd master die: For, after such a lord, I rest secure, Thou wilt no foreign reins, or Trojan load endure." He said; and straight th' officious courser kneels, To take his wonted weight. His hands he fills With pointed jav'lins; on his head he lac'd His glitt'ring helm, which terribly was grac'd With waving horsehair, nodding from afar; Then spurr'd his thund'ring steed amidst the war. Love, anguish, wrath, and grief, to madness wrought, Despair, and secret shame, and conscious thought Of inborn worth, his lab'ring soul oppress'd, Roll'd in his eyes, and rag'd within his breast. Then loud he call'd Aeneas thrice by name: The loud repeated voice to glad Aeneas came. "Great Jove," he said, "and the far-shooting god, Inspire thy mind to make thy challenge good!" He spoke no more; but hasten'd, void of fear, And threaten'd with his long protended spear. To whom Mezentius thus: "Thy vaunts are vain. My Lausus lies extended on the plain: He's lost! thy conquest is already won; The wretched sire is murther'd in the son. Nor fate I fear, but all the gods defy. Forbear thy threats: my bus'ness is to die; But first receive this parting legacy." He said; and straight a whirling dart he sent; Another after, and another went. Round in a spacious ring he rides the field, And vainly plies th' impenetrable shield. Thrice rode he round; and thrice Aeneas wheel'd, Turn'd as he turn'd: the golden orb withstood The strokes, and bore about an iron wood. Impatient of delay, and weary grown, Still to defend, and to defend alone, To wrench the darts which in his buckler light, Urg'd and o'er-labor'd in unequal fight; At length resolv'd, he throws with all his force Full at the temples of the warrior horse. Just where the stroke was aim'd, th' unerring spear Made way, and stood transfix'd thro' either ear. Seiz'd with unwonted pain, surpris'd with fright, The wounded steed curvets, and, rais'd upright, Lights on his feet before; his hoofs behind Spring up in air aloft, and lash the wind. Down comes the rider headlong from his height: His horse came after with unwieldy weight, And, flound'ring forward, pitching on his head, His lord's incumber'd shoulder overlaid. From either host, the mingled shouts and cries Of Trojans and Rutulians rend the skies. Aeneas, hast'ning, wav'd his fatal sword High o'er his head, with this reproachful word: "Now; where are now thy vaunts, the fierce disdain Of proud Mezentius, and the lofty strain?" Struggling, and wildly staring on the skies, With scarce recover'd sight he thus replies: "Why these insulting words, this waste of breath, To souls undaunted, and secure of death? 'T is no dishonor for the brave to die, Nor came I here with hope victory; Nor ask I life, nor fought with that design: As I had us'd my fortune, use thou thine. My dying son contracted no such band; The gift is hateful from his murd'rer's hand. For this, this only favor let me sue, If pity can to conquer'd foes be due: Refuse it not; but let my body have The last retreat of humankind, a grave. Too well I know th' insulting people's hate; Protect me from their vengeance after fate: This refuge for my poor remains provide, And lay my much-lov'd Lausus by my side." He said, and to the sword his throat applied. The crimson stream distain'd his arms around, And the disdainful soul came rushing thro' the wound.

Book X

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Book X begins with a council of the gods. Jupiter calls the gods to Mount Olympus, where he berates them for having meddled with fate. Although Venus and Juno attempt to argue the cases of, respectively, the Trojans and the Latins, Jupiter asserts that there is to be no further divine intervention in the battle: "what each man does will shape his trial and fortune" . While the gods hold their council, the fighting on earth continues: the Trojans are still trapped inside their battlements as the Latins storm their gates. Aeneas, with Pallas at his side, travels back to the Trojan camp from his meeting with the Etruscans after securing their pledge of assistance. With him aboard the ships are a number of notable chiefs and warriors, all of whom are described in considerable detail. On the voyage, Aeneas is met by the sea nymphs who were once his ships, and the leader of the nymphs, Cymodoce, warns him of the siege taking place on the Trojan camp. She also predicts that the next day will see a great many Rutulian casualities. When the Trojans see Aeneas approaching, his shield held high, their hope is renewed. Immediately upon docking, however, Aeneas and his men are attacked by the Latins. Horrific fighting ensues, during which many lives are lost on both sides. Aeneas, Turnus, and Pallas are each responsible for an amazing number of deaths. Pallas, invoking his father's name, enters into battle with Lausus, Mezentius's son, but is slain by Turnus. Turnus callously slings Pallas's belt across his shoulders - a decision that he will come to regret in the last moments of his own life. Pallas's friends carry him back to camp, where Aeneas is spurred into fury at the sight of the dead body of the boy entrusted to him by his friend for safekeeping. In a rage, Aeneas cuts a wide, bloody swath through the Rutulian army - like a "torrent/ or black whirlwind" - in search of Turnus. Juno, fearing for Turnus's life, asks Jupiter to help her protect her favorite, and he consents to this one favor. In an effort to send Turnus away from the battlefield, she conjures a mist in Aeneas's shape and allows Turnus to catch sight of it. Turnus pursues the phantom as it boards a ship, which then sets out to sea. Upon realizing that he has been tricked, Turnus is deeply angered; he wonders whether he should save himself from the disgrace of having seemed to abandon his troops by falling upon his sword, or whether he should try to swim back to shore. Three times he tries to jump into the water, but three times Juno restrains him. In Turnus's absence, Aeneas and Mezentius meet on the battlefield. Although Mezentius is harmed, he is able to escape Aeneas. His son Lausus, upset at the sight of his father's wound, confronts Aeneas. Aeneas warns the young boy not to engage with him in battle - "Why are you rushing to sure death?" - but Lausus refuses to back down, and Aeneas slays him easily. As the boy dies, however, Aeneas is filled with thoughts of his own father, and feels dismayed by what he has done. When Mezentius hears of the death of his son, he is grief-stricken and sets out to avenge Lausus's death or to die himself. He engages in battle with Aeneas but is finally cast from his horse. As Aeneas holds his sword poised above Mezentius's body, the old man bares his throat willingly, his final words a plea to be buried alongside his beloved son.

The question of the inevitability of destiny is answered once and for all at the outset of Book X, when Jupiter addresses the council of the gods. He chides Juno and Venus for having attempted to alter the course of fate, refusing to allow any further meddling: "Jupiter is king of all alike/ the Fates will find their way" . Although he agrees that Juno may help Turnus live a little longer, he tells her that Turnus's fate remains set in stone: "If you ask respite from impending death,/ a breathing space for that doomed youth ... then let your Turnus flee" . He will allow her to sway the course of events slightly, but she can do nothing to alter the eventual outcome. Book X portrays Aeneas in a far different light than what we have seen thus far. Here we see a vengeful, impassioned Aeneas, wreaking havoc on the battlefield. Even though certain elements of his behavior recall Turnus's rage earlier, Aeneas's actions stem from the far nobler desire to avenge the death of the blameless youth, Pallas, who was entrusted to his care. Furthermore, he displays a morality on the battlefield far different than that of Turnus: when he is forced to kill Lausus, he is filled with pity and perhaps even regret. Aeneas had wounded Lausus's father, and his own close relationship with Anchises helps him to see why the young Latin might have been driven to seek battle with him. Turnus is not, however, wholly without redeeming qualities here. Once again, one could admire his passion and determination to abide by his convictions while fighting a losing battle. After Juno, in a last-ditch attempt to save his life, tricks him into boarding a boat that takes him away from certain death, Turnus tries to throw himself overboard three times: he will either return to the battlefield and fight Aeneas, despite the inevitably hopeless outcome, or he will die at sea - he will not be regarded as a coward who abandoned his men and his beliefs. The level of passion that Turnus displays in this chapter is almost unparalleled in the Aeneid. The only other character with a comparable display of emotion is Dido. The moment when Aeneas goes raging through the battlefield after learning of Pallas's death is one of the few times in the epic when his emotionality rivals that of Dido and Turnus. Interestingly, both Dido and Turnus are driven to such a state by love ; Aeneas, however, is flung into the throes of near-madness by the loss of a boy who was like a son. Once again, Virgil underscores his belief that the relationship between sons and fathers is of utmost importance - so important, in fact, that it can push a relatively calm and moderate man to impassioned fury. Virgil's ability to create antagonists as complex as his protagonists is exemplified in the death of Mezentius. The previous chapter displayed his many misdeeds, and his evil nature has been emphasized repeatedly. Yet Virgil arouses sympathy during Mezentius's final battle against Aeneas. Mezentius is acting out of a paternal love similar to the bond between Aeneas and Ascanius, and when he finally dies, he does it bravely, turning his throat up to meet Aeneas's sword. If he cannot avenge the death of his son, he wishes to die on the battlefield and join him in the afterlife. Even though Mezentius is a "bad guy," he is no stock evil character, deprived of redeeming characteristics; he is a complex, multilayered character who stands as a testament to Virgil's extraordinary craftsmanship.

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The Aeneid.book xi

book xi

{"name": "Book XI", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-xi", "summary": "Although Aeneas is deeply distressed by the deaths of Pallas and his other comrades, he still offers a sacrifice to the gods composed of spoils taken from Mezentius. He and his men bury the bodies of their slain companions and take great care readying Pallas's corpse for return to King Evander. Aeneas weeps over Pallas's fate and for having failed to keep his friend's son safe. Nevertheless, he is heartened by the fact that Pallas did not die a coward. Messengers from the Latin camp then approach Aeneas, begging him to allow them to bury their dead. \"Good Aeneas\" grants them their request, telling them that it is only Turnus who should be fighting him and that the Latins and Trojans should seek peace. The Latin Drances, who has an old grudge against Turnus, tells Aeneas that he admires him greatly, and they agree on a peace of twenty-six days during which all may bury their dead. Rumor reaches King Evander before Pallas's body does, alerting him to his son's sad fate. Evander throws himself across the bier on which Pallas's corpse lays, crying, \"I ... have undone/ the fate of fathers: I survive my son\" . Nevertheless, he asserts that he does not blame Aeneas and that he is glad his son died bravely. In a deeply emotional scene, Aeneas and his men set fire to the bodies of their comrades, throw spoils taken from the bodies of the Latins into the flames, and offer sacrifices. Elsewhere, the Latins do the same for their fallen men, and some women cry out that only Turnus should be suffering, since it is only he who seeks war. King Latinus, pained by the turn of events, calls a council of the city's chiefs. Some feel that the problem should be settled by a duel between Aeneas and Turnus alone, and when they learn that the great Greek warrior Diomedes has rejected their plea for aid, Latinus proposes that they attempt to establish peace. Drances attacks Turnus, blaming the war on his arrogance, and Turnus responds by mocking Drances and calling him a coward. He tells Latinus that he is happy to fight Aeneas alone, but begs him not to \"falter in dishonor at the threshold\" . As the council argues, they receive word that the Trojans are marching on the city. Turnus takes advantage of the ensuing panic to urge the Latins to take up arms, and he prepares himself for battle. The Latins are joined by the legendary warrior Camilla and her Volscians, who take over the defense of the city against the approaching Trojan horsemen, while Turnus rides off to ambush Aeneas, who is taking a different route through the forest. Virgil focuses briefly on Camilla's interesting history: when King Metabus fled his city in exile, he took the infant Camilla with him. When he approached a river that he could not safely cross with his daughter, he strapped her to a lance and threw her across, after praying to the goddess Diana to keep her safe. The girl was raised in the wilderness and became Diana's favorite: a fellow virgin whose only true love is of arms. The Trojans finally reach the city, and the battle begins. Camilla is the fiercest warrior on the field, and she slays uncountable Trojans until she is finally taken down by Arruns. Arruns is only able to kill Camilla because he has prayed to Apollo to help him end her attack. Now Diana seeks vengeance by sending her sentinel, Opis, to slay Arruns. Having lost Camilla and unable to hold back the Trojan army, the Latins scatter. Camilla's closest companion, Acca, sends word to Turnus of the events taking place, and Turnus is forced to abandon his ambush and return to the city only moments before Aeneas passes through. Book XI ends with both men returning to their respective camps on the outskirts of Laurentum to fortify themselves for the next day's battle.", "analysis": "One of the more interesting problems that Virgil must have encountered while writing the Aeneid is the difficulty of maintaining suspense in a tale with such a preordained outcome. Throughout the story, readers are repeatedly made aware of the inevitability of Aeneas's victory; the gods themselves have asserted that his destiny is to found a city in Italy that will one day become the Roman Empire, and to act as the father to a long line of kings that will lead to the great Caesar Augustus, Virgil's patron. Even King Latinus tells the council that there is no use in continuing the war: \"My citizens,/ we wage a luckless war against a nation/ of gods, unconquered men; no battle can/ exhaust them\" . Nevertheless, Virgil is first of all a storyteller, and he does all that he can to keep his readers on tenterhooks as to the manner in which this outcome will be reached. He does this by allowing the action to take a dramatic turn: in the previous chapter, the Latins had the upper hand, exemplified by their destruction of the Trojan fortifications; in Book XI, the Latins maintain their position , and even slay one of Aeneas' closest comrades, Pallas, but the chapter ends with the Latins scattering as the Trojan army presses in. Virgil's skill lies in allowing his readers to know only the story's ending, not how it will come to pass. Although Aeneas's human limitations have been emphasized earlier, and he has even shown some character flaws, Book XI lauds him as an unfailingly fair, moral leader. The funeral rites that he gives Pallas are so exhaustive that even King Evander says that he could do no better for his own son, and Aeneas weeps genuine tears of mourning over the bodies of his fallen comrades. Indeed, the degree of sorrow that Aeneas expresses over the death of Pallas is almost startling if we recall that he only recently met the boy, when King Evander introduced them. Pallas, it seems, reminds Aeneas of his son, Ascanius, and the possibility of death that might have awaited the boy if he had not been preordained to help found Rome. Even though he is overwhelmed by sadness at the deaths of his friends, Aeneas is so merciful that he allows the Latin envoys to reclaim the bodies of their dead so that they can be buried. Time and again, Virgil emphasizes that though Aeneas is a courageous warrior who will never shy away from the battlefield, what he truly wants is peace. This outlook contrasts markedly with that of Turnus, who refuses even to consider abandoning the conflict. Camilla is a strong presence in this episode; Virgil describes the origins of the great female warrior in considerable detail. This is particularly striking given the fact that this episode and those surrounding it focus almost entirely on the battle taking place, making the story of Camilla's background a welcome, peaceful respite from the exhausting bloodshed. Like Dido, Camilla is a strong female character who commands the respect of the men around her, but unlike Dido, Camilla has no strong personal presence. She is described wholly in terms of her abilities on the battlefield, and does not appear to have any notable personality traits. Although audiences may wonder why Camilla is fighting on the \"wrong\" side, the fact that Virgil focuses solely on her skill on the battlefield helps to explain this: Camilla is first of all a fighter who will engage in battle wherever she finds it. One particularly interesting element of Book XI is the absence of Lavinia. Even though the battle between the Trojans and the Latins is ostensibly being fought over the hand of this character, she is rarely mentioned. She remains quite peripheral and faceless . Even in King Latinus's council, the focus is never on the person over whom the war is being fought; by this point, it seems to be far more about Turnus's pride and determination to prove that he is the better man than it is about the love of a woman. Lavinia seems unlikely to inspire such impassioned devotion as to incite a war, and Virgil may have presented her in this manner in order to demonstrate that the mechanisms that bring Aeneas to his destiny are irrelevant - the fulfillment of his fate remains of first importance."}

BOOK XI Scarce had the rosy Morning rais'd her head Above the waves, and left her wat'ry bed; The pious chief, whom double cares attend For his unburied soldiers and his friend, Yet first to Heav'n perform'd a victor's vows: He bar'd an ancient oak of all her boughs; Then on a rising ground the trunk he plac'd, Which with the spoils of his dead foe he grac'd. The coat of arms by proud Mezentius worn, Now on a naked snag in triumph borne, Was hung on high, and glitter'd from afar, A trophy sacred to the God of War. Above his arms, fix'd on the leafless wood, Appear'd his plumy crest, besmear'd with blood: His brazen buckler on the left was seen; Truncheons of shiver'd lances hung between; And on the right was placed his corslet, bor'd; And to the neck was tied his unavailing sword. A crowd of chiefs inclose the godlike man, Who thus, conspicuous in the midst, began: "Our toils, my friends, are crown'd with sure success; The greater part perform'd, achieve the less. Now follow cheerful to the trembling town; Press but an entrance, and presume it won. Fear is no more, for fierce Mezentius lies, As the first fruits of war, a sacrifice. Turnus shall fall extended on the plain, And, in this omen, is already slain. Prepar'd in arms, pursue your happy chance; That none unwarn'd may plead his ignorance, And I, at Heav'n's appointed hour, may find Your warlike ensigns waving in the wind. Meantime the rites and fun'ral pomps prepare, Due to your dead companions of the war: The last respect the living can bestow, To shield their shadows from contempt below. That conquer'd earth be theirs, for which they fought, And which for us with their own blood they bought; But first the corpse of our unhappy friend To the sad city of Evander send, Who, not inglorious, in his age's bloom, Was hurried hence by too severe a doom." Thus, weeping while he spoke, he took his way, Where, new in death, lamented Pallas lay. Acoetes watch'd the corpse; whose youth deserv'd The father's trust; and now the son he serv'd With equal faith, but less auspicious care. Th' attendants of the slain his sorrow share. A troop of Trojans mix'd with these appear, And mourning matrons with dishevel'd hair. Soon as the prince appears, they raise a cry; All beat their breasts, and echoes rend the sky. They rear his drooping forehead from the ground; But, when Aeneas view'd the grisly wound Which Pallas in his manly bosom bore, And the fair flesh distain'd with purple gore; First, melting into tears, the pious man Deplor'd so sad a sight, then thus began: "Unhappy youth! when Fortune gave the rest Of my full wishes, she refus'd the best! She came; but brought not thee along, to bless My longing eyes, and share in my success: She grudg'd thy safe return, the triumphs due To prosp'rous valor, in the public view. Not thus I promis'd, when thy father lent Thy needless succor with a sad consent; Embrac'd me, parting for th' Etrurian land, And sent me to possess a large command. He warn'd, and from his own experience told, Our foes were warlike, disciplin'd, and bold. And now perhaps, in hopes of thy return, Rich odors on his loaded altars burn, While we, with vain officious pomp, prepare To send him back his portion of the war, A bloody breathless body, which can owe No farther debt, but to the pow'rs below. The wretched father, ere his race is run, Shall view the fun'ral honors of his son. These are my triumphs of the Latian war, Fruits of my plighted faith and boasted care! And yet, unhappy sire, thou shalt not see A son whose death disgrac'd his ancestry; Thou shalt not blush, old man, however griev'd: Thy Pallas no dishonest wound receiv'd. He died no death to make thee wish, too late, Thou hadst not liv'd to see his shameful fate: But what a champion has th' Ausonian coast, And what a friend hast thou, Ascanius, lost!" Thus having mourn'd, he gave the word around, To raise the breathless body from the ground; And chose a thousand horse, the flow'r of all His warlike troops, to wait the funeral, To bear him back and share Evander's grief: A well-becoming, but a weak relief. Of oaken twigs they twist an easy bier, Then on their shoulders the sad burden rear. The body on this rural hearse is borne: Strew'd leaves and funeral greens the bier adorn. All pale he lies, and looks a lovely flow'r, New cropp'd by virgin hands, to dress the bow'r: Unfaded yet, but yet unfed below, No more to mother earth or the green stern shall owe. Then two fair vests, of wondrous work and cost, Of purple woven, and with gold emboss'd, For ornament the Trojan hero brought, Which with her hands Sidonian Dido wrought. One vest array'd the corpse; and one they spread O'er his clos'd eyes, and wrapp'd around his head, That, when the yellow hair in flame should fall, The catching fire might burn the golden caul. Besides, the spoils of foes in battle slain, When he descended on the Latian plain; Arms, trappings, horses, by the hearse are led In long array- th' achievements of the dead. Then, pinion'd with their hands behind, appear Th' unhappy captives, marching in the rear, Appointed off'rings in the victor's name, To sprinkle with their blood the fun'ral flame. Inferior trophies by the chiefs are borne; Gauntlets and helms their loaded hands adorn; And fair inscriptions fix'd, and titles read Of Latian leaders conquer'd by the dead. Acoetes on his pupil's corpse attends, With feeble steps, supported by his friends. Pausing at ev'ry pace, in sorrow drown'd, Betwixt their arms he sinks upon the ground; Where grov'ling while he lies in deep despair, He beats his breast, and rends his hoary hair. The champion's chariot next is seen to roll, Besmear'd with hostile blood, and honorably foul. To close the pomp, Aethon, the steed of state, Is led, the fun'rals of his lord to wait. Stripp'd of his trappings, with a sullen pace He walks; and the big tears run rolling down his face. The lance of Pallas, and the crimson crest, Are borne behind: the victor seiz'd the rest. The march begins: the trumpets hoarsely sound; The pikes and lances trail along the ground. Thus while the Trojan and Arcadian horse To Pallantean tow'rs direct their course, In long procession rank'd, the pious chief Stopp'd in the rear, and gave a vent to grief: "The public care," he said, "which war attends, Diverts our present woes, at least suspends. Peace with the manes of great Pallas dwell! Hail, holy relics! and a last farewell!" He said no more, but, inly thro' he mourn'd, Restrained his tears, and to the camp return'd. Now suppliants, from Laurentum sent, demand A truce, with olive branches in their hand; Obtest his clemency, and from the plain Beg leave to draw the bodies of their slain. They plead, that none those common rites deny To conquer'd foes that in fair battle die. All cause of hate was ended in their death; Nor could he war with bodies void of breath. A king, they hop'd, would hear a king's request, Whose son he once was call'd, and once his guest. Their suit, which was too just to be denied, The hero grants, and farther thus replied: "O Latian princes, how severe a fate In causeless quarrels has involv'd your state, And arm'd against an unoffending man, Who sought your friendship ere the war began! You beg a truce, which I would gladly give, Not only for the slain, but those who live. I came not hither but by Heav'n's command, And sent by fate to share the Latian land. Nor wage I wars unjust: your king denied My proffer'd friendship, and my promis'd bride; Left me for Turnus. Turnus then should try His cause in arms, to conquer or to die. My right and his are in dispute: the slain Fell without fault, our quarrel to maintain. In equal arms let us alone contend; And let him vanquish, whom his fates befriend. This is the way (so tell him) to possess The royal virgin, and restore the peace. Bear this message back, with ample leave, That your slain friends may fun'ral rites receive." Thus having said- th' embassadors, amaz'd, Stood mute a while, and on each other gaz'd. Drances, their chief, who harbor'd in his breast Long hate to Turnus, as his foe profess'd, Broke silence first, and to the godlike man, With graceful action bowing, thus began: "Auspicious prince, in arms a mighty name, But yet whose actions far transcend your fame; Would I your justice or your force express, Thought can but equal; and all words are less. Your answer we shall thankfully relate, And favors granted to the Latian state. If wish'd success our labor shall attend, Think peace concluded, and the king your friend: Let Turnus leave the realm to your command, And seek alliance in some other land: Build you the city which your fates assign; We shall be proud in the great work to join." Thus Drances; and his words so well persuade The rest impower'd, that soon a truce is made. Twelve days the term allow'd: and, during those, Latians and Trojans, now no longer foes, Mix'd in the woods, for fun'ral piles prepare To fell the timber, and forget the war. Loud axes thro' the groaning groves resound; Oak, mountain ash, and poplar spread the ground; First fall from high; and some the trunks receive In loaden wains; with wedges some they cleave. And now the fatal news by Fame is blown Thro' the short circuit of th' Arcadian town, Of Pallas slain- by Fame, which just before His triumphs on distended pinions bore. Rushing from out the gate, the people stand, Each with a fun'ral flambeau in his hand. Wildly they stare, distracted with amaze: The fields are lighten'd with a fiery blaze, That cast a sullen splendor on their friends, The marching troop which their dead prince attends. Both parties meet: they raise a doleful cry; The matrons from the walls with shrieks reply, And their mix'd mourning rends the vaulted sky. The town is fill'd with tumult and with tears, Till the loud clamors reach Evander's ears: Forgetful of his state, he runs along, With a disorder'd pace, and cleaves the throng; Falls on the corpse; and groaning there he lies, With silent grief, that speaks but at his eyes. Short sighs and sobs succeed; till sorrow breaks A passage, and at once he weeps and speaks: "O Pallas! thou hast fail'd thy plighted word, To fight with caution, not to tempt the sword! I warn'd thee, but in vain; for well I knew What perils youthful ardor would pursue, That boiling blood would carry thee too far, Young as thou wert in dangers, raw to war! O curst essay of arms, disastrous doom, Prelude of bloody fields, and fights to come! Hard elements of unauspicious war, Vain vows to Heav'n, and unavailing care! Thrice happy thou, dear partner of my bed, Whose holy soul the stroke of Fortune fled, Praescious of ills, and leaving me behind, To drink the dregs of life by fate assign'd! Beyond the goal of nature I have gone: My Pallas late set out, but reach'd too soon. If, for my league against th' Ausonian state, Amidst their weapons I had found my fate, (Deserv'd from them,) then I had been return'd A breathless victor, and my son had mourn'd. Yet will I not my Trojan friend upbraid, Nor grudge th' alliance I so gladly made. 'T was not his fault, my Pallas fell so young, But my own crime, for having liv'd too long. Yet, since the gods had destin'd him to die, At least he led the way to victory: First for his friends he won the fatal shore, And sent whole herds of slaughter'd foes before; A death too great, too glorious to deplore. Nor will I add new honors to thy grave, Content with those the Trojan hero gave: That funeral pomp thy Phrygian friends design'd, In which the Tuscan chiefs and army join'd. Great spoils and trophies, gain'd by thee, they bear: Then let thy own achievements be thy share. Even thou, O Turnus, hadst a trophy stood, Whose mighty trunk had better grac'd the wood, If Pallas had arriv'd, with equal length Of years, to match thy bulk with equal strength. But why, unhappy man, dost thou detain These troops, to view the tears thou shedd'st in vain? Go, friends, this message to your lord relate: Tell him, that, if I bear my bitter fate, And, after Pallas' death, live ling'ring on, 'T is to behold his vengeance for my son. I stay for Turnus, whose devoted head Is owing to the living and the dead. My son and I expect it from his hand; 'T is all that he can give, or we demand. Joy is no more; but I would gladly go, To greet my Pallas with such news below." The morn had now dispell'd the shades of night, Restoring toils, when she restor'd the light. The Trojan king and Tuscan chief command To raise the piles along the winding strand. Their friends convey the dead fun'ral fires; Black smold'ring smoke from the green wood expires; The light of heav'n is chok'd, and the new day retires. Then thrice around the kindled piles they go (For ancient custom had ordain'd it so) Thrice horse and foot about the fires are led; And thrice, with loud laments, they hail the dead. Tears, trickling down their breasts, bedew the ground, And drums and trumpets mix their mournful sound. Amid the blaze, their pious brethren throw The spoils, in battle taken from the foe: Helms, bits emboss'd, and swords of shining steel; One casts a target, one a chariot wheel; Some to their fellows their own arms restore: The fauchions which in luckless fight they bore, Their bucklers pierc'd, their darts bestow'd in vain, And shiver'd lances gather'd from the plain. Whole herds of offer'd bulls, about the fire, And bristled boars, and woolly sheep expire. Around the piles a careful troop attends, To watch the wasting flames, and weep their burning friends; Ling'ring along the shore, till dewy night New decks the face of heav'n with starry light. The conquer'd Latians, with like pious care, Piles without number for their dead prepare. Part in the places where they fell are laid; And part are to the neighb'ring fields convey'd. The corps of kings, and captains of renown, Borne off in state, are buried in the town; The rest, unhonor'd, and without a name, Are cast a common heap to feed the flame. Trojans and Latians vie with like desires To make the field of battle shine with fires, And the promiscuous blaze to heav'n aspires. Now had the morning thrice renew'd the light, And thrice dispell'd the shadows of the night, When those who round the wasted fires remain, Perform the last sad office to the slain. They rake the yet warm ashes from below; These, and the bones unburn'd, in earth bestow; These relics with their country rites they grace, And raise a mount of turf to mark the place. But, in the palace of the king, appears A scene more solemn, and a pomp of tears. Maids, matrons, widows, mix their common moans; Orphans their sires, and sires lament their sons. All in that universal sorrow share, And curse the cause of this unhappy war: A broken league, a bride unjustly sought, A crown usurp'd, which with their blood is bought! These are the crimes with which they load the name Of Turnus, and on him alone exclaim: "Let him who lords it o'er th' Ausonian land Engage the Trojan hero hand to hand: His is the gain; our lot is but to serve; 'T is just, the sway he seeks, he should deserve." This Drances aggravates; and adds, with spite: "His foe expects, and dares him to the fight." Nor Turnus wants a party, to support His cause and credit in the Latian court. His former acts secure his present fame, And the queen shades him with her mighty name. While thus their factious minds with fury burn, The legates from th' Aetolian prince return: Sad news they bring, that, after all the cost And care employ'd, their embassy is lost; That Diomedes refus'd his aid in war, Unmov'd with presents, and as deaf to pray'r. Some new alliance must elsewhere be sought, Or peace with Troy on hard conditions bought. Latinus, sunk in sorrow, finds too late, A foreign son is pointed out by fate; And, till Aeneas shall Lavinia wed, The wrath of Heav'n is hov'ring o'er his head. The gods, he saw, espous'd the juster side, When late their titles in the field were tried: Witness the fresh laments, and fun'ral tears undried. Thus, full of anxious thought, he summons all The Latian senate to the council hall. The princes come, commanded by their head, And crowd the paths that to the palace lead. Supreme in pow'r, and reverenc'd for his years, He takes the throne, and in the midst appears. Majestically sad, he sits in state, And bids his envoys their success relate. When Venulus began, the murmuring sound Was hush'd, and sacred silence reign'd around. "We have," said he, "perform'd your high command, And pass'd with peril a long tract of land: We reach'd the place desir'd; with wonder fill'd, The Grecian tents and rising tow'rs beheld. Great Diomede has compass'd round with walls The city, which Argyripa he calls, From his own Argos nam'd. We touch'd, with joy, The royal hand that raz'd unhappy Troy. When introduc'd, our presents first we bring, Then crave an instant audience from the king. His leave obtain'd, our native soil we name, And tell th' important cause for which we came. Attentively he heard us, while we spoke; Then, with soft accents, and a pleasing look, Made this return: 'Ausonian race, of old Renown'd for peace, and for an age of gold, What madness has your alter'd minds possess'd, To change for war hereditary rest, Solicit arms unknown, and tempt the sword, A needless ill your ancestors abhorr'd? We- for myself I speak, and all the name Of Grecians, who to Troy's destruction came, Omitting those who were in battle slain, Or borne by rolling Simois to the main- Not one but suffer'd, and too dearly bought The prize of honor which in arms he sought; Some doom'd to death, and some in exile driv'n. Outcasts, abandon'd by the care of Heav'n; So worn, so wretched, so despis'd a crew, As ev'n old Priam might with pity view. Witness the vessels by Minerva toss'd In storms; the vengeful Capharean coast; Th' Euboean rocks! the prince, whose brother led Our armies to revenge his injur'd bed, In Egypt lost! Ulysses with his men Have seen Charybdis and the Cyclops' den. Why should I name Idomeneus, in vain Restor'd to scepters, and expell'd again? Or young Achilles, by his rival slain? Ev'n he, the King of Men, the foremost name Of all the Greeks, and most renown'd by fame, The proud revenger of another's wife, Yet by his own adult'ress lost his life; Fell at his threshold; and the spoils of Troy The foul polluters of his bed enjoy. The gods have envied me the sweets of life, My much lov'd country, and my more lov'd wife: Banish'd from both, I mourn; while in the sky, Transform'd to birds, my lost companions fly: Hov'ring about the coasts, they make their moan, And cuff the cliffs with pinions not their own. What squalid specters, in the dead of night, Break my short sleep, and skim before my sight! I might have promis'd to myself those harms, Mad as I was, when I, with mortal arms, Presum'd against immortal pow'rs to move, And violate with wounds the Queen of Love. Such arms this hand shall never more employ; No hate remains with me to ruin'd Troy. I war not with its dust; nor am I glad To think of past events, or good or bad. Your presents I return: whate'er you bring To buy my friendship, send the Trojan king. We met in fight; I know him, to my cost: With what a whirling force his lance he toss'd! Heav'ns! what a spring was in his arm, to throw! How high he held his shield, and rose at ev'ry blow! Had Troy produc'd two more his match in might, They would have chang'd the fortune of the fight: Th' invasion of the Greeks had been return'd, Our empire wasted, and our cities burn'd. The long defense the Trojan people made, The war protracted, and the siege delay'd, Were due to Hector's and this hero's hand: Both brave alike, and equal in command; Aeneas, not inferior in the field, In pious reverence to the gods excell'd. Make peace, ye Latians, and avoid with care Th' impending dangers of a fatal war.' He said no more; but, with this cold excuse, Refus'd th' alliance, and advis'd a truce." Thus Venulus concluded his report. A jarring murmur fill'd the factious court: As, when a torrent rolls with rapid force, And dashes o'er the stones that stop the course, The flood, constrain'd within a scanty space, Roars horrible along th' uneasy race; White foam in gath'ring eddies floats around; The rocky shores rebellow to the sound. The murmur ceas'd: then from his lofty throne The king invok'd the gods, and thus begun: "I wish, ye Latins, what we now debate Had been resolv'd before it was too late. Much better had it been for you and me, Unforc'd by this our last necessity, To have been earlier wise, than now to call A council, when the foe surrounds the wall. O citizens, we wage unequal war, With men not only Heav'n's peculiar care, But Heav'n's own race; unconquer'd in the field, Or, conquer'd, yet unknowing how to yield. What hopes you had in Diomedes, lay down: Our hopes must center on ourselves alone. Yet those how feeble, and, indeed, how vain, You see too well; nor need my words explain. Vanquish'd without resource; laid flat by fate; Factions within, a foe without the gate! Not but I grant that all perform'd their parts With manly force, and with undaunted hearts: With our united strength the war we wag'd; With equal numbers, equal arms, engag'd. You see th' event.- Now hear what I propose, To save our friends, and satisfy our foes. A tract of land the Latins have possess'd Along the Tiber, stretching to the west, Which now Rutulians and Auruncans till, And their mix'd cattle graze the fruitful hill. Those mountains fill'd with firs, that lower land, If you consent, the Trojan shall command, Call'd into part of what is ours; and there, On terms agreed, the common country share. There let'em build and settle, if they please; Unless they choose once more to cross the seas, In search of seats remote from Italy, And from unwelcome inmates set us free. Then twice ten galleys let us build with speed, Or twice as many more, if more they need. Materials are at hand; a well-grown wood Runs equal with the margin of the flood: Let them the number and the form assign; The care and cost of all the stores be mine. To treat the peace, a hundred senators Shall be commission'd hence with ample pow'rs, With olive the presents they shall bear, A purple robe, a royal iv'ry chair, And all the marks of sway that Latian monarchs wear, And sums of gold. Among yourselves debate This great affair, and save the sinking state." Then Drances took the word, who grudg'd, long since, The rising glories of the Daunian prince. Factious and rich, bold at the council board, But cautious in the field, he shunn'd the sword; A close caballer, and tongue-valiant lord. Noble his mother was, and near the throne; But, what his father's parentage, unknown. He rose, and took th' advantage of the times, To load young Turnus with invidious crimes. "Such truths, O king," said he, "your words contain, As strike the sense, and all replies are vain; Nor are your loyal subjects now to seek What common needs require, but fear to speak. Let him give leave of speech, that haughty man, Whose pride this unauspicious war began; For whose ambition (let me dare to say, Fear set apart, tho' death is in my way) The plains of Latium run with blood around. So many valiant heroes bite the ground; Dejected grief in ev'ry face appears; A town in mourning, and a land in tears; While he, th' undoubted author of our harms, The man who menaces the gods with arms, Yet, after all his boasts, forsook the fight, And sought his safety in ignoble flight. Now, best of kings, since you propose to send Such bounteous presents to your Trojan friend; Add yet a greater at our joint request, One which he values more than all the rest: Give him the fair Lavinia for his bride; With that alliance let the league be tied, And for the bleeding land a lasting peace provide. Let insolence no longer awe the throne; But, with a father's right, bestow your own. For this maligner of the general good, If still we fear his force, he must be woo'd; His haughty godhead we with pray'rs implore, Your scepter to release, and our just rights restore. O cursed cause of all our ills, must we Wage wars unjust, and fall in fight, for thee! What right hast thou to rule the Latian state, And send us out to meet our certain fate? 'T is a destructive war: from Turnus' hand Our peace and public safety we demand. Let the fair bride to the brave chief remain; If not, the peace, without the pledge, is vain. Turnus, I know you think me not your friend, Nor will I much with your belief contend: I beg your greatness not to give the law In others' realms, but, beaten, to withdraw. Pity your own, or pity our estate; Nor twist our fortunes with your sinking fate. Your interest is, the war should never cease; But we have felt enough to wish the peace: A land exhausted to the last remains, Depopulated towns, and driven plains. Yet, if desire of fame, and thirst of pow'r, A beauteous princess, with a crown in dow'r, So fire your mind, in arms assert your right, And meet your foe, who dares you to the fight. Mankind, it seems, is made for you alone; We, but the slaves who mount you to the throne: A base ignoble crowd, without a name, Unwept, unworthy, of the fun'ral flame, By duty bound to forfeit each his life, That Turnus may possess a royal wife. Permit not, mighty man, so mean a crew Should share such triumphs, and detain from you The post of honor, your undoubted due. Rather alone your matchless force employ, To merit what alone you must enjoy." These words, so full of malice mix'd with art, Inflam'd with rage the youthful hero's heart. Then, groaning from the bottom of his breast, He heav'd for wind, and thus his wrath express'd: "You, Drances, never want a stream of words, Then, when the public need requires our swords. First in the council hall to steer the state, And ever foremost in a tongue-debate, While our strong walls secure us from the foe, Ere yet with blood our ditches overflow: But let the potent orator declaim, And with the brand of coward blot my name; Free leave is giv'n him, when his fatal hand Has cover'd with more corps the sanguine strand, And high as mine his tow'ring trophies stand. If any doubt remains, who dares the most, Let us decide it at the Trojan's cost, And issue both abreast, where honor calls- Foes are not far to seek without the walls- Unless his noisy tongue can only fight, And feet were giv'n him but to speed his flight. I beaten from the field? I forc'd away? Who, but so known a dastard, dares to say? Had he but ev'n beheld the fight, his eyes Had witness'd for me what his tongue denies: What heaps of Trojans by this hand were slain, And how the bloody Tiber swell'd the main. All saw, but he, th' Arcadian troops retire In scatter'd squadrons, and their prince expire. The giant brothers, in their camp, have found, I was not forc'd with ease to quit my ground. Not such the Trojans tried me, when, inclos'd, I singly their united arms oppos'd: First forc'd an entrance thro' their thick array; Then, glutted with their slaughter, freed my way. 'T is a destructive war? So let it be, But to the Phrygian pirate, and to thee! Meantime proceed to fill the people's ears With false reports, their minds with panic fears: Extol the strength of a twice-conquer'd race; Our foes encourage, and our friends debase. Believe thy fables, and the Trojan town Triumphant stands; the Grecians are o'erthrown; Suppliant at Hector's feet Achilles lies, And Diomede from fierce Aeneas flies. Say rapid Aufidus with awful dread Runs backward from the sea, and hides his head, When the great Trojan on his bank appears; For that's as true as thy dissembled fears Of my revenge. Dismiss that vanity: Thou, Drances, art below a death from me. Let that vile soul in that vile body rest; The lodging is well worthy of the guest. "Now, royal father, to the present state Of our affairs, and of this high debate: If in your arms thus early you diffide, And think your fortune is already tried; If one defeat has brought us down so low, As never more in fields to meet the foe; Then I conclude for peace: 't is time to treat, And lie like vassals at the victor's feet. But, O! if any ancient blood remains, One drop of all our fathers', in our veins, That man would I prefer before the rest, Who dar'd his death with an undaunted breast; Who comely fell, by no dishonest wound, To shun that sight, and, dying, gnaw'd the ground. But, if we still have fresh recruits in store, If our confederates can afford us more; If the contended field we bravely fought, And not a bloodless victory was bought; Their losses equal'd ours; and, for their slain, With equal fires they fill'd the shining plain; Why thus, unforc'd, should we so tamely yield, And, ere the trumpet sounds, resign the field? Good unexpected, evils unforeseen, Appear by turns, as fortune shifts the scene: Some, rais'd aloft, come tumbling down amain; Then fall so hard, they bound and rise again. If Diomede refuse his aid to lend, The great Messapus yet remains our friend: Tolumnius, who foretells events, is ours; Th' Italian chiefs and princes join their pow'rs: Nor least in number, nor in name the last, Your own brave subjects have your cause embrac'd Above the rest, the Volscian Amazon Contains an army in herself alone, And heads a squadron, terrible to sight, With glitt'ring shields, in brazen armor bright. Yet, if the foe a single fight demand, And I alone the public peace withstand; If you consent, he shall not be refus'd, Nor find a hand to victory unus'd. This new Achilles, let him take the field, With fated armor, and Vulcanian shield! For you, my royal father, and my fame, I, Turnus, not the least of all my name, Devote my soul. He calls me hand to hand, And I alone will answer his demand. Drances shall rest secure, and neither share The danger, nor divide the prize of war." While they debate, nor these nor those will yield, Aeneas draws his forces to the field, And moves his camp. The scouts with flying speed Return, and thro' the frighted city spread Th' unpleasing news, the Trojans are descried, In battle marching by the river side, And bending to the town. They take th' alarm: Some tremble, some are bold; all in confusion arm. Th' impetuous youth press forward to the field; They clash the sword, and clatter on the shield: The fearful matrons raise a screaming cry; Old feeble men with fainter groans reply; A jarring sound results, and mingles in the sky, Like that of swans remurm'ring to the floods, Or birds of diff'ring kinds in hollow woods. Turnus th' occasion takes, and cries aloud: "Talk on, ye quaint haranguers of the crowd: Declaim in praise of peace, when danger calls, And the fierce foes in arms approach the walls." He said, and, turning short, with speedy pace, Casts back a scornful glance, and quits the place: "Thou, Volusus, the Volscian troops command To mount; and lead thyself our Ardean band. Messapus and Catillus, post your force Along the fields, to charge the Trojan horse. Some guard the passes, others man the wall; Drawn up in arms, the rest attend my call." They swarm from ev'ry quarter of the town, And with disorder'd haste the rampires crown. Good old Latinus, when he saw, too late, The gath'ring storm just breaking on the state, Dismiss'd the council till a fitter time, And own'd his easy temper as his crime, Who, forc'd against his reason, had complied To break the treaty for the promis'd bride. Some help to sink new trenches; others aid To ram the stones, or raise the palisade. Hoarse trumpets sound th' alarm; around the walls Runs a distracted crew, whom their last labor calls. A sad procession in the streets is seen, Of matrons, that attend the mother queen: High in her chair she sits, and, at her side, With downcast eyes, appears the fatal bride. They mount the cliff, where Pallas' temple stands; Pray'rs in their mouths, and presents in their hands, With censers first they fume the sacred shrine, Then in this common supplication join: "O patroness of arms, unspotted maid, Propitious hear, and lend thy Latins aid! Break short the pirate's lance; pronounce his fate, And lay the Phrygian low before the gate." Now Turnus arms for fight. His back and breast Well-temper'd steel and scaly brass invest: The cuishes which his brawny thighs infold Are mingled metal damask'd o'er with gold. His faithful fauchion sits upon his side; Nor casque, nor crest, his manly features hide: But, bare to view, amid surrounding friends, With godlike grace, he from the tow'r descends. Exulting in his strength, he seems to dare His absent rival, and to promise war. Freed from his keepers, thus, with broken reins, The wanton courser prances o'er the plains, Or in the pride of youth o'erleaps the mounds, And snuffs the females in forbidden grounds. Or seeks his wat'ring in the well-known flood, To quench his thirst, and cool his fiery blood: He swims luxuriant in the liquid plain, And o'er his shoulder flows his waving mane: He neighs, he snorts, he bears his head on high; Before his ample chest the frothy waters fly. Soon as the prince appears without the gate, The Volscians, with their virgin leader, wait His last commands. Then, with a graceful mien, Lights from her lofty steed the warrior queen: Her squadron imitates, and each descends; Whose common suit Camilla thus commends: "If sense of honor, if a soul secure Of inborn worth, that can all tests endure, Can promise aught, or on itself rely Greatly to dare, to conquer or to die; Then, I alone, sustain'd by these, will meet The Tyrrhene troops, and promise their defeat. Ours be the danger, ours the sole renown: You, gen'ral, stay behind, and guard the town:" Turnus a while stood mute, with glad surprise, And on the fierce virago fix'd his eyes; Then thus return'd: "O grace of Italy, With what becoming thanks can I reply? Not only words lie lab'ring in my breast, But thought itself is by thy praise oppress'd. Yet rob me not of all; but let me join My toils, my hazard, and my fame, with thine. The Trojan, not in stratagem unskill'd, Sends his light horse before to scour the field: Himself, thro' steep ascents and thorny brakes, A larger compass to the city takes. This news my scouts confirm, and I prepare To foil his cunning, and his force to dare; With chosen foot his passage to forelay, And place an ambush in the winding way. Thou, with thy Volscians, face the Tuscan horse; The brave Messapus shall thy troops inforce With those of Tibur, and the Latian band, Subjected all to thy supreme command." This said, he warns Messapus to the war, Then ev'ry chief exhorts with equal care. All thus encourag'd, his own troops he joins, And hastes to prosecute his deep designs. Inclos'd with hills, a winding valley lies, By nature form'd for fraud, and fitted for surprise. A narrow track, by human steps untrode, Leads, thro' perplexing thorns, to this obscure abode. High o'er the vale a steepy mountain stands, Whence the surveying sight the nether ground commands. The top is level, an offensive seat Of war; and from the war a safe retreat: For, on the right and left, is room to press The foes at hand, or from afar distress; To drive 'em headlong downward, and to pour On their descending backs a stony show'r. Thither young Turnus took the well-known way, Possess'd the pass, and in blind ambush lay. Meantime Latonian Phoebe, from the skies, Beheld th' approaching war with hateful eyes, And call'd the light-foot Opis to her aid, Her most belov'd and ever-trusty maid; Then with a sigh began: "Camilla goes To meet her death amidst her fatal foes: The nymphs I lov'd of all my mortal train, Invested with Diana's arms, in vain. Nor is my kindness for the virgin new: 'T was born with her; and with her years it grew. Her father Metabus, when forc'd away From old Privernum, for tyrannic sway, Snatch'd up, and sav'd from his prevailing foes, This tender babe, companion of his woes. Casmilla was her mother; but he drown'd One hissing letter in a softer sound, And call'd Camilla. Thro' the woods he flies; Wrapp'd in his robe the royal infant lies. His foes in sight, he mends his weary pace; With shout and clamors they pursue the chase. The banks of Amasene at length he gains: The raging flood his farther flight restrains, Rais'd o'er the borders with unusual rains. Prepar'd to plunge into the stream, he fears, Not for himself, but for the charge he bears. Anxious, he stops a while, and thinks in haste; Then, desp'rate in distress, resolves at last. A knotty lance of well-boil'd oak he bore; The middle part with cork he cover'd o'er: He clos'd the child within the hollow space; With twigs of bending osier bound the case; Then pois'd the spear, heavy with human weight, And thus invok'd my favor for the freight: 'Accept, great goddess of the woods,' he said, 'Sent by her sire, this dedicated maid! Thro' air she flies a suppliant to thy shrine; And the first weapons that she knows, are thine.' He said; and with full force the spear he threw: Above the sounding waves Camilla flew. Then, press'd by foes, he stemm'd the stormy tide, And gain'd, by stress of arms, the farther side. His fasten'd spear he pull'd from out the ground, And, victor of his vows, his infant nymph unbound; Nor, after that, in towns which walls inclose, Would trust his hunted life amidst his foes; But, rough, in open air he chose to lie; Earth was his couch, his cov'ring was the sky. On hills unshorn, or in a desart den, He shunn'd the dire society of men. A shepherd's solitary life he led; His daughter with the milk of mares he fed. The dugs of bears, and ev'ry salvage beast, He drew, and thro' her lips the liquor press'd. The little Amazon could scarcely go: He loads her with a quiver and a bow; And, that she might her stagg'ring steps command, He with a slender jav'lin fills her hand. Her flowing hair no golden fillet bound; Nor swept her trailing robe the dusty ground. Instead of these, a tiger's hide o'erspread Her back and shoulders, fasten'd to her head. The flying dart she first attempts to fling, And round her tender temples toss'd the sling; Then, as her strength with years increas'd, began To pierce aloft in air the soaring swan, And from the clouds to fetch the heron and the crane. The Tuscan matrons with each other vied, To bless their rival sons with such a bride; But she disdains their love, to share with me The sylvan shades and vow'd virginity. And, O! I wish, contented with my cares Of salvage spoils, she had not sought the wars! Then had she been of my celestial train, And shunn'd the fate that dooms her to be slain. But since, opposing Heav'n's decree, she goes To find her death among forbidden foes, Haste with these arms, and take thy steepy flight. Where, with the gods, averse, the Latins fight. This bow to thee, this quiver I bequeath, This chosen arrow, to revenge her death: By whate'er hand Camilla shall be slain, Or of the Trojan or Italian train, Let him not pass unpunish'd from the plain. Then, in a hollow cloud, myself will aid To bear the breathless body of my maid: Unspoil'd shall be her arms, and unprofan'd Her holy limbs with any human hand, And in a marble tomb laid in her native land." She said. The faithful nymph descends from high With rapid flight, and cuts the sounding sky: Black clouds and stormy winds around her body fly. By this, the Trojan and the Tuscan horse, Drawn up in squadrons, with united force, Approach the walls: the sprightly coursers bound, Press forward on their bits, and shift their ground. Shields, arms, and spears flash horribly from far; And the fields glitter with a waving war. Oppos'd to these, come on with furious force Messapus, Coras, and the Latian horse; These in the body plac'd, on either hand Sustain'd and clos'd by fair Camilla's band. Advancing in a line, they couch their spears; And less and less the middle space appears. Thick smoke obscures the field; and scarce are seen The neighing coursers, and the shouting men. In distance of their darts they stop their course; Then man to man they rush, and horse to horse. The face of heav'n their flying jav'lins hide, And deaths unseen are dealt on either side. Tyrrhenus, and Aconteus, void of fear, By mettled coursers borne in full career, Meet first oppos'd; and, with a mighty shock, Their horses' heads against each other knock. Far from his steed is fierce Aconteus cast, As with an engine's force, or lightning's blast: He rolls along in blood, and breathes his last. The Latin squadrons take a sudden fright, And sling their shields behind, to save their backs in flight Spurring at speed to their own walls they drew; Close in the rear the Tuscan troops pursue, And urge their flight: Asylas leads the chase; Till, seiz'd, with shame, they wheel about and face, Receive their foes, and raise a threat'ning cry. The Tuscans take their turn to fear and fly. So swelling surges, with a thund'ring roar, Driv'n on each other's backs, insult the shore, Bound o'er the rocks, incroach upon the land, And far upon the beach eject the sand; Then backward, with a swing, they take their way, Repuls'd from upper ground, and seek their mother sea; With equal hurry quit th' invaded shore, And swallow back the sand and stones they spew'd before. Twice were the Tuscans masters of the field, Twice by the Latins, in their turn, repell'd. Asham'd at length, to the third charge they ran; Both hosts resolv'd, and mingled man to man. Now dying groans are heard; the fields are strow'd With falling bodies, and are drunk with blood. Arms, horses, men, on heaps together lie: Confus'd the fight, and more confus'd the cry. Orsilochus, who durst not press too near Strong Remulus, at distance drove his spear, And stuck the steel beneath his horse's ear. The fiery steed, impatient of the wound, Curvets, and, springing upward with a bound, His helpless lord cast backward on the ground. Catillus pierc'd Iolas first; then drew His reeking lance, and at Herminius threw, The mighty champion of the Tuscan crew. His neck and throat unarm'd, his head was bare, But shaded with a length of yellow hair: Secure, he fought, expos'd on ev'ry part, A spacious mark for swords, and for the flying dart. Across the shoulders came the feather'd wound; Transfix'd he fell, and doubled to the ground. The sands with streaming blood are sanguine dyed, And death with honor sought on either side. Resistless thro' the war Camilla rode, In danger unappall'd, and pleas'd with blood. One side was bare for her exerted breast; One shoulder with her painted quiver press'd. Now from afar her fatal jav'lins play; Now with her ax's edge she hews her way: Diana's arms upon her shoulder sound; And when, too closely press'd, she quits the ground, From her bent bow she sends a backward wound. Her maids, in martial pomp, on either side, Larina, Tulla, fierce Tarpeia, ride: Italians all; in peace, their queen's delight; In war, the bold companions of the fight. So march'd the Tracian Amazons of old, When Thermodon with bloody billows roll'd: Such troops as these in shining arms were seen, When Theseus met in fight their maiden queen: Such to the field Penthisilea led, From the fierce virgin when the Grecians fled; With such, return'd triumphant from the war, Her maids with cries attend the lofty car; They clash with manly force their moony shields; With female shouts resound the Phrygian fields. Who foremost, and who last, heroic maid, On the cold earth were by thy courage laid? Thy spear, of mountain ash, Eumenius first, With fury driv'n, from side to side transpierc'd: A purple stream came spouting from the wound; Bath'd in his blood he lies, and bites the ground. Liris and Pegasus at once she slew: The former, as the slacken'd reins he drew Of his faint steed; the latter, as he stretch'd His arm to prop his friend, the jav'lin reach'd. By the same weapon, sent from the same hand, Both fall together, and both spurn the sand. Amastrus next is added to the slain: The rest in rout she follows o'er the plain: Tereus, Harpalycus, Demophoon, And Chromis, at full speed her fury shun. Of all her deadly darts, not one she lost; Each was attended with a Trojan ghost. Young Ornithus bestrode a hunter steed, Swift for the chase, and of Apulian breed. Him from afar she spied, in arms unknown: O'er his broad back an ox's hide was thrown; His helm a wolf, whose gaping jaws were spread A cov'ring for his cheeks, and grinn'd around his head, He clench'd within his hand an iron prong, And tower'd above the rest, conspicuous in the throng. Him soon she singled from the flying train, And slew with ease; then thus insults the slain: "Vain hunter, didst thou think thro' woods to chase The savage herd, a vile and trembling race? Here cease thy vaunts, and own my victory: A woman warrior was too strong for thee. Yet, if the ghosts demand the conqu'ror's name, Confessing great Camilla, save thy shame." Then Butes and Orsilochus she slew, The bulkiest bodies of the Trojan crew; But Butes breast to breast: the spear descends Above the gorget, where his helmet ends, And o'er the shield which his left side defends. Orsilochus and she their courses ply: He seems to follow, and she seems to fly; But in a narrower ring she makes the race; And then he flies, and she pursues the chase. Gath'ring at length on her deluded foe, She swings her ax, and rises to the blow Full on the helm behind, with such a sway The weapon falls, the riven steel gives way: He groans, he roars, he sues in vain for grace; Brains, mingled with his blood, besmear his face. Astonish'd Aunus just arrives by chance, To see his fall; nor farther dares advance; But, fixing on the horrid maid his eye, He stares, and shakes, and finds it vain to fly; Yet, like a true Ligurian, born to cheat, (At least while fortune favor'd his deceit,) Cries out aloud: "What courage have you shown, Who trust your courser's strength, and not your own? Forego the vantage of your horse, alight, And then on equal terms begin the fight: It shall be seen, weak woman, what you can, When, foot to foot, you combat with a man," He said. She glows with anger and disdain, Dismounts with speed to dare him on the plain, And leaves her horse at large among her train; With her drawn sword defies him to the field, And, marching, lifts aloft her maiden shield. The youth, who thought his cunning did succeed, Reins round his horse, and urges all his speed; Adds the remembrance of the spur, and hides The goring rowels in his bleeding sides. "Vain fool, and coward!" cries the lofty maid, "Caught in the train which thou thyself hast laid! On others practice thy Ligurian arts; Thin stratagems and tricks of little hearts Are lost on me: nor shalt thou safe retire, With vaunting lies, to thy fallacious sire." At this, so fast her flying feet she sped, That soon she strain'd beyond his horse's head: Then turning short, at once she seiz'd the rein, And laid the boaster grov'ling on the plain. Not with more ease the falcon, from above, Trusses in middle air the trembling dove, Then plumes the prey, in her strong pounces bound: The feathers, foul with blood, come tumbling to the ground. Now mighty Jove, from his superior height, With his broad eye surveys th' unequal fight. He fires the breast of Tarchon with disdain, And sends him to redeem th' abandon'd plain. Betwixt the broken ranks the Tuscan rides, And these encourages, and those he chides; Recalls each leader, by his name, from flight; Renews their ardor, and restores the fight. "What panic fear has seiz'd your souls? O shame, O brand perpetual of th' Etrurian name! Cowards incurable, a woman's hand Drives, breaks, and scatters your ignoble band! Now cast away the sword, and quit the shield! What use of weapons which you dare not wield? Not thus you fly your female foes by night, Nor shun the feast, when the full bowls invite; When to fat off'rings the glad augur calls, And the shrill hornpipe sounds to bacchanals. These are your studied cares, your lewd delight: Swift to debauch, but slow to manly fight." Thus having said, he spurs amid the foes, Not managing the life he meant to lose. The first he found he seiz'd with headlong haste, In his strong gripe, and clasp'd around the waist; 'T was Venulus, whom from his horse he tore, And, laid athwart his own, in triumph bore. Loud shouts ensue; the Latins turn their eyes, And view th' unusual sight with vast surprise. The fiery Tarchon, flying o'er the plains, Press'd in his arms the pond'rous prey sustains; Then, with his shorten'd spear, explores around His jointed arms, to fix a deadly wound. Nor less the captive struggles for his life: He writhes his body to prolong the strife, And, fencing for his naked throat, exerts His utmost vigor, and the point averts. So stoops the yellow eagle from on high, And bears a speckled serpent thro' the sky, Fast'ning his crooked talons on the prey: The pris'ner hisses thro' the liquid way; Resists the royal hawk; and, tho' oppress'd, She fights in volumes, and erects her crest: Turn'd to her foe, she stiffens ev'ry scale, And shoots her forky tongue, and whisks her threat'ning tail. Against the victor, all defense is weak: Th' imperial bird still plies her with his beak; He tears her bowels, and her breast he gores; Then claps his pinions, and securely soars. Thus, thro' the midst of circling enemies, Strong Tarchon snatch'd and bore away his prize. The Tyrrhene troops, that shrunk before, now press The Latins, and presume the like success. Then Aruns, doom'd to death, his arts assay'd, To murther, unespied, the Volscian maid: This way and that his winding course he bends, And, whereso'er she turns, her steps attends. When she retires victorious from the chase, He wheels about with care, and shifts his place; When, rushing on, she seeks her foes flight, He keeps aloof, but keeps her still in sight: He threats, and trembles, trying ev'ry way, Unseen to kill, and safely to betray. Chloreus, the priest of Cybele, from far, Glitt'ring in Phrygian arms amidst the war, Was by the virgin view'd. The steed he press'd Was proud with trappings, and his brawny chest With scales of gilded brass was cover'd o'er; A robe of Tyrian dye the rider wore. With deadly wounds he gall'd the distant foe; Gnossian his shafts, and Lycian was his bow: A golden helm his front and head surrounds A gilded quiver from his shoulder sounds. Gold, weav'd with linen, on his thighs he wore, With flowers of needlework distinguish'd o'er, With golden buckles bound, and gather'd up before. Him the fierce maid beheld with ardent eyes, Fond and ambitious of so rich a prize, Or that the temple might his trophies hold, Or else to shine herself in Trojan gold. Blind in her haste, she chases him alone. And seeks his life, regardless of her own. This lucky moment the sly traitor chose: Then, starting from his ambush, up he rose, And threw, but first to Heav'n address'd his vows: "O patron of Socrates' high abodes, Phoebus, the ruling pow'r among the gods, Whom first we serve, whole woods of unctuous pine Are fell'd for thee, and to thy glory shine; By thee protected with our naked soles, Thro' flames unsing'd we march, and tread the kindled coals Give me, propitious pow'r, to wash away The stains of this dishonorable day: Nor spoils, nor triumph, from the fact I claim, But with my future actions trust my fame. Let me, by stealth, this female plague o'ercome, And from the field return inglorious home." Apollo heard, and, granting half his pray'r, Shuffled in winds the rest, and toss'd in empty air. He gives the death desir'd; his safe return By southern tempests to the seas is borne. Now, when the jav'lin whizz'd along the skies, Both armies on Camilla turn'd their eyes, Directed by the sound. Of either host, Th' unhappy virgin, tho' concern'd the most, Was only deaf; so greedy was she bent On golden spoils, and on her prey intent; Till in her pap the winged weapon stood Infix'd, and deeply drunk the purple blood. Her sad attendants hasten to sustain Their dying lady, drooping on the plain. Far from their sight the trembling Aruns flies, With beating heart, and fear confus'd with joys; Nor dares he farther to pursue his blow, Or ev'n to bear the sight of his expiring foe. As, when the wolf has torn a bullock's hide At unawares, or ranch'd a shepherd's side, Conscious of his audacious deed, he flies, And claps his quiv'ring tail between his thighs: So, speeding once, the wretch no more attends, But, spurring forward, herds among his friends. She wrench'd the jav'lin with her dying hands, But wedg'd within her breast the weapon stands; The wood she draws, the steely point remains; She staggers in her seat with agonizing pains: (A gath'ring mist o'erclouds her cheerful eyes, And from her cheeks the rosy color flies:) Then turns to her, whom of her female train She trusted most, and thus she speaks with pain: "Acca, 't is past! he swims before my sight, Inexorable Death; and claims his right. Bear my last words to Turnus; fly with speed, And bid him timely to my charge succeed, Repel the Trojans, and the town relieve: Farewell! and in this kiss my parting breath receive." She said, and, sliding, sunk upon the plain: Dying, her open'd hand forsakes the rein; Short, and more short, she pants; by slow degrees Her mind the passage from her body frees. She drops her sword; she nods her plumy crest, Her drooping head declining on her breast: In the last sigh her struggling soul expires, And, murm'ring with disdain, to Stygian sounds retires. A shout, that struck the golden stars, ensued; Despair and rage the languish'd fight renew'd. The Trojan troops and Tuscans, in a line, Advance to charge; the mix'd Arcadians join. But Cynthia's maid, high seated, from afar Surveys the field, and fortune of the war, Unmov'd a while, till, prostrate on the plain, Welt'ring in blood, she sees Camilla slain, And, round her corpse, of friends and foes a fighting train. Then, from the bottom of her breast, she drew A mournful sigh, and these sad words ensue: "Too dear a fine, ah much lamented maid, For warring with the Trojans, thou hast paid! Nor aught avail'd, in this unhappy strife, Diana's sacred arms, to save thy life. Yet unreveng'd thy goddess will not leave Her vot'ry's death, nor; with vain sorrow grieve. Branded the wretch, and be his name abhorr'd; But after ages shall thy praise record. Th' inglorious coward soon shall press the plain: Thus vows thy queen, and thus the Fates ordain." High o'er the field there stood a hilly mound, Sacred the place, and spread with oaks around, Where, in a marble tomb, Dercennus lay, A king that once in Latium bore the sway. The beauteous Opis thither bent her flight, To mark the traitor Aruns from the height. Him in refulgent arms she soon espied, Swoln with success; and loudly thus she cried: "Thy backward steps, vain boaster, are too late; Turn like a man, at length, and meet thy fate. Charg'd with my message, to Camilla go, And say I sent thee to the shades below, An honor undeserv'd from Cynthia's bow." She said, and from her quiver chose with speed The winged shaft, predestin'd for the deed; Then to the stubborn yew her strength applied, Till the far distant horns approach'd on either side. The bowstring touch'd her breast, so strong she drew; Whizzing in air the fatal arrow flew. At once the twanging bow and sounding dart The traitor heard, and felt the point within his heart. Him, beating with his heels in pangs of death, His flying friends to foreign fields bequeath. The conqu'ring damsel, with expanded wings, The welcome message to her mistress brings. Their leader lost, the Volscians quit the field, And, unsustain'd, the chiefs of Turnus yield. The frighted soldiers, when their captains fly, More on their speed than on their strength rely. Confus'd in flight, they bear each other down, And spur their horses headlong to the town. Driv'n by their foes, and to their fears resign'd, Not once they turn, but take their wounds behind. These drop the shield, and those the lance forego, Or on their shoulders bear the slacken'd bow. The hoofs of horses, with a rattling sound, Beat short and thick, and shake the rotten ground. Black clouds of dust come rolling in the sky, And o'er the darken'd walls and rampires fly. The trembling matrons, from their lofty stands, Rend heav'n with female shrieks, and wring their hands. All pressing on, pursuers and pursued, Are crush'd in crowds, a mingled multitude. Some happy few escape: the throng too late Rush on for entrance, till they choke the gate. Ev'n in the sight of home, the wretched sire Looks on, and sees his helpless son expire. Then, in a fright, the folding gates they close, But leave their friends excluded with their foes. The vanquish'd cry; the victors loudly shout; 'T is terror all within, and slaughter all without. Blind in their fear, they bounce against the wall, Or, to the moats pursued, precipitate their fall. The Latian virgins, valiant with despair, Arm'd on the tow'rs, the common danger share: So much of zeal their country's cause inspir'd; So much Camilla's great example fir'd. Poles, sharpen'd in the flames, from high they throw, With imitated darts, to gall the foe. Their lives for godlike freedom they bequeath, And crowd each other to be first in death. Meantime to Turnus, ambush'd in the shade, With heavy tidings came th' unhappy maid: "The Volscians overthrown, Camilla kill'd; The foes, entirely masters of the field, Like a resistless flood, come rolling on: The cry goes off the plain, and thickens to the town." Inflam'd with rage, (for so the Furies fire The Daunian's breast, and so the Fates require,) He leaves the hilly pass, the woods in vain Possess'd, and downward issues on the plain. Scarce was he gone, when to the straits, now freed From secret foes, the Trojan troops succeed. Thro' the black forest and the ferny brake, Unknowingly secure, their way they take; From the rough mountains to the plain descend, And there, in order drawn, their line extend. Both armies now in open fields are seen; Nor far the distance of the space between. Both to the city bend. Aeneas sees, Thro' smoking fields, his hast'ning enemies; And Turnus views the Trojans in array, And hears th' approaching horses proudly neigh. Soon had their hosts in bloody battle join'd; But westward to the sea the sun declin'd. Intrench'd before the town both armies lie, While Night with sable wings involves the sky.

Book XI

https://web.archive.org/web/20210422020919/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-aeneid/study-guide/summary-book-xi

Although Aeneas is deeply distressed by the deaths of Pallas and his other comrades, he still offers a sacrifice to the gods composed of spoils taken from Mezentius. He and his men bury the bodies of their slain companions and take great care readying Pallas's corpse for return to King Evander. Aeneas weeps over Pallas's fate and for having failed to keep his friend's son safe. Nevertheless, he is heartened by the fact that Pallas did not die a coward. Messengers from the Latin camp then approach Aeneas, begging him to allow them to bury their dead. "Good Aeneas" grants them their request, telling them that it is only Turnus who should be fighting him and that the Latins and Trojans should seek peace. The Latin Drances, who has an old grudge against Turnus, tells Aeneas that he admires him greatly, and they agree on a peace of twenty-six days during which all may bury their dead. Rumor reaches King Evander before Pallas's body does, alerting him to his son's sad fate. Evander throws himself across the bier on which Pallas's corpse lays, crying, "I ... have undone/ the fate of fathers: I survive my son" . Nevertheless, he asserts that he does not blame Aeneas and that he is glad his son died bravely. In a deeply emotional scene, Aeneas and his men set fire to the bodies of their comrades, throw spoils taken from the bodies of the Latins into the flames, and offer sacrifices. Elsewhere, the Latins do the same for their fallen men, and some women cry out that only Turnus should be suffering, since it is only he who seeks war. King Latinus, pained by the turn of events, calls a council of the city's chiefs. Some feel that the problem should be settled by a duel between Aeneas and Turnus alone, and when they learn that the great Greek warrior Diomedes has rejected their plea for aid, Latinus proposes that they attempt to establish peace. Drances attacks Turnus, blaming the war on his arrogance, and Turnus responds by mocking Drances and calling him a coward. He tells Latinus that he is happy to fight Aeneas alone, but begs him not to "falter in dishonor at the threshold" . As the council argues, they receive word that the Trojans are marching on the city. Turnus takes advantage of the ensuing panic to urge the Latins to take up arms, and he prepares himself for battle. The Latins are joined by the legendary warrior Camilla and her Volscians, who take over the defense of the city against the approaching Trojan horsemen, while Turnus rides off to ambush Aeneas, who is taking a different route through the forest. Virgil focuses briefly on Camilla's interesting history: when King Metabus fled his city in exile, he took the infant Camilla with him. When he approached a river that he could not safely cross with his daughter, he strapped her to a lance and threw her across, after praying to the goddess Diana to keep her safe. The girl was raised in the wilderness and became Diana's favorite: a fellow virgin whose only true love is of arms. The Trojans finally reach the city, and the battle begins. Camilla is the fiercest warrior on the field, and she slays uncountable Trojans until she is finally taken down by Arruns. Arruns is only able to kill Camilla because he has prayed to Apollo to help him end her attack. Now Diana seeks vengeance by sending her sentinel, Opis, to slay Arruns. Having lost Camilla and unable to hold back the Trojan army, the Latins scatter. Camilla's closest companion, Acca, sends word to Turnus of the events taking place, and Turnus is forced to abandon his ambush and return to the city only moments before Aeneas passes through. Book XI ends with both men returning to their respective camps on the outskirts of Laurentum to fortify themselves for the next day's battle.

One of the more interesting problems that Virgil must have encountered while writing the Aeneid is the difficulty of maintaining suspense in a tale with such a preordained outcome. Throughout the story, readers are repeatedly made aware of the inevitability of Aeneas's victory; the gods themselves have asserted that his destiny is to found a city in Italy that will one day become the Roman Empire, and to act as the father to a long line of kings that will lead to the great Caesar Augustus, Virgil's patron. Even King Latinus tells the council that there is no use in continuing the war: "My citizens,/ we wage a luckless war against a nation/ of gods, unconquered men; no battle can/ exhaust them" . Nevertheless, Virgil is first of all a storyteller, and he does all that he can to keep his readers on tenterhooks as to the manner in which this outcome will be reached. He does this by allowing the action to take a dramatic turn: in the previous chapter, the Latins had the upper hand, exemplified by their destruction of the Trojan fortifications; in Book XI, the Latins maintain their position , and even slay one of Aeneas' closest comrades, Pallas, but the chapter ends with the Latins scattering as the Trojan army presses in. Virgil's skill lies in allowing his readers to know only the story's ending, not how it will come to pass. Although Aeneas's human limitations have been emphasized earlier, and he has even shown some character flaws, Book XI lauds him as an unfailingly fair, moral leader. The funeral rites that he gives Pallas are so exhaustive that even King Evander says that he could do no better for his own son, and Aeneas weeps genuine tears of mourning over the bodies of his fallen comrades. Indeed, the degree of sorrow that Aeneas expresses over the death of Pallas is almost startling if we recall that he only recently met the boy, when King Evander introduced them. Pallas, it seems, reminds Aeneas of his son, Ascanius, and the possibility of death that might have awaited the boy if he had not been preordained to help found Rome. Even though he is overwhelmed by sadness at the deaths of his friends, Aeneas is so merciful that he allows the Latin envoys to reclaim the bodies of their dead so that they can be buried. Time and again, Virgil emphasizes that though Aeneas is a courageous warrior who will never shy away from the battlefield, what he truly wants is peace. This outlook contrasts markedly with that of Turnus, who refuses even to consider abandoning the conflict. Camilla is a strong presence in this episode; Virgil describes the origins of the great female warrior in considerable detail. This is particularly striking given the fact that this episode and those surrounding it focus almost entirely on the battle taking place, making the story of Camilla's background a welcome, peaceful respite from the exhausting bloodshed. Like Dido, Camilla is a strong female character who commands the respect of the men around her, but unlike Dido, Camilla has no strong personal presence. She is described wholly in terms of her abilities on the battlefield, and does not appear to have any notable personality traits. Although audiences may wonder why Camilla is fighting on the "wrong" side, the fact that Virgil focuses solely on her skill on the battlefield helps to explain this: Camilla is first of all a fighter who will engage in battle wherever she finds it. One particularly interesting element of Book XI is the absence of Lavinia. Even though the battle between the Trojans and the Latins is ostensibly being fought over the hand of this character, she is rarely mentioned. She remains quite peripheral and faceless . Even in King Latinus's council, the focus is never on the person over whom the war is being fought; by this point, it seems to be far more about Turnus's pride and determination to prove that he is the better man than it is about the love of a woman. Lavinia seems unlikely to inspire such impassioned devotion as to incite a war, and Virgil may have presented her in this manner in order to demonstrate that the mechanisms that bring Aeneas to his destiny are irrelevant - the fulfillment of his fate remains of first importance.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_ii.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_1_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book ii

book ii

{"name": "Book II", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section2/", "summary": "Did you suppose, my father, That I could tear myself away and leave you? Fulfilling Dido's request, Aeneas begins his sorrowful story, adding that retelling it entails reexperiencing the pain. He takes us back to ten years into the Trojan War: at the moment the tale begins, the Danaans have constructed a giant wooden horse with a hollow belly. They secretly hide their best soldiers, fully armed, within the horse, while the rest of the Greek army lies low some distance from Troy. The sight of a massive horse standing before their gates on an apparently deserted battlefield baffles the Trojans. Near the horse, the Trojans find a Greek youth named Sinon. He explains that the Greeks have wished to flee Troy for some time but were prevented by fierce storms. A prophet told them to sacrifice one of their own, and Sinon was chosen. But Sinon managed to escape during the preparations, and the Greeks left him behind. The Trojans show him pity and ask the meaning of the great horse. Sinon says that it was an offering to the goddess Minerva, who turned against the Greeks after the desecration of one of her temples by Ulysses. Sinon claims that if any harm comes to the wooden statue, Troy will be destroyed by Minerva's wrath, but if the Trojans install the horse within their city walls, they will rise victorious in war against southern Greece, like a tidal wave, with Minerva on their side. Aeneas continues his story: after Sinon finishes speaking, two giant serpents rise up from the sea and devour the Trojan priest Laocoon and his two sons as punishment for hurling a spear at the horse. The snakes then slither up to the shrine of Minerva. The Trojans interpret the snakes' attack as an omen that they must appease Minerva, so they wheel the horse into the city of Troy. Night falls, and while the city sleeps, Sinon opens the horse's belly, releasing the Greek warriors. The warriors kill the Trojan guards and open the gates of the city to the rest of their forces. Meanwhile, Hector, the fallen leader of the Trojan army, appears to Aeneas in a dream and informs him that the city has been infiltrated. Climbing to his roof, Aeneas sees fighting everywhere and Troy in flames. He runs for arms and then heads for the heart of the city, joined by a few of his men. Aeneas and his men surprise and kill many Greeks, but are too badly outnumbered to make a difference. Eventually they go to King Priam's palace, where a battle is brewing. The Greeks, led by Pyrrhus, break into the palace. Pyrrhus kills Polites, the young son of Priam and Hecuba, and then slaughters Priam on his own altar. Aeneas continues relating his story: nearly overcome with grief over this slaughter, he sees Helen, the cause of the war, hiding. He determines to kill her, but Venus appears and explains that blame for the war belongs with the gods, not Helen. Venus advises Aeneas to flee Troy at once, since his fate is elsewhere. Aeneas then proceeds to the house of his father, Anchises, but Anchises refuses to leave. But after omens appear--first a harmless tongue of flame on Ascanius's forehead, then a bright falling star in the sky--Anchises is persuaded to flee the city. Aeneas takes his father on his back and flees with his wife, Creusa, his son, Ascanius, and many other followers. Unfortunately, in the commotion Creusa is lost from the group. After everyone exits the city, Aeneas returns to search for her, but instead he meets her shade, or spirit. She tells him not to be sorrowful because a new home and wife await him in Hesperia. Somewhat comforted, Aeneas leaves Troy burning and leads the survivors into the mountains.", "analysis": "With Aeneas's claim that his tale of Troy's fall is so sorrowful that it would bring tears even to the eyes of a soldier as harsh as Ulysses, Virgil calls attention to his own act of retelling the Trojan horse episode from a new angle, that of the vanquished Trojans. In Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, we learn the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of Ulysses and the Greeks. Virgil's claim is that even the Greeks, the victors, would be able to feel the sorrow of the event if it were told properly from the point of view of the victims. Virgil writes a characteristically evenhanded account, so that both losers and winners earn our sympathy and respect. Virgil tries to minimize the humiliation of the Trojans and of his hero, Aeneas. He makes sure that Aeneas does not appear to be less of a warrior than the Greeks, even though they defeated him. When Aeneas admits that the Trojans were duped by the wooden horse trick, Virgil tempers the failure by emphasizing that not all Trojans were fooled. Aeneas's mention that some Trojans counseled the others to destroy the horse demonstrates that there was in fact a degree of wisdom and perhaps even foresight among the Trojan people. He also carefully recounts all the details by which they were persuaded and frightened--the lies of the young Greek and the sign of the serpents, which gobbled up Laocoon, the man who had most vocally protested bringing the horse inside the city--in order to show that the Trojan fear of offending the gods was valid. In the end, the Trojans bring the horse into their city not out of foolishness but out of a legitimate and even honorable respect for the gods. Against Aeneas's description of the Trojans' earnest reverence, the Greeks begin to look guilty of bad sportsmanship. At points during his story, Aeneas emphasizes the irrelevance of mortal concerns in the face of divine will. Venus's persuasion of Aeneas to not kill Helen, for instance, relies on the ultimate inability of mortals to influence their destinies. Venus tells him to hold neither Helen nor Paris responsible for Troy's downfall: he must realize that \"the harsh will of the gods\" caused Troy's destruction. Venus's words reveal that although Aeneas and the Trojans lose a battle with the Greeks that they might have won, in the end they have no choice but to submit to the unfavorable will of the gods. But the gods' will is also what enables some of the Trojans to escape from Troy. Again, fate must always be fulfilled: Aeneas is destined to survive. His sufferings in Troy are to be redeemed, eventually, by his glory in Italy. The shade of his wife, Creusa, comforts him with this message, and following his encounter with Creusa's shade, Aeneas keeps his foretold destiny always in mind, distant though this destiny may seem."}

BOOK II All were attentive to the godlike man, When from his lofty couch he thus began: "Great queen, what you command me to relate Renews the sad remembrance of our fate: An empire from its old foundations rent, And ev'ry woe the Trojans underwent; A peopled city made a desart place; All that I saw, and part of which I was: Not ev'n the hardest of our foes could hear, Nor stern Ulysses tell without a tear. And now the latter watch of wasting night, And setting stars, to kindly rest invite; But, since you take such int'rest in our woe, And Troy's disastrous end desire to know, I will restrain my tears, and briefly tell What in our last and fatal night befell. "By destiny compell'd, and in despair, The Greeks grew weary of the tedious war, And by Minerva's aid a fabric rear'd, Which like a steed of monstrous height appear'd: The sides were plank'd with pine; they feign'd it made For their return, and this the vow they paid. Thus they pretend, but in the hollow side Selected numbers of their soldiers hide: With inward arms the dire machine they load, And iron bowels stuff the dark abode. In sight of Troy lies Tenedos, an isle (While Fortune did on Priam's empire smile) Renown'd for wealth; but, since, a faithless bay, Where ships expos'd to wind and weather lay. There was their fleet conceal'd. We thought, for Greece Their sails were hoisted, and our fears release. The Trojans, coop'd within their walls so long, Unbar their gates, and issue in a throng, Like swarming bees, and with delight survey The camp deserted, where the Grecians lay: The quarters of the sev'ral chiefs they show'd; Here Phoenix, here Achilles, made abode; Here join'd the battles; there the navy rode. Part on the pile their wond'ring eyes employ: The pile by Pallas rais'd to ruin Troy. Thymoetes first ('t is doubtful whether hir'd, Or so the Trojan destiny requir'd) Mov'd that the ramparts might be broken down, To lodge the monster fabric in the town. But Capys, and the rest of sounder mind, The fatal present to the flames designed, Or to the wat'ry deep; at least to bore The hollow sides, and hidden frauds explore. The giddy vulgar, as their fancies guide, With noise say nothing, and in parts divide. Laocoon, follow'd by a num'rous crowd, Ran from the fort, and cried, from far, aloud: 'O wretched countrymen! what fury reigns? What more than madness has possess'd your brains? Think you the Grecians from your coasts are gone? And are Ulysses' arts no better known? This hollow fabric either must inclose, Within its blind recess, our secret foes; Or 't is an engine rais'd above the town, T' o'erlook the walls, and then to batter down. Somewhat is sure design'd, by fraud or force: Trust not their presents, nor admit the horse.' Thus having said, against the steed he threw His forceful spear, which, hissing as flew, Pierc'd thro' the yielding planks of jointed wood, And trembling in the hollow belly stood. The sides, transpierc'd, return a rattling sound, And groans of Greeks inclos'd come issuing thro' the wound And, had not Heav'n the fall of Troy design'd, Or had not men been fated to be blind, Enough was said and done t'inspire a better mind. Then had our lances pierc'd the treach'rous wood, And Ilian tow'rs and Priam's empire stood. Meantime, with shouts, the Trojan shepherds bring A captive Greek, in bands, before the king; Taken to take; who made himself their prey, T' impose on their belief, and Troy betray; Fix'd on his aim, and obstinately bent To die undaunted, or to circumvent. About the captive, tides of Trojans flow; All press to see, and some insult the foe. Now hear how well the Greeks their wiles disguis'd; Behold a nation in a man compris'd. Trembling the miscreant stood, unarm'd and bound; He star'd, and roll'd his haggard eyes around, Then said: 'Alas! what earth remains, what sea Is open to receive unhappy me? What fate a wretched fugitive attends, Scorn'd by my foes, abandon'd by my friends?' He said, and sigh'd, and cast a rueful eye: Our pity kindles, and our passions die. We cheer youth to make his own defense, And freely tell us what he was, and whence: What news he could impart, we long to know, And what to credit from a captive foe. "His fear at length dismiss'd, he said: 'Whate'er My fate ordains, my words shall be sincere: I neither can nor dare my birth disclaim; Greece is my country, Sinon is my name. Tho' plung'd by Fortune's pow'r in misery, 'T is not in Fortune's pow'r to make me lie. If any chance has hither brought the name Of Palamedes, not unknown to fame, Who suffer'd from the malice of the times, Accus'd and sentenc'd for pretended crimes, Because these fatal wars he would prevent; Whose death the wretched Greeks too late lament- Me, then a boy, my father, poor and bare Of other means, committed to his care, His kinsman and companion in the war. While Fortune favor'd, while his arms support The cause, and rul'd the counsels, of the court, I made some figure there; nor was my name Obscure, nor I without my share of fame. But when Ulysses, with fallacious arts, Had made impression in the people's hearts, And forg'd a treason in my patron's name (I speak of things too far divulg'd by fame), My kinsman fell. Then I, without support, In private mourn'd his loss, and left the court. Mad as I was, I could not bear his fate With silent grief, but loudly blam'd the state, And curs'd the direful author of my woes. 'T was told again; and hence my ruin rose. I threaten'd, if indulgent Heav'n once more Would land me safely on my native shore, His death with double vengeance to restore. This mov'd the murderer's hate; and soon ensued Th' effects of malice from a man so proud. Ambiguous rumors thro' the camp he spread, And sought, by treason, my devoted head; New crimes invented; left unturn'd no stone, To make my guilt appear, and hide his own; Till Calchas was by force and threat'ning wrought- But why- why dwell I on that anxious thought? If on my nation just revenge you seek, And 't is t' appear a foe, t' appear a Greek; Already you my name and country know; Assuage your thirst of blood, and strike the blow: My death will both the kingly brothers please, And set insatiate Ithacus at ease.' This fair unfinish'd tale, these broken starts, Rais'd expectations in our longing hearts: Unknowing as we were in Grecian arts. His former trembling once again renew'd, With acted fear, the villain thus pursued: "'Long had the Grecians (tir'd with fruitless care, And wearied with an unsuccessful war) Resolv'd to raise the siege, and leave the town; And, had the gods permitted, they had gone; But oft the wintry seas and southern winds Withstood their passage home, and chang'd their minds. Portents and prodigies their souls amaz'd; But most, when this stupendous pile was rais'd: Then flaming meteors, hung in air, were seen, And thunders rattled thro' a sky serene. Dismay'd, and fearful of some dire event, Eurypylus t' enquire their fate was sent. He from the gods this dreadful answer brought: "O Grecians, when the Trojan shores you sought, Your passage with a virgin's blood was bought: So must your safe return be bought again, And Grecian blood once more atone the main." The spreading rumor round the people ran; All fear'd, and each believ'd himself the man. Ulysses took th' advantage of their fright; Call'd Calchas, and produc'd in open sight: Then bade him name the wretch, ordain'd by fate The public victim, to redeem the state. Already some presag'd the dire event, And saw what sacrifice Ulysses meant. For twice five days the good old seer withstood Th' intended treason, and was dumb to blood, Till, tir'd, with endless clamors and pursuit Of Ithacus, he stood no longer mute; But, as it was agreed, pronounc'd that I Was destin'd by the wrathful gods to die. All prais'd the sentence, pleas'd the storm should fall On one alone, whose fury threaten'd all. The dismal day was come; the priests prepare Their leaven'd cakes, and fillets for my hair. I follow'd nature's laws, and must avow I broke my bonds and fled the fatal blow. Hid in a weedy lake all night I lay, Secure of safety when they sail'd away. But now what further hopes for me remain, To see my friends, or native soil, again; My tender infants, or my careful sire, Whom they returning will to death require; Will perpetrate on them their first design, And take the forfeit of their heads for mine? Which, O! if pity mortal minds can move, If there be faith below, or gods above, If innocence and truth can claim desert, Ye Trojans, from an injur'd wretch avert.' "False tears true pity move; the king commands To loose his fetters, and unbind his hands: Then adds these friendly words: 'Dismiss thy fears; Forget the Greeks; be mine as thou wert theirs. But truly tell, was it for force or guile, Or some religious end, you rais'd the pile?' Thus said the king. He, full of fraudful arts, This well-invented tale for truth imparts: 'Ye lamps of heav'n!' he said, and lifted high His hands now free, 'thou venerable sky! Inviolable pow'rs, ador'd with dread! Ye fatal fillets, that once bound this head! Ye sacred altars, from whose flames I fled! Be all of you adjur'd; and grant I may, Without a crime, th' ungrateful Greeks betray, Reveal the secrets of the guilty state, And justly punish whom I justly hate! But you, O king, preserve the faith you gave, If I, to save myself, your empire save. The Grecian hopes, and all th' attempts they made, Were only founded on Minerva's aid. But from the time when impious Diomede, And false Ulysses, that inventive head, Her fatal image from the temple drew, The sleeping guardians of the castle slew, Her virgin statue with their bloody hands Polluted, and profan'd her holy bands; From thence the tide of fortune left their shore, And ebb'd much faster than it flow'd before: Their courage languish'd, as their hopes decay'd; And Pallas, now averse, refus'd her aid. Nor did the goddess doubtfully declare Her alter'd mind and alienated care. When first her fatal image touch'd the ground, She sternly cast her glaring eyes around, That sparkled as they roll'd, and seem'd to threat: Her heav'nly limbs distill'd a briny sweat. Thrice from the ground she leap'd, was seen to wield Her brandish'd lance, and shake her horrid shield. Then Calchas bade our host for flight And hope no conquest from the tedious war, Till first they sail'd for Greece; with pray'rs besought Her injur'd pow'r, and better omens brought. And now their navy plows the wat'ry main, Yet soon expect it on your shores again, With Pallas pleas'd; as Calchas did ordain. But first, to reconcile the blue-ey'd maid For her stol'n statue and her tow'r betray'd, Warn'd by the seer, to her offended name We rais'd and dedicate this wondrous frame, So lofty, lest thro' your forbidden gates It pass, and intercept our better fates: For, once admitted there, our hopes are lost; And Troy may then a new Palladium boast; For so religion and the gods ordain, That, if you violate with hands profane Minerva's gift, your town in flames shall burn, (Which omen, O ye gods, on Graecia turn!) But if it climb, with your assisting hands, The Trojan walls, and in the city stands; Then Troy shall Argos and Mycenae burn, And the reverse of fate on us return.' "With such deceits he gain'd their easy hearts, Too prone to credit his perfidious arts. What Diomede, nor Thetis' greater son, A thousand ships, nor ten years' siege, had done- False tears and fawning words the city won. "A greater omen, and of worse portent, Did our unwary minds with fear torment, Concurring to produce the dire event. Laocoon, Neptune's priest by lot that year, With solemn pomp then sacrific'd a steer; When, dreadful to behold, from sea we spied Two serpents, rank'd abreast, the seas divide, And smoothly sweep along the swelling tide. Their flaming crests above the waves they show; Their bellies seem to burn the seas below; Their speckled tails advance to steer their course, And on the sounding shore the flying billows force. And now the strand, and now the plain they held; Their ardent eyes with bloody streaks were fill'd; Their nimble tongues they brandish'd as they came, And lick'd their hissing jaws, that sputter'd flame. We fled amaz'd; their destin'd way they take, And to Laocoon and his children make; And first around the tender boys they wind, Then with their sharpen'd fangs their limbs and bodies grind. The wretched father, running to their aid With pious haste, but vain, they next invade; Twice round his waist their winding volumes roll'd; And twice about his gasping throat they fold. The priest thus doubly chok'd, their crests divide, And tow'ring o'er his head in triumph ride. With both his hands he labors at the knots; His holy fillets the blue venom blots; His roaring fills the flitting air around. Thus, when an ox receives a glancing wound, He breaks his bands, the fatal altar flies, And with loud bellowings breaks the yielding skies. Their tasks perform'd, the serpents quit their prey, And to the tow'r of Pallas make their way: Couch'd at her feet, they lie protected there By her large buckler and protended spear. Amazement seizes all; the gen'ral cry Proclaims Laocoon justly doom'd to die, Whose hand the will of Pallas had withstood, And dared to violate the sacred wood. All vote t' admit the steed, that vows be paid And incense offer'd to th' offended maid. A spacious breach is made; the town lies bare; Some hoisting-levers, some the wheels prepare And fasten to the horse's feet; the rest With cables haul along th' unwieldly beast. Each on his fellow for assistance calls; At length the fatal fabric mounts the walls, Big with destruction. Boys with chaplets crown'd, And choirs of virgins, sing and dance around. Thus rais'd aloft, and then descending down, It enters o'er our heads, and threats the town. O sacred city, built by hands divine! O valiant heroes of the Trojan line! Four times he struck: as oft the clashing sound Of arms was heard, and inward groans rebound. Yet, mad with zeal, and blinded with our fate, We haul along the horse in solemn state; Then place the dire portent within the tow'r. Cassandra cried, and curs'd th' unhappy hour; Foretold our fate; but, by the god's decree, All heard, and none believ'd the prophecy. With branches we the fanes adorn, and waste, In jollity, the day ordain'd to be the last. Meantime the rapid heav'ns roll'd down the light, And on the shaded ocean rush'd the night; Our men, secure, nor guards nor sentries held, But easy sleep their weary limbs compell'd. The Grecians had embark'd their naval pow'rs From Tenedos, and sought our well-known shores, Safe under covert of the silent night, And guided by th' imperial galley's light; When Sinon, favor'd by the partial gods, Unlock'd the horse, and op'd his dark abodes; Restor'd to vital air our hidden foes, Who joyful from their long confinement rose. Tysander bold, and Sthenelus their guide, And dire Ulysses down the cable slide: Then Thoas, Athamas, and Pyrrhus haste; Nor was the Podalirian hero last, Nor injur'd Menelaus, nor the fam'd Epeus, who the fatal engine fram'd. A nameless crowd succeed; their forces join T' invade the town, oppress'd with sleep and wine. Those few they find awake first meet their fate; Then to their fellows they unbar the gate. "'T was in the dead of night, when sleep repairs Our bodies worn with toils, our minds with cares, When Hector's ghost before my sight appears: A bloody shroud he seem'd, and bath'd in tears; Such as he was, when, by Pelides slain, Thessalian coursers dragg'd him o'er the plain. Swoln were his feet, as when the thongs were thrust Thro' the bor'd holes; his body black with dust; Unlike that Hector who return'd from toils Of war, triumphant, in Aeacian spoils, Or him who made the fainting Greeks retire, And launch'd against their navy Phrygian fire. His hair and beard stood stiffen'd with his gore; And all the wounds he for his country bore Now stream'd afresh, and with new purple ran. I wept to see the visionary man, And, while my trance continued, thus began: 'O light of Trojans, and support of Troy, Thy father's champion, and thy country's joy! O, long expected by thy friends! from whence Art thou so late return'd for our defense? Do we behold thee, wearied as we are With length of labors, and with toils of war? After so many fun'rals of thy own Art thou restor'd to thy declining town? But say, what wounds are these? What new disgrace Deforms the manly features of thy face?' "To this the specter no reply did frame, But answer'd to the cause for which he came, And, groaning from the bottom of his breast, This warning in these mournful words express'd: 'O goddess-born! escape, by timely flight, The flames and horrors of this fatal night. The foes already have possess'd the wall; Troy nods from high, and totters to her fall. Enough is paid to Priam's royal name, More than enough to duty and to fame. If by a mortal hand my father's throne Could be defended, 't was by mine alone. Now Troy to thee commends her future state, And gives her gods companions of thy fate: From their assistance walls expect, Which, wand'ring long, at last thou shalt erect.' He said, and brought me, from their blest abodes, The venerable statues of the gods, With ancient Vesta from the sacred choir, The wreaths and relics of th' immortal fire. "Now peals of shouts come thund'ring from afar, Cries, threats, and loud laments, and mingled war: The noise approaches, tho' our palace stood Aloof from streets, encompass'd with a wood. Louder, and yet more loud, I hear th' alarms Of human cries distinct, and clashing arms. Fear broke my slumbers; I no longer stay, But mount the terrace, thence the town survey, And hearken what the frightful sounds convey. Thus, when a flood of fire by wind is borne, Crackling it rolls, and mows the standing corn; Or deluges, descending on the plains, Sweep o'er the yellow year, destroy the pains Of lab'ring oxen and the peasant's gains; Unroot the forest oaks, and bear away Flocks, folds, and trees, and undistinguish'd prey: The shepherd climbs the cliff, and sees from far The wasteful ravage of the wat'ry war. Then Hector's faith was manifestly clear'd, And Grecian frauds in open light appear'd. The palace of Deiphobus ascends In smoky flames, and catches on his friends. Ucalegon burns next: the seas are bright With splendor not their own, and shine with Trojan light. New clamors and new clangors now arise, The sound of trumpets mix'd with fighting cries. With frenzy seiz'd, I run to meet th' alarms, Resolv'd on death, resolv'd to die in arms, But first to gather friends, with them t' oppose (If fortune favor'd) and repel the foes; Spurr'd by my courage, by my country fir'd, With sense of honor and revenge inspir'd. "Pantheus, Apollo's priest, a sacred name, Had scap'd the Grecian swords, and pass'd the flame: With relics loaden. to my doors he fled, And by the hand his tender grandson led. 'What hope, O Pantheus? whither can we run? Where make a stand? and what may yet be done?' Scarce had I said, when Pantheus, with a groan: 'Troy is no more, and Ilium was a town! The fatal day, th' appointed hour, is come, When wrathful Jove's irrevocable doom Transfers the Trojan state to Grecian hands. The fire consumes the town, the foe commands; And armed hosts, an unexpected force, Break from the bowels of the fatal horse. Within the gates, proud Sinon throws about The flames; and foes for entrance press without, With thousand others, whom I fear to name, More than from Argos or Mycenae came. To sev'ral posts their parties they divide; Some block the narrow streets, some scour the wide: The bold they kill, th' unwary they surprise; Who fights finds death, and death finds him who flies. The warders of the gate but scarce maintain Th' unequal combat, and resist in vain.' "I heard; and Heav'n, that well-born souls inspires, Prompts me thro' lifted swords and rising fires To run where clashing arms and clamor calls, And rush undaunted to defend the walls. Ripheus and Iph'itus by my side engage, For valor one renown'd, and one for age. Dymas and Hypanis by moonlight knew My motions and my mien, and to my party drew; With young Coroebus, who by love was led To win renown and fair Cassandra's bed, And lately brought his troops to Priam's aid, Forewarn'd in vain by the prophetic maid. Whom when I saw resolv'd in arms to fall, And that one spirit animated all: 'Brave souls!' said I,- 'but brave, alas! in vain- Come, finish what our cruel fates ordain. You see the desp'rate state of our affairs, And heav'n's protecting pow'rs are deaf to pray'rs. The passive gods behold the Greeks defile Their temples, and abandon to the spoil Their own abodes: we, feeble few, conspire To save a sinking town, involv'd in fire. Then let us fall, but fall amidst our foes: Despair of life the means of living shows.' So bold a speech incourag'd their desire Of death, and added fuel to their fire. "As hungry wolves, with raging appetite, Scour thro' the fields, nor fear the stormy night- Their whelps at home expect the promis'd food, And long to temper their dry chaps in blood- So rush'd we forth at once; resolv'd to die, Resolv'd, in death, the last extremes to try. We leave the narrow lanes behind, and dare Th' unequal combat in the public square: Night was our friend; our leader was despair. What tongue can tell the slaughter of that night? What eyes can weep the sorrows and affright? An ancient and imperial city falls: The streets are fill'd with frequent funerals; Houses and holy temples float in blood, And hostile nations make a common flood. Not only Trojans fall; but, in their turn, The vanquish'd triumph, and the victors mourn. Ours take new courage from despair and night: Confus'd the fortune is, confus'd the fight. All parts resound with tumults, plaints, and fears; And grisly Death in sundry shapes appears. Androgeos fell among us, with his band, Who thought us Grecians newly come to land. 'From whence,' said he, 'my friends, this long delay? You loiter, while the spoils are borne away: Our ships are laden with the Trojan store; And you, like truants, come too late ashore.' He said, but soon corrected his mistake, Found, by the doubtful answers which we make: Amaz'd, he would have shunn'd th' unequal fight; But we, more num'rous, intercept his flight. As when some peasant, in a bushy brake, Has with unwary footing press'd a snake; He starts aside, astonish'd, when he spies His rising crest, blue neck, and rolling eyes; So from our arms surpris'd Androgeos flies. In vain; for him and his we compass'd round, Possess'd with fear, unknowing of the ground, And of their lives an easy conquest found. Thus Fortune on our first endeavor smil'd. Coroebus then, with youthful hopes beguil'd, Swoln with success, and a daring mind, This new invention fatally design'd. 'My friends,' said he, 'since Fortune shows the way, 'T is fit we should th' auspicious guide obey. For what has she these Grecian arms bestow'd, But their destruction, and the Trojans' good? Then change we shields, and their devices bear: Let fraud supply the want of force in war. They find us arms.' This said, himself he dress'd In dead Androgeos' spoils, his upper vest, His painted buckler, and his plumy crest. Thus Ripheus, Dymas, all the Trojan train, Lay down their own attire, and strip the slain. Mix'd with the Greeks, we go with ill presage, Flatter'd with hopes to glut our greedy rage; Unknown, assaulting whom we blindly meet, And strew with Grecian carcasses the street. Thus while their straggling parties we defeat, Some to the shore and safer ships retreat; And some, oppress'd with more ignoble fear, Remount the hollow horse, and pant in secret there. "But, ah! what use of valor can be made, When heav'n's propitious pow'rs refuse their aid! Behold the royal prophetess, the fair Cassandra, dragg'd by her dishevel'd hair, Whom not Minerva's shrine, nor sacred bands, In safety could protect from sacrilegious hands: On heav'n she cast her eyes, she sigh'd, she cried- 'T was all she could- her tender arms were tied. So sad a sight Coroebus could not bear; But, fir'd with rage, distracted with despair, Amid the barb'rous ravishers he flew: Our leader's rash example we pursue. But storms of stones, from the proud temple's height, Pour down, and on our batter'd helms alight: We from our friends receiv'd this fatal blow, Who thought us Grecians, as we seem'd in show. They aim at the mistaken crests, from high; And ours beneath the pond'rous ruin lie. Then, mov'd with anger and disdain, to see Their troops dispers'd, the royal virgin free, The Grecians rally, and their pow'rs unite, With fury charge us, and renew the fight. The brother kings with Ajax join their force, And the whole squadron of Thessalian horse. "Thus, when the rival winds their quarrel try, Contending for the kingdom of the sky, South, east, and west, on airy coursers borne; The whirlwind gathers, and the woods are torn: Then Nereus strikes the deep; the billows rise, And, mix'd with ooze and sand, pollute the skies. The troops we squander'd first again appear From several quarters, and enclose the rear. They first observe, and to the rest betray, Our diff'rent speech; our borrow'd arms survey. Oppress'd with odds, we fall; Coroebus first, At Pallas' altar, by Peneleus pierc'd. Then Ripheus follow'd, in th' unequal fight; Just of his word, observant of the right: Heav'n thought not so. Dymas their fate attends, With Hypanis, mistaken by their friends. Nor, Pantheus, thee, thy miter, nor the bands Of awful Phoebus, sav'd from impious hands. Ye Trojan flames, your testimony bear, What I perform'd, and what I suffer'd there; No sword avoiding in the fatal strife, Expos'd to death, and prodigal of life; Witness, ye heavens! I live not by my fault: I strove to have deserv'd the death I sought. But, when I could not fight, and would have died, Borne off to distance by the growing tide, Old Iphitus and I were hurried thence, With Pelias wounded, and without defense. New clamors from th' invested palace ring: We run to die, or disengage the king. So hot th' assault, so high the tumult rose, While ours defend, and while the Greeks oppose As all the Dardan and Argolic race Had been contracted in that narrow space; Or as all Ilium else were void of fear, And tumult, war, and slaughter, only there. Their targets in a tortoise cast, the foes, Secure advancing, to the turrets rose: Some mount the scaling ladders; some, more bold, Swerve upwards, and by posts and pillars hold; Their left hand gripes their bucklers in th' ascent, While with their right they seize the battlement. From their demolish'd tow'rs the Trojans throw Huge heaps of stones, that, falling, crush the foe; And heavy beams and rafters from the sides (Such arms their last necessity provides) And gilded roofs, come tumbling from on high, The marks of state and ancient royalty. The guards below, fix'd in the pass, attend The charge undaunted, and the gate defend. Renew'd in courage with recover'd breath, A second time we ran to tempt our death, To clear the palace from the foe, succeed The weary living, and revenge the dead. "A postern door, yet unobserv'd and free, Join'd by the length of a blind gallery, To the king's closet led: a way well known To Hector's wife, while Priam held the throne, Thro' which she brought Astyanax, unseen, To cheer his grandsire and his grandsire's queen. Thro' this we pass, and mount the tow'r, from whence With unavailing arms the Trojans make defense. From this the trembling king had oft descried The Grecian camp, and saw their navy ride. Beams from its lofty height with swords we hew, Then, wrenching with our hands, th' assault renew; And, where the rafters on the columns meet, We push them headlong with our arms and feet. The lightning flies not swifter than the fall, Nor thunder louder than the ruin'd wall: Down goes the top at once; the Greeks beneath Are piecemeal torn, or pounded into death. Yet more succeed, and more to death are sent; We cease not from above, nor they below relent. Before the gate stood Pyrrhus, threat'ning loud, With glitt'ring arms conspicuous in the crowd. So shines, renew'd in youth, the crested snake, Who slept the winter in a thorny brake, And, casting off his slough when spring returns, Now looks aloft, and with new glory burns; Restor'd with poisonous herbs, his ardent sides Reflect the sun; and rais'd on spires he rides; High o'er the grass, hissing he rolls along, And brandishes by fits his forky tongue. Proud Periphas, and fierce Automedon, His father's charioteer, together run To force the gate; the Scyrian infantry Rush on in crowds, and the barr'd passage free. Ent'ring the court, with shouts the skies they rend; And flaming firebrands to the roofs ascend. Himself, among the foremost, deals his blows, And with his ax repeated strokes bestows On the strong doors; then all their shoulders ply, Till from the posts the brazen hinges fly. He hews apace; the double bars at length Yield to his ax and unresisted strength. A mighty breach is made: the rooms conceal'd Appear, and all the palace is reveal'd; The halls of audience, and of public state, And where the lonely queen in secret sate. Arm'd soldiers now by trembling maids are seen, With not a door, and scarce a space, between. The house is fill'd with loud laments and cries, And shrieks of women rend the vaulted skies; The fearful matrons run from place to place, And kiss the thresholds, and the posts embrace. The fatal work inhuman Pyrrhus plies, And all his father sparkles in his eyes; Nor bars, nor fighting guards, his force sustain: The bars are broken, and the guards are slain. In rush the Greeks, and all the apartments fill; Those few defendants whom they find, they kill. Not with so fierce a rage the foaming flood Roars, when he finds his rapid course withstood; Bears down the dams with unresisted sway, And sweeps the cattle and the cots away. These eyes beheld him when he march'd between The brother kings: I saw th' unhappy queen, The hundred wives, and where old Priam stood, To stain his hallow'd altar with his brood. The fifty nuptial beds (such hopes had he, So large a promise, of a progeny), The posts, of plated gold, and hung with spoils, Fell the reward of the proud victor's toils. Where'er the raging fire had left a space, The Grecians enter and possess the place. "Perhaps you may of Priam's fate enquire. He, when he saw his regal town on fire, His ruin'd palace, and his ent'ring foes, On ev'ry side inevitable woes, In arms, disus'd, invests his limbs, decay'd, Like them, with age; a late and useless aid. His feeble shoulders scarce the weight sustain; Loaded, not arm'd, he creeps along with pain, Despairing of success, ambitious to be slain! Uncover'd but by heav'n, there stood in view An altar; near the hearth a laurel grew, Dodder'd with age, whose boughs encompass round The household gods, and shade the holy ground. Here Hecuba, with all her helpless train Of dames, for shelter sought, but sought in vain. Driv'n like a flock of doves along the sky, Their images they hug, and to their altars fly. The Queen, when she beheld her trembling lord, And hanging by his side a heavy sword, 'What rage,' she cried, 'has seiz'd my husband's mind? What arms are these, and to what use design'd? These times want other aids! Were Hector here, Ev'n Hector now in vain, like Priam, would appear. With us, one common shelter thou shalt find, Or in one common fate with us be join'd.' She said, and with a last salute embrac'd The poor old man, and by the laurel plac'd. Behold! Polites, one of Priam's sons, Pursued by Pyrrhus, there for safety runs. Thro' swords and foes, amaz'd and hurt, he flies Thro' empty courts and open galleries. Him Pyrrhus, urging with his lance, pursues, And often reaches, and his thrusts renews. The youth, transfix'd, with lamentable cries, Expires before his wretched parent's eyes: Whom gasping at his feet when Priam saw, The fear of death gave place to nature's law; And, shaking more with anger than with age, 'The gods,' said he, 'requite thy brutal rage! As sure they will, barbarian, sure they must, If there be gods in heav'n, and gods be just- Who tak'st in wrongs an insolent delight; With a son's death t' infect a father's sight. Not he, whom thou and lying fame conspire To call thee his- not he, thy vaunted sire, Thus us'd my wretched age: the gods he fear'd, The laws of nature and of nations heard. He cheer'd my sorrows, and, for sums of gold, The bloodless carcass of my Hector sold; Pitied the woes a parent underwent, And sent me back in safety from his tent.' "This said, his feeble hand a javelin threw, Which, flutt'ring, seem'd to loiter as it flew: Just, and but barely, to the mark it held, And faintly tinkled on the brazen shield. "Then Pyrrhus thus: 'Go thou from me to fate, And to my father my foul deeds relate. Now die!' With that he dragg'd the trembling sire, Slidd'ring thro' clotter'd blood and holy mire, (The mingled paste his murder'd son had made,) Haul'd from beneath the violated shade, And on the sacred pile the royal victim laid. His right hand held his bloody falchion bare, His left he twisted in his hoary hair; Then, with a speeding thrust, his heart he found: The lukewarm blood came rushing thro' the wound, And sanguine streams distain'd the sacred ground. Thus Priam fell, and shar'd one common fate With Troy in ashes, and his ruin'd state: He, who the scepter of all Asia sway'd, Whom monarchs like domestic slaves obey'd. On the bleak shore now lies th' abandon'd king, A headless carcass, and a nameless thing. "Then, not before, I felt my cruddled blood Congeal with fear, my hair with horror stood: My father's image fill'd my pious mind, Lest equal years might equal fortune find. Again I thought on my forsaken wife, And trembled for my son's abandon'd life. I look'd about, but found myself alone, Deserted at my need! My friends were gone. Some spent with toil, some with despair oppress'd, Leap'd headlong from the heights; the flames consum'd the rest. Thus, wand'ring in my way, without a guide, The graceless Helen in the porch I spied Of Vesta's temple; there she lurk'd alone; Muffled she sate, and, what she could, unknown: But, by the flames that cast their blaze around, That common bane of Greece and Troy I found. For Ilium burnt, she dreads the Trojan sword; More dreads the vengeance of her injur'd lord; Ev'n by those gods who refug'd her abhorr'd. Trembling with rage, the strumpet I regard, Resolv'd to give her guilt the due reward: 'Shall she triumphant sail before the wind, And leave in flames unhappy Troy behind? Shall she her kingdom and her friends review, In state attended with a captive crew, While unreveng'd the good old Priam falls, And Grecian fires consume the Trojan walls? For this the Phrygian fields and Xanthian flood Were swell'd with bodies, and were drunk with blood? 'T is true, a soldier can small honor gain, And boast no conquest, from a woman slain: Yet shall the fact not pass without applause, Of vengeance taken in so just a cause; The punish'd crime shall set my soul at ease, And murm'ring manes of my friends appease.' Thus while I rave, a gleam of pleasing light Spread o'er the place; and, shining heav'nly bright, My mother stood reveal'd before my sight Never so radiant did her eyes appear; Not her own star confess'd a light so clear: Great in her charms, as when on gods above She looks, and breathes herself into their love. She held my hand, the destin'd blow to break; Then from her rosy lips began to speak: 'My son, from whence this madness, this neglect Of my commands, and those whom I protect? Why this unmanly rage? Recall to mind Whom you forsake, what pledges leave behind. Look if your helpless father yet survive, Or if Ascanius or Creusa live. Around your house the greedy Grecians err; And these had perish'd in the nightly war, But for my presence and protecting care. Not Helen's face, nor Paris, was in fault; But by the gods was this destruction brought. Now cast your eyes around, while I dissolve The mists and films that mortal eyes involve, Purge from your sight the dross, and make you see The shape of each avenging deity. Enlighten'd thus, my just commands fulfil, Nor fear obedience to your mother's will. Where yon disorder'd heap of ruin lies, Stones rent from stones; where clouds of dust arise- Amid that smother Neptune holds his place, Below the wall's foundation drives his mace, And heaves the building from the solid base. Look where, in arms, imperial Juno stands Full in the Scaean gate, with loud commands, Urging on shore the tardy Grecian bands. See! Pallas, of her snaky buckler proud, Bestrides the tow'r, refulgent thro' the cloud: See! Jove new courage to the foe supplies, And arms against the town the partial deities. Haste hence, my son; this fruitless labor end: Haste, where your trembling spouse and sire attend: Haste; and a mother's care your passage shall befriend.' She said, and swiftly vanish'd from my sight, Obscure in clouds and gloomy shades of night. I look'd, I listen'd; dreadful sounds I hear; And the dire forms of hostile gods appear. Troy sunk in flames I saw (nor could prevent), And Ilium from its old foundations rent; Rent like a mountain ash, which dar'd the winds, And stood the sturdy strokes of lab'ring hinds. About the roots the cruel ax resounds; The stumps are pierc'd with oft-repeated wounds: The war is felt on high; the nodding crown Now threats a fall, and throws the leafy honors down. To their united force it yields, tho' late, And mourns with mortal groans th' approaching fate: The roots no more their upper load sustain; But down she falls, and spreads a ruin thro' the plain. "Descending thence, I scape thro' foes and fire: Before the goddess, foes and flames retire. Arriv'd at home, he, for whose only sake, Or most for his, such toils I undertake, The good Anchises, whom, by timely flight, I purpos'd to secure on Ida's height, Refus'd the journey, resolute to die And add his fun'rals to the fate of Troy, Rather than exile and old age sustain. 'Go you, whose blood runs warm in ev'ry vein. Had Heav'n decreed that I should life enjoy, Heav'n had decreed to save unhappy Troy. 'T is, sure, enough, if not too much, for one, Twice to have seen our Ilium overthrown. Make haste to save the poor remaining crew, And give this useless corpse a long adieu. These weak old hands suffice to stop my breath; At least the pitying foes will aid my death, To take my spoils, and leave my body bare: As for my sepulcher, let Heav'n take care. 'T is long since I, for my celestial wife Loath'd by the gods, have dragg'd a ling'ring life; Since ev'ry hour and moment I expire, Blasted from heav'n by Jove's avenging fire.' This oft repeated, he stood fix'd to die: Myself, my wife, my son, my family, Intreat, pray, beg, and raise a doleful cry- 'What, will he still persist, on death resolve, And in his ruin all his house involve!' He still persists his reasons to maintain; Our pray'rs, our tears, our loud laments, are vain. "Urg'd by despair, again I go to try The fate of arms, resolv'd in fight to die: 'What hope remains, but what my death must give? Can I, without so dear a father, live? You term it prudence, what I baseness call: Could such a word from such a parent fall? If Fortune please, and so the gods ordain, That nothing should of ruin'd Troy remain, And you conspire with Fortune to be slain, The way to death is wide, th' approaches near: For soon relentless Pyrrhus will appear, Reeking with Priam's blood- the wretch who slew The son (inhuman) in the father's view, And then the sire himself to the dire altar drew. O goddess mother, give me back to Fate; Your gift was undesir'd, and came too late! Did you, for this, unhappy me convey Thro' foes and fires, to see my house a prey? Shall I my father, wife, and son behold, Welt'ring in blood, each other's arms infold? Haste! gird my sword, tho' spent and overcome: 'T is the last summons to receive our doom. I hear thee, Fate; and I obey thy call! Not unreveng'd the foe shall see my fall. Restore me to the yet unfinish'd fight: My death is wanting to conclude the night.' Arm'd once again, my glitt'ring sword I wield, While th' other hand sustains my weighty shield, And forth I rush to seek th' abandon'd field. I went; but sad Creusa stopp'd my way, And cross the threshold in my passage lay, Embrac'd my knees, and, when I would have gone, Shew'd me my feeble sire and tender son: 'If death be your design, at least,' said she, 'Take us along to share your destiny. If any farther hopes in arms remain, This place, these pledges of your love, maintain. To whom do you expose your father's life, Your son's, and mine, your now forgotten wife!' While thus she fills the house with clam'rous cries, Our hearing is diverted by our eyes: For, while I held my son, in the short space Betwixt our kisses and our last embrace; Strange to relate, from young Iulus' head A lambent flame arose, which gently spread Around his brows, and on his temples fed. Amaz'd, with running water we prepare To quench the sacred fire, and slake his hair; But old Anchises, vers'd in omens, rear'd His hands to heav'n, and this request preferr'd: 'If any vows, almighty Jove, can bend Thy will; if piety can pray'rs commend, Confirm the glad presage which thou art pleas'd to send.' Scarce had he said, when, on our left, we hear A peal of rattling thunder roll in air: There shot a streaming lamp along the sky, Which on the winged lightning seem'd to fly; From o'er the roof the blaze began to move, And, trailing, vanish'd in th' Idaean grove. It swept a path in heav'n, and shone a guide, Then in a steaming stench of sulphur died. "The good old man with suppliant hands implor'd The gods' protection, and their star ador'd. 'Now, now,' said he, 'my son, no more delay! I yield, I follow where Heav'n shews the way. Keep, O my country gods, our dwelling place, And guard this relic of the Trojan race, This tender child! These omens are your own, And you can yet restore the ruin'd town. At least accomplish what your signs foreshow: I stand resign'd, and am prepar'd to go.' "He said. The crackling flames appear on high. And driving sparkles dance along the sky. With Vulcan's rage the rising winds conspire, And near our palace roll the flood of fire. 'Haste, my dear father, ('t is no time to wait,) And load my shoulders with a willing freight. Whate'er befalls, your life shall be my care; One death, or one deliv'rance, we will share. My hand shall lead our little son; and you, My faithful consort, shall our steps pursue. Next, you, my servants, heed my strict commands: Without the walls a ruin'd temple stands, To Ceres hallow'd once; a cypress nigh Shoots up her venerable head on high, By long religion kept; there bend your feet, And in divided parties let us meet. Our country gods, the relics, and the bands, Hold you, my father, in your guiltless hands: In me 't is impious holy things to bear, Red as I am with slaughter, new from war, Till in some living stream I cleanse the guilt Of dire debate, and blood in battle spilt.' Thus, ord'ring all that prudence could provide, I clothe my shoulders with a lion's hide And yellow spoils; then, on my bending back, The welcome load of my dear father take; While on my better hand Ascanius hung, And with unequal paces tripp'd along. Creusa kept behind; by choice we stray Thro' ev'ry dark and ev'ry devious way. I, who so bold and dauntless, just before, The Grecian darts and shock of lances bore, At ev'ry shadow now am seiz'd with fear, Not for myself, but for the charge I bear; Till, near the ruin'd gate arriv'd at last, Secure, and deeming all the danger past, A frightful noise of trampling feet we hear. My father, looking thro' the shades, with fear, Cried out: 'Haste, haste, my son, the foes are nigh; Their swords and shining armor I descry.' Some hostile god, for some unknown offense, Had sure bereft my mind of better sense; For, while thro' winding ways I took my flight, And sought the shelter of the gloomy night, Alas! I lost Creusa: hard to tell If by her fatal destiny she fell, Or weary sate, or wander'd with affright; But she was lost for ever to my sight. I knew not, or reflected, till I meet My friends, at Ceres' now deserted seat. We met: not one was wanting; only she Deceiv'd her friends, her son, and wretched me. "What mad expressions did my tongue refuse! Whom did I not, of gods or men, accuse! This was the fatal blow, that pain'd me more Than all I felt from ruin'd Troy before. Stung with my loss, and raving with despair, Abandoning my now forgotten care, Of counsel, comfort, and of hope bereft, My sire, my son, my country gods I left. In shining armor once again I sheathe My limbs, not feeling wounds, nor fearing death. Then headlong to the burning walls I run, And seek the danger I was forc'd to shun. I tread my former tracks; thro' night explore Each passage, ev'ry street I cross'd before. All things were full of horror and affright, And dreadful ev'n the silence of the night. Then to my father's house I make repair, With some small glimpse of hope to find her there. Instead of her, the cruel Greeks I met; The house was fill'd with foes, with flames beset. Driv'n on the wings of winds, whole sheets of fire, Thro' air transported, to the roofs aspire. From thence to Priam's palace I resort, And search the citadel and desart court. Then, unobserv'd, I pass by Juno's church: A guard of Grecians had possess'd the porch; There Phoenix and Ulysses watch prey, And thither all the wealth of Troy convey: The spoils which they from ransack'd houses brought, And golden bowls from burning altars caught, The tables of the gods, the purple vests, The people's treasure, and the pomp of priests. A rank of wretched youths, with pinion'd hands, And captive matrons, in long order stands. Then, with ungovern'd madness, I proclaim, Thro' all the silent street, Creusa's name: Creusa still I call; at length she hears, And sudden thro' the shades of night appears- Appears, no more Creusa, nor my wife, But a pale specter, larger than the life. Aghast, astonish'd, and struck dumb with fear, I stood; like bristles rose my stiffen'd hair. Then thus the ghost began to soothe my grief 'Nor tears, nor cries, can give the dead relief. Desist, my much-lov'd lord,'t indulge your pain; You bear no more than what the gods ordain. My fates permit me not from hence to fly; Nor he, the great controller of the sky. Long wand'ring ways for you the pow'rs decree; On land hard labors, and a length of sea. Then, after many painful years are past, On Latium's happy shore you shall be cast, Where gentle Tiber from his bed beholds The flow'ry meadows, and the feeding folds. There end your toils; and there your fates provide A quiet kingdom, and a royal bride: There fortune shall the Trojan line restore, And you for lost Creusa weep no more. Fear not that I shall watch, with servile shame, Th' imperious looks of some proud Grecian dame; Or, stooping to the victor's lust, disgrace My goddess mother, or my royal race. And now, farewell! The parent of the gods Restrains my fleeting soul in her abodes: I trust our common issue to your care.' She said, and gliding pass'd unseen in air. I strove to speak: but horror tied my tongue; And thrice about her neck my arms I flung, And, thrice deceiv'd, on vain embraces hung. Light as an empty dream at break of day, Or as a blast of wind, she rush'd away. "Thus having pass'd the night in fruitless pain, I to my longing friends return again, Amaz'd th' augmented number to behold, Of men and matrons mix'd, of young and old; A wretched exil'd crew together brought, With arms appointed, and with treasure fraught, Resolv'd, and willing, under my command, To run all hazards both of sea and land. The Morn began, from Ida, to display Her rosy cheeks; and Phosphor led the day: Before the gates the Grecians took their post, And all pretense of late relief was lost. I yield to Fate, unwillingly retire, And, loaded, up the hill convey my sire."

Book II

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section2/

Did you suppose, my father, That I could tear myself away and leave you? Fulfilling Dido's request, Aeneas begins his sorrowful story, adding that retelling it entails reexperiencing the pain. He takes us back to ten years into the Trojan War: at the moment the tale begins, the Danaans have constructed a giant wooden horse with a hollow belly. They secretly hide their best soldiers, fully armed, within the horse, while the rest of the Greek army lies low some distance from Troy. The sight of a massive horse standing before their gates on an apparently deserted battlefield baffles the Trojans. Near the horse, the Trojans find a Greek youth named Sinon. He explains that the Greeks have wished to flee Troy for some time but were prevented by fierce storms. A prophet told them to sacrifice one of their own, and Sinon was chosen. But Sinon managed to escape during the preparations, and the Greeks left him behind. The Trojans show him pity and ask the meaning of the great horse. Sinon says that it was an offering to the goddess Minerva, who turned against the Greeks after the desecration of one of her temples by Ulysses. Sinon claims that if any harm comes to the wooden statue, Troy will be destroyed by Minerva's wrath, but if the Trojans install the horse within their city walls, they will rise victorious in war against southern Greece, like a tidal wave, with Minerva on their side. Aeneas continues his story: after Sinon finishes speaking, two giant serpents rise up from the sea and devour the Trojan priest Laocoon and his two sons as punishment for hurling a spear at the horse. The snakes then slither up to the shrine of Minerva. The Trojans interpret the snakes' attack as an omen that they must appease Minerva, so they wheel the horse into the city of Troy. Night falls, and while the city sleeps, Sinon opens the horse's belly, releasing the Greek warriors. The warriors kill the Trojan guards and open the gates of the city to the rest of their forces. Meanwhile, Hector, the fallen leader of the Trojan army, appears to Aeneas in a dream and informs him that the city has been infiltrated. Climbing to his roof, Aeneas sees fighting everywhere and Troy in flames. He runs for arms and then heads for the heart of the city, joined by a few of his men. Aeneas and his men surprise and kill many Greeks, but are too badly outnumbered to make a difference. Eventually they go to King Priam's palace, where a battle is brewing. The Greeks, led by Pyrrhus, break into the palace. Pyrrhus kills Polites, the young son of Priam and Hecuba, and then slaughters Priam on his own altar. Aeneas continues relating his story: nearly overcome with grief over this slaughter, he sees Helen, the cause of the war, hiding. He determines to kill her, but Venus appears and explains that blame for the war belongs with the gods, not Helen. Venus advises Aeneas to flee Troy at once, since his fate is elsewhere. Aeneas then proceeds to the house of his father, Anchises, but Anchises refuses to leave. But after omens appear--first a harmless tongue of flame on Ascanius's forehead, then a bright falling star in the sky--Anchises is persuaded to flee the city. Aeneas takes his father on his back and flees with his wife, Creusa, his son, Ascanius, and many other followers. Unfortunately, in the commotion Creusa is lost from the group. After everyone exits the city, Aeneas returns to search for her, but instead he meets her shade, or spirit. She tells him not to be sorrowful because a new home and wife await him in Hesperia. Somewhat comforted, Aeneas leaves Troy burning and leads the survivors into the mountains.

With Aeneas's claim that his tale of Troy's fall is so sorrowful that it would bring tears even to the eyes of a soldier as harsh as Ulysses, Virgil calls attention to his own act of retelling the Trojan horse episode from a new angle, that of the vanquished Trojans. In Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, we learn the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of Ulysses and the Greeks. Virgil's claim is that even the Greeks, the victors, would be able to feel the sorrow of the event if it were told properly from the point of view of the victims. Virgil writes a characteristically evenhanded account, so that both losers and winners earn our sympathy and respect. Virgil tries to minimize the humiliation of the Trojans and of his hero, Aeneas. He makes sure that Aeneas does not appear to be less of a warrior than the Greeks, even though they defeated him. When Aeneas admits that the Trojans were duped by the wooden horse trick, Virgil tempers the failure by emphasizing that not all Trojans were fooled. Aeneas's mention that some Trojans counseled the others to destroy the horse demonstrates that there was in fact a degree of wisdom and perhaps even foresight among the Trojan people. He also carefully recounts all the details by which they were persuaded and frightened--the lies of the young Greek and the sign of the serpents, which gobbled up Laocoon, the man who had most vocally protested bringing the horse inside the city--in order to show that the Trojan fear of offending the gods was valid. In the end, the Trojans bring the horse into their city not out of foolishness but out of a legitimate and even honorable respect for the gods. Against Aeneas's description of the Trojans' earnest reverence, the Greeks begin to look guilty of bad sportsmanship. At points during his story, Aeneas emphasizes the irrelevance of mortal concerns in the face of divine will. Venus's persuasion of Aeneas to not kill Helen, for instance, relies on the ultimate inability of mortals to influence their destinies. Venus tells him to hold neither Helen nor Paris responsible for Troy's downfall: he must realize that "the harsh will of the gods" caused Troy's destruction. Venus's words reveal that although Aeneas and the Trojans lose a battle with the Greeks that they might have won, in the end they have no choice but to submit to the unfavorable will of the gods. But the gods' will is also what enables some of the Trojans to escape from Troy. Again, fate must always be fulfilled: Aeneas is destined to survive. His sufferings in Troy are to be redeemed, eventually, by his glory in Italy. The shade of his wife, Creusa, comforts him with this message, and following his encounter with Creusa's shade, Aeneas keeps his foretold destiny always in mind, distant though this destiny may seem.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_iv.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_3_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book iv

book iv

{"name": "Book IV", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section4/", "summary": "The flame of love for Aeneas that Cupid has lit in Dido's heart only grows while she listens to his sorrowful tale. She hesitates, though, because after the death of her husband, Sychaeus, she swore that she would never marry again. On the other hand, as her sister Anna counsels her, by marrying Aeneas she would increase the might of Carthage, because many Trojan warriors follow Aeneas. For the moment, consumed by love, Dido allows the work of city building to fall by the wayside. Juno sees Dido's love for Aeneas as a way to keep Aeneas from going to Italy. Pretending to make a peace offering, Juno suggests to Venus that they find a way to get Dido and Aeneas alone together. If they marry, Juno suggests, the Trojans and the Tyrians would be at peace, and she and Venus would end their feud. Venus knows Juno is just trying to keep the Trojans from Italy but allows Juno to go ahead anyway. One day when Dido, her court, and Aeneas are out hunting, Juno brings a storm down upon them to send the group scrambling for shelter and arranges for Aeneas and Dido to wind up in a cave by themselves. They make love in the cave and live openly as lovers when they return to Carthage. Dido considers them to be married though the union has yet to be consecrated in ceremony. Anxious rumors spread that Dido and Aeneas have surrendered themselves entirely to lust and have begun to neglect their responsibilities as rulers. When Jupiter learns of Dido and Aeneas's affair, he dispatches Mercury to Carthage to remind Aeneas that his destiny lies elsewhere and that he must leave for Italy. This message shocks Aeneas--he must obey, but he does not know how to tell Dido of his departure. He tries to prepare his fleet to set sail in secret, but the queen suspects his ploy and confronts him. In a rage, she insults him and accuses him of stealing her honor. While Aeneas pities her, he maintains that he has no choice but to follow the will of the gods: \"I sail for Italy not of my own free will\" . As a last effort, Dido sends Anna to try to persuade the Trojan hero to stay, but to no avail. Dido writhes between fierce love and bitter anger. Suddenly, she appears calm and instructs Anna to build a great fire in the courtyard. There, Dido says, she can rid Aeneas from her mind by burning all the clothes and weapons he has left behind and even the bed they slept on. Anna obeys, not realizing that Dido is in fact planning her own death--by making the fire her own funeral pyre. As night falls, Dido's grief leaves her sleepless. Aeneas does sleep, but in his dreams, Mercury visits him again to tell him that he has delayed too long already and must leave at once. Aeneas awakens and calls his men to the ships, and they set sail. Dido sees the fleet leaving and falls into her final despair. She can no longer bear to live. Running out to the courtyard, she climbs upon the pyre and unsheathes a sword Aeneas has left behind. She throws herself upon the blade and with her last words curses her absent lover. As Anna and the servants run up to the dying queen, Juno takes pity on Dido and ends her suffering and her life.", "analysis": "Although her relationship with Aeneas spans only this one book of the Aeneid, Dido has become a literary icon for the tragic lover, like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Though at times Aeneas's happiness in his love for Dido seems to equal hers, it is with considerably less grief and anxiety that he is able to leave her in Carthage and go back about the business of bringing the survivors of Troy to Italy and founding Rome. Whereas Dido not only loves Aeneas but hopes he and his warriors will strengthen her city, Aeneas's actions are the result of a momentary abandonment of his true duties and responsibilities. He indulges temporarily in romance and the pleasures of the flesh, but when Jupiter, through Mercury, reminds Aeneas of his destiny, he is dutiful and ready to resume his mission. When Aeneas says good-bye to Dido, we see two sides to the hero as in Book I, when he hides his worries to appear brave before his crew. Aeneas's statement that he is forced to sail to Italy and Virgil's remark that Aeneas \"struggle with desire to calm and comfort in all her pain\" demonstrate Aeneas's conflicted nature . He piously carries out the duties allotted him by fate; though he feels emotions and experiences desires, he is powerless to act on them. From Virgil's perspective, Aeneas is not heartless, as Dido thinks him, but merely capable of subordinating matters of the heart to the demands of duty. Aeneas's reminder to Dido that they were never officially married suggests, somewhat dubiously, that had they entered into such an ordained commitment he would not leave. But, he argues, without a true marriage, he is sacrificing only his own desires by leaving Dido. Virgil treats love as he treats the gods--as an outside force acting upon mortals, not a function of the individual's free will or innate identity. He does not idealize love; rather, he associates it with imagery linked to madness, fire, or disease, presenting love as a force that acts on Dido with a violence that is made literal by the end of Book IV in her suicide. Virgil's language in the first lines of the book indicates that Dido's emotions corrode her self-control; he describes her love as \"inward fire eating her away\" . Later, Dido's decision to have a funeral pyre erected and then kill herself upon it returns to this imagery, and Virgil compares Dido's suicide to a city taken over by enemies, \"As though . . . / . . . / Flames billowed on the roofs of men and gods\" . Cupid's arrow, shot to promote love between Aeneas and Dido, causes hatred, death, and destruction. Love is at odds with law and fate, as it distracts its victims from their responsibilities. While with Aeneas, Dido abandons her construction of Carthage. She even admits to Aeneas that her own subjects have grown to hate her because of her selfish actions. Aeneas, too, must move on because the time he spends with Dido only keeps him from his selfless task of founding an empire. In the Aeneid, civic responsibility resides with the male. An attitude that might be termed misogynistic seeps into Virgil's descriptions of Juno and even Dido. Aeneas's dream-vision of Mercury articulates this sentiment: \"woman's a thing / forever fitful and forever changing\" . Virgil clearly enjoys making Juno look foolish, and he also likes to depict Juno's vain efforts in comic terms as a domestic quarrel--a battle of wills between husband and wife played out before an audience that knows Jupiter has the power in the divine family. Dido also shows herself to be less responsible than her partner. Whereas Dido kills herself for love, leaving the city she founded without a leader, Aeneas returns to his course, guiding the refugees of a lost city to the foundation of a new city."}

BOOK IV But anxious cares already seiz'd the queen: She fed within her veins a flame unseen; The hero's valor, acts, and birth inspire Her soul with love, and fan the secret fire. His words, his looks, imprinted in her heart, Improve the passion, and increase the smart. Now, when the purple morn had chas'd away The dewy shadows, and restor'd the day, Her sister first with early care she sought, And thus in mournful accents eas'd her thought: "My dearest Anna, what new dreams affright My lab'ring soul! what visions of the night Disturb my quiet, and distract my breast With strange ideas of our Trojan guest! His worth, his actions, and majestic air, A man descended from the gods declare. Fear ever argues a degenerate kind; His birth is well asserted by his mind. Then, what he suffer'd, when by Fate betray'd! What brave attempts for falling Troy he made! Such were his looks, so gracefully he spoke, That, were I not resolv'd against the yoke Of hapless marriage, never to be curst With second love, so fatal was my first, To this one error I might yield again; For, since Sichaeus was untimely slain, This only man is able to subvert The fix'd foundations of my stubborn heart. And, to confess my frailty, to my shame, Somewhat I find within, if not the same, Too like the sparkles of my former flame. But first let yawning earth a passage rend, And let me thro' the dark abyss descend; First let avenging Jove, with flames from high, Drive down this body to the nether sky, Condemn'd with ghosts in endless night to lie, Before I break the plighted faith I gave! No! he who had my vows shall ever have; For, whom I lov'd on earth, I worship in the grave." She said: the tears ran gushing from her eyes, And stopp'd her speech. Her sister thus replies: "O dearer than the vital air I breathe, Will you to grief your blooming years bequeath, Condemn'd to waste in woes your lonely life, Without the joys of mother or of wife? Think you these tears, this pompous train of woe, Are known or valued by the ghosts below? I grant that, while your sorrows yet were green, It well became a woman, and a queen, The vows of Tyrian princes to neglect, To scorn Hyarbas, and his love reject, With all the Libyan lords of mighty name; But will you fight against a pleasing flame! This little spot of land, which Heav'n bestows, On ev'ry side is hemm'd with warlike foes; Gaetulian cities here are spread around, And fierce Numidians there your frontiers bound; Here lies a barren waste of thirsty land, And there the Syrtes raise the moving sand; Barcaean troops besiege the narrow shore, And from the sea Pygmalion threatens more. Propitious Heav'n, and gracious Juno, lead This wand'ring navy to your needful aid: How will your empire spread, your city rise, From such a union, and with such allies? Implore the favor of the pow'rs above, And leave the conduct of the rest to love. Continue still your hospitable way, And still invent occasions of their stay, Till storms and winter winds shall cease to threat, And planks and oars repair their shatter'd fleet." These words, which from a friend and sister came, With ease resolv'd the scruples of her fame, And added fury to the kindled flame. Inspir'd with hope, the project they pursue; On ev'ry altar sacrifice renew: A chosen ewe of two years old they pay To Ceres, Bacchus, and the God of Day; Preferring Juno's pow'r, for Juno ties The nuptial knot and makes the marriage joys. The beauteous queen before her altar stands, And holds the golden goblet in her hands. A milk-white heifer she with flow'rs adorns, And pours the ruddy wine betwixt her horns; And, while the priests with pray'r the gods invoke, She feeds their altars with Sabaean smoke, With hourly care the sacrifice renews, And anxiously the panting entrails views. What priestly rites, alas! what pious art, What vows avail to cure a bleeding heart! A gentle fire she feeds within her veins, Where the soft god secure in silence reigns. Sick with desire, and seeking him she loves, From street to street the raving Dido roves. So when the watchful shepherd, from the blind, Wounds with a random shaft the careless hind, Distracted with her pain she flies the woods, Bounds o'er the lawn, and seeks the silent floods, With fruitless care; for still the fatal dart Sticks in her side, and rankles in her heart. And now she leads the Trojan chief along The lofty walls, amidst the busy throng; Displays her Tyrian wealth, and rising town, Which love, without his labor, makes his own. This pomp she shows, to tempt her wand'ring guest; Her falt'ring tongue forbids to speak the rest. When day declines, and feasts renew the night, Still on his face she feeds her famish'd sight; She longs again to hear the prince relate His own adventures and the Trojan fate. He tells it o'er and o'er; but still in vain, For still she begs to hear it once again. The hearer on the speaker's mouth depends, And thus the tragic story never ends. Then, when they part, when Phoebe's paler light Withdraws, and falling stars to sleep invite, She last remains, when ev'ry guest is gone, Sits on the bed he press'd, and sighs alone; Absent, her absent hero sees and hears; Or in her bosom young Ascanius bears, And seeks the father's image in the child, If love by likeness might be so beguil'd. Meantime the rising tow'rs are at a stand; No labors exercise the youthful band, Nor use of arts, nor toils of arms they know; The mole is left unfinish'd to the foe; The mounds, the works, the walls, neglected lie, Short of their promis'd heighth, that seem'd to threat the sky, But when imperial Juno, from above, Saw Dido fetter'd in the chains of love, Hot with the venom which her veins inflam'd, And by no sense of shame to be reclaim'd, With soothing words to Venus she begun: "High praises, endless honors, you have won, And mighty trophies, with your worthy son! Two gods a silly woman have undone! Nor am I ignorant, you both suspect This rising city, which my hands erect: But shall celestial discord never cease? 'T is better ended in a lasting peace. You stand possess'd of all your soul desir'd: Poor Dido with consuming love is fir'd. Your Trojan with my Tyrian let us join; So Dido shall be yours, Aeneas mine: One common kingdom, one united line. Eliza shall a Dardan lord obey, And lofty Carthage for a dow'r convey." Then Venus, who her hidden fraud descried, Which would the scepter of the world misguide To Libyan shores, thus artfully replied: "Who, but a fool, would wars with Juno choose, And such alliance and such gifts refuse, If Fortune with our joint desires comply? The doubt is all from Jove and destiny; Lest he forbid, with absolute command, To mix the people in one common land- Or will the Trojan and the Tyrian line In lasting leagues and sure succession join? But you, the partner of his bed and throne, May move his mind; my wishes are your own." "Mine," said imperial Juno, "be the care; Time urges, now, to perfect this affair: Attend my counsel, and the secret share. When next the Sun his rising light displays, And gilds the world below with purple rays, The queen, Aeneas, and the Tyrian court Shall to the shady woods, for sylvan game, resort. There, while the huntsmen pitch their toils around, And cheerful horns from side to side resound, A pitchy cloud shall cover all the plain With hail, and thunder, and tempestuous rain; The fearful train shall take their speedy flight, Dispers'd, and all involv'd in gloomy night; One cave a grateful shelter shall afford To the fair princess and the Trojan lord. I will myself the bridal bed prepare, If you, to bless the nuptials, will be there: So shall their loves be crown'd with due delights, And Hymen shall be present at the rites." The Queen of Love consents, and closely smiles At her vain project, and discover'd wiles. The rosy morn was risen from the main, And horns and hounds awake the princely train: They issue early thro' the city gate, Where the more wakeful huntsmen ready wait, With nets, and toils, and darts, beside the force Of Spartan dogs, and swift Massylian horse. The Tyrian peers and officers of state For the slow queen in antechambers wait; Her lofty courser, in the court below, Who his majestic rider seems to know, Proud of his purple trappings, paws the ground, And champs the golden bit, and spreads the foam around. The queen at length appears; on either hand The brawny guards in martial order stand. A flow'r'd simar with golden fringe she wore, And at her back a golden quiver bore; Her flowing hair a golden caul restrains, A golden clasp the Tyrian robe sustains. Then young Ascanius, with a sprightly grace, Leads on the Trojan youth to view the chase. But far above the rest in beauty shines The great Aeneas, the troop he joins; Like fair Apollo, when he leaves the frost Of wint'ry Xanthus, and the Lycian coast, When to his native Delos he resorts, Ordains the dances, and renews the sports; Where painted Scythians, mix'd with Cretan bands, Before the joyful altars join their hands: Himself, on Cynthus walking, sees below The merry madness of the sacred show. Green wreaths of bays his length of hair inclose; A golden fillet binds his awful brows; His quiver sounds: not less the prince is seen In manly presence, or in lofty mien. Now had they reach'd the hills, and storm'd the seat Of salvage beasts, in dens, their last retreat. The cry pursues the mountain goats: they bound From rock to rock, and keep the craggy ground; Quite otherwise the stags, a trembling train, In herds unsingled, scour the dusty plain, And a long chase in open view maintain. The glad Ascanius, as his courser guides, Spurs thro' the vale, and these and those outrides. His horse's flanks and sides are forc'd to feel The clanking lash, and goring of the steel. Impatiently he views the feeble prey, Wishing some nobler beast to cross his way, And rather would the tusky boar attend, Or see the tawny lion downward bend. Meantime, the gath'ring clouds obscure the skies: From pole to pole the forky lightning flies; The rattling thunders roll; and Juno pours A wintry deluge down, and sounding show'rs. The company, dispers'd, to converts ride, And seek the homely cots, or mountain's hollow side. The rapid rains, descending from the hills, To rolling torrents raise the creeping rills. The queen and prince, as love or fortune guides, One common cavern in her bosom hides. Then first the trembling earth the signal gave, And flashing fires enlighten all the cave; Hell from below, and Juno from above, And howling nymphs, were conscious of their love. From this ill-omen'd hour in time arose Debate and death, and all succeeding woes. The queen, whom sense of honor could not move, No longer made a secret of her love, But call'd it marriage, by that specious name To veil the crime and sanctify the shame. The loud report thro' Libyan cities goes. Fame, the great ill, from small beginnings grows: Swift from the first; and ev'ry moment brings New vigor to her flights, new pinions to her wings. Soon grows the pigmy to gigantic size; Her feet on earth, her forehead in the skies. Inrag'd against the gods, revengeful Earth Produc'd her last of the Titanian birth. Swift is her walk, more swift her winged haste: A monstrous phantom, horrible and vast. As many plumes as raise her lofty flight, So many piercing eyes inlarge her sight; Millions of opening mouths to Fame belong, And ev'ry mouth is furnish'd with a tongue, And round with list'ning ears the flying plague is hung. She fills the peaceful universe with cries; No slumbers ever close her wakeful eyes; By day, from lofty tow'rs her head she shews, And spreads thro' trembling crowds disastrous news; With court informers haunts, and royal spies; Things done relates, not done she feigns, and mingles truth with lies. Talk is her business, and her chief delight To tell of prodigies and cause affright. She fills the people's ears with Dido's name, Who, lost to honor and the sense of shame, Admits into her throne and nuptial bed A wand'ring guest, who from his country fled: Whole days with him she passes in delights, And wastes in luxury long winter nights, Forgetful of her fame and royal trust, Dissolv'd in ease, abandon'd to her lust. The goddess widely spreads the loud report, And flies at length to King Hyarba's court. When first possess'd with this unwelcome news Whom did he not of men and gods accuse? This prince, from ravish'd Garamantis born, A hundred temples did with spoils adorn, In Ammon's honor, his celestial sire; A hundred altars fed with wakeful fire; And, thro' his vast dominions, priests ordain'd, Whose watchful care these holy rites maintain'd. The gates and columns were with garlands crown'd, And blood of victim beasts enrich'd the ground. He, when he heard a fugitive could move The Tyrian princess, who disdain'd his love, His breast with fury burn'd, his eyes with fire, Mad with despair, impatient with desire; Then on the sacred altars pouring wine, He thus with pray'rs implor'd his sire divine: "Great Jove! propitious to the Moorish race, Who feast on painted beds, with off'rings grace Thy temples, and adore thy pow'r divine With blood of victims, and with sparkling wine, Seest thou not this? or do we fear in vain Thy boasted thunder, and thy thoughtless reign? Do thy broad hands the forky lightnings lance? Thine are the bolts, or the blind work of chance? A wand'ring woman builds, within our state, A little town, bought at an easy rate; She pays me homage, and my grants allow A narrow space of Libyan lands to plow; Yet, scorning me, by passion blindly led, Admits a banish'd Trojan to her bed! And now this other Paris, with his train Of conquer'd cowards, must in Afric reign! (Whom, what they are, their looks and garb confess, Their locks with oil perfum'd, their Lydian dress.) He takes the spoil, enjoys the princely dame; And I, rejected I, adore an empty name." His vows, in haughty terms, he thus preferr'd, And held his altar's horns. The mighty Thund'rer heard; Then cast his eyes on Carthage, where he found The lustful pair in lawless pleasure drown'd, Lost in their loves, insensible of shame, And both forgetful of their better fame. He calls Cyllenius, and the god attends, By whom his menacing command he sends: "Go, mount the western winds, and cleave the sky; Then, with a swift descent, to Carthage fly: There find the Trojan chief, who wastes his days In slothful riot and inglorious ease, Nor minds the future city, giv'n by fate. To him this message from my mouth relate: 'Not so fair Venus hop'd, when twice she won Thy life with pray'rs, nor promis'd such a son. Hers was a hero, destin'd to command A martial race, and rule the Latian land, Who should his ancient line from Teucer draw, And on the conquer'd world impose the law.' If glory cannot move a mind so mean, Nor future praise from fading pleasure wean, Yet why should he defraud his son of fame, And grudge the Romans their immortal name! What are his vain designs! what hopes he more From his long ling'ring on a hostile shore, Regardless to redeem his honor lost, And for his race to gain th' Ausonian coast! Bid him with speed the Tyrian court forsake; With this command the slumb'ring warrior wake." Hermes obeys; with golden pinions binds His flying feet, and mounts the western winds: And, whether o'er the seas or earth he flies, With rapid force they bear him down the skies. But first he grasps within his awful hand The mark of sov'reign pow'r, his magic wand; With this he draws the ghosts from hollow graves; With this he drives them down the Stygian waves; With this he seals in sleep the wakeful sight, And eyes, tho' clos'd in death, restores to light. Thus arm'd, the god begins his airy race, And drives the racking clouds along the liquid space; Now sees the tops of Atlas, as he flies, Whose brawny back supports the starry skies; Atlas, whose head, with piny forests crown'd, Is beaten by the winds, with foggy vapors bound. Snows hide his shoulders; from beneath his chin The founts of rolling streams their race begin; A beard of ice on his large breast depends. Here, pois'd upon his wings, the god descends: Then, rested thus, he from the tow'ring height Plung'd downward, with precipitated flight, Lights on the seas, and skims along the flood. As waterfowl, who seek their fishy food, Less, and yet less, to distant prospect show; By turns they dance aloft, and dive below: Like these, the steerage of his wings he plies, And near the surface of the water flies, Till, having pass'd the seas, and cross'd the sands, He clos'd his wings, and stoop'd on Libyan lands: Where shepherds once were hous'd in homely sheds, Now tow'rs within the clouds advance their heads. Arriving there, he found the Trojan prince New ramparts raising for the town's defense. A purple scarf, with gold embroider'd o'er, (Queen Dido's gift,) about his waist he wore; A sword, with glitt'ring gems diversified, For ornament, not use, hung idly by his side. Then thus, with winged words, the god began, Resuming his own shape: "Degenerate man, Thou woman's property, what mak'st thou here, These foreign walls and Tyrian tow'rs to rear, Forgetful of thy own? All-pow'rful Jove, Who sways the world below and heav'n above, Has sent me down with this severe command: What means thy ling'ring in the Libyan land? If glory cannot move a mind so mean, Nor future praise from flitting pleasure wean, Regard the fortunes of thy rising heir: The promis'd crown let young Ascanius wear, To whom th' Ausonian scepter, and the state Of Rome's imperial name is ow'd by fate." So spoke the god; and, speaking, took his flight, Involv'd in clouds, and vanish'd out of sight. The pious prince was seiz'd with sudden fear; Mute was his tongue, and upright stood his hair. Revolving in his mind the stern command, He longs to fly, and loathes the charming land. What should he say? or how should he begin? What course, alas! remains to steer between Th' offended lover and the pow'rful queen? This way and that he turns his anxious mind, And all expedients tries, and none can find. Fix'd on the deed, but doubtful of the means, After long thought, to this advice he leans: Three chiefs he calls, commands them to repair The fleet, and ship their men with silent care; Some plausible pretense he bids them find, To color what in secret he design'd. Himself, meantime, the softest hours would choose, Before the love-sick lady heard the news; And move her tender mind, by slow degrees, To suffer what the sov'reign pow'r decrees: Jove will inspire him, when, and what to say. They hear with pleasure, and with haste obey. But soon the queen perceives the thin disguise: (What arts can blind a jealous woman's eyes!) She was the first to find the secret fraud, Before the fatal news was blaz'd abroad. Love the first motions of the lover hears, Quick to presage, and ev'n in safety fears. Nor impious Fame was wanting to report The ships repair'd, the Trojans' thick resort, And purpose to forsake the Tyrian court. Frantic with fear, impatient of the wound, And impotent of mind, she roves the city round. Less wild the Bacchanalian dames appear, When, from afar, their nightly god they hear, And howl about the hills, and shake the wreathy spear. At length she finds the dear perfidious man; Prevents his form'd excuse, and thus began: "Base and ungrateful! could you hope to fly, And undiscover'd scape a lover's eye? Nor could my kindness your compassion move. Nor plighted vows, nor dearer bands of love? Or is the death of a despairing queen Not worth preventing, tho' too well foreseen? Ev'n when the wintry winds command your stay, You dare the tempests, and defy the sea. False as you are, suppose you were not bound To lands unknown, and foreign coasts to sound; Were Troy restor'd, and Priam's happy reign, Now durst you tempt, for Troy, the raging main? See whom you fly! am I the foe you shun? Now, by those holy vows, so late begun, By this right hand, (since I have nothing more To challenge, but the faith you gave before;) I beg you by these tears too truly shed, By the new pleasures of our nuptial bed; If ever Dido, when you most were kind, Were pleasing in your eyes, or touch'd your mind; By these my pray'rs, if pray'rs may yet have place, Pity the fortunes of a falling race. For you I have provok'd a tyrant's hate, Incens'd the Libyan and the Tyrian state; For you alone I suffer in my fame, Bereft of honor, and expos'd to shame. Whom have I now to trust, ungrateful guest? (That only name remains of all the rest!) What have I left? or whither can I fly? Must I attend Pygmalion's cruelty, Or till Hyarba shall in triumph lead A queen that proudly scorn'd his proffer'd bed? Had you deferr'd, at least, your hasty flight, And left behind some pledge of our delight, Some babe to bless the mother's mournful sight, Some young Aeneas, to supply your place, Whose features might express his father's face; I should not then complain to live bereft Of all my husband, or be wholly left." Here paus'd the queen. Unmov'd he holds his eyes, By Jove's command; nor suffer'd love to rise, Tho' heaving in his heart; and thus at length replies: "Fair queen, you never can enough repeat Your boundless favors, or I own my debt; Nor can my mind forget Eliza's name, While vital breath inspires this mortal frame. This only let me speak in my defense: I never hop'd a secret flight from hence, Much less pretended to the lawful claim Of sacred nuptials, or a husband's name. For, if indulgent Heav'n would leave me free, And not submit my life to fate's decree, My choice would lead me to the Trojan shore, Those relics to review, their dust adore, And Priam's ruin'd palace to restore. But now the Delphian oracle commands, And fate invites me to the Latian lands. That is the promis'd place to which I steer, And all my vows are terminated there. If you, a Tyrian, and a stranger born, With walls and tow'rs a Libyan town adorn, Why may not we- like you, a foreign race- Like you, seek shelter in a foreign place? As often as the night obscures the skies With humid shades, or twinkling stars arise, Anchises' angry ghost in dreams appears, Chides my delay, and fills my soul with fears; And young Ascanius justly may complain Of his defrauded and destin'd reign. Ev'n now the herald of the gods appear'd: Waking I saw him, and his message heard. From Jove he came commission'd, heav'nly bright With radiant beams, and manifest to sight (The sender and the sent I both attest) These walls he enter'd, and those words express'd. Fair queen, oppose not what the gods command; Forc'd by my fate, I leave your happy land." Thus while he spoke, already she began, With sparkling eyes, to view the guilty man; From head to foot survey'd his person o'er, Nor longer these outrageous threats forebore: "False as thou art, and, more than false, forsworn! Not sprung from noble blood, nor goddess-born, But hewn from harden'd entrails of a rock! And rough Hyrcanian tigers gave thee suck! Why should I fawn? what have I worse to fear? Did he once look, or lent a list'ning ear, Sigh'd when I sobb'd, or shed one kindly tear?- All symptoms of a base ungrateful mind, So foul, that, which is worse, 'tis hard to find. Of man's injustice why should I complain? The gods, and Jove himself, behold in vain Triumphant treason; yet no thunder flies, Nor Juno views my wrongs with equal eyes; Faithless is earth, and faithless are the skies! Justice is fled, and Truth is now no more! I sav'd the shipwrack'd exile on my shore; With needful food his hungry Trojans fed; I took the traitor to my throne and bed: Fool that I was- 't is little to repeat The rest- I stor'd and rigg'd his ruin'd fleet. I rave, I rave! A god's command he pleads, And makes Heav'n accessary to his deeds. Now Lycian lots, and now the Delian god, Now Hermes is employ'd from Jove's abode, To warn him hence; as if the peaceful state Of heav'nly pow'rs were touch'd with human fate! But go! thy flight no longer I detain- Go seek thy promis'd kingdom thro' the main! Yet, if the heav'ns will hear my pious vow, The faithless waves, not half so false as thou, Or secret sands, shall sepulchers afford To thy proud vessels, and their perjur'd lord. Then shalt thou call on injur'd Dido's name: Dido shall come in a black sulph'ry flame, When death has once dissolv'd her mortal frame; Shall smile to see the traitor vainly weep: Her angry ghost, arising from the deep, Shall haunt thee waking, and disturb thy sleep. At least my shade thy punishment shall know, And Fame shall spread the pleasing news below." Abruptly here she stops; then turns away Her loathing eyes, and shuns the sight of day. Amaz'd he stood, revolving in his mind What speech to frame, and what excuse to find. Her fearful maids their fainting mistress led, And softly laid her on her ivory bed. But good Aeneas, tho' he much desir'd To give that pity which her grief requir'd; Tho' much he mourn'd, and labor'd with his love, Resolv'd at length, obeys the will of Jove; Reviews his forces: they with early care Unmoor their vessels, and for sea prepare. The fleet is soon afloat, in all its pride, And well-calk'd galleys in the harbor ride. Then oaks for oars they fell'd; or, as they stood, Of its green arms despoil'd the growing wood, Studious of flight. The beach is cover'd o'er With Trojan bands, that blacken all the shore: On ev'ry side are seen, descending down, Thick swarms of soldiers, loaden from the town. Thus, in battalia, march embodied ants, Fearful of winter, and of future wants, T' invade the corn, and to their cells convey The plunder'd forage of their yellow prey. The sable troops, along the narrow tracks, Scarce bear the weighty burthen on their backs: Some set their shoulders to the pond'rous grain; Some guard the spoil; some lash the lagging train; All ply their sev'ral tasks, and equal toil sustain. What pangs the tender breast of Dido tore, When, from the tow'r, she saw the cover'd shore, And heard the shouts of sailors from afar, Mix'd with the murmurs of the wat'ry war! All-pow'rful Love! what changes canst thou cause In human hearts, subjected to thy laws! Once more her haughty soul the tyrant bends: To pray'rs and mean submissions she descends. No female arts or aids she left untried, Nor counsels unexplor'd, before she died. "Look, Anna! look! the Trojans crowd to sea; They spread their canvas, and their anchors weigh. The shouting crew their ships with garlands bind, Invoke the sea gods, and invite the wind. Could I have thought this threat'ning blow so near, My tender soul had been forewarn'd to bear. But do not you my last request deny; With yon perfidious man your int'rest try, And bring me news, if I must live or die. You are his fav'rite; you alone can find The dark recesses of his inmost mind: In all his trusted secrets you have part, And know the soft approaches to his heart. Haste then, and humbly seek my haughty foe; Tell him, I did not with the Grecians go, Nor did my fleet against his friends employ, Nor swore the ruin of unhappy Troy, Nor mov'd with hands profane his father's dust: Why should he then reject a suit so just! Whom does he shun, and whither would he fly! Can he this last, this only pray'r deny! Let him at least his dang'rous flight delay, Wait better winds, and hope a calmer sea. The nuptials he disclaims I urge no more: Let him pursue the promis'd Latian shore. A short delay is all I ask him now; A pause of grief, an interval from woe, Till my soft soul be temper'd to sustain Accustom'd sorrows, and inur'd to pain. If you in pity grant this one request, My death shall glut the hatred of his breast." This mournful message pious Anna bears, And seconds with her own her sister's tears: But all her arts are still employ'd in vain; Again she comes, and is refus'd again. His harden'd heart nor pray'rs nor threat'nings move; Fate, and the god, had stopp'd his ears to love. As, when the winds their airy quarrel try, Justling from ev'ry quarter of the sky, This way and that the mountain oak they bend, His boughs they shatter, and his branches rend; With leaves and falling mast they spread the ground; The hollow valleys echo to the sound: Unmov'd, the royal plant their fury mocks, Or, shaken, clings more closely to the rocks; Far as he shoots his tow'ring head on high, So deep in earth his fix'd foundations lie. No less a storm the Trojan hero bears; Thick messages and loud complaints he hears, And bandied words, still beating on his ears. Sighs, groans, and tears proclaim his inward pains; But the firm purpose of his heart remains. The wretched queen, pursued by cruel fate, Begins at length the light of heav'n to hate, And loathes to live. Then dire portents she sees, To hasten on the death her soul decrees: Strange to relate! for when, before the shrine, She pours in sacrifice the purple wine, The purple wine is turn'd to putrid blood, And the white offer'd milk converts to mud. This dire presage, to her alone reveal'd, From all, and ev'n her sister, she conceal'd. A marble temple stood within the grove, Sacred to death, and to her murther'd love; That honor'd chapel she had hung around With snowy fleeces, and with garlands crown'd: Oft, when she visited this lonely dome, Strange voices issued from her husband's tomb; She thought she heard him summon her away, Invite her to his grave, and chide her stay. Hourly 't is heard, when with a boding note The solitary screech owl strains her throat, And, on a chimney's top, or turret's height, With songs obscene disturbs the silence of the night. Besides, old prophecies augment her fears; And stern Aeneas in her dreams appears, Disdainful as by day: she seems, alone, To wander in her sleep, thro' ways unknown, Guideless and dark; or, in a desart plain, To seek her subjects, and to seek in vain: Like Pentheus, when, distracted with his fear, He saw two suns, and double Thebes, appear; Or mad Orestes, when his mother's ghost Full in his face infernal torches toss'd, And shook her snaky locks: he shuns the sight, Flies o'er the stage, surpris'd with mortal fright; The Furies guard the door and intercept his flight. Now, sinking underneath a load of grief, From death alone she seeks her last relief; The time and means resolv'd within her breast, She to her mournful sister thus address'd (Dissembling hope, her cloudy front she clears, And a false vigor in her eyes appears): "Rejoice!" she said. "Instructed from above, My lover I shall gain, or lose my love. Nigh rising Atlas, next the falling sun, Long tracts of Ethiopian climates run: There a Massylian priestess I have found, Honor'd for age, for magic arts renown'd: Th' Hesperian temple was her trusted care; 'T was she supplied the wakeful dragon's fare. She poppy seeds in honey taught to steep, Reclaim'd his rage, and sooth'd him into sleep. She watch'd the golden fruit; her charms unbind The chains of love, or fix them on the mind: She stops the torrents, leaves the channel dry, Repels the stars, and backward bears the sky. The yawning earth rebellows to her call, Pale ghosts ascend, and mountain ashes fall. Witness, ye gods, and thou my better part, How loth I am to try this impious art! Within the secret court, with silent care, Erect a lofty pile, expos'd in air: Hang on the topmost part the Trojan vest, Spoils, arms, and presents, of my faithless guest. Next, under these, the bridal bed be plac'd, Where I my ruin in his arms embrac'd: All relics of the wretch are doom'd to fire; For so the priestess and her charms require." Thus far she said, and farther speech forbears; A mortal paleness in her face appears: Yet the mistrustless Anna could not find The secret fun'ral in these rites design'd; Nor thought so dire a rage possess'd her mind. Unknowing of a train conceal'd so well, She fear'd no worse than when Sichaeus fell; Therefore obeys. The fatal pile they rear, Within the secret court, expos'd in air. The cloven holms and pines are heap'd on high, And garlands on the hollow spaces lie. Sad cypress, vervain, yew, compose the wreath, And ev'ry baleful green denoting death. The queen, determin'd to the fatal deed, The spoils and sword he left, in order spread, And the man's image on the nuptial bed. And now (the sacred altars plac'd around) The priestess enters, with her hair unbound, And thrice invokes the pow'rs below the ground. Night, Erebus, and Chaos she proclaims, And threefold Hecate, with her hundred names, And three Dianas: next, she sprinkles round With feign'd Avernian drops the hallow'd ground; Culls hoary simples, found by Phoebe's light, With brazen sickles reap'd at noon of night; Then mixes baleful juices in the bowl, And cuts the forehead of a newborn foal, Robbing the mother's love. The destin'd queen Observes, assisting at the rites obscene; A leaven'd cake in her devoted hands She holds, and next the highest altar stands: One tender foot was shod, her other bare; Girt was her gather'd gown, and loose her hair. Thus dress'd, she summon'd, with her dying breath, The heav'ns and planets conscious of her death, And ev'ry pow'r, if any rules above, Who minds, or who revenges, injur'd love. "'T was dead of night, when weary bodies close Their eyes in balmy sleep and soft repose: The winds no longer whisper thro' the woods, Nor murm'ring tides disturb the gentle floods. The stars in silent order mov'd around; And Peace, with downy wings, was brooding on the ground The flocks and herds, and party-color'd fowl, Which haunt the woods, or swim the weedy pool, Stretch'd on the quiet earth, securely lay, Forgetting the past labors of the day. All else of nature's common gift partake: Unhappy Dido was alone awake. Nor sleep nor ease the furious queen can find; Sleep fled her eyes, as quiet fled her mind. Despair, and rage, and love divide her heart; Despair and rage had some, but love the greater part. Then thus she said within her secret mind: "What shall I do? what succor can I find? Become a suppliant to Hyarba's pride, And take my turn, to court and be denied? Shall I with this ungrateful Trojan go, Forsake an empire, and attend a foe? Himself I refug'd, and his train reliev'd- 'T is true- but am I sure to be receiv'd? Can gratitude in Trojan souls have place! Laomedon still lives in all his race! Then, shall I seek alone the churlish crew, Or with my fleet their flying sails pursue? What force have I but those whom scarce before I drew reluctant from their native shore? Will they again embark at my desire, Once more sustain the seas, and quit their second Tyre? Rather with steel thy guilty breast invade, And take the fortune thou thyself hast made. Your pity, sister, first seduc'd my mind, Or seconded too well what I design'd. These dear-bought pleasures had I never known, Had I continued free, and still my own; Avoiding love, I had not found despair, But shar'd with salvage beasts the common air. Like them, a lonely life I might have led, Not mourn'd the living, nor disturb'd the dead." These thoughts she brooded in her anxious breast. On board, the Trojan found more easy rest. Resolv'd to sail, in sleep he pass'd the night; And order'd all things for his early flight. To whom once more the winged god appears; His former youthful mien and shape he wears, And with this new alarm invades his ears: "Sleep'st thou, O goddess-born! and canst thou drown Thy needful cares, so near a hostile town, Beset with foes; nor hear'st the western gales Invite thy passage, and inspire thy sails? She harbors in her heart a furious hate, And thou shalt find the dire effects too late; Fix'd on revenge, and obstinate to die. Haste swiftly hence, while thou hast pow'r to fly. The sea with ships will soon be cover'd o'er, And blazing firebrands kindle all the shore. Prevent her rage, while night obscures the skies, And sail before the purple morn arise. Who knows what hazards thy delay may bring? Woman's a various and a changeful thing." Thus Hermes in the dream; then took his flight Aloft in air unseen, and mix'd with night. Twice warn'd by the celestial messenger, The pious prince arose with hasty fear; Then rous'd his drowsy train without delay: "Haste to your banks; your crooked anchors weigh, And spread your flying sails, and stand to sea. A god commands: he stood before my sight, And urg'd us once again to speedy flight. O sacred pow'r, what pow'r soe'er thou art, To thy blest orders I resign my heart. Lead thou the way; protect thy Trojan bands, And prosper the design thy will commands." He said: and, drawing forth his flaming sword, His thund'ring arm divides the many-twisted cord. An emulating zeal inspires his train: They run; they snatch; they rush into the main. With headlong haste they leave the desert shores, And brush the liquid seas with lab'ring oars. Aurora now had left her saffron bed, And beams of early light the heav'ns o'erspread, When, from a tow'r, the queen, with wakeful eyes, Saw day point upward from the rosy skies. She look'd to seaward; but the sea was void, And scarce in ken the sailing ships descried. Stung with despite, and furious with despair, She struck her trembling breast, and tore her hair. "And shall th' ungrateful traitor go," she said, "My land forsaken, and my love betray'd? Shall we not arm? not rush from ev'ry street, To follow, sink, and burn his perjur'd fleet? Haste, haul my galleys out! pursue the foe! Bring flaming brands! set sail, and swiftly row! What have I said? where am I? Fury turns My brain; and my distemper'd bosom burns. Then, when I gave my person and my throne, This hate, this rage, had been more timely shown. See now the promis'd faith, the vaunted name, The pious man, who, rushing thro' the flame, Preserv'd his gods, and to the Phrygian shore The burthen of his feeble father bore! I should have torn him piecemeal; strow'd in floods His scatter'd limbs, or left expos'd in woods; Destroy'd his friends and son; and, from the fire, Have set the reeking boy before the sire. Events are doubtful, which on battles wait: Yet where's the doubt, to souls secure of fate? My Tyrians, at their injur'd queen's command, Had toss'd their fires amid the Trojan band; At once extinguish'd all the faithless name; And I myself, in vengeance of my shame, Had fall'n upon the pile, to mend the fun'ral flame. Thou Sun, who view'st at once the world below; Thou Juno, guardian of the nuptial vow; Thou Hecate hearken from thy dark abodes! Ye Furies, fiends, and violated gods, All pow'rs invok'd with Dido's dying breath, Attend her curses and avenge her death! If so the Fates ordain, Jove commands, Th' ungrateful wretch should find the Latian lands, Yet let a race untam'd, and haughty foes, His peaceful entrance with dire arms oppose: Oppress'd with numbers in th' unequal field, His men discourag'd, and himself expell'd, Let him for succor sue from place to place, Torn from his subjects, and his son's embrace. First, let him see his friends in battle slain, And their untimely fate lament in vain; And when, at length, the cruel war shall cease, On hard conditions may he buy his peace: Nor let him then enjoy supreme command; But fall, untimely, by some hostile hand, And lie unburied on the barren sand! These are my pray'rs, and this my dying will; And you, my Tyrians, ev'ry curse fulfil. Perpetual hate and mortal wars proclaim, Against the prince, the people, and the name. These grateful off'rings on my grave bestow; Nor league, nor love, the hostile nations know! Now, and from hence, in ev'ry future age, When rage excites your arms, and strength supplies the rage Rise some avenger of our Libyan blood, With fire and sword pursue the perjur'd brood; Our arms, our seas, our shores, oppos'd to theirs; And the same hate descend on all our heirs!" This said, within her anxious mind she weighs The means of cutting short her odious days. Then to Sichaeus' nurse she briefly said (For, when she left her country, hers was dead): "Go, Barce, call my sister. Let her care The solemn rites of sacrifice prepare; The sheep, and all th' atoning off'rings bring, Sprinkling her body from the crystal spring With living drops; then let her come, and thou With sacred fillets bind thy hoary brow. Thus will I pay my vows to Stygian Jove, And end the cares of my disastrous love; Then cast the Trojan image on the fire, And, as that burns, my passions shall expire." The nurse moves onward, with officious care, And all the speed her aged limbs can bear. But furious Dido, with dark thoughts involv'd, Shook at the mighty mischief she resolv'd. With livid spots distinguish'd was her face; Red were her rolling eyes, and discompos'd her pace; Ghastly she gaz'd, with pain she drew her breath, And nature shiver'd at approaching death. Then swiftly to the fatal place she pass'd, And mounts the fun'ral pile with furious haste; Unsheathes the sword the Trojan left behind (Not for so dire an enterprise design'd). But when she view'd the garments loosely spread, Which once he wore, and saw the conscious bed, She paus'd, and with a sigh the robes embrac'd; Then on the couch her trembling body cast, Repress'd the ready tears, and spoke her last: "Dear pledges of my love, while Heav'n so pleas'd, Receive a soul, of mortal anguish eas'd: My fatal course is finish'd; and I go, A glorious name, among the ghosts below. A lofty city by my hands is rais'd, Pygmalion punish'd, and my lord appeas'd. What could my fortune have afforded more, Had the false Trojan never touch'd my shore!" Then kiss'd the couch; and, "Must I die," she said, "And unreveng'd? 'T is doubly to be dead! Yet ev'n this death with pleasure I receive: On any terms, 't is better than to live. These flames, from far, may the false Trojan view; These boding omens his base flight pursue!" She said, and struck; deep enter'd in her side The piercing steel, with reeking purple dyed: Clogg'd in the wound the cruel weapon stands; The spouting blood came streaming on her hands. Her sad attendants saw the deadly stroke, And with loud cries the sounding palace shook. Distracted, from the fatal sight they fled, And thro' the town the dismal rumor spread. First from the frighted court the yell began; Redoubled, thence from house to house it ran: The groans of men, with shrieks, laments, and cries Of mixing women, mount the vaulted skies. Not less the clamor, than if- ancient Tyre, Or the new Carthage, set by foes on fire- The rolling ruin, with their lov'd abodes, Involv'd the blazing temples of their gods. Her sister hears; and, furious with despair, She beats her breast, and rends her yellow hair, And, calling on Eliza's name aloud, Runs breathless to the place, and breaks the crowd. "Was all that pomp of woe for this prepar'd; These fires, this fun'ral pile, these altars rear'd? Was all this train of plots contriv'd," said she, "All only to deceive unhappy me? Which is the worst? Didst thou in death pretend To scorn thy sister, or delude thy friend? Thy summon'd sister, and thy friend, had come; One sword had serv'd us both, one common tomb: Was I to raise the pile, the pow'rs invoke, Not to be present at the fatal stroke? At once thou hast destroy'd thyself and me, Thy town, thy senate, and thy colony! Bring water; bathe the wound; while I in death Lay close my lips to hers, and catch the flying breath." This said, she mounts the pile with eager haste, And in her arms the gasping queen embrac'd; Her temples chaf'd; and her own garments tore, To stanch the streaming blood, and cleanse the gore. Thrice Dido tried to raise her drooping head, And, fainting thrice, fell grov'ling on the bed; Thrice op'd her heavy eyes, and sought the light, But, having found it, sicken'd at the sight, And clos'd her lids at last in endless night. Then Juno, grieving that she should sustain A death so ling'ring, and so full of pain, Sent Iris down, to free her from the strife Of lab'ring nature, and dissolve her life. For since she died, not doom'd by Heav'n's decree, Or her own crime, but human casualty, And rage of love, that plung'd her in despair, The Sisters had not cut the topmost hair, Which Proserpine and they can only know; Nor made her sacred to the shades below. Downward the various goddess took her flight, And drew a thousand colors from the light; Then stood above the dying lover's head, And said: "I thus devote thee to the dead. This off'ring to th' infernal gods I bear." Thus while she spoke, she cut the fatal hair: The struggling soul was loos'd, and life dissolv'd in air.

Book IV

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section4/

The flame of love for Aeneas that Cupid has lit in Dido's heart only grows while she listens to his sorrowful tale. She hesitates, though, because after the death of her husband, Sychaeus, she swore that she would never marry again. On the other hand, as her sister Anna counsels her, by marrying Aeneas she would increase the might of Carthage, because many Trojan warriors follow Aeneas. For the moment, consumed by love, Dido allows the work of city building to fall by the wayside. Juno sees Dido's love for Aeneas as a way to keep Aeneas from going to Italy. Pretending to make a peace offering, Juno suggests to Venus that they find a way to get Dido and Aeneas alone together. If they marry, Juno suggests, the Trojans and the Tyrians would be at peace, and she and Venus would end their feud. Venus knows Juno is just trying to keep the Trojans from Italy but allows Juno to go ahead anyway. One day when Dido, her court, and Aeneas are out hunting, Juno brings a storm down upon them to send the group scrambling for shelter and arranges for Aeneas and Dido to wind up in a cave by themselves. They make love in the cave and live openly as lovers when they return to Carthage. Dido considers them to be married though the union has yet to be consecrated in ceremony. Anxious rumors spread that Dido and Aeneas have surrendered themselves entirely to lust and have begun to neglect their responsibilities as rulers. When Jupiter learns of Dido and Aeneas's affair, he dispatches Mercury to Carthage to remind Aeneas that his destiny lies elsewhere and that he must leave for Italy. This message shocks Aeneas--he must obey, but he does not know how to tell Dido of his departure. He tries to prepare his fleet to set sail in secret, but the queen suspects his ploy and confronts him. In a rage, she insults him and accuses him of stealing her honor. While Aeneas pities her, he maintains that he has no choice but to follow the will of the gods: "I sail for Italy not of my own free will" . As a last effort, Dido sends Anna to try to persuade the Trojan hero to stay, but to no avail. Dido writhes between fierce love and bitter anger. Suddenly, she appears calm and instructs Anna to build a great fire in the courtyard. There, Dido says, she can rid Aeneas from her mind by burning all the clothes and weapons he has left behind and even the bed they slept on. Anna obeys, not realizing that Dido is in fact planning her own death--by making the fire her own funeral pyre. As night falls, Dido's grief leaves her sleepless. Aeneas does sleep, but in his dreams, Mercury visits him again to tell him that he has delayed too long already and must leave at once. Aeneas awakens and calls his men to the ships, and they set sail. Dido sees the fleet leaving and falls into her final despair. She can no longer bear to live. Running out to the courtyard, she climbs upon the pyre and unsheathes a sword Aeneas has left behind. She throws herself upon the blade and with her last words curses her absent lover. As Anna and the servants run up to the dying queen, Juno takes pity on Dido and ends her suffering and her life.

Although her relationship with Aeneas spans only this one book of the Aeneid, Dido has become a literary icon for the tragic lover, like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Though at times Aeneas's happiness in his love for Dido seems to equal hers, it is with considerably less grief and anxiety that he is able to leave her in Carthage and go back about the business of bringing the survivors of Troy to Italy and founding Rome. Whereas Dido not only loves Aeneas but hopes he and his warriors will strengthen her city, Aeneas's actions are the result of a momentary abandonment of his true duties and responsibilities. He indulges temporarily in romance and the pleasures of the flesh, but when Jupiter, through Mercury, reminds Aeneas of his destiny, he is dutiful and ready to resume his mission. When Aeneas says good-bye to Dido, we see two sides to the hero as in Book I, when he hides his worries to appear brave before his crew. Aeneas's statement that he is forced to sail to Italy and Virgil's remark that Aeneas "struggle with desire to calm and comfort in all her pain" demonstrate Aeneas's conflicted nature . He piously carries out the duties allotted him by fate; though he feels emotions and experiences desires, he is powerless to act on them. From Virgil's perspective, Aeneas is not heartless, as Dido thinks him, but merely capable of subordinating matters of the heart to the demands of duty. Aeneas's reminder to Dido that they were never officially married suggests, somewhat dubiously, that had they entered into such an ordained commitment he would not leave. But, he argues, without a true marriage, he is sacrificing only his own desires by leaving Dido. Virgil treats love as he treats the gods--as an outside force acting upon mortals, not a function of the individual's free will or innate identity. He does not idealize love; rather, he associates it with imagery linked to madness, fire, or disease, presenting love as a force that acts on Dido with a violence that is made literal by the end of Book IV in her suicide. Virgil's language in the first lines of the book indicates that Dido's emotions corrode her self-control; he describes her love as "inward fire eating her away" . Later, Dido's decision to have a funeral pyre erected and then kill herself upon it returns to this imagery, and Virgil compares Dido's suicide to a city taken over by enemies, "As though . . . / . . . / Flames billowed on the roofs of men and gods" . Cupid's arrow, shot to promote love between Aeneas and Dido, causes hatred, death, and destruction. Love is at odds with law and fate, as it distracts its victims from their responsibilities. While with Aeneas, Dido abandons her construction of Carthage. She even admits to Aeneas that her own subjects have grown to hate her because of her selfish actions. Aeneas, too, must move on because the time he spends with Dido only keeps him from his selfless task of founding an empire. In the Aeneid, civic responsibility resides with the male. An attitude that might be termed misogynistic seeps into Virgil's descriptions of Juno and even Dido. Aeneas's dream-vision of Mercury articulates this sentiment: "woman's a thing / forever fitful and forever changing" . Virgil clearly enjoys making Juno look foolish, and he also likes to depict Juno's vain efforts in comic terms as a domestic quarrel--a battle of wills between husband and wife played out before an audience that knows Jupiter has the power in the divine family. Dido also shows herself to be less responsible than her partner. Whereas Dido kills herself for love, leaving the city she founded without a leader, Aeneas returns to his course, guiding the refugees of a lost city to the foundation of a new city.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_vi.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_5_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book vi

book vi

{"name": "Book VI", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section6/", "summary": "Roman, remember by your strength to rule . . .To spare the conquered, battle down the proud. At last, the Trojan fleet arrives on the shores of Italy. The ships drop anchor off the coast of Cumae, near modern-day Naples. Following his father's instructions, Aeneas makes for the Temple of Apollo, where the Sibyl, a priestess, meets him. She commands him to make his request. Aeneas prays to Apollo to allow the Trojans to settle in Latium. The priestess warns him that more trials await in Italy: fighting on the scale of the Trojan War, a foe of the caliber of the Greek warrior Achilles, and further interference from Juno. Aeneas inquires whether the Sibyl can gain him entrance to Dis, so that he might visit his father's spirit as directed. The Sibyl informs him that to enter Dis with any hope of returning, he must first have a sign. He must find a golden branch in the nearby forest. She instructs him that if the bough breaks off the tree easily, it means fate calls Aeneas to the underworld. If Aeneas is not meant to travel there, the bough will not come off the tree. Aeneas looks in dismay at the size of the forest, but after he says a prayer, a pair of doves descends and guides him to the desired tree, from which he manages to tear the golden branch. The hero returns to the priestess with the token, and she leads him to the gate of Dis. Just inside the gate runs the river Acheron. The ferryman Charon delivers the spirits of the dead across the river; however, Aeneas notices that some souls are refused passage and must remain on the near bank. The Sibyl explains that these are the souls of dead people whose corpses have not received proper burial. With great sadness, Aeneas spots Palinurus among the undelivered. Charon explains to the visitors that no living bodies may cross the river, but the Sibyl shows him the golden branch. Appeased, Charon ferries them across. On the other side, Aeneas stands aghast, hearing the wailing of thousands of suffering souls. The spirits of the recently deceased line up before Minos for judgment. Nearby are the Fields of Mourning, where those who died for love wander. There, Aeneas sees Dido. Surprised and saddened, he speaks to her, with some regret, claiming that he left her not of his own will. The shade of the dead queen turns away from him toward the shade of her husband, Sychaeus, and Aeneas sheds tears of pity. Aeneas continues to the field of war heroes, where he sees many casualties of the Trojan War. The Greeks flee at first sight of him. The Sibyl urges Aeneas onward, and they pass an enormous fortress. Inside the fortress, Rhadamanthus doles out judgments upon the most evil of sinners, and terrible tortures are carried out. Finally, Aeneas and the Sibyl come to the Blessed Groves, where the good wander about in peace and comfort. At last, Aeneas sees his father. Anchises greets him warmly and congratulates him on having made the difficult journey. He gladly answers some of Aeneas's many questions, regarding such issues as how the dead are dispersed in Dis and how good souls can eventually reach the Fields of Gladness. But with little time at hand, Anchises presses on to the reason for Aeneas's journey to the underworld--the explication of his lineage in Italy. Anchises describes what will become of the Trojan descendants: Romulus will found Rome, a Caesar will eventually come from the line of Ascanius, and Rome will reach a Golden Age of rule over the world. Finally, Aeneas grasps the profound significance of his long journey to Italy. Anchises accompanies Aeneas out of Dis, and Aeneas returns to his comrades on the beach. At once, they pull up anchor and move out along the coast.", "analysis": "Aeneas's journey to the underworld in Book VI is another of the Aeneid's most famous passages. In fact, this passage helped raise Virgil to the status of a Christian prophet in the Middle Ages. In the fourteenth century, the Italian poet Dante used it as the foundation for his journey through hell in the Inferno, even though Virgil's version of the afterlife was obviously not a Christian one. Like Virgil, for example, Dante designed a hell with many sections and in which more severe punishments are handed down to those with greater sins. Also like Virgil, Dante exercised his formidable imagination in inventing penalties for sinners. While Virgil's Dis is pre-Christian, it represents an advanced version of classical theology, which was not codified in the way that modern religions are. In a world of temperamental gods who demand sacrifice and seem to dispense punishments and rewards almost arbitrarily, Virgil portrays an afterlife in which people are judged according to the virtue of their lives on Earth. This scheme of the afterlife is an idea that Christianity fused with the Judaic tradition into the Western consciousness centuries later, but that has its sources in the Orphic mysteries of classical antiquity. The presence of Orpheus, \"priest of Thrace,\" in the Blessed Groves confirms the influence of Orphism, which was also a source for Plato's views of the afterlife, on Virgil's vision of the land of shades. Rhadamanthus's practice of listening to sinners and then sentencing them is remarkably similar to the Christian conception of judgment after death: souls who fail to repent for their sins on Earth pay more dearly for them in hell. Of course, one major difference is that Virgil does not have a separate equivalent of Christian heaven. All souls migrate to Dis, and the good ones occupy a better place, the Fields of Gladness, within the grand dungeon. However, in a way this scheme still fits with Christian theology, which postulates that before Christ's death and resurrection, all souls--good or bad--went to purgatory. To a Christian mindset, then, it was theologically accurate for Virgil, who died nineteen years before Christ's birth, to place even the good souls in Dis. Though this connection may seem tenuous to us, Virgil's influence among Christian poets and scholars increased because of these affinities. Aeneas's trip to the underworld is also Virgil's opportunity to indulge in an extensive account of Rome's future glory, particularly in his glorification of the Caesars. Virgil renders Augustus--his own ruler and benefactor--the epitome of the Roman Empire, the promised ruler who presides over the Golden Age. That Augustus was a patron of Virgil should not necessarily cause us to dismiss these passages as pure propaganda, however. Virgil had good reason to think he was living at the high point of history--after all, Rome ruled most of the known world and seemed invincible. In this context, Augustus emerges as the natural counterpart to Aeneas, bringing to perfect fruition the city whose history the Trojan hero initiated."}

BOOK VI He said, and wept; then spread his sails before The winds, and reach'd at length the Cumaean shore: Their anchors dropp'd, his crew the vessels moor. They turn their heads to sea, their sterns to land, And greet with greedy joy th' Italian strand. Some strike from clashing flints their fiery seed; Some gather sticks, the kindled flames to feed, Or search for hollow trees, and fell the woods, Or trace thro' valleys the discover'd floods. Thus, while their sev'ral charges they fulfil, The pious prince ascends the sacred hill Where Phoebus is ador'd; and seeks the shade Which hides from sight his venerable maid. Deep in a cave the Sibyl makes abode; Thence full of fate returns, and of the god. Thro' Trivia's grove they walk; and now behold, And enter now, the temple roof'd with gold. When Daedalus, to fly the Cretan shore, His heavy limbs on jointed pinions bore, (The first who sail'd in air,) 't is sung by Fame, To the Cumaean coast at length he came, And here alighting, built this costly frame. Inscrib'd to Phoebus, here he hung on high The steerage of his wings, that cut the sky: Then o'er the lofty gate his art emboss'd Androgeos' death, and off'rings to his ghost; Sev'n youths from Athens yearly sent, to meet The fate appointed by revengeful Crete. And next to those the dreadful urn was plac'd, In which the destin'd names by lots were cast: The mournful parents stand around in tears, And rising Crete against their shore appears. There too, in living sculpture, might be seen The mad affection of the Cretan queen; Then how she cheats her bellowing lover's eye; The rushing leap, the doubtful progeny, The lower part a beast, a man above, The monument of their polluted love. Not far from thence he grav'd the wondrous maze, A thousand doors, a thousand winding ways: Here dwells the monster, hid from human view, Not to be found, but by the faithful clew; Till the kind artist, mov'd with pious grief, Lent to the loving maid this last relief, And all those erring paths describ'd so well That Theseus conquer'd and the monster fell. Here hapless Icarus had found his part, Had not the father's grief restrain'd his art. He twice assay'd to cast his son in gold; Twice from his hands he dropp'd the forming mold. All this with wond'ring eyes Aeneas view'd; Each varying object his delight renew'd: Eager to read the rest- Achates came, And by his side the mad divining dame, The priestess of the god, Deiphobe her name. "Time suffers not," she said, "to feed your eyes With empty pleasures; haste the sacrifice. Sev'n bullocks, yet unyok'd, for Phoebus choose, And for Diana sev'n unspotted ewes." This said, the servants urge the sacred rites, While to the temple she the prince invites. A spacious cave, within its farmost part, Was hew'd and fashion'd by laborious art Thro' the hill's hollow sides: before the place, A hundred doors a hundred entries grace; As many voices issue, and the sound Of Sybil's words as many times rebound. Now to the mouth they come. Aloud she cries: "This is the time; enquire your destinies. He comes; behold the god!" Thus while she said, (And shiv'ring at the sacred entry stay'd,) Her color chang'd; her face was not the same, And hollow groans from her deep spirit came. Her hair stood up; convulsive rage possess'd Her trembling limbs, and heav'd her lab'ring breast. Greater than humankind she seem'd to look, And with an accent more than mortal spoke. Her staring eyes with sparkling fury roll; When all the god came rushing on her soul. Swiftly she turn'd, and, foaming as she spoke: "Why this delay?" she cried- "the pow'rs invoke! Thy pray'rs alone can open this abode; Else vain are my demands, and dumb the god." She said no more. The trembling Trojans hear, O'erspread with a damp sweat and holy fear. The prince himself, with awful dread possess'd, His vows to great Apollo thus address'd: "Indulgent god, propitious pow'r to Troy, Swift to relieve, unwilling to destroy, Directed by whose hand the Dardan dart Pierc'd the proud Grecian's only mortal part: Thus far, by fate's decrees and thy commands, Thro' ambient seas and thro' devouring sands, Our exil'd crew has sought th' Ausonian ground; And now, at length, the flying coast is found. Thus far the fate of Troy, from place to place, With fury has pursued her wand'ring race. Here cease, ye pow'rs, and let your vengeance end: Troy is no more, and can no more offend. And thou, O sacred maid, inspir'd to see Th' event of things in dark futurity; Give me what Heav'n has promis'd to my fate, To conquer and command the Latian state; To fix my wand'ring gods, and find a place For the long exiles of the Trojan race. Then shall my grateful hands a temple rear To the twin gods, with vows and solemn pray'r; And annual rites, and festivals, and games, Shall be perform'd to their auspicious names. Nor shalt thou want thy honors in my land; For there thy faithful oracles shall stand, Preserv'd in shrines; and ev'ry sacred lay, Which, by thy mouth, Apollo shall convey: All shall be treasur'd by a chosen train Of holy priests, and ever shall remain. But O! commit not thy prophetic mind To flitting leaves, the sport of ev'ry wind, Lest they disperse in air our empty fate; Write not, but, what the pow'rs ordain, relate." Struggling in vain, impatient of her load, And lab'ring underneath the pond'rous god, The more she strove to shake him from her breast, With more and far superior force he press'd; Commands his entrance, and, without control, Usurps her organs and inspires her soul. Now, with a furious blast, the hundred doors Ope of themselves; a rushing whirlwind roars Within the cave, and Sibyl's voice restores: "Escap'd the dangers of the wat'ry reign, Yet more and greater ills by land remain. The coast, so long desir'd (nor doubt th' event), Thy troops shall reach, but, having reach'd, repent. Wars, horrid wars, I view- a field of blood, And Tiber rolling with a purple flood. Simois nor Xanthus shall be wanting there: A new Achilles shall in arms appear, And he, too, goddess-born. Fierce Juno's hate, Added to hostile force, shall urge thy fate. To what strange nations shalt not thou resort, Driv'n to solicit aid at ev'ry court! The cause the same which Ilium once oppress'd; A foreign mistress, and a foreign guest. But thou, secure of soul, unbent with woes, The more thy fortune frowns, the more oppose. The dawnings of thy safety shall be shown From whence thou least shalt hope, a Grecian town." Thus, from the dark recess, the Sibyl spoke, And the resisting air the thunder broke; The cave rebellow'd, and the temple shook. Th' ambiguous god, who rul'd her lab'ring breast, In these mysterious words his mind express'd; Some truths reveal'd, in terms involv'd the rest. At length her fury fell, her foaming ceas'd, And, ebbing in her soul, the god decreas'd. Then thus the chief: "No terror to my view, No frightful face of danger can be new. Inur'd to suffer, and resolv'd to dare, The Fates, without my pow'r, shall be without my care. This let me crave, since near your grove the road To hell lies open, and the dark abode Which Acheron surrounds, th' innavigable flood; Conduct me thro' the regions void of light, And lead me longing to my father's sight. For him, a thousand dangers I have sought, And, rushing where the thickest Grecians fought, Safe on my back the sacred burthen brought. He, for my sake, the raging ocean tried, And wrath of Heav'n, my still auspicious guide, And bore beyond the strength decrepid age supplied. Oft, since he breath'd his last, in dead of night His reverend image stood before my sight; Enjoin'd to seek, below, his holy shade; Conducted there by your unerring aid. But you, if pious minds by pray'rs are won, Oblige the father, and protect the son. Yours is the pow'r; nor Proserpine in vain Has made you priestess of her nightly reign. If Orpheus, arm'd with his enchanting lyre, The ruthless king with pity could inspire, And from the shades below redeem his wife; If Pollux, off'ring his alternate life, Could free his brother, and can daily go By turns aloft, by turns descend below- Why name I Theseus, or his greater friend, Who trod the downward path, and upward could ascend? Not less than theirs from Jove my lineage came; My mother greater, my descent the same." So pray'd the Trojan prince, and, while he pray'd, His hand upon the holy altar laid. Then thus replied the prophetess divine: "O goddess-born of great Anchises' line, The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labor lies. To few great Jupiter imparts this grace, And those of shining worth and heav'nly race. Betwixt those regions and our upper light, Deep forests and impenetrable night Possess the middle space: th' infernal bounds Cocytus, with his sable waves, surrounds. But if so dire a love your soul invades, As twice below to view the trembling shades; If you so hard a toil will undertake, As twice to pass th' innavigable lake; Receive my counsel. In the neighb'ring grove There stands a tree; the queen of Stygian Jove Claims it her own; thick woods and gloomy night Conceal the happy plant from human sight. One bough it bears; but (wondrous to behold!) The ductile rind and leaves of radiant gold: This from the vulgar branches must be torn, And to fair Proserpine the present borne, Ere leave be giv'n to tempt the nether skies. The first thus rent a second will arise, And the same metal the same room supplies. Look round the wood, with lifted eyes, to see The lurking gold upon the fatal tree: Then rend it off, as holy rites command; The willing metal will obey thy hand, Following with ease, if favor'd by thy fate, Thou art foredoom'd to view the Stygian state: If not, no labor can the tree constrain; And strength of stubborn arms and steel are vain. Besides, you know not, while you here attend, Th' unworthy fate of your unhappy friend: Breathless he lies; and his unburied ghost, Depriv'd of fun'ral rites, pollutes your host. Pay first his pious dues; and, for the dead, Two sable sheep around his hearse be led; Then, living turfs upon his body lay: This done, securely take the destin'd way, To find the regions destitute of day." She said, and held her peace. Aeneas went Sad from the cave, and full of discontent, Unknowing whom the sacred Sibyl meant. Achates, the companion of his breast, Goes grieving by his side, with equal cares oppress'd. Walking, they talk'd, and fruitlessly divin'd What friend the priestess by those words design'd. But soon they found an object to deplore: Misenus lay extended on the shore; Son of the God of Winds: none so renown'd The warrior trumpet in the field to sound; With breathing brass to kindle fierce alarms, And rouse to dare their fate in honorable arms. He serv'd great Hector, and was ever near, Not with his trumpet only, but his spear. But by Pelides' arms when Hector fell, He chose Aeneas; and he chose as well. Swoln with applause, and aiming still at more, He now provokes the sea gods from the shore; With envy Triton heard the martial sound, And the bold champion, for his challenge, drown'd; Then cast his mangled carcass on the strand: The gazing crowd around the body stand. All weep; but most Aeneas mourns his fate, And hastens to perform the funeral state. In altar-wise, a stately pile they rear; The basis broad below, and top advanc'd in air. An ancient wood, fit for the work design'd, (The shady covert of the salvage kind,) The Trojans found: the sounding ax is plied; Firs, pines, and pitch trees, and the tow'ring pride Of forest ashes, feel the fatal stroke, And piercing wedges cleave the stubborn oak. Huge trunks of trees, fell'd from the steepy crown Of the bare mountains, roll with ruin down. Arm'd like the rest the Trojan prince appears, And by his pious labor urges theirs. Thus while he wrought, revolving in his mind The ways to compass what his wish design'd, He cast his eyes upon the gloomy grove, And then with vows implor'd the Queen of Love: "O may thy pow'r, propitious still to me, Conduct my steps to find the fatal tree, In this deep forest; since the Sibyl's breath Foretold, alas! too true, Misenus' death." Scarce had he said, when, full before his sight, Two doves, descending from their airy flight, Secure upon the grassy plain alight. He knew his mother's birds; and thus he pray'd: "Be you my guides, with your auspicious aid, And lead my footsteps, till the branch be found, Whose glitt'ring shadow gilds the sacred ground. And thou, great parent, with celestial care, In this distress be present to my pray'r!" Thus having said, he stopp'd with watchful sight, Observing still the motions of their flight, What course they took, what happy signs they shew. They fed, and, flutt'ring, by degrees withdrew Still farther from the place, but still in view: Hopping and flying, thus they led him on To the slow lake, whose baleful stench to shun They wing'd their flight aloft; then, stooping low, Perch'd on the double tree that bears the golden bough. Thro' the green leafs the glitt'ring shadows glow; As, on the sacred oak, the wintry mistletoe, Where the proud mother views her precious brood, And happier branches, which she never sow'd. Such was the glitt'ring; such the ruddy rind, And dancing leaves, that wanton'd in the wind. He seiz'd the shining bough with griping hold, And rent away, with ease, the ling'ring gold; Then to the Sibyl's palace bore the prize. Meantime the Trojan troops, with weeping eyes, To dead Misenus pay his obsequies. First, from the ground a lofty pile they rear, Of pitch trees, oaks, and pines, and unctuous fir: The fabric's front with cypress twigs they strew, And stick the sides with boughs of baleful yew. The topmost part his glitt'ring arms adorn; Warm waters, then, in brazen caldrons borne, Are pour'd to wash his body, joint by joint, And fragrant oils the stiffen'd limbs anoint. With groans and cries Misenus they deplore: Then on a bier, with purple cover'd o'er, The breathless body, thus bewail'd, they lay, And fire the pile, their faces turn'd away- Such reverend rites their fathers us'd to pay. Pure oil and incense on the fire they throw, And fat of victims, which his friends bestow. These gifts the greedy flames to dust devour; Then on the living coals red wine they pour; And, last, the relics by themselves dispose, Which in a brazen urn the priests inclose. Old Corynaeus compass'd thrice the crew, And dipp'd an olive branch in holy dew; Which thrice he sprinkled round, and thrice aloud Invok'd the dead, and then dismissed the crowd. But good Aeneas order'd on the shore A stately tomb, whose top a trumpet bore, A soldier's fauchion, and a seaman's oar. Thus was his friend interr'd; and deathless fame Still to the lofty cape consigns his name. These rites perform'd, the prince, without delay, Hastes to the nether world his destin'd way. Deep was the cave; and, downward as it went From the wide mouth, a rocky rough descent; And here th' access a gloomy grove defends, And there th' unnavigable lake extends, O'er whose unhappy waters, void of light, No bird presumes to steer his airy flight; Such deadly stenches from the depths arise, And steaming sulphur, that infects the skies. From hence the Grecian bards their legends make, And give the name Avernus to the lake. Four sable bullocks, in the yoke untaught, For sacrifice the pious hero brought. The priestess pours the wine betwixt their horns; Then cuts the curling hair; that first oblation burns, Invoking Hecate hither to repair: A pow'rful name in hell and upper air. The sacred priests with ready knives bereave The beasts of life, and in full bowls receive The streaming blood: a lamb to Hell and Night (The sable wool without a streak of white) Aeneas offers; and, by fate's decree, A barren heifer, Proserpine, to thee, With holocausts he Pluto's altar fills; Sev'n brawny bulls with his own hand he kills; Then on the broiling entrails oil he pours; Which, ointed thus, the raging flame devours. Late the nocturnal sacrifice begun, Nor ended till the next returning sun. Then earth began to bellow, trees to dance, And howling dogs in glimm'ring light advance, Ere Hecate came. "Far hence be souls profane!" The Sibyl cried, "and from the grove abstain! Now, Trojan, take the way thy fates afford; Assume thy courage, and unsheathe thy sword." She said, and pass'd along the gloomy space; The prince pursued her steps with equal pace. Ye realms, yet unreveal'd to human sight, Ye gods who rule the regions of the night, Ye gliding ghosts, permit me to relate The mystic wonders of your silent state! Obscure they went thro' dreary shades, that led Along the waste dominions of the dead. Thus wander travelers in woods by night, By the moon's doubtful and malignant light, When Jove in dusky clouds involves the skies, And the faint crescent shoots by fits before their eyes. Just in the gate and in the jaws of hell, Revengeful Cares and sullen Sorrows dwell, And pale Diseases, and repining Age, Want, Fear, and Famine's unresisted rage; Here Toils, and Death, and Death's half-brother, Sleep, Forms terrible to view, their sentry keep; With anxious Pleasures of a guilty mind, Deep Frauds before, and open Force behind; The Furies' iron beds; and Strife, that shakes Her hissing tresses and unfolds her snakes. Full in the midst of this infernal road, An elm displays her dusky arms abroad: The God of Sleep there hides his heavy head, And empty dreams on ev'ry leaf are spread. Of various forms unnumber'd specters more, Centaurs, and double shapes, besiege the door. Before the passage, horrid Hydra stands, And Briareus with all his hundred hands; Gorgons, Geryon with his triple frame; And vain Chimaera vomits empty flame. The chief unsheath'd his shining steel, prepar'd, Tho' seiz'd with sudden fear, to force the guard, Off'ring his brandish'd weapon at their face; Had not the Sibyl stopp'd his eager pace, And told him what those empty phantoms were: Forms without bodies, and impassive air. Hence to deep Acheron they take their way, Whose troubled eddies, thick with ooze and clay, Are whirl'd aloft, and in Cocytus lost. There Charon stands, who rules the dreary coast- A sordid god: down from his hoary chin A length of beard descends, uncomb'd, unclean; His eyes, like hollow furnaces on fire; A girdle, foul with grease, binds his obscene attire. He spreads his canvas; with his pole he steers; The freights of flitting ghosts in his thin bottom bears. He look'd in years; yet in his years were seen A youthful vigor and autumnal green. An airy crowd came rushing where he stood, Which fill'd the margin of the fatal flood: Husbands and wives, boys and unmarried maids, And mighty heroes' more majestic shades, And youths, intomb'd before their fathers' eyes, With hollow groans, and shrieks, and feeble cries. Thick as the leaves in autumn strow the woods, Or fowls, by winter forc'd, forsake the floods, And wing their hasty flight to happier lands; Such, and so thick, the shiv'ring army stands, And press for passage with extended hands. Now these, now those, the surly boatman bore: The rest he drove to distance from the shore. The hero, who beheld with wond'ring eyes The tumult mix'd with shrieks, laments, and cries, Ask'd of his guide, what the rude concourse meant; Why to the shore the thronging people bent; What forms of law among the ghosts were us'd; Why some were ferried o'er, and some refus'd. "Son of Anchises, offspring of the gods," The Sibyl said, "you see the Stygian floods, The sacred stream which heav'n's imperial state Attests in oaths, and fears to violate. The ghosts rejected are th' unhappy crew Depriv'd of sepulchers and fun'ral due: The boatman, Charon; those, the buried host, He ferries over to the farther coast; Nor dares his transport vessel cross the waves With such whose bones are not compos'd in graves. A hundred years they wander on the shore; At length, their penance done, are wafted o'er." The Trojan chief his forward pace repress'd, Revolving anxious thoughts within his breast, He saw his friends, who, whelm'd beneath the waves, Their fun'ral honors claim'd, and ask'd their quiet graves. The lost Leucaspis in the crowd he knew, And the brave leader of the Lycian crew, Whom, on the Tyrrhene seas, the tempests met; The sailors master'd, and the ship o'erset. Amidst the spirits, Palinurus press'd, Yet fresh from life, a new-admitted guest, Who, while he steering view'd the stars, and bore His course from Afric to the Latian shore, Fell headlong down. The Trojan fix'd his view, And scarcely thro' the gloom the sullen shadow knew. Then thus the prince: "What envious pow'r, O friend, Brought your lov'd life to this disastrous end? For Phoebus, ever true in all he said, Has in your fate alone my faith betray'd. The god foretold you should not die, before You reach'd, secure from seas, th' Italian shore. Is this th' unerring pow'r?" The ghost replied; "Nor Phoebus flatter'd, nor his answers lied; Nor envious gods have sent me to the deep: But, while the stars and course of heav'n I keep, My wearied eyes were seiz'd with fatal sleep. I fell; and, with my weight, the helm constrain'd Was drawn along, which yet my gripe retain'd. Now by the winds and raging waves I swear, Your safety, more than mine, was then my care; Lest, of the guide bereft, the rudder lost, Your ship should run against the rocky coast. Three blust'ring nights, borne by the southern blast, I floated, and discover'd land at last: High on a mounting wave my head I bore, Forcing my strength, and gath'ring to the shore. Panting, but past the danger, now I seiz'd The craggy cliffs, and my tir'd members eas'd. While, cumber'd with my dropping clothes, I lay, The cruel nation, covetous of prey, Stain'd with my blood th' unhospitable coast; And now, by winds and waves, my lifeless limbs are toss'd: Which O avert, by yon ethereal light, Which I have lost for this eternal night! Or, if by dearer ties you may be won, By your dead sire, and by your living son, Redeem from this reproach my wand'ring ghost; Or with your navy seek the Velin coast, And in a peaceful grave my corpse compose; Or, if a nearer way your mother shows, Without whose aid you durst not undertake This frightful passage o'er the Stygian lake, Lend to this wretch your hand, and waft him o'er To the sweet banks of yon forbidden shore." Scarce had he said, the prophetess began: "What hopes delude thee, miserable man? Think'st thou, thus unintomb'd, to cross the floods, To view the Furies and infernal gods, And visit, without leave, the dark abodes? Attend the term of long revolving years; Fate, and the dooming gods, are deaf to tears. This comfort of thy dire misfortune take: The wrath of Heav'n, inflicted for thy sake, With vengeance shall pursue th' inhuman coast, Till they propitiate thy offended ghost, And raise a tomb, with vows and solemn pray'r; And Palinurus' name the place shall bear." This calm'd his cares; sooth'd with his future fame, And pleas'd to hear his propagated name. Now nearer to the Stygian lake they draw: Whom, from the shore, the surly boatman saw; Observ'd their passage thro' the shady wood, And mark'd their near approaches to the flood. Then thus he call'd aloud, inflam'd with wrath: "Mortal, whate'er, who this forbidden path In arms presum'st to tread, I charge thee, stand, And tell thy name, and bus'ness in the land. Know this, the realm of night- the Stygian shore: My boat conveys no living bodies o'er; Nor was I pleas'd great Theseus once to bear, Who forc'd a passage with his pointed spear, Nor strong Alcides- men of mighty fame, And from th' immortal gods their lineage came. In fetters one the barking porter tied, And took him trembling from his sov'reign's side: Two sought by force to seize his beauteous bride." To whom the Sibyl thus: "Compose thy mind; Nor frauds are here contriv'd, nor force design'd. Still may the dog the wand'ring troops constrain Of airy ghosts, and vex the guilty train, And with her grisly lord his lovely queen remain. The Trojan chief, whose lineage is from Jove, Much fam'd for arms, and more for filial love, Is sent to seek his sire in your Elysian grove. If neither piety, nor Heav'n's command, Can gain his passage to the Stygian strand, This fatal present shall prevail at least." Then shew'd the shining bough, conceal'd within her vest. No more was needful: for the gloomy god Stood mute with awe, to see the golden rod; Admir'd the destin'd off'ring to his queen- A venerable gift, so rarely seen. His fury thus appeas'd, he puts to land; The ghosts forsake their seats at his command: He clears the deck, receives the mighty freight; The leaky vessel groans beneath the weight. Slowly she sails, and scarcely stems the tides; The pressing water pours within her sides. His passengers at length are wafted o'er, Expos'd, in muddy weeds, upon the miry shore. No sooner landed, in his den they found The triple porter of the Stygian sound, Grim Cerberus, who soon began to rear His crested snakes, and arm'd his bristling hair. The prudent Sibyl had before prepar'd A sop, in honey steep'd, to charm the guard; Which, mix'd with pow'rful drugs, she cast before His greedy grinning jaws, just op'd to roar. With three enormous mouths he gapes; and straight, With hunger press'd, devours the pleasing bait. Long draughts of sleep his monstrous limbs enslave; He reels, and, falling, fills the spacious cave. The keeper charm'd, the chief without delay Pass'd on, and took th' irremeable way. Before the gates, the cries of babes new born, Whom fate had from their tender mothers torn, Assault his ears: then those, whom form of laws Condemn'd to die, when traitors judg'd their cause. Nor want they lots, nor judges to review The wrongful sentence, and award a new. Minos, the strict inquisitor, appears; And lives and crimes, with his assessors, hears. Round in his urn the blended balls he rolls, Absolves the just, and dooms the guilty souls. The next, in place and punishment, are they Who prodigally throw their souls away; Fools, who, repining at their wretched state, And loathing anxious life, suborn'd their fate. With late repentance now they would retrieve The bodies they forsook, and wish to live; Their pains and poverty desire to bear, To view the light of heav'n, and breathe the vital air: But fate forbids; the Stygian floods oppose, And with circling streams the captive souls inclose. Not far from thence, the Mournful Fields appear So call'd from lovers that inhabit there. The souls whom that unhappy flame invades, In secret solitude and myrtle shades Make endless moans, and, pining with desire, Lament too late their unextinguish'd fire. Here Procris, Eriphyle here he found, Baring her breast, yet bleeding with the wound Made by her son. He saw Pasiphae there, With Phaedra's ghost, a foul incestuous pair. There Laodamia, with Evadne, moves, Unhappy both, but loyal in their loves: Caeneus, a woman once, and once a man, But ending in the sex she first began. Not far from these Phoenician Dido stood, Fresh from her wound, her bosom bath'd in blood; Whom when the Trojan hero hardly knew, Obscure in shades, and with a doubtful view, (Doubtful as he who sees, thro' dusky night, Or thinks he sees, the moon's uncertain light,) With tears he first approach'd the sullen shade; And, as his love inspir'd him, thus he said: "Unhappy queen! then is the common breath Of rumor true, in your reported death, And I, alas! the cause? By Heav'n, I vow, And all the pow'rs that rule the realms below, Unwilling I forsook your friendly state, Commanded by the gods, and forc'd by fate- Those gods, that fate, whose unresisted might Have sent me to these regions void of light, Thro' the vast empire of eternal night. Nor dar'd I to presume, that, press'd with grief, My flight should urge you to this dire relief. Stay, stay your steps, and listen to my vows: 'T is the last interview that fate allows!" In vain he thus attempts her mind to move With tears, and pray'rs, and late-repenting love. Disdainfully she look'd; then turning round, But fix'd her eyes unmov'd upon the ground, And what he says and swears, regards no more Than the deaf rocks, when the loud billows roar; But whirl'd away, to shun his hateful sight, Hid in the forest and the shades of night; Then sought Sichaeus thro' the shady grove, Who answer'd all her cares, and equal'd all her love. Some pious tears the pitying hero paid, And follow'd with his eyes the flitting shade, Then took the forward way, by fate ordain'd, And, with his guide, the farther fields attain'd, Where, sever'd from the rest, the warrior souls remain'd. Tydeus he met, with Meleager's race, The pride of armies, and the soldiers' grace; And pale Adrastus with his ghastly face. Of Trojan chiefs he view'd a num'rous train, All much lamented, all in battle slain; Glaucus and Medon, high above the rest, Antenor's sons, and Ceres' sacred priest. And proud Idaeus, Priam's charioteer, Who shakes his empty reins, and aims his airy spear. The gladsome ghosts, in circling troops, attend And with unwearied eyes behold their friend; Delight to hover near, and long to know What bus'ness brought him to the realms below. But Argive chiefs, and Agamemnon's train, When his refulgent arms flash'd thro' the shady plain, Fled from his well-known face, with wonted fear, As when his thund'ring sword and pointed spear Drove headlong to their ships, and glean'd the routed rear. They rais'd a feeble cry, with trembling notes; But the weak voice deceiv'd their gasping throats. Here Priam's son, Deiphobus, he found, Whose face and limbs were one continued wound: Dishonest, with lopp'd arms, the youth appears, Spoil'd of his nose, and shorten'd of his ears. He scarcely knew him, striving to disown His blotted form, and blushing to be known; And therefore first began: "O Teucer's race, Who durst thy faultless figure thus deface? What heart could wish, what hand inflict, this dire disgrace? 'Twas fam'd, that in our last and fatal night Your single prowess long sustain'd the fight, Till tir'd, not forc'd, a glorious fate you chose, And fell upon a heap of slaughter'd foes. But, in remembrance of so brave a deed, A tomb and fun'ral honors I decreed; Thrice call'd your manes on the Trojan plains: The place your armor and your name retains. Your body too I sought, and, had I found, Design'd for burial in your native ground." The ghost replied: "Your piety has paid All needful rites, to rest my wand'ring shade; But cruel fate, and my more cruel wife, To Grecian swords betray'd my sleeping life. These are the monuments of Helen's love: The shame I bear below, the marks I bore above. You know in what deluding joys we pass'd The night that was by Heav'n decreed our last: For, when the fatal horse, descending down, Pregnant with arms, o'erwhelm'd th' unhappy town She feign'd nocturnal orgies; left my bed, And, mix'd with Trojan dames, the dances led Then, waving high her torch, the signal made, Which rous'd the Grecians from their ambuscade. With watching overworn, with cares oppress'd, Unhappy I had laid me down to rest, And heavy sleep my weary limbs possess'd. Meantime my worthy wife our arms mislaid, And from beneath my head my sword convey'd; The door unlatch'd, and, with repeated calls, Invites her former lord within my walls. Thus in her crime her confidence she plac'd, And with new treasons would redeem the past. What need I more? Into the room they ran, And meanly murther'd a defenseless man. Ulysses, basely born, first led the way. Avenging pow'rs! with justice if I pray, That fortune be their own another day! But answer you; and in your turn relate, What brought you, living, to the Stygian state: Driv'n by the winds and errors of the sea, Or did you Heav'n's superior doom obey? Or tell what other chance conducts your way, To view with mortal eyes our dark retreats, Tumults and torments of th' infernal seats." While thus in talk the flying hours they pass, The sun had finish'd more than half his race: And they, perhaps, in words and tears had spent The little time of stay which Heav'n had lent; But thus the Sibyl chides their long delay: "Night rushes down, and headlong drives the day: 'T is here, in different paths, the way divides; The right to Pluto's golden palace guides; The left to that unhappy region tends, Which to the depth of Tartarus descends; The seat of night profound, and punish'd fiends." Then thus Deiphobus: "O sacred maid, Forbear to chide, and be your will obey'd! Lo! to the secret shadows I retire, To pay my penance till my years expire. Proceed, auspicious prince, with glory crown'd, And born to better fates than I have found." He said; and, while he said, his steps he turn'd To secret shadows, and in silence mourn'd. The hero, looking on the left, espied A lofty tow'r, and strong on ev'ry side With treble walls, which Phlegethon surrounds, Whose fiery flood the burning empire bounds; And, press'd betwixt the rocks, the bellowing noise resounds Wide is the fronting gate, and, rais'd on high With adamantine columns, threats the sky. Vain is the force of man, and Heav'n's as vain, To crush the pillars which the pile sustain. Sublime on these a tow'r of steel is rear'd; And dire Tisiphone there keeps the ward, Girt in her sanguine gown, by night and day, Observant of the souls that pass the downward way. From hence are heard the groans of ghosts, the pains Of sounding lashes and of dragging chains. The Trojan stood astonish'd at their cries, And ask'd his guide from whence those yells arise; And what the crimes, and what the tortures were, And loud laments that rent the liquid air. She thus replied: "The chaste and holy race Are all forbidden this polluted place. But Hecate, when she gave to rule the woods, Then led me trembling thro' these dire abodes, And taught the tortures of th' avenging gods. These are the realms of unrelenting fate; And awful Rhadamanthus rules the state. He hears and judges each committed crime; Enquires into the manner, place, and time. The conscious wretch must all his acts reveal, (Loth to confess, unable to conceal), From the first moment of his vital breath, To his last hour of unrepenting death. Straight, o'er the guilty ghost, the Fury shakes The sounding whip and brandishes her snakes, And the pale sinner, with her sisters, takes. Then, of itself, unfolds th' eternal door; With dreadful sounds the brazen hinges roar. You see, before the gate, what stalking ghost Commands the guard, what sentries keep the post. More formidable Hydra stands within, Whose jaws with iron teeth severely grin. The gaping gulf low to the center lies, And twice as deep as earth is distant from the skies. The rivals of the gods, the Titan race, Here, sing'd with lightning, roll within th' unfathom'd space. Here lie th' Alaean twins, (I saw them both,) Enormous bodies, of gigantic growth, Who dar'd in fight the Thund'rer to defy, Affect his heav'n, and force him from the sky. Salmoneus, suff'ring cruel pains, I found, For emulating Jove; the rattling sound Of mimic thunder, and the glitt'ring blaze Of pointed lightnings, and their forky rays. Thro' Elis and the Grecian towns he flew; Th' audacious wretch four fiery coursers drew: He wav'd a torch aloft, and, madly vain, Sought godlike worship from a servile train. Ambitious fool! with horny hoofs to pass O'er hollow arches of resounding brass, To rival thunder in its rapid course, And imitate inimitable force! But he, the King of Heav'n, obscure on high, Bar'd his red arm, and, launching from the sky His writhen bolt, not shaking empty smoke, Down to the deep abyss the flaming felon strook. There Tityus was to see, who took his birth From heav'n, his nursing from the foodful earth. Here his gigantic limbs, with large embrace, Infold nine acres of infernal space. A rav'nous vulture, in his open'd side, Her crooked beak and cruel talons tried; Still for the growing liver digg'd his breast; The growing liver still supplied the feast; Still are his entrails fruitful to their pains: Th' immortal hunger lasts, th' immortal food remains. Ixion and Perithous I could name, And more Thessalian chiefs of mighty fame. High o'er their heads a mold'ring rock is plac'd, That promises a fall, and shakes at ev'ry blast. They lie below, on golden beds display'd; And genial feasts with regal pomp are made. The Queen of Furies by their sides is set, And snatches from their mouths th' untasted meat, Which if they touch, her hissing snakes she rears, Tossing her torch, and thund'ring in their ears. Then they, who brothers' better claim disown, Expel their parents, and usurp the throne; Defraud their clients, and, to lucre sold, Sit brooding on unprofitable gold; Who dare not give, and ev'n refuse to lend To their poor kindred, or a wanting friend. Vast is the throng of these; nor less the train Of lustful youths, for foul adult'ry slain: Hosts of deserters, who their honor sold, And basely broke their faith for bribes of gold. All these within the dungeon's depth remain, Despairing pardon, and expecting pain. Ask not what pains; nor farther seek to know Their process, or the forms of law below. Some roll a weighty stone; some, laid along, And bound with burning wires, on spokes of wheels are hung Unhappy Theseus, doom'd for ever there, Is fix'd by fate on his eternal chair; And wretched Phlegyas warns the world with cries (Could warning make the world more just or wise): 'Learn righteousness, and dread th' avenging deities.' To tyrants others have their country sold, Imposing foreign lords, for foreign gold; Some have old laws repeal'd, new statutes made, Not as the people pleas'd, but as they paid; With incest some their daughters' bed profan'd: All dar'd the worst of ills, and, what they dar'd, attain'd. Had I a hundred mouths, a hundred tongues, And throats of brass, inspir'd with iron lungs, I could not half those horrid crimes repeat, Nor half the punishments those crimes have met. But let us haste our voyage to pursue: The walls of Pluto's palace are in view; The gate, and iron arch above it, stands On anvils labor'd by the Cyclops' hands. Before our farther way the Fates allow, Here must we fix on high the golden bough." She said: and thro' the gloomy shades they pass'd, And chose the middle path. Arriv'd at last, The prince with living water sprinkled o'er His limbs and body; then approach'd the door, Possess'd the porch, and on the front above He fix'd the fatal bough requir'd by Pluto's love. These holy rites perform'd, they took their way Where long extended plains of pleasure lay: The verdant fields with those of heav'n may vie, With ether vested, and a purple sky; The blissful seats of happy souls below. Stars of their own, and their own suns, they know; Their airy limbs in sports they exercise, And on the green contend the wrestler's prize. Some in heroic verse divinely sing; Others in artful measures led the ring. The Thracian bard, surrounded by the rest, There stands conspicuous in his flowing vest; His flying fingers, and harmonious quill, Strikes sev'n distinguish'd notes, and sev'n at once they fill. Here found they Teucer's old heroic race, Born better times and happier years to grace. Assaracus and Ilus here enjoy Perpetual fame, with him who founded Troy. The chief beheld their chariots from afar, Their shining arms, and coursers train'd to war: Their lances fix'd in earth, their steeds around, Free from their harness, graze the flow'ry ground. The love of horses which they had, alive, And care of chariots, after death survive. Some cheerful souls were feasting on the plain; Some did the song, and some the choir maintain, Beneath a laurel shade, where mighty Po Mounts up to woods above, and hides his head below. Here patriots live, who, for their country's good, In fighting fields, were prodigal of blood: Priests of unblemish'd lives here make abode, And poets worthy their inspiring god; And searching wits, of more mechanic parts, Who grac'd their age with new-invented arts: Those who to worth their bounty did extend, And those who knew that bounty to commend. The heads of these with holy fillets bound, And all their temples were with garlands crown'd. To these the Sibyl thus her speech address'd, And first to him surrounded by the rest (Tow'ring his height, and ample was his breast): "Say, happy souls, divine Musaeus, say, Where lives Anchises, and where lies our way To find the hero, for whose only sake We sought the dark abodes, and cross'd the bitter lake?" To this the sacred poet thus replied: "In no fix'd place the happy souls reside. In groves we live, and lie on mossy beds, By crystal streams, that murmur thro' the meads: But pass yon easy hill, and thence descend; The path conducts you to your journey's end." This said, he led them up the mountain's brow, And shews them all the shining fields below. They wind the hill, and thro' the blissful meadows go. But old Anchises, in a flow'ry vale, Review'd his muster'd race, and took the tale: Those happy spirits, which, ordain'd by fate, For future beings and new bodies wait- With studious thought observ'd th' illustrious throng, In nature's order as they pass'd along: Their names, their fates, their conduct, and their care, In peaceful senates and successful war. He, when Aeneas on the plain appears, Meets him with open arms, and falling tears. "Welcome," he said, "the gods' undoubted race! O long expected to my dear embrace! Once more 't is giv'n me to behold your face! The love and pious duty which you pay Have pass'd the perils of so hard a way. 'T is true, computing times, I now believ'd The happy day approach'd; nor are my hopes deceiv'd. What length of lands, what oceans have you pass'd; What storms sustain'd, and on what shores been cast? How have I fear'd your fate! but fear'd it most, When love assail'd you, on the Libyan coast." To this, the filial duty thus replies: "Your sacred ghost before my sleeping eyes Appear'd, and often urg'd this painful enterprise. After long tossing on the Tyrrhene sea, My navy rides at anchor in the bay. But reach your hand, O parent shade, nor shun The dear embraces of your longing son!" He said; and falling tears his face bedew: Then thrice around his neck his arms he threw; And thrice the flitting shadow slipp'd away, Like winds, or empty dreams that fly the day. Now, in a secret vale, the Trojan sees A sep'rate grove, thro' which a gentle breeze Plays with a passing breath, and whispers thro' the trees; And, just before the confines of the wood, The gliding Lethe leads her silent flood. About the boughs an airy nation flew, Thick as the humming bees, that hunt the golden dew; In summer's heat on tops of lilies feed, And creep within their bells, to suck the balmy seed: The winged army roams the fields around; The rivers and the rocks remurmur to the sound. Aeneas wond'ring stood, then ask'd the cause Which to the stream the crowding people draws. Then thus the sire: "The souls that throng the flood Are those to whom, by fate, are other bodies ow'd: In Lethe's lake they long oblivion taste, Of future life secure, forgetful of the past. Long has my soul desir'd this time and place, To set before your sight your glorious race, That this presaging joy may fire your mind To seek the shores by destiny design'd."- "O father, can it be, that souls sublime Return to visit our terrestrial clime, And that the gen'rous mind, releas'd by death, Can covet lazy limbs and mortal breath?" Anchises then, in order, thus begun To clear those wonders to his godlike son: "Know, first, that heav'n, and earth's compacted frame, And flowing waters, and the starry flame, And both the radiant lights, one common soul Inspires and feeds, and animates the whole. This active mind, infus'd thro' all the space, Unites and mingles with the mighty mass. Hence men and beasts the breath of life obtain, And birds of air, and monsters of the main. Th' ethereal vigor is in all the same, And every soul is fill'd with equal flame; As much as earthy limbs, and gross allay Of mortal members, subject to decay, Blunt not the beams of heav'n and edge of day. From this coarse mixture of terrestrial parts, Desire and fear by turns possess their hearts, And grief, and joy; nor can the groveling mind, In the dark dungeon of the limbs confin'd, Assert the native skies, or own its heav'nly kind: Nor death itself can wholly wash their stains; But long-contracted filth ev'n in the soul remains. The relics of inveterate vice they wear, And spots of sin obscene in ev'ry face appear. For this are various penances enjoin'd; And some are hung to bleach upon the wind, Some plung'd in waters, others purg'd in fires, Till all the dregs are drain'd, and all the rust expires. All have their manes, and those manes bear: The few, so cleans'd, to these abodes repair, And breathe, in ample fields, the soft Elysian air. Then are they happy, when by length of time The scurf is worn away of each committed crime; No speck is left of their habitual stains, But the pure ether of the soul remains. But, when a thousand rolling years are past, (So long their punishments and penance last,) Whole droves of minds are, by the driving god, Compell'd to drink the deep Lethaean flood, In large forgetful draughts to steep the cares Of their past labors, and their irksome years, That, unrememb'ring of its former pain, The soul may suffer mortal flesh again." Thus having said, the father spirit leads The priestess and his son thro' swarms of shades, And takes a rising ground, from thence to see The long procession of his progeny. "Survey," pursued the sire, "this airy throng, As, offer'd to thy view, they pass along. These are th' Italian names, which fate will join With ours, and graff upon the Trojan line. Observe the youth who first appears in sight, And holds the nearest station to the light, Already seems to snuff the vital air, And leans just forward, on a shining spear: Silvius is he, thy last-begotten race, But first in order sent, to fill thy place; An Alban name, but mix'd with Dardan blood, Born in the covert of a shady wood: Him fair Lavinia, thy surviving wife, Shall breed in groves, to lead a solitary life. In Alba he shall fix his royal seat, And, born a king, a race of kings beget. Then Procas, honor of the Trojan name, Capys, and Numitor, of endless fame. A second Silvius after these appears; Silvius Aeneas, for thy name he bears; For arms and justice equally renown'd, Who, late restor'd, in Alba shall be crown'd. How great they look! how vig'rously they wield Their weighty lances, and sustain the shield! But they, who crown'd with oaken wreaths appear, Shall Gabian walls and strong Fidena rear; Nomentum, Bola, with Pometia, found; And raise Collatian tow'rs on rocky ground. All these shall then be towns of mighty fame, Tho' now they lie obscure, and lands without a name. See Romulus the great, born to restore The crown that once his injur'd grandsire wore. This prince a priestess of your blood shall bear, And like his sire in arms he shall appear. Two rising crests, his royal head adorn; Born from a god, himself to godhead born: His sire already signs him for the skies, And marks the seat amidst the deities. Auspicious chief! thy race, in times to come, Shall spread the conquests of imperial Rome- Rome, whose ascending tow'rs shall heav'n invade, Involving earth and ocean in her shade; High as the Mother of the Gods in place, And proud, like her, of an immortal race. Then, when in pomp she makes the Phrygian round, With golden turrets on her temples crown'd; A hundred gods her sweeping train supply; Her offspring all, and all command the sky. "Now fix your sight, and stand intent, to see Your Roman race, and Julian progeny. The mighty Caesar waits his vital hour, Impatient for the world, and grasps his promis'd pow'r. But next behold the youth of form divine, Ceasar himself, exalted in his line; Augustus, promis'd oft, and long foretold, Sent to the realm that Saturn rul'd of old; Born to restore a better age of gold. Afric and India shall his pow'r obey; He shall extend his propagated sway Beyond the solar year, without the starry way, Where Atlas turns the rolling heav'ns around, And his broad shoulders with their lights are crown'd. At his foreseen approach, already quake The Caspian kingdoms and Maeotian lake: Their seers behold the tempest from afar, And threat'ning oracles denounce the war. Nile hears him knocking at his sev'nfold gates, And seeks his hidden spring, and fears his nephew's fates. Nor Hercules more lands or labors knew, Not tho' the brazen-footed hind he slew, Freed Erymanthus from the foaming boar, And dipp'd his arrows in Lernaean gore; Nor Bacchus, turning from his Indian war, By tigers drawn triumphant in his car, From Nisus' top descending on the plains, With curling vines around his purple reins. And doubt we yet thro' dangers to pursue The paths of honor, and a crown in view? But what's the man, who from afar appears? His head with olive crown'd, his hand a censer bears, His hoary beard and holy vestments bring His lost idea back: I know the Roman king. He shall to peaceful Rome new laws ordain, Call'd from his mean abode a scepter to sustain. Him Tullus next in dignity succeeds, An active prince, and prone to martial deeds. He shall his troops for fighting fields prepare, Disus'd to toils, and triumphs of the war. By dint of sword his crown he shall increase, And scour his armor from the rust of peace. Whom Ancus follows, with a fawning air, But vain within, and proudly popular. Next view the Tarquin kings, th' avenging sword Of Brutus, justly drawn, and Rome restor'd. He first renews the rods and ax severe, And gives the consuls royal robes to wear. His sons, who seek the tyrant to sustain, And long for arbitrary lords again, With ignominy scourg'd, in open sight, He dooms to death deserv'd, asserting public right. Unhappy man, to break the pious laws Of nature, pleading in his children's cause! Howeer the doubtful fact is understood, 'T is love of honor, and his country's good: The consul, not the father, sheds the blood. Behold Torquatus the same track pursue; And, next, the two devoted Decii view: The Drusian line, Camillus loaded home With standards well redeem'd, and foreign foes o'ercome The pair you see in equal armor shine, Now, friends below, in close embraces join; But, when they leave the shady realms of night, And, cloth'd in bodies, breathe your upper light, With mortal hate each other shall pursue: What wars, what wounds, what slaughter shall ensue! From Alpine heights the father first descends; His daughter's husband in the plain attends: His daughter's husband arms his eastern friends. Embrace again, my sons, be foes no more; Nor stain your country with her children's gore! And thou, the first, lay down thy lawless claim, Thou, of my blood, who bearist the Julian name! Another comes, who shall in triumph ride, And to the Capitol his chariot guide, From conquer'd Corinth, rich with Grecian spoils. And yet another, fam'd for warlike toils, On Argos shall impose the Roman laws, And on the Greeks revenge the Trojan cause; Shall drag in chains their Achillean race; Shall vindicate his ancestors' disgrace, And Pallas, for her violated place. Great Cato there, for gravity renown'd, And conqu'ring Cossus goes with laurels crown'd. Who can omit the Gracchi? who declare The Scipios' worth, those thunderbolts of war, The double bane of Carthage? Who can see Without esteem for virtuous poverty, Severe Fabricius, or can cease t' admire The plowman consul in his coarse attire? Tir'd as I am, my praise the Fabii claim; And thou, great hero, greatest of thy name, Ordain'd in war to save the sinking state, And, by delays, to put a stop to fate! Let others better mold the running mass Of metals, and inform the breathing brass, And soften into flesh a marble face; Plead better at the bar; describe the skies, And when the stars descend, and when they rise. But, Rome, 't is thine alone, with awful sway, To rule mankind, and make the world obey, Disposing peace and war by thy own majestic way; To tame the proud, the fetter'd slave to free: These are imperial arts, and worthy thee." He paus'd; and, while with wond'ring eyes they view'd The passing spirits, thus his speech renew'd: "See great Marcellus! how, untir'd in toils, He moves with manly grace, how rich with regal spoils! He, when his country, threaten'd with alarms, Requires his courage and his conqu'ring arms, Shall more than once the Punic bands affright; Shall kill the Gaulish king in single fight; Then to the Capitol in triumph move, And the third spoils shall grace Feretrian Jove." Aeneas here beheld, of form divine, A godlike youth in glitt'ring armor shine, With great Marcellus keeping equal pace; But gloomy were his eyes, dejected was his face. He saw, and, wond'ring, ask'd his airy guide, What and of whence was he, who press'd the hero's side: "His son, or one of his illustrious name? How like the former, and almost the same! Observe the crowds that compass him around; All gaze, and all admire, and raise a shouting sound: But hov'ring mists around his brows are spread, And night, with sable shades, involves his head." "Seek not to know," the ghost replied with tears, "The sorrows of thy sons in future years. This youth (the blissful vision of a day) Shall just be shown on earth, and snatch'd away. The gods too high had rais'd the Roman state, Were but their gifts as permanent as great. What groans of men shall fill the Martian field! How fierce a blaze his flaming pile shall yield! What fun'ral pomp shall floating Tiber see, When, rising from his bed, he views the sad solemnity! No youth shall equal hopes of glory give, No youth afford so great a cause to grieve; The Trojan honor, and the Roman boast, Admir'd when living, and ador'd when lost! Mirror of ancient faith in early youth! Undaunted worth, inviolable truth! No foe, unpunish'd, in the fighting field Shall dare thee, foot to foot, with sword and shield; Much less in arms oppose thy matchless force, When thy sharp spurs shall urge thy foaming horse. Ah! couldst thou break thro' fate's severe decree, A new Marcellus shall arise in thee! Full canisters of fragrant lilies bring, Mix'd with the purple roses of the spring; Let me with fun'ral flow'rs his body strow; This gift which parents to their children owe, This unavailing gift, at least, I may bestow!" Thus having said, he led the hero round The confines of the blest Elysian ground; Which when Anchises to his son had shown, And fir'd his mind to mount the promis'd throne, He tells the future wars, ordain'd by fate; The strength and customs of the Latian state; The prince, and people; and forearms his care With rules, to push his fortune, or to bear. Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn; Of polish'd ivory this, that of transparent horn: True visions thro' transparent horn arise; Thro' polish'd ivory pass deluding lies. Of various things discoursing as he pass'd, Anchises hither bends his steps at last. Then, thro' the gate of iv'ry, he dismiss'd His valiant offspring and divining guest. Straight to the ships Aeneas his way, Embark'd his men, and skimm'd along the sea, Still coasting, till he gain'd Cajeta's bay. At length on oozy ground his galleys moor; Their heads are turn'd to sea, their sterns to shore.

Book VI

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section6/

Roman, remember by your strength to rule . . .To spare the conquered, battle down the proud. At last, the Trojan fleet arrives on the shores of Italy. The ships drop anchor off the coast of Cumae, near modern-day Naples. Following his father's instructions, Aeneas makes for the Temple of Apollo, where the Sibyl, a priestess, meets him. She commands him to make his request. Aeneas prays to Apollo to allow the Trojans to settle in Latium. The priestess warns him that more trials await in Italy: fighting on the scale of the Trojan War, a foe of the caliber of the Greek warrior Achilles, and further interference from Juno. Aeneas inquires whether the Sibyl can gain him entrance to Dis, so that he might visit his father's spirit as directed. The Sibyl informs him that to enter Dis with any hope of returning, he must first have a sign. He must find a golden branch in the nearby forest. She instructs him that if the bough breaks off the tree easily, it means fate calls Aeneas to the underworld. If Aeneas is not meant to travel there, the bough will not come off the tree. Aeneas looks in dismay at the size of the forest, but after he says a prayer, a pair of doves descends and guides him to the desired tree, from which he manages to tear the golden branch. The hero returns to the priestess with the token, and she leads him to the gate of Dis. Just inside the gate runs the river Acheron. The ferryman Charon delivers the spirits of the dead across the river; however, Aeneas notices that some souls are refused passage and must remain on the near bank. The Sibyl explains that these are the souls of dead people whose corpses have not received proper burial. With great sadness, Aeneas spots Palinurus among the undelivered. Charon explains to the visitors that no living bodies may cross the river, but the Sibyl shows him the golden branch. Appeased, Charon ferries them across. On the other side, Aeneas stands aghast, hearing the wailing of thousands of suffering souls. The spirits of the recently deceased line up before Minos for judgment. Nearby are the Fields of Mourning, where those who died for love wander. There, Aeneas sees Dido. Surprised and saddened, he speaks to her, with some regret, claiming that he left her not of his own will. The shade of the dead queen turns away from him toward the shade of her husband, Sychaeus, and Aeneas sheds tears of pity. Aeneas continues to the field of war heroes, where he sees many casualties of the Trojan War. The Greeks flee at first sight of him. The Sibyl urges Aeneas onward, and they pass an enormous fortress. Inside the fortress, Rhadamanthus doles out judgments upon the most evil of sinners, and terrible tortures are carried out. Finally, Aeneas and the Sibyl come to the Blessed Groves, where the good wander about in peace and comfort. At last, Aeneas sees his father. Anchises greets him warmly and congratulates him on having made the difficult journey. He gladly answers some of Aeneas's many questions, regarding such issues as how the dead are dispersed in Dis and how good souls can eventually reach the Fields of Gladness. But with little time at hand, Anchises presses on to the reason for Aeneas's journey to the underworld--the explication of his lineage in Italy. Anchises describes what will become of the Trojan descendants: Romulus will found Rome, a Caesar will eventually come from the line of Ascanius, and Rome will reach a Golden Age of rule over the world. Finally, Aeneas grasps the profound significance of his long journey to Italy. Anchises accompanies Aeneas out of Dis, and Aeneas returns to his comrades on the beach. At once, they pull up anchor and move out along the coast.

Aeneas's journey to the underworld in Book VI is another of the Aeneid's most famous passages. In fact, this passage helped raise Virgil to the status of a Christian prophet in the Middle Ages. In the fourteenth century, the Italian poet Dante used it as the foundation for his journey through hell in the Inferno, even though Virgil's version of the afterlife was obviously not a Christian one. Like Virgil, for example, Dante designed a hell with many sections and in which more severe punishments are handed down to those with greater sins. Also like Virgil, Dante exercised his formidable imagination in inventing penalties for sinners. While Virgil's Dis is pre-Christian, it represents an advanced version of classical theology, which was not codified in the way that modern religions are. In a world of temperamental gods who demand sacrifice and seem to dispense punishments and rewards almost arbitrarily, Virgil portrays an afterlife in which people are judged according to the virtue of their lives on Earth. This scheme of the afterlife is an idea that Christianity fused with the Judaic tradition into the Western consciousness centuries later, but that has its sources in the Orphic mysteries of classical antiquity. The presence of Orpheus, "priest of Thrace," in the Blessed Groves confirms the influence of Orphism, which was also a source for Plato's views of the afterlife, on Virgil's vision of the land of shades. Rhadamanthus's practice of listening to sinners and then sentencing them is remarkably similar to the Christian conception of judgment after death: souls who fail to repent for their sins on Earth pay more dearly for them in hell. Of course, one major difference is that Virgil does not have a separate equivalent of Christian heaven. All souls migrate to Dis, and the good ones occupy a better place, the Fields of Gladness, within the grand dungeon. However, in a way this scheme still fits with Christian theology, which postulates that before Christ's death and resurrection, all souls--good or bad--went to purgatory. To a Christian mindset, then, it was theologically accurate for Virgil, who died nineteen years before Christ's birth, to place even the good souls in Dis. Though this connection may seem tenuous to us, Virgil's influence among Christian poets and scholars increased because of these affinities. Aeneas's trip to the underworld is also Virgil's opportunity to indulge in an extensive account of Rome's future glory, particularly in his glorification of the Caesars. Virgil renders Augustus--his own ruler and benefactor--the epitome of the Roman Empire, the promised ruler who presides over the Golden Age. That Augustus was a patron of Virgil should not necessarily cause us to dismiss these passages as pure propaganda, however. Virgil had good reason to think he was living at the high point of history--after all, Rome ruled most of the known world and seemed invincible. In this context, Augustus emerges as the natural counterpart to Aeneas, bringing to perfect fruition the city whose history the Trojan hero initiated.

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The Aeneid.book vii

book vii

{"name": "Book VII", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section7/", "summary": "Amata tossed and turned . . .. . .While the infection first, like dew of poisonFallen on her, pervaded all her senses. Sailing up the coast of Italy, the Trojans reach the mouth of the Tiber River, near the kingdom of Latium. Virgil, invoking the muse once again to kick off the second half of his epic narrative, describes the political state of affairs in Latium. The king, Latinus, has a single daughter, Lavinia. She is pursued by many suitors, but the great warrior Turnus, lord of a nearby kingdom, appears most eligible for her hand. Worried by a prophet's prediction that a foreign army will conquer the kingdom, Latinus consults the Oracle of Faunus. A strange voice from the oracle instructs the king that his daughter should marry a foreigner, not a Latin. Meanwhile, Aeneas and his captains are eating on the beach, with fruit spread out on flat, hard loaves of bread. They finish the fruit but are still hungry, so they eat the bread that they have used as tables. Ascanius notes with a laugh that they have indeed eaten their tables, thus fulfilling the Harpies' curse in a manner less dire than anticipated. Aeneas recognizes that they have arrived at their promised land. The next day, he sends emissaries to King Latinus, requesting a share of the land for the foundation of a new city. Latinus offers territory as well as something extra--mindful of the oracle's words, he suggests that Aeneas take the hand of Lavinia in matrimony. Latinus recognizes that accepting fate, even if it means that the Trojans will one day rule his kingdom, proves a safer course than resisting destiny. Juno, however, still has not exhausted her anger against the Trojans. Unable to keep them from Italian shores forever, she vows at least to delay the foundation of their city and to cause them more suffering. She dispatches Allecto, one of the Furies, to Latium to rouse anger on the part of the natives against the Trojans. First, Allecto infects Queen Amata, Latinus's wife, causing her to oppose the marriage of Lavinia and Aeneas. Virgil describes Allecto's rousing of Amata's anger with the metaphor of a snake that twists and winds itself around Amata's body. Then Allecto approaches Turnus and inflames him with indignation at the idea of losing Lavinia and submitting to a Trojan king. Turnus assembles his army and prepares to drive the Trojans out of Italy. Shepherds prove the first to bear arms. As a result of Juno's meddling, Ascanius sets off to hunt in the woods and fells a stag that happens to be a favorite pet of Latinus's herdsman. The animal staggers back to his master before dying. The herdsman summons the other shepherds to track down the hunter, and the Trojans, sensing a commotion, come to Ascanius's aid. Many Latins are slain in a brief skirmish, then each side retreats temporarily. The shepherds go before King Latinus, carrying the dead, and plead with him to launch an all-out assault on the Trojans. Latinus does not wish to engage in battle, but all the court--even his own wife--clamor for war. In the end, he throws up his hands and retreats to his chambers, feeling unable to stop what the gods have set in motion. Turnus amasses a great army, captained by the greatest warriors in Italy, and marches them to war.", "analysis": "The Trojans' landing in Latium begins the epic's second half. The Aeneid demands comparison to the epics of Homer: whereas the first half of Virgil's epic--a chronicle of the wanderings of Aeneas and his crew in the wake of the fall of Troy--takes up the themes of the Odyssey, the second six books share the martial themes of the Iliad. In these later books, Virgil describes the strife that leads to the unification of the Latin peoples. Virgil's second invocation to the muse marks this division. Beginning in Book VII, Virgil dwells with more careful attention on the geography of the region he describes. He knows that these locations are familiar to his contemporary Roman audience, and will reinforce their sense of historical connection to the legendary events of the narrative. Virgil also incorporates an interesting element of Roman lore into the beginning of the war between the Latins and Trojans. Historically, whenever the Romans prepared to march into battle against an enemy, they would open the Gates of War--enormous gates of brass and iron that were constructed as a tribute to Mars, the god of war. Opening these gates, they believed themselves to be releasing the Furies, who inflame the hearts of soldiers and drive them into the fray with a passion for death--the polytheistic version of a battle cry. Virgil claims that this tradition already existed in the time of Aeneas. Generally, the king opens the gates, but since Latinus is unwilling--as he has opposed the war from the start--Juno descends to open the gates herself. At this moment, Turnus, whom the Fury Allecto has already infected with bloodlust, gathers his company to march out and confront the Trojans. Even though Juno openly admits for the first time that she cannot win, she persists in her defiance of the fates. She cannot prevent the Trojans from founding a new city, yet she remains fixed in her determination to inflict suffering on them. She says: It will not be permitted me--so be it-- To keep the man from rule in Italy; By changeless fate Lavinia waits, his bride. And yet to drag it out, to pile delay Upon delay in these great matters--that I can do: to destroy both countries' people, That I can do. At this point in the narrative, Virgil has imparted Juno with base emotions that, in their extremity, seem beyond human capacity. Her obsession with revenge drives her to hurt Aeneas, though she acknowledges the futility of the violence she incites with phrases such as \"t will not be permitted me\" and \"changeless fate.\" For Juno, thwarting the Trojans is no longer a matter of control but rather of pride, as her resolute assertion, \"That I can do,\" makes clear. Virgil's Juno, a fearsome, self-important, and vengeful character from the start, reaches the height of her anger in this passage and appears pathetic in her willful obstruction of fated events."}

BOOK VII And thou, O matron of immortal fame, Here dying, to the shore hast left thy name; Cajeta still the place is call'd from thee, The nurse of great Aeneas' infancy. Here rest thy bones in rich Hesperia's plains; Thy name ('t is all a ghost can have) remains. Now, when the prince her fun'ral rites had paid, He plow'd the Tyrrhene seas with sails display'd. From land a gentle breeze arose by night, Serenely shone the stars, the moon was bright, And the sea trembled with her silver light. Now near the shelves of Circe's shores they run, (Circe the rich, the daughter of the Sun,) A dang'rous coast: the goddess wastes her days In joyous songs; the rocks resound her lays: In spinning, or the loom, she spends the night, And cedar brands supply her father's light. From hence were heard, rebellowing to the main, The roars of lions that refuse the chain, The grunts of bristled boars, and groans of bears, And herds of howling wolves that stun the sailors' ears. These from their caverns, at the close of night, Fill the sad isle with horror and affright. Darkling they mourn their fate, whom Circe's pow'r, (That watch'd the moon and planetary hour,) With words and wicked herbs from humankind Had alter'd, and in brutal shapes confin'd. Which monsters lest the Trojans' pious host Should bear, or touch upon th' inchanted coast, Propitious Neptune steer'd their course by night With rising gales that sped their happy flight. Supplied with these, they skim the sounding shore, And hear the swelling surges vainly roar. Now, when the rosy morn began to rise, And wav'd her saffron streamer thro' the skies; When Thetis blush'd in purple not her own, And from her face the breathing winds were blown, A sudden silence sate upon the sea, And sweeping oars, with struggling, urge their way. The Trojan, from the main, beheld a wood, Which thick with shades and a brown horror stood: Betwixt the trees the Tiber took his course, With whirlpools dimpled; and with downward force, That drove the sand along, he took his way, And roll'd his yellow billows to the sea. About him, and above, and round the wood, The birds that haunt the borders of his flood, That bath'd within, or basked upon his side, To tuneful songs their narrow throats applied. The captain gives command; the joyful train Glide thro' the gloomy shade, and leave the main. Now, Erato, thy poet's mind inspire, And fill his soul with thy celestial fire! Relate what Latium was; her ancient kings; Declare the past and state of things, When first the Trojan fleet Ausonia sought, And how the rivals lov'd, and how they fought. These are my theme, and how the war began, And how concluded by the godlike man: For I shall sing of battles, blood, and rage, Which princes and their people did engage; And haughty souls, that, mov'd with mutual hate, In fighting fields pursued and found their fate; That rous'd the Tyrrhene realm with loud alarms, And peaceful Italy involv'd in arms. A larger scene of action is display'd; And, rising hence, a greater work is weigh'd. Latinus, old and mild, had long possess'd The Latin scepter, and his people blest: His father Faunus; a Laurentian dame His mother; fair Marica was her name. But Faunus came from Picus: Picus drew His birth from Saturn, if records be true. Thus King Latinus, in the third degree, Had Saturn author of his family. But this old peaceful prince, as Heav'n decreed, Was blest with no male issue to succeed: His sons in blooming youth were snatch'd by fate; One only daughter heir'd the royal state. Fir'd with her love, and with ambition led, The neighb'ring princes court her nuptial bed. Among the crowd, but far above the rest, Young Turnus to the beauteous maid address'd. Turnus, for high descent and graceful mien, Was first, and favor'd by the Latian queen; With him she strove to join Lavinia's hand, But dire portents the purpos'd match withstand. Deep in the palace, of long growth, there stood A laurel's trunk, a venerable wood; Where rites divine were paid; whose holy hair Was kept and cut with superstitious care. This plant Latinus, when his town he wall'd, Then found, and from the tree Laurentum call'd; And last, in honor of his new abode, He vow'd the laurel to the laurel's god. It happen'd once (a boding prodigy!) A swarm of bees, that cut the liquid sky, (Unknown from whence they took their airy flight,) Upon the topmost branch in clouds alight; There with their clasping feet together clung, And a long cluster from the laurel hung. An ancient augur prophesied from hence: "Behold on Latian shores a foreign prince! From the same parts of heav'n his navy stands, To the same parts on earth; his army lands; The town he conquers, and the tow'r commands." Yet more, when fair Lavinia fed the fire Before the gods, and stood beside her sire, (Strange to relate!) the flames, involv'd in smoke Of incense, from the sacred altar broke, Caught her dishevel'd hair and rich attire; Her crown and jewels crackled in the fire: From thence the fuming trail began to spread And lambent glories danc'd about her head. This new portent the seer with wonder views, Then pausing, thus his prophecy renews: "The nymph, who scatters flaming fires around, Shall shine with honor, shall herself be crown'd; But, caus'd by her irrevocable fate, War shall the country waste, and change the state." Latinus, frighted with this dire ostent, For counsel to his father Faunus went, And sought the shades renown'd for prophecy Which near Albunea's sulph'rous fountain lie. To these the Latian and the Sabine land Fly, when distress'd, and thence relief demand. The priest on skins of off'rings takes his ease, And nightly visions in his slumber sees; A swarm of thin aerial shapes appears, And, flutt'ring round his temples, deafs his ears: These he consults, the future fates to know, From pow'rs above, and from the fiends below. Here, for the gods' advice, Latinus flies, Off'ring a hundred sheep for sacrifice: Their woolly fleeces, as the rites requir'd, He laid beneath him, and to rest retir'd. No sooner were his eyes in slumber bound, When, from above, a more than mortal sound Invades his ears; and thus the vision spoke: "Seek not, my seed, in Latian bands to yoke Our fair Lavinia, nor the gods provoke. A foreign son upon thy shore descends, Whose martial fame from pole to pole extends. His race, in arms and arts of peace renown'd, Not Latium shall contain, nor Europe bound: 'T is theirs whate'er the sun surveys around." These answers, in the silent night receiv'd, The king himself divulg'd, the land believ'd: The fame thro' all the neighb'ring nations flew, When now the Trojan navy was in view. Beneath a shady tree, the hero spread His table on the turf, with cakes of bread; And, with his chiefs, on forest fruits he fed. They sate; and, (not without the god's command,) Their homely fare dispatch'd, the hungry band Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour, To mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour. Ascanius this observ'd, and smiling said: "See, we devour the plates on which we fed." The speech had omen, that the Trojan race Should find repose, and this the time and place. Aeneas took the word, and thus replies, Confessing fate with wonder in his eyes: "All hail, O earth! all hail, my household gods! Behold the destin'd place of your abodes! For thus Anchises prophesied of old, And this our fatal place of rest foretold: 'When, on a foreign shore, instead of meat, By famine forc'd, your trenchers you shall eat, Then ease your weary Trojans will attend, And the long labors of your voyage end. Remember on that happy coast to build, And with a trench inclose the fruitful field.' This was that famine, this the fatal place Which ends the wand'ring of our exil'd race. Then, on to-morrow's dawn, your care employ, To search the land, and where the cities lie, And what the men; but give this day to joy. Now pour to Jove; and, after Jove is blest, Call great Anchises to the genial feast: Crown high the goblets with a cheerful draught; Enjoy the present hour; adjourn the future thought." Thus having said, the hero bound his brows With leafy branches, then perform'd his vows; Adoring first the genius of the place, Then Earth, the mother of the heav'nly race, The nymphs, and native godheads yet unknown, And Night, and all the stars that gild her sable throne, And ancient Cybel, and Idaean Jove, And last his sire below, and mother queen above. Then heav'n's high monarch thunder'd thrice aloud, And thrice he shook aloft a golden cloud. Soon thro' the joyful camp a rumor flew, The time was come their city to renew. Then ev'ry brow with cheerful green is crown'd, The feasts are doubled, and the bowls go round. When next the rosy morn disclos'd the day, The scouts to sev'ral parts divide their way, To learn the natives' names, their towns explore, The coasts and trendings of the crooked shore: Here Tiber flows, and here Numicus stands; Here warlike Latins hold the happy lands. The pious chief, who sought by peaceful ways To found his empire, and his town to raise, A hundred youths from all his train selects, And to the Latian court their course directs, (The spacious palace where their prince resides,) And all their heads with wreaths of olive hides. They go commission'd to require a peace, And carry presents to procure access. Thus while they speed their pace, the prince designs His new-elected seat, and draws the lines. The Trojans round the place a rampire cast, And palisades about the trenches plac'd. Meantime the train, proceeding on their way, From far the town and lofty tow'rs survey; At length approach the walls. Without the gate, They see the boys and Latian youth debate The martial prizes on the dusty plain: Some drive the cars, and some the coursers rein; Some bend the stubborn bow for victory, And some with darts their active sinews try. A posting messenger, dispatch'd from hence, Of this fair troop advis'd their aged prince, That foreign men of mighty stature came; Uncouth their habit, and unknown their name. The king ordains their entrance, and ascends His regal seat, surrounded by his friends. The palace built by Picus, vast and proud, Supported by a hundred pillars stood, And round incompass'd with a rising wood. The pile o'erlook'd the town, and drew the sight; Surpris'd at once with reverence and delight. There kings receiv'd the marks of sov'reign pow'r; In state the monarchs march'd; the lictors bore Their awful axes and the rods before. Here the tribunal stood, the house of pray'r, And here the sacred senators repair; All at large tables, in long order set, A ram their off'ring, and a ram their meat. Above the portal, carv'd in cedar wood, Plac'd in their ranks, their godlike grandsires stood; Old Saturn, with his crooked scythe, on high; And Italus, that led the colony; And ancient Janus, with his double face, And bunch of keys, the porter of the place. There good Sabinus, planter of the vines, On a short pruning hook his head reclines, And studiously surveys his gen'rous wines; Then warlike kings, who for their country fought, And honorable wounds from battle brought. Around the posts hung helmets, darts, and spears, And captive chariots, axes, shields, and bars, And broken beaks of ships, the trophies of their wars. Above the rest, as chief of all the band, Was Picus plac'd, a buckler in his hand; His other wav'd a long divining wand. Girt in his Gabin gown the hero sate, Yet could not with his art avoid his fate: For Circe long had lov'd the youth in vain, Till love, refus'd, converted to disdain: Then, mixing pow'rful herbs, with magic art, She chang'd his form, who could not change his heart; Constrain'd him in a bird, and made him fly, With party-color'd plumes, a chatt'ring pie. In this high temple, on a chair of state, The seat of audience, old Latinus sate; Then gave admission to the Trojan train; And thus with pleasing accents he began: "Tell me, ye Trojans, for that name you own, Nor is your course upon our coasts unknown- Say what you seek, and whither were you bound: Were you by stress of weather cast aground? (Such dangers as on seas are often seen, And oft befall to miserable men,) Or come, your shipping in our ports to lay, Spent and disabled in so long a way? Say what you want: the Latians you shall find Not forc'd to goodness, but by will inclin'd; For, since the time of Saturn's holy reign, His hospitable customs we retain. I call to mind (but time the tale has worn) Th' Arunci told, that Dardanus, tho' born On Latian plains, yet sought the Phrygian shore, And Samothracia, Samos call'd before. From Tuscan Coritum he claim'd his birth; But after, when exempt from mortal earth, From thence ascended to his kindred skies, A god, and, as a god, augments their sacrifice," He said. Ilioneus made this reply: "O king, of Faunus' royal family! Nor wintry winds to Latium forc'd our way, Nor did the stars our wand'ring course betray. Willing we sought your shores; and, hither bound, The port, so long desir'd, at length we found; From our sweet homes and ancient realms expell'd; Great as the greatest that the sun beheld. The god began our line, who rules above; And, as our race, our king descends from Jove: And hither are we come, by his command, To crave admission in your happy land. How dire a tempest, from Mycenae pour'd, Our plains, our temples, and our town devour'd; What was the waste of war, what fierce alarms Shook Asia's crown with European arms; Ev'n such have heard, if any such there be, Whose earth is bounded by the frozen sea; And such as, born beneath the burning sky And sultry sun, betwixt the tropics lie. From that dire deluge, thro' the wat'ry waste, Such length of years, such various perils past, At last escap'd, to Latium we repair, To beg what you without your want may spare: The common water, and the common air; Sheds which ourselves will build, and mean abodes, Fit to receive and serve our banish'd gods. Nor our admission shall your realm disgrace, Nor length of time our gratitude efface. Besides, what endless honor you shall gain, To save and shelter Troy's unhappy train! Now, by my sov'reign, and his fate, I swear, Renown'd for faith in peace, for force in war; Oft our alliance other lands desir'd, And, what we seek of you, of us requir'd. Despite not then, that in our hands we bear These holy boughs, sue with words of pray'r. Fate and the gods, by their supreme command, Have doom'd our ships to seek the Latian land. To these abodes our fleet Apollo sends; Here Dardanus was born, and hither tends; Where Tuscan Tiber rolls with rapid force, And where Numicus opes his holy source. Besides, our prince presents, with his request, Some small remains of what his sire possess'd. This golden charger, snatch'd from burning Troy, Anchises did in sacrifice employ; This royal robe and this tiara wore Old Priam, and this golden scepter bore In full assemblies, and in solemn games; These purple vests were weav'd by Dardan dames." Thus while he spoke, Latinus roll'd around His eyes, and fix'd a while upon the ground. Intent he seem'd, and anxious in his breast; Not by the scepter mov'd, or kingly vest, But pond'ring future things of wondrous weight; Succession, empire, and his daughter's fate. On these he mus'd within his thoughtful mind, And then revolv'd what Faunus had divin'd. This was the foreign prince, by fate decreed To share his scepter, and Lavinia's bed; This was the race that sure portents foreshew To sway the world, and land and sea subdue. At length he rais'd his cheerful head, and spoke: "The pow'rs," said he, "the pow'rs we both invoke, To you, and yours, and mine, propitious be, And firm our purpose with their augury! Have what you ask; your presents I receive; Land, where and when you please, with ample leave; Partake and use my kingdom as your own; All shall be yours, while I command the crown: And, if my wish'd alliance please your king, Tell him he should not send the peace, but bring. Then let him not a friend's embraces fear; The peace is made when I behold him here. Besides this answer, tell my royal guest, I add to his commands my own request: One only daughter heirs my crown and state, Whom not our oracles, nor Heav'n, nor fate, Nor frequent prodigies, permit to join With any native of th' Ausonian line. A foreign son-in-law shall come from far (Such is our doom), a chief renown'd in war, Whose race shall bear aloft the Latian name, And thro' the conquer'd world diffuse our fame. Himself to be the man the fates require, I firmly judge, and, what I judge, desire." He said, and then on each bestow'd a steed. Three hundred horses, in high stables fed, Stood ready, shining all, and smoothly dress'd: Of these he chose the fairest and the best, To mount the Trojan troop. At his command The steeds caparison'd with purple stand, With golden trappings, glorious to behold, And champ betwixt their teeth the foaming gold. Then to his absent guest the king decreed A pair of coursers born of heav'nly breed, Who from their nostrils breath'd ethereal fire; Whom Circe stole from her celestial sire, By substituting mares produc'd on earth, Whose wombs conceiv'd a more than mortal birth. These draw the chariot which Latinus sends, And the rich present to the prince commends. Sublime on stately steeds the Trojans borne, To their expecting lord with peace return. But jealous Juno, from Pachynus' height, As she from Argos took her airy flight, Beheld with envious eyes this hateful sight. She saw the Trojan and his joyful train Descend upon the shore, desert the main, Design a town, and, with unhop'd success, Th' embassadors return with promis'd peace. Then, pierc'd with pain, she shook her haughty head, Sigh'd from her inward soul, and thus she said: "O hated offspring of my Phrygian foes! O fates of Troy, which Juno's fates oppose! Could they not fall unpitied on the plain, But slain revive, and, taken, scape again? When execrable Troy in ashes lay, Thro' fires and swords and seas they forc'd their way. Then vanquish'd Juno must in vain contend, Her rage disarm'd, her empire at an end. Breathless and tir'd, is all my fury spent? Or does my glutted spleen at length relent? As if 't were little from their town to chase, I thro' the seas pursued their exil'd race; Ingag'd the heav'ns, oppos'd the stormy main; But billows roar'd, and tempests rag'd in vain. What have my Scyllas and my Syrtes done, When these they overpass, and those they shun? On Tiber's shores they land, secure of fate, Triumphant o'er the storms and Juno's hate. Mars could in mutual blood the Centaurs bathe, And Jove himself gave way to Cynthia's wrath, Who sent the tusky boar to Calydon; (What great offense had either people done?) But I, the consort of the Thunderer, Have wag'd a long and unsuccessful war, With various arts and arms in vain have toil'd, And by a mortal man at length am foil'd. If native pow'r prevail not, shall I doubt To seek for needful succor from without? If Jove and Heav'n my just desires deny, Hell shall the pow'r of Heav'n and Jove supply. Grant that the Fates have firm'd, by their decree, The Trojan race to reign in Italy; At least I can defer the nuptial day, And with protracted wars the peace delay: With blood the dear alliance shall be bought, And both the people near destruction brought; So shall the son-in-law and father join, With ruin, war, and waste of either line. O fatal maid, thy marriage is endow'd With Phrygian, Latian, and Rutulian blood! Bellona leads thee to thy lover's hand; Another queen brings forth another brand, To burn with foreign fires another land! A second Paris, diff'ring but in name, Shall fire his country with a second flame." Thus having said, she sinks beneath the ground, With furious haste, and shoots the Stygian sound, To rouse Alecto from th' infernal seat Of her dire sisters, and their dark retreat. This Fury, fit for her intent, she chose; One who delights in wars and human woes. Ev'n Pluto hates his own misshapen race; Her sister Furies fly her hideous face; So frightful are the forms the monster takes, So fierce the hissings of her speckled snakes. Her Juno finds, and thus inflames her spite: "O virgin daughter of eternal Night, Give me this once thy labor, to sustain My right, and execute my just disdain. Let not the Trojans, with a feign'd pretense Of proffer'd peace, delude the Latian prince. Expel from Italy that odious name, And let not Juno suffer in her fame. 'T is thine to ruin realms, o'erturn a state, Betwixt the dearest friends to raise debate, And kindle kindred blood to mutual hate. Thy hand o'er towns the fun'ral torch displays, And forms a thousand ills ten thousand ways. Now shake, out thy fruitful breast, the seeds Of envy, discord, and of cruel deeds: Confound the peace establish'd, and prepare Their souls to hatred, and their hands to war." Smear'd as she was with black Gorgonian blood, The Fury sprang above the Stygian flood; And on her wicker wings, sublime thro' night, She to the Latian palace took her flight: There sought the queen's apartment, stood before The peaceful threshold, and besieg'd the door. Restless Amata lay, her swelling breast Fir'd with disdain for Turnus dispossess'd, And the new nuptials of the Trojan guest. From her black bloody locks the Fury shakes Her darling plague, the fav'rite of her snakes; With her full force she threw the poisonous dart, And fix'd it deep within Amata's heart, That, thus envenom'd, she might kindle rage, And sacrifice to strife her house husband's age. Unseen, unfelt, the fiery serpent skims Betwixt her linen and her naked limbs; His baleful breath inspiring, as he glides, Now like a chain around her neck he rides, Now like a fillet to her head repairs, And with his circling volumes folds her hairs. At first the silent venom slid with ease, And seiz'd her cooler senses by degrees; Then, ere th' infected mass was fir'd too far, In plaintive accents she began the war, And thus bespoke her husband: "Shall," she said, "A wand'ring prince enjoy Lavinia's bed? If nature plead not in a parent's heart, Pity my tears, and pity her desert. I know, my dearest lord, the time will come, You in vain, reverse your cruel doom; The faithless pirate soon will set to sea, And bear the royal virgin far away! A guest like him, a Trojan guest before, In shew of friendship sought the Spartan shore, And ravish'd Helen from her husband bore. Think on a king's inviolable word; And think on Turnus, her once plighted lord: To this false foreigner you give your throne, And wrong a friend, a kinsman, and a son. Resume your ancient care; and, if the god Your sire, and you, resolve on foreign blood, Know all are foreign, in a larger sense, Not born your subjects, or deriv'd from hence. Then, if the line of Turnus you retrace, He springs from Inachus of Argive race." But when she saw her reasons idly spent, And could not move him from his fix'd intent, She flew to rage; for now the snake possess'd Her vital parts, and poison'd all her breast; She raves, she runs with a distracted pace, And fills with horrid howls the public place. And, as young striplings whip the top for sport, On the smooth pavement of an empty court; The wooden engine flies and whirls about, Admir'd, with clamors, of the beardless rout; They lash aloud; each other they provoke, And lend their little souls at ev'ry stroke: Thus fares the queen; and thus her fury blows Amidst the crowd, and kindles as she goes. Nor yet content, she strains her malice more, And adds new ills to those contriv'd before: She flies the town, and, mixing with a throng Of madding matrons, bears the bride along, Wand'ring thro' woods and wilds, and devious ways, And with these arts the Trojan match delays. She feign'd the rites of Bacchus; cried aloud, And to the buxom god the virgin vow'd. "Evoe! O Bacchus!" thus began the song; And "Evoe!" answer'd all the female throng. "O virgin! worthy thee alone!" she cried; "O worthy thee alone!" the crew replied. "For thee she feeds her hair, she leads thy dance, And with thy winding ivy wreathes her lance." Like fury seiz'd the rest; the progress known, All seek the mountains, and forsake the town: All, clad in skins of beasts, the jav'lin bear, Give to the wanton winds their flowing hair, And shrieks and shoutings rend the suff'ring air. The queen herself, inspir'd with rage divine, Shook high above her head a flaming pine; Then roll'd her haggard eyes around the throng, And sung, in Turnus' name, the nuptial song: "Io, ye Latian dames! if any here Hold your unhappy queen, Amata, dear; If there be here," she said, "who dare maintain My right, nor think the name of mother vain; Unbind your fillets, loose your flowing hair, And orgies and nocturnal rites prepare." Amata's breast the Fury thus invades, And fires with rage, amid the sylvan shades; Then, when she found her venom spread so far, The royal house embroil'd in civil war, Rais'd on her dusky wings, she cleaves the skies, And seeks the palace where young Turnus lies. His town, as fame reports, was built of old By Danae, pregnant with almighty gold, Who fled her father's rage, and, with a train Of following Argives, thro' the stormy main, Driv'n by the southern blasts, was fated here to reign. 'T was Ardua once; now Ardea's name it bears; Once a fair city, now consum'd with years. Here, in his lofty palace, Turnus lay, Betwixt the confines of the night and day, Secure in sleep. The Fury laid aside Her looks and limbs, and with new methods tried The foulness of th' infernal form to hide. Propp'd on a staff, she takes a trembling mien: Her face is furrow'd, and her front obscene; Deep-dinted wrinkles on her cheek she draws; Sunk are her eyes, and toothless are her jaws; Her hoary hair with holy fillets bound, Her temples with an olive wreath are crown'd. Old Chalybe, who kept the sacred fane Of Juno, now she seem'd, and thus began, Appearing in a dream, to rouse the careless man: "Shall Turnus then such endless toil sustain In fighting fields, and conquer towns in vain? Win, for a Trojan head to wear the prize, Usurp thy crown, enjoy thy victories? The bride and scepter which thy blood has bought, The king transfers; and foreign heirs are sought. Go now, deluded man, and seek again New toils, new dangers, on the dusty plain. Repel the Tuscan foes; their city seize; Protect the Latians in luxurious ease. This dream all-pow'rful Juno sends; I bear Her mighty mandates, and her words you hear. Haste; arm your Ardeans; issue to the plain; With fate to friend, assault the Trojan train: Their thoughtless chiefs, their painted ships, that lie In Tiber's mouth, with fire and sword destroy. The Latian king, unless he shall submit, Own his old promise, and his new forget- Let him, in arms, the pow'r of Turnus prove, And learn to fear whom he disdains to love. For such is Heav'n's command." The youthful prince With scorn replied, and made this bold defense: "You tell me, mother, what I knew before: The Phrygian fleet is landed on the shore. I neither fear nor will provoke the war; My fate is Juno's most peculiar care. But time has made you dote, and vainly tell Of arms imagin'd in your lonely cell. Go; be the temple and the gods your care; Permit to men the thought of peace and war." These haughty words Alecto's rage provoke, And frighted Turnus trembled as she spoke. Her eyes grow stiffen'd, and with sulphur burn; Her hideous looks and hellish form return; Her curling snakes with hissings fill the place, And open all the furies of her face: Then, darting fire from her malignant eyes, She cast him backward as he strove to rise, And, ling'ring, sought to frame some new replies. High on her head she rears two twisted snakes, Her chains she rattles, and her whip she shakes; And, churning bloody foam, thus loudly speaks: "Behold whom time has made to dote, and tell Of arms imagin'd in her lonely cell! Behold the Fates' infernal minister! War, death, destruction, in my hand I bear." Thus having said, her smold'ring torch, impress'd With her full force, she plung'd into his breast. Aghast he wak'd; and, starting from his bed, Cold sweat, in clammy drops, his limbs o'erspread. "Arms! arms!" he cries: "my sword and shield prepare!" He breathes defiance, blood, and mortal war. So, when with crackling flames a caldron fries, The bubbling waters from the bottom rise: Above the brims they force their fiery way; Black vapors climb aloft, and cloud the day. The peace polluted thus, a chosen band He first commissions to the Latian land, In threat'ning embassy; then rais'd the rest, To meet in arms th' intruding Trojan guest, To force the foes from the Lavinian shore, And Italy's indanger'd peace restore. Himself alone an equal match he boasts, To fight the Phrygian and Ausonian hosts. The gods invok'd, the Rutuli prepare Their arms, and warn each other to the war. His beauty these, and those his blooming age, The rest his house and his own fame ingage. While Turnus urges thus his enterprise, The Stygian Fury to the Trojans flies; New frauds invents, and takes a steepy stand, Which overlooks the vale with wide command; Where fair Ascanius and his youthful train, With horns and hounds, a hunting match ordain, And pitch their toils around the shady plain. The Fury fires the pack; they snuff, they vent, And feed their hungry nostrils with the scent. 'Twas of a well-grown stag, whose antlers rise High o'er his front; his beams invade the skies. From this light cause th' infernal maid prepares The country churls to mischief, hate, and wars. The stately beast the two Tyrrhidae bred, Snatch'd from his dams, and the tame youngling fed. Their father Tyrrheus did his fodder bring, Tyrrheus, chief ranger to the Latian king: Their sister Silvia cherish'd with her care The little wanton, and did wreaths prepare To hang his budding horns, with ribbons tied His tender neck, and comb'd his silken hide, And bathed his body. Patient of command In time he grew, and, growing us'd to hand, He waited at his master's board for food; Then sought his salvage kindred in the wood, Where grazing all the day, at night he came To his known lodgings, and his country dame. This household beast, that us'd the woodland grounds, Was view'd at first by the young hero's hounds, As down the stream he swam, to seek retreat In the cool waters, and to quench his heat. Ascanius young, and eager of his game, Soon bent his bow, uncertain in his aim; But the dire fiend the fatal arrow guides, Which pierc'd his bowels thro' his panting sides. The bleeding creature issues from the floods, Possess'd with fear, and seeks his known abodes, His old familiar hearth and household gods. He falls; he fills the house with heavy groans, Implores their pity, and his pain bemoans. Young Silvia beats her breast, and cries aloud For succor from the clownish neighborhood: The churls assemble; for the fiend, who lay In the close woody covert, urg'd their way. One with a brand yet burning from the flame, Arm'd with a knotty club another came: Whate'er they catch or find, without their care, Their fury makes an instrument of war. Tyrrheus, the foster father of the beast, Then clench'd a hatchet in his horny fist, But held his hand from the descending stroke, And left his wedge within the cloven oak, To whet their courage and their rage provoke. And now the goddess, exercis'd in ill, Who watch'd an hour to work her impious will, Ascends the roof, and to her crooked horn, Such as was then by Latian shepherds borne, Adds all her breath: the rocks and woods around, And mountains, tremble at th' infernal sound. The sacred lake of Trivia from afar, The Veline fountains, and sulphureous Nar, Shake at the baleful blast, the signal of the war. Young mothers wildly stare, with fear possess'd, And strain their helpless infants to their breast. The clowns, a boist'rous, rude, ungovern'd crew, With furious haste to the loud summons flew. The pow'rs of Troy, then issuing on the plain, With fresh recruits their youthful chief sustain: Not theirs a raw and unexperienc'd train, But a firm body of embattled men. At first, while fortune favor'd neither side, The fight with clubs and burning brands was tried; But now, both parties reinforc'd, the fields Are bright with flaming swords and brazen shields. A shining harvest either host displays, And shoots against the sun with equal rays. Thus, when a black-brow'd gust begins to rise, White foam at first on the curl'd ocean fries; Then roars the main, the billows mount the skies; Till, by the fury of the storm full blown, The muddy bottom o'er the clouds is thrown. First Almon falls, old Tyrrheus' eldest care, Pierc'd with an arrow from the distant war: Fix'd in his throat the flying weapon stood, And stopp'd his breath, and drank his vital blood Huge heaps of slain around the body rise: Among the rest, the rich Galesus lies; A good old man, while peace he preach'd in vain, Amidst the madness of th' unruly train: Five herds, five bleating flocks, his pastures fill'd; His lands a hundred yoke of oxen till'd. Thus, while in equal scales their fortune stood The Fury bath'd them in each other's blood; Then, having fix'd the fight, exulting flies, And bears fulfill'd her promise to the skies. To Juno thus she speaks: "Behold! It is done, The blood already drawn, the war begun; The discord is complete; nor can they cease The dire debate, nor you command the peace. Now, since the Latian and the Trojan brood Have tasted vengeance and the sweets of blood; Speak, and my pow'r shall add this office more: The neighb'ing nations of th' Ausonian shore Shall hear the dreadful rumor, from afar, Of arm'd invasion, and embrace the war." Then Juno thus: "The grateful work is done, The seeds of discord sow'd, the war begun; Frauds, fears, and fury have possess'd the state, And fix'd the causes of a lasting hate. A bloody Hymen shall th' alliance join Betwixt the Trojan and Ausonian line: But thou with speed to night and hell repair; For not the gods, nor angry Jove, will bear Thy lawless wand'ring walks in upper air. Leave what remains to me." Saturnia said: The sullen fiend her sounding wings display'd, Unwilling left the light, and sought the nether shade. In midst of Italy, well known to fame, There lies a lake (Amsanctus is the name) Below the lofty mounts: on either side Thick forests the forbidden entrance hide. Full in the center of the sacred wood An arm arises of the Stygian flood, Which, breaking from beneath with bellowing sound, Whirls the black waves and rattling stones around. Here Pluto pants for breath from out his cell, And opens wide the grinning jaws of hell. To this infernal lake the Fury flies; Here hides her hated head, and frees the lab'ring skies. Saturnian Juno now, with double care, Attends the fatal process of the war. The clowns, return'd, from battle bear the slain, Implore the gods, and to their king complain. The corps of Almon and the rest are shown; Shrieks, clamors, murmurs, fill the frighted town. Ambitious Turnus in the press appears, And, aggravating crimes, augments their fears; Proclaims his private injuries aloud, A solemn promise made, and disavow'd; A foreign son is sought, and a mix'd mungril brood. Then they, whose mothers, frantic with their fear, In woods and wilds the flags of Bacchus bear, And lead his dances with dishevel'd hair, Increase the clamor, and the war demand, (Such was Amata's interest in the land,) Against the public sanctions of the peace, Against all omens of their ill success. With fates averse, the rout in arms resort, To force their monarch, and insult the court. But, like a rock unmov'd, a rock that braves The raging tempest and the rising waves- Propp'd on himself he stands; his solid sides Wash off the seaweeds, and the sounding tides- So stood the pious prince, unmov'd, and long Sustain'd the madness of the noisy throng. But, when he found that Juno's pow'r prevail'd, And all the methods of cool counsel fail'd, He calls the gods to witness their offense, Disclaims the war, asserts his innocence. "Hurried by fate," he cries, "and borne before A furious wind, we have the faithful shore. O more than madmen! you yourselves shall bear The guilt of blood and sacrilegious war: Thou, Turnus, shalt atone it by thy fate, And pray to Heav'n for peace, but pray too late. For me, my stormy voyage at an end, I to the port of death securely tend. The fun'ral pomp which to your kings you pay, Is all I want, and all you take away." He said no more, but, in his walls confin'd, Shut out the woes which he too well divin'd Nor with the rising storm would vainly strive, But left the helm, and let the vessel drive. A solemn custom was observ'd of old, Which Latium held, and now the Romans hold, Their standard when in fighting fields they rear Against the fierce Hyrcanians, or declare The Scythian, Indian, or Arabian war; Or from the boasting Parthians would regain Their eagles, lost in Carrhae's bloody plain. Two gates of steel (the name of Mars they bear, And still are worship'd with religious fear) Before his temple stand: the dire abode, And the fear'd issues of the furious god, Are fenc'd with brazen bolts; without the gates, The wary guardian Janus doubly waits. Then, when the sacred senate votes the wars, The Roman consul their decree declares, And in his robes the sounding gates unbars. The youth in military shouts arise, And the loud trumpets break the yielding skies. These rites, of old by sov'reign princes us'd, Were the king's office; but the king refus'd, Deaf to their cries, nor would the gates unbar Of sacred peace, or loose th' imprison'd war; But hid his head, and, safe from loud alarms, Abhorr'd the wicked ministry of arms. Then heav'n's imperious queen shot down from high: At her approach the brazen hinges fly; The gates are forc'd, and ev'ry falling bar; And, like a tempest, issues out the war. The peaceful cities of th' Ausonian shore, Lull'd in their ease, and undisturb'd before, Are all on fire; and some, with studious care, Their restiff steeds in sandy plains prepare; Some their soft limbs in painful marches try, And war is all their wish, and arms the gen'ral cry. Part scour the rusty shields with seam; and part New grind the blunted ax, and point the dart: With joy they view the waving ensigns fly, And hear the trumpet's clangor pierce the sky. Five cities forge their arms: th' Atinian pow'rs, Antemnae, Tibur with her lofty tow'rs, Ardea the proud, the Crustumerian town: All these of old were places of renown. Some hammer helmets for the fighting field; Some twine young sallows to support the shield; The croslet some, and some the cuishes mold, With silver plated, and with ductile gold. The rustic honors of the scythe and share Give place to swords and plumes, the pride of war. Old fauchions are new temper'd in the fires; The sounding trumpet ev'ry soul inspires. The word is giv'n; with eager speed they lace The shining headpiece, and the shield embrace. The neighing steeds are to the chariot tied; The trusty weapon sits on ev'ry side. And now the mighty labor is begun Ye Muses, open all your Helicon. Sing you the chiefs that sway'd th' Ausonian land, Their arms, and armies under their command; What warriors in our ancient clime were bred; What soldiers follow'd, and what heroes led. For well you know, and can record alone, What fame to future times conveys but darkly down. Mezentius first appear'd upon the plain: Scorn sate upon his brows, and sour disdain, Defying earth and heav'n. Etruria lost, He brings to Turnus' aid his baffled host. The charming Lausus, full of youthful fire, Rode in the rank, and next his sullen sire; To Turnus only second in the grace Of manly mien, and features of the face. A skilful horseman, and a huntsman bred, With fates averse a thousand men he led: His sire unworthy of so brave a son; Himself well worthy of a happier throne. Next Aventinus drives his chariot round The Latian plains, with palms and laurels crown'd. Proud of his steeds, he smokes along the field; His father's hydra fills his ample shield: A hundred serpents hiss about the brims; The son of Hercules he justly seems By his broad shoulders and gigantic limbs; Of heav'nly part, and part of earthly blood, A mortal woman mixing with a god. For strong Alcides, after he had slain The triple Geryon, drove from conquer'd Spain His captive herds; and, thence in triumph led, On Tuscan Tiber's flow'ry banks they fed. Then on Mount Aventine the son of Jove The priestess Rhea found, and forc'd to love. For arms, his men long piles and jav'lins bore; And poles with pointed steel their foes in battle gore. Like Hercules himself his son appears, In salvage pomp; a lion's hide he wears; About his shoulders hangs the shaggy skin; The teeth and gaping jaws severely grin. Thus, like the god his father, homely dress'd, He strides into the hall, a horrid guest. Then two twin brothers from fair Tibur came, (Which from their brother Tiburs took the name,) Fierce Coras and Catillus, void of fear: Arm'd Argive horse they led, and in the front appear. Like cloud-born Centaurs, from the mountain's height With rapid course descending to the fight; They rush along; the rattling woods give way; The branches bend before their sweepy sway. Nor was Praeneste's founder wanting there, Whom fame reports the son of Mulciber: Found in the fire, and foster'd in the plains, A shepherd and a king at once he reigns, And leads to Turnus' aid his country swains. His own Praeneste sends a chosen band, With those who plow Saturnia's Gabine land; Besides the succor which cold Anien yields, The rocks of Hernicus, and dewy fields, Anagnia fat, and Father Amasene- A num'rous rout, but all of naked men: Nor arms they wear, nor swords and bucklers wield, Nor drive the chariot thro' the dusty field, But whirl from leathern slings huge balls of lead, And spoils of yellow wolves adorn their head; The left foot naked, when they march to fight, But in a bull's raw hide they sheathe the right. Messapus next, (great Neptune was his sire,) Secure of steel, and fated from the fire, In pomp appears, and with his ardor warms A heartless train, unexercis'd in arms: The just Faliscans he to battle brings, And those who live where Lake Ciminia springs; And where Feronia's grove and temple stands, Who till Fescennian or Flavinian lands. All these in order march, and marching sing The warlike actions of their sea-born king; Like a long team of snowy swans on high, Which clap their wings, and cleave the liquid sky, When, homeward from their wat'ry pastures borne, They sing, and Asia's lakes their notes return. Not one who heard their music from afar, Would think these troops an army train'd to war, But flocks of fowl, that, when the tempests roar, With their hoarse gabbling seek the silent shore. Then Clausus came, who led a num'rous band Of troops embodied from the Sabine land, And, in himself alone, an army brought. 'T was he, the noble Claudian race begot, The Claudian race, ordain'd, in times to come, To share the greatness of imperial Rome. He led the Cures forth, of old renown, Mutuscans from their olive-bearing town, And all th' Eretian pow'rs; besides a band That follow'd from Velinum's dewy land, And Amiternian troops, of mighty fame, And mountaineers, that from Severus came, And from the craggy cliffs of Tetrica, And those where yellow Tiber takes his way, And where Himella's wanton waters play. Casperia sends her arms, with those that lie By Fabaris, and fruitful Foruli: The warlike aids of Horta next appear, And the cold Nursians come to close the rear, Mix'd with the natives born of Latine blood, Whom Allia washes with her fatal flood. Not thicker billows beat the Libyan main, When pale Orion sets in wintry rain; Nor thicker harvests on rich Hermus rise, Or Lycian fields, when Phoebus burns the skies, Than stand these troops: their bucklers ring around; Their trampling turns the turf, and shakes the solid ground. High in his chariot then Halesus came, A foe by birth to Troy's unhappy name: From Agamemnon born- to Turnus' aid A thousand men the youthful hero led, Who till the Massic soil, for wine renown'd, And fierce Auruncans from their hilly ground, And those who live by Sidicinian shores, And where with shoaly fords Vulturnus roars, Cales' and Osca's old inhabitants, And rough Saticulans, inur'd to wants: Light demi-lances from afar they throw, Fasten'd with leathern thongs, to gall the foe. Short crooked swords in closer fight they wear; And on their warding arm light bucklers bear. Nor Oebalus, shalt thou be left unsung, From nymph Semethis and old Telon sprung, Who then in Teleboan Capri reign'd; But that short isle th' ambitious youth disdain'd, And o'er Campania stretch'd his ample sway, Where swelling Sarnus seeks the Tyrrhene sea; O'er Batulum, and where Abella sees, From her high tow'rs, the harvest of her trees. And these (as was the Teuton use of old) Wield brazen swords, and brazen bucklers hold; Sling weighty stones, when from afar they fight; Their casques are cork, a covering thick and light. Next these in rank, the warlike Ufens went, And led the mountain troops that Nursia sent. The rude Equicolae his rule obey'd; Hunting their sport, and plund'ring was their trade. In arms they plow'd, to battle still prepar'd: Their soil was barren, and their hearts were hard. Umbro the priest the proud Marrubians led, By King Archippus sent to Turnus' aid, And peaceful olives crown'd his hoary head. His wand and holy words, the viper's rage, And venom'd wounds of serpents could assuage. He, when he pleas'd with powerful juice to steep Their temples, shut their eyes in pleasing sleep. But vain were Marsian herbs, and magic art, To cure the wound giv'n by the Dardan dart: Yet his untimely fate th' Angitian woods In sighs remurmur'd to the Fucine floods. The son of fam'd Hippolytus was there, Fam'd as his sire, and, as his mother, fair; Whom in Egerian groves Aricia bore, And nurs'd his youth along the marshy shore, Where great Diana's peaceful altars flame, In fruitful fields; and Virbius was his name. Hippolytus, as old records have said, Was by his stepdam sought to share her bed; But, when no female arts his mind could move, She turn'd to furious hate her impious love. Torn by wild horses on the sandy shore, Another's crimes th' unhappy hunter bore, Glutting his father's eyes with guiltless gore. But chaste Diana, who his death deplor'd, With Aesculapian herbs his life restor'd. Then Jove, who saw from high, with just disdain, The dead inspir'd with vital breath again, Struck to the center, with his flaming dart, Th' unhappy founder of the godlike art. But Trivia kept in secret shades alone Her care, Hippolytus, to fate unknown; And call'd him Virbius in th' Egerian grove, Where then he liv'd obscure, but safe from Jove. For this, from Trivia's temple and her wood Are coursers driv'n, who shed their master's blood, Affrighted by the monsters of the flood. His son, the second Virbius, yet retain'd His father's art, and warrior steeds he rein'd. Amid the troops, and like the leading god, High o'er the rest in arms the graceful Turnus rode: A triple of plumes his crest adorn'd, On which with belching flames Chimaera burn'd: The more the kindled combat rises high'r, The more with fury burns the blazing fire. Fair Io grac'd his shield; but Io now With horns exalted stands, and seems to low- A noble charge! Her keeper by her side, To watch her walks, his hundred eyes applied; And on the brims her sire, the wat'ry god, Roll'd from a silver urn his crystal flood. A cloud of foot succeeds, and fills the fields With swords, and pointed spears, and clatt'ring shields; Of Argives, and of old Sicanian bands, And those who plow the rich Rutulian lands; Auruncan youth, and those Sacrana yields, And the proud Labicans, with painted shields, And those who near Numician streams reside, And those whom Tiber's holy forests hide, Or Circe's hills from the main land divide; Where Ufens glides along the lowly lands, Or the black water of Pomptina stands. Last, from the Volscians fair Camilla came, And led her warlike troops, a warrior dame; Unbred to spinning, in the loom unskill'd, She chose the nobler Pallas of the field. Mix'd with the first, the fierce virago fought, Sustain'd the toils of arms, the danger sought, Outstripp'd the winds in speed upon the plain, Flew o'er the fields, nor hurt the bearded grain: She swept the seas, and, as she skimm'd along, Her flying feet unbath'd on billows hung. Men, boys, and women, stupid with surprise, Where'er she passes, fix their wond'ring eyes: Longing they look, and, gaping at the sight, Devour her o'er and o'er with vast delight; Her purple habit sits with such a grace On her smooth shoulders, and so suits her face; Her head with ringlets of her hair is crown'd, And in a golden caul the curls are bound. She shakes her myrtle jav'lin; and, behind, Her Lycian quiver dances in the wind.

Book VII

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section7/

Amata tossed and turned . . .. . .While the infection first, like dew of poisonFallen on her, pervaded all her senses. Sailing up the coast of Italy, the Trojans reach the mouth of the Tiber River, near the kingdom of Latium. Virgil, invoking the muse once again to kick off the second half of his epic narrative, describes the political state of affairs in Latium. The king, Latinus, has a single daughter, Lavinia. She is pursued by many suitors, but the great warrior Turnus, lord of a nearby kingdom, appears most eligible for her hand. Worried by a prophet's prediction that a foreign army will conquer the kingdom, Latinus consults the Oracle of Faunus. A strange voice from the oracle instructs the king that his daughter should marry a foreigner, not a Latin. Meanwhile, Aeneas and his captains are eating on the beach, with fruit spread out on flat, hard loaves of bread. They finish the fruit but are still hungry, so they eat the bread that they have used as tables. Ascanius notes with a laugh that they have indeed eaten their tables, thus fulfilling the Harpies' curse in a manner less dire than anticipated. Aeneas recognizes that they have arrived at their promised land. The next day, he sends emissaries to King Latinus, requesting a share of the land for the foundation of a new city. Latinus offers territory as well as something extra--mindful of the oracle's words, he suggests that Aeneas take the hand of Lavinia in matrimony. Latinus recognizes that accepting fate, even if it means that the Trojans will one day rule his kingdom, proves a safer course than resisting destiny. Juno, however, still has not exhausted her anger against the Trojans. Unable to keep them from Italian shores forever, she vows at least to delay the foundation of their city and to cause them more suffering. She dispatches Allecto, one of the Furies, to Latium to rouse anger on the part of the natives against the Trojans. First, Allecto infects Queen Amata, Latinus's wife, causing her to oppose the marriage of Lavinia and Aeneas. Virgil describes Allecto's rousing of Amata's anger with the metaphor of a snake that twists and winds itself around Amata's body. Then Allecto approaches Turnus and inflames him with indignation at the idea of losing Lavinia and submitting to a Trojan king. Turnus assembles his army and prepares to drive the Trojans out of Italy. Shepherds prove the first to bear arms. As a result of Juno's meddling, Ascanius sets off to hunt in the woods and fells a stag that happens to be a favorite pet of Latinus's herdsman. The animal staggers back to his master before dying. The herdsman summons the other shepherds to track down the hunter, and the Trojans, sensing a commotion, come to Ascanius's aid. Many Latins are slain in a brief skirmish, then each side retreats temporarily. The shepherds go before King Latinus, carrying the dead, and plead with him to launch an all-out assault on the Trojans. Latinus does not wish to engage in battle, but all the court--even his own wife--clamor for war. In the end, he throws up his hands and retreats to his chambers, feeling unable to stop what the gods have set in motion. Turnus amasses a great army, captained by the greatest warriors in Italy, and marches them to war.

The Trojans' landing in Latium begins the epic's second half. The Aeneid demands comparison to the epics of Homer: whereas the first half of Virgil's epic--a chronicle of the wanderings of Aeneas and his crew in the wake of the fall of Troy--takes up the themes of the Odyssey, the second six books share the martial themes of the Iliad. In these later books, Virgil describes the strife that leads to the unification of the Latin peoples. Virgil's second invocation to the muse marks this division. Beginning in Book VII, Virgil dwells with more careful attention on the geography of the region he describes. He knows that these locations are familiar to his contemporary Roman audience, and will reinforce their sense of historical connection to the legendary events of the narrative. Virgil also incorporates an interesting element of Roman lore into the beginning of the war between the Latins and Trojans. Historically, whenever the Romans prepared to march into battle against an enemy, they would open the Gates of War--enormous gates of brass and iron that were constructed as a tribute to Mars, the god of war. Opening these gates, they believed themselves to be releasing the Furies, who inflame the hearts of soldiers and drive them into the fray with a passion for death--the polytheistic version of a battle cry. Virgil claims that this tradition already existed in the time of Aeneas. Generally, the king opens the gates, but since Latinus is unwilling--as he has opposed the war from the start--Juno descends to open the gates herself. At this moment, Turnus, whom the Fury Allecto has already infected with bloodlust, gathers his company to march out and confront the Trojans. Even though Juno openly admits for the first time that she cannot win, she persists in her defiance of the fates. She cannot prevent the Trojans from founding a new city, yet she remains fixed in her determination to inflict suffering on them. She says: It will not be permitted me--so be it-- To keep the man from rule in Italy; By changeless fate Lavinia waits, his bride. And yet to drag it out, to pile delay Upon delay in these great matters--that I can do: to destroy both countries' people, That I can do. At this point in the narrative, Virgil has imparted Juno with base emotions that, in their extremity, seem beyond human capacity. Her obsession with revenge drives her to hurt Aeneas, though she acknowledges the futility of the violence she incites with phrases such as "t will not be permitted me" and "changeless fate." For Juno, thwarting the Trojans is no longer a matter of control but rather of pride, as her resolute assertion, "That I can do," makes clear. Virgil's Juno, a fearsome, self-important, and vengeful character from the start, reaches the height of her anger in this passage and appears pathetic in her willful obstruction of fated events.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_viii.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_7_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book viii

book viii

{"name": "Book VIII", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section8/", "summary": "While Turnus gathers his forces, Aeneas readies the Trojan troops and solicits support from nearby cities in Latium. Still, he is troubled at his prospects in battle. That night, the river god Tiberinus speaks to him and tells him to approach and form an alliance with the Arcadians, who are also at war with the Latins. Aeneas takes two galleys and rows several days up the Tiber to the forest of the Arcadians. There, the Trojans address the Arcadian king, Evander, who gladly offers aid against their common enemy and invites Aeneas to a feast. After the feast, holy rites are performed in honor of Hercules, the patron of the Arcadians, who killed the monster Cacus near where Arcadia now stands. Evander also explains how Saturn descended to Italy long ago and formed a nation from the wild savages who inhabited the land, calling it Latium. The Arcadians still dwell in relative simplicity. Even Evander boasts only a small house but offers everything at his disposal to Aeneas in hospitality. Meanwhile, Venus frets over Aeneas's upcoming war. She speaks to her husband, Vulcan, the god of fire and forging, and persuades him to make Aeneas new weapons and armor that will give him an added advantage. Vulcan commands his workers--Cyclopes inside the great volcano Etna--to begin forging the items. The next morning, back in Arcadia, King Evander assigns what troops he can spare to Aeneas's command. He also bids neighboring kingdoms to send their aid. All told, several thousand soldiers are rallied to accompany the Trojans back to the front, but due to their increased numbers, they must march rather than row, which causes a delay. Finally, Evander dispatches Pallas, his own son, and requests that Aeneas teach Pallas the arts of war and return him home in safety. The new army marches all day. At the camp that night, Venus suddenly appears to Aeneas and presents him with the arms that Vulcan has completed: helmet, corselet, sword, spear, and shield, all of them beautifully crafted and stronger than metal forged by humans. The face of the shield is particularly notable, for on it Vulcan has depicted the story of the Roman glory that awaits Italy. Aeneas sees Romulus being nursed by the she-wolf, the defeat of the Gauls, Caesar Augustus as he defeats Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium, and much else.", "analysis": "After many books in which we see Aeneas being alternately tormented at the hands of Juno and rescued by Venus and her allies, the fates begin to balance out. A veritable coalition of immortals now fortifies Aeneas for the coming campaign: he receives help from the gods Tiberinus, Venus, and Vulcan. Tiberinus helps Aeneas by telling him how to find help from a mortal, King Evander. Evander's immediate recognition of Aeneas--Evander knew Anchises and notices the family resemblance--prompts him to offer his hand without hesitation to form a pact with Aeneas. This gesture of automatic trust and loyalty is founded both on Aeneas's reputation and on his family lineage, two elements of character that rank among the highest values of heroic culture. The Trojans obtain the reinforcements they need in large part because they are recognized and even expected--their coming has been heralded in prophecy far and wide. Everywhere they tread, the famous name of Troy earns them respect and hospitality. The rich description of Aeneas's shield parallels Homer's description, in the Iliad, of the shield that Vulcan--known in the Iliad by his Greek name, Hephaestus--makes for Achilles. By emulating Homer, Virgil responds to and attempts to surpass the Greek tradition with the Roman. This desire to surpass was also evident in Augustan Rome, the Golden Age during which Virgil wrote, as the Roman Empire strove to outshine the accomplishments of ancient Greece. Aeneas's taking up of the new armor also symbolizes the way he symbolically shoulders the whole weight of the destiny of Rome. Like Anchises's speech in Book VI, Virgil's description of the mural on the shield Vulcan forges for Aeneas promotes the Roman legend and stresses Augustus's position as the culmination of that legend. Repeating some of the scenes that Anchises describes in the underworld, Virgil particularly emphasizes the contrast between Romulus's humble beginnings and Caesar's far-reaching glory. As before, Virgil compresses the many centuries that separate Romulus from Augustus into a few lines, which heightens the impact of the contrast. This rags-to-riches progression is a good tool for Virgil because it parallels the Aeneid's plot: Aeneas and his followers leave Troy as refugees without a home, but go on to found a new and greater city in Italy. The city that the Trojans eventually establish--to be called Lavinium, after Lavinia--is not the site of Rome. Centuries later, Rome will be built by Romulus and Remus further up the Tiber, near where the Arcadians dwell when Aeneas approaches them to form an alliance. Aeneas's excursion away from the main scene of action brings him to the land that will become Rome. To Roman audiences, this powerful geographic connection would make more concrete their understanding of Aeneas as the founding father of their civilization."}

BOOK VIII When Turnus had assembled all his pow'rs, His standard planted on Laurentum's tow'rs; When now the sprightly trumpet, from afar, Had giv'n the signal of approaching war, Had rous'd the neighing steeds to scour the fields, While the fierce riders clatter'd on their shields; Trembling with rage, the Latian youth prepare To join th' allies, and headlong rush to war. Fierce Ufens, and Messapus, led the crowd, With bold Mezentius, who blasphem'd aloud. These thro' the country took their wasteful course, The fields to forage, and to gather force. Then Venulus to Diomede they send, To beg his aid Ausonia to defend, Declare the common danger, and inform The Grecian leader of the growing storm: Aeneas, landed on the Latian coast, With banish'd gods, and with a baffled host, Yet now aspir'd to conquest of the state, And claim'd a title from the gods and fate; What num'rous nations in his quarrel came, And how they spread his formidable name. What he design'd, what mischief might arise, If fortune favor'd his first enterprise, Was left for him to weigh, whose equal fears, And common interest, was involv'd in theirs. While Turnus and th' allies thus urge the war, The Trojan, floating in a flood of care, Beholds the tempest which his foes prepare. This way and that he turns his anxious mind; Thinks, and rejects the counsels he design'd; Explores himself in vain, in ev'ry part, And gives no rest to his distracted heart. So, when the sun by day, or moon by night, Strike on the polish'd brass their trembling light, The glitt'ring species here and there divide, And cast their dubious beams from side to side; Now on the walls, now on the pavement play, And to the ceiling flash the glaring day. 'T was night; and weary nature lull'd asleep The birds of air, and fishes of the deep, And beasts, and mortal men. The Trojan chief Was laid on Tiber's banks, oppress'd with grief, And found in silent slumber late relief. Then, thro' the shadows of the poplar wood, Arose the father of the Roman flood; An azure robe was o'er his body spread, A wreath of shady reeds adorn'd his head: Thus, manifest to sight, the god appear'd, And with these pleasing words his sorrow cheer'd: "Undoubted offspring of ethereal race, O long expected in this promis'd place! Who thro' the foes hast borne thy banish'd gods, Restor'd them to their hearths, and old abodes; This is thy happy home, the clime where fate Ordains thee to restore the Trojan state. Fear not! The war shall end in lasting peace, And all the rage of haughty Juno cease. And that this nightly vision may not seem Th' effect of fancy, or an idle dream, A sow beneath an oak shall lie along, All white herself, and white her thirty young. When thirty rolling years have run their race, Thy son Ascanius, on this empty space, Shall build a royal town, of lasting fame, Which from this omen shall receive the name. Time shall approve the truth. For what remains, And how with sure success to crown thy pains, With patience next attend. A banish'd band, Driv'n with Evander from th' Arcadian land, Have planted here, and plac'd on high their walls; Their town the founder Pallanteum calls, Deriv'd from Pallas, his great-grandsire's name: But the fierce Latians old possession claim, With war infesting the new colony. These make thy friends, and on their aid rely. To thy free passage I submit my streams. Wake, son of Venus, from thy pleasing dreams; And, when the setting stars are lost in day, To Juno's pow'r thy just devotion pay; With sacrifice the wrathful queen appease: Her pride at length shall fall, her fury cease. When thou return'st victorious from the war, Perform thy vows to me with grateful care. The god am I, whose yellow water flows Around these fields, and fattens as it goes: Tiber my name; among the rolling floods Renown'd on earth, esteem'd among the gods. This is my certain seat. In times to come, My waves shall wash the walls of mighty Rome." He said, and plung'd below. While yet he spoke, His dream Aeneas and his sleep forsook. He rose, and looking up, beheld the skies With purple blushing, and the day arise. Then water in his hollow palm he took From Tiber's flood, and thus the pow'rs bespoke: "Laurentian nymphs, by whom the streams are fed, And Father Tiber, in thy sacred bed Receive Aeneas, and from danger keep. Whatever fount, whatever holy deep, Conceals thy wat'ry stores; where'er they rise, And, bubbling from below, salute the skies; Thou, king of horned floods, whose plenteous urn Suffices fatness to the fruitful corn, For this thy kind compassion of our woes, Shalt share my morning song and ev'ning vows. But, O be present to thy people's aid, And firm the gracious promise thou hast made!" Thus having said, two galleys from his stores, With care he chooses, mans, and fits with oars. Now on the shore the fatal swine is found. Wondrous to tell!- She lay along the ground: Her well-fed offspring at her udders hung; She white herself, and white her thirty young. Aeneas takes the mother and her brood, And all on Juno's altar are bestow'd. The foll'wing night, and the succeeding day, Propitious Tiber smooth'd his wat'ry way: He roll'd his river back, and pois'd he stood, A gentle swelling, and a peaceful flood. The Trojans mount their ships; they put from shore, Borne on the waves, and scarcely dip an oar. Shouts from the land give omen to their course, And the pitch'd vessels glide with easy force. The woods and waters wonder at the gleam Of shields, and painted ships that stem the stream. One summer's night and one whole day they pass Betwixt the greenwood shades, and cut the liquid glass. The fiery sun had finish'd half his race, Look'd back, and doubted in the middle space, When they from far beheld the rising tow'rs, The tops of sheds, and shepherds' lowly bow'rs, Thin as they stood, which, then of homely clay, Now rise in marble, from the Roman sway. These cots (Evander's kingdom, mean and poor) The Trojan saw, and turn'd his ships to shore. 'T was on a solemn day: th' Arcadian states, The king and prince, without the city gates, Then paid their off'rings in a sacred grove To Hercules, the warrior son of Jove. Thick clouds of rolling smoke involve the skies, And fat of entrails on his altar fries. But, when they saw the ships that stemm'd the flood, And glitter'd thro' the covert of the wood, They rose with fear, and left th' unfinish'd feast, Till dauntless Pallas reassur'd the rest To pay the rites. Himself without delay A jav'lin seiz'd, and singly took his way; Then gain'd a rising ground, and call'd from far: "Resolve me, strangers, whence, and what you are; Your bus'ness here; and bring you peace or war?" High on the stern Aeneas his stand, And held a branch of olive in his hand, While thus he spoke: "The Phrygians' arms you see, Expell'd from Troy, provok'd in Italy By Latian foes, with war unjustly made; At first affianc'd, and at last betray'd. This message bear: 'The Trojans and their chief Bring holy peace, and beg the king's relief.' Struck with so great a name, and all on fire, The youth replies: "Whatever you require, Your fame exacts. Upon our shores descend. A welcome guest, and, what you wish, a friend." He said, and, downward hasting to the strand, Embrac'd the stranger prince, and join'd his hand. Conducted to the grove, Aeneas broke The silence first, and thus the king bespoke: "Best of the Greeks, to whom, by fate's command, I bear these peaceful branches in my hand, Undaunted I approach you, tho' I know Your birth is Grecian, and your land my foe; From Atreus tho' your ancient lineage came, And both the brother kings your kindred claim; Yet, my self-conscious worth, your high renown, Your virtue, thro' the neighb'ring nations blown, Our fathers' mingled blood, Apollo's voice, Have led me hither, less by need than choice. Our founder Dardanus, as fame has sung, And Greeks acknowledge, from Electra sprung: Electra from the loins of Atlas came; Atlas, whose head sustains the starry frame. Your sire is Mercury, whom long before On cold Cyllene's top fair Maia bore. Maia the fair, on fame if we rely, Was Atlas' daughter, who sustains the sky. Thus from one common source our streams divide; Ours is the Trojan, yours th' Arcadian side. Rais'd by these hopes, I sent no news before, Nor ask'd your leave, nor did your faith implore; But come, without a pledge, my own ambassador. The same Rutulians, who with arms pursue The Trojan race, are equal foes to you. Our host expell'd, what farther force can stay The victor troops from universal sway? Then will they stretch their pow'r athwart the land, And either sea from side to side command. Receive our offer'd faith, and give us thine; Ours is a gen'rous and experienc'd line: We want not hearts nor bodies for the war; In council cautious, and in fields we dare." He said; and while spoke, with piercing eyes Evander view'd the man with vast surprise, Pleas'd with his action, ravish'd with his face: Then answer'd briefly, with a royal grace: "O valiant leader of the Trojan line, In whom the features of thy father shine, How I recall Anchises! how I see His motions, mien, and all my friend, in thee! Long tho' it be, 't is fresh within my mind, When Priam to his sister's court design'd A welcome visit, with a friendly stay, And thro' th' Arcadian kingdom took his way. Then, past a boy, the callow down began To shade my chin, and call me first a man. I saw the shining train with vast delight, And Priam's goodly person pleas'd my sight: But great Anchises, far above the rest, With awful wonder fir'd my youthful breast. I long'd to join in friendship's holy bands Our mutual hearts, and plight our mutual hands. I first accosted him: I sued, I sought, And, with a loving force, to Pheneus brought. He gave me, when at length constrain'd to go, A Lycian quiver and a Gnossian bow, A vest embroider'd, glorious to behold, And two rich bridles, with their bits of gold, Which my son's coursers in obedience hold. The league you ask, I offer, as your right; And, when to-morrow's sun reveals the light, With swift supplies you shall be sent away. Now celebrate with us this solemn day, Whose holy rites admit no long delay. Honor our annual feast; and take your seat, With friendly welcome, at a homely treat." Thus having said, the bowls (remov'd for fear) The youths replac'd, and soon restor'd the cheer. On sods of turf he set the soldiers round: A maple throne, rais'd higher from the ground, Receiv'd the Trojan chief; and, o'er the bed, A lion's shaggy hide for ornament they spread. The loaves were serv'd in canisters; the wine In bowls; the priest renew'd the rites divine: Broil'd entrails are their food, and beef's continued chine. But when the rage of hunger was repress'd, Thus spoke Evander to his royal guest: "These rites, these altars, and this feast, O king, From no vain fears or superstition spring, Or blind devotion, or from blinder chance, Or heady zeal, or brutal ignorance; But, sav'd from danger, with a grateful sense, The labors of a god we recompense. See, from afar, yon rock that mates the sky, About whose feet such heaps of rubbish lie; Such indigested ruin; bleak and bare, How desart now it stands, expos'd in air! 'T was once a robber's den, inclos'd around With living stone, and deep beneath the ground. The monster Cacus, more than half a beast, This hold, impervious to the sun, possess'd. The pavement ever foul with human gore; Heads, and their mangled members, hung the door. Vulcan this plague begot; and, like his sire, Black clouds he belch'd, and flakes of livid fire. Time, long expected, eas'd us of our load, And brought the needful presence of a god. Th' avenging force of Hercules, from Spain, Arriv'd in triumph, from Geryon slain: Thrice liv'd the giant, and thrice liv'd in vain. His prize, the lowing herds, Alcides drove Near Tiber's bank, to graze the shady grove. Allur'd with hope of plunder, and intent By force to rob, by fraud to circumvent, The brutal Cacus, as by chance they stray'd, Four oxen thence, and four fair kine convey'd; And, lest the printed footsteps might be seen, He dragg'd 'em backwards to his rocky den. The tracks averse a lying notice gave, And led the searcher backward from the cave. "Meantime the herdsman hero shifts his place, To find fresh pasture and untrodden grass. The beasts, who miss'd their mates, fill'd all around With bellowings, and the rocks restor'd the sound. One heifer, who had heard her love complain, Roar'd from the cave, and made the project vain. Alcides found the fraud; with rage he shook, And toss'd about his head his knotted oak. Swift as the winds, or Scythian arrows' flight, He clomb, with eager haste, th' aerial height. Then first we saw the monster mend his pace; Fear his eyes, and paleness in his face, Confess'd the god's approach. Trembling he springs, As terror had increas'd his feet with wings; Nor stay'd for stairs; but down the depth he threw His body, on his back the door he drew (The door, a rib of living rock; with pains His father hew'd it out, and bound with iron chains): He broke the heavy links, the mountain clos'd, And bars and levers to his foe oppos'd. The wretch had hardly made his dungeon fast; The fierce avenger came with bounding haste; Survey'd the mouth of the forbidden hold, And here and there his raging eyes he roll'd. He gnash'd his teeth; and thrice he compass'd round With winged speed the circuit of the ground. Thrice at the cavern's mouth he pull'd in vain, And, panting, thrice desisted from his pain. A pointed flinty rock, all bare and black, Grew gibbous from behind the mountain's back; Owls, ravens, all ill omens of the night, Here built their nests, and hither wing'd their flight. The leaning head hung threat'ning o'er the flood, And nodded to the left. The hero stood Adverse, with planted feet, and, from the right, Tugg'd at the solid stone with all his might. Thus heav'd, the fix'd foundations of the rock Gave way; heav'n echo'd at the rattling shock. Tumbling, it chok'd the flood: on either side The banks leap backward, and the streams divide; The sky shrunk upward with unusual dread, And trembling Tiber div'd beneath his bed. The court of Cacus stands reveal'd to sight; The cavern glares with new-admitted light. So the pent vapors, with a rumbling sound, Heave from below, and rend the hollow ground; A sounding flaw succeeds; and, from on high, The gods with hate beheld the nether sky: The ghosts repine at violated night, And curse th' invading sun, and sicken at the sight. The graceless monster, caught in open day, Inclos'd, and in despair to fly away, Howls horrible from underneath, and fills His hollow palace with unmanly yells. The hero stands above, and from afar Plies him with darts, and stones, and distant war. He, from his nostrils huge mouth, expires Black clouds of smoke, amidst his father's fires, Gath'ring, with each repeated blast, the night, To make uncertain aim, and erring sight. The wrathful god then plunges from above, And, where in thickest waves the sparkles drove, There lights; and wades thro' fumes, and gropes his way, Half sing'd, half stifled, till he grasps his prey. The monster, spewing fruitless flames, he found; He squeez'd his throat; he writh'd his neck around, And in a knot his crippled members bound; Then from their sockets tore his burning eyes: Roll'd on a heap, the breathless robber lies. The doors, unbarr'd, receive the rushing day, And thoro' lights disclose the ravish'd prey. The bulls, redeem'd, breathe open air again. Next, by the feet, they drag him from his den. The wond'ring neighborhood, with glad surprise, Behold his shagged breast, his giant size, His mouth that flames no more, and his extinguish'd eyes. From that auspicious day, with rites divine, We worship at the hero's holy shrine. Potitius first ordain'd these annual vows: As priests, were added the Pinarian house, Who rais'd this altar in the sacred shade, Where honors, ever due, for ever shall be paid. For these deserts, and this high virtue shown, Ye warlike youths, your heads with garlands crown: Fill high the goblets with a sparkling flood, And with deep draughts invoke our common god." This said, a double wreath Evander twin'd, And poplars black and white his temples bind. Then brims his ample bowl. With like design The rest invoke the gods, with sprinkled wine. Meantime the sun descended from the skies, And the bright evening star began to rise. And now the priests, Potitius at their head, In skins of beasts involv'd, the long procession led; Held high the flaming tapers in their hands, As custom had prescrib'd their holy bands; Then with a second course the tables load, And with full chargers offer to the god. The Salii sing, and cense his altars round With Saban smoke, their heads with poplar bound- One choir of old, another of the young, To dance, and bear the burthen of the song. The lay records the labors, and the praise, And all th' immortal acts of Hercules: First, how the mighty babe, when swath'd in bands, The serpents strangled with his infant hands; Then, as in years and matchless force he grew, Th' Oechalian walls, and Trojan, overthrew. Besides, a thousand hazards they relate, Procur'd by Juno's and Eurystheus' hate: "Thy hands, unconquer'd hero, could subdue The cloud-born Centaurs, and the monster crew: Nor thy resistless arm the bull withstood, Nor he, the roaring terror of the wood. The triple porter of the Stygian seat, With lolling tongue, lay fawning at thy feet, And, seiz'd with fear, forgot his mangled meat. Th' infernal waters trembled at thy sight; Thee, god, no face of danger could affright; Not huge Typhoeus, nor th' unnumber'd snake, Increas'd with hissing heads, in Lerna's lake. Hail, Jove's undoubted son! an added grace To heav'n and the great author of thy race! Receive the grateful off'rings which we pay, And smile propitious on thy solemn day!" In numbers thus they sung; above the rest, The den and death of Cacus crown the feast. The woods to hollow vales convey the sound, The vales to hills, and hills the notes rebound. The rites perform'd, the cheerful train retire. Betwixt young Pallas and his aged sire, The Trojan pass'd, the city to survey, And pleasing talk beguil'd the tedious way. The stranger cast around his curious eyes, New objects viewing still, with new surprise; With greedy joy enquires of various things, And acts and monuments of ancient kings. Then thus the founder of the Roman tow'rs: "These woods were first the seat of sylvan pow'rs, Of Nymphs and Fauns, and salvage men, who took Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn oak. Nor laws they knew, nor manners, nor the care Of lab'ring oxen, or the shining share, Nor arts of gain, nor what they gain'd to spare. Their exercise the chase; the running flood Supplied their thirst, the trees supplied their food. Then Saturn came, who fled the pow'r of Jove, Robb'd of his realms, and banish'd from above. The men, dispers'd on hills, to towns he brought, And laws ordain'd, and civil customs taught, And Latium call'd the land where safe he lay From his unduteous son, and his usurping sway. With his mild empire, peace and plenty came; And hence the golden times deriv'd their name. A more degenerate and discolor'd age Succeeded this, with avarice and rage. Th' Ausonians then, and bold Sicanians came; And Saturn's empire often chang'd the name. Then kings, gigantic Tybris, and the rest, With arbitrary sway the land oppress'd: For Tiber's flood was Albula before, Till, from the tyrant's fate, his name it bore. I last arriv'd, driv'n from my native home By fortune's pow'r, and fate's resistless doom. Long toss'd on seas, I sought this happy land, Warn'd by my mother nymph, and call'd by Heav'n's command." Thus, walking on, he spoke, and shew'd the gate, Since call'd Carmental by the Roman state; Where stood an altar, sacred to the name Of old Carmenta, the prophetic dame, Who to her son foretold th' Aenean race, Sublime in fame, and Rome's imperial place: Then shews the forest, which, in after times, Fierce Romulus for perpetrated crimes A sacred refuge made; with this, the shrine Where Pan below the rock had rites divine: Then tells of Argus' death, his murder'd guest, Whose grave and tomb his innocence attest. Thence, to the steep Tarpeian rock he leads; Now roof'd with gold, then thatch'd with homely reeds. A reverent fear (such superstition reigns Among the rude) ev'n then possess'd the swains. Some god, they knew- what god, they could not tell- Did there amidst the sacred horror dwell. Th' Arcadians thought him Jove; and said they saw The mighty Thund'rer with majestic awe, Who took his shield, and dealt his bolts around, And scatter'd tempests on the teeming ground. Then saw two heaps of ruins, (once they stood Two stately towns, on either side the flood,) Saturnia's and Janicula's remains; And either place the founder's name retains. Discoursing thus together, they resort Where poor Evander kept his country court. They view'd the ground of Rome's litigious hall; (Once oxen low'd, where now the lawyers bawl;) Then, stooping, thro' the narrow gate they press'd, When thus the king bespoke his Trojan guest: "Mean as it is, this palace, and this door, Receiv'd Alcides, then a conqueror. Dare to be poor; accept our homely food, Which feasted him, and emulate a god." Then underneath a lowly roof he led The weary prince, and laid him on a bed; The stuffing leaves, with hides of bears o'erspread. Now Night had shed her silver dews around, And with her sable wings embrac'd the ground, When love's fair goddess, anxious for her son, (New tumults rising, and new wars begun,) Couch'd with her husband in his golden bed, With these alluring words invokes his aid; And, that her pleasing speech his mind may move, Inspires each accent with the charms of love: "While cruel fate conspir'd with Grecian pow'rs, To level with the ground the Trojan tow'rs, I ask'd not aid th' unhappy to restore, Nor did the succor of thy skill implore; Nor urg'd the labors of my lord in vain, A sinking empire longer to sustain, Tho'much I ow'd to Priam's house, and more The dangers of Aeneas did deplore. But now, by Jove's command, and fate's decree, His race is doom'd to reign in Italy: With humble suit I beg thy needful art, O still propitious pow'r, that rules my heart! A mother kneels a suppliant for her son. By Thetis and Aurora thou wert won To forge impenetrable shields, and grace With fated arms a less illustrious race. Behold, what haughty nations are combin'd Against the relics of the Phrygian kind, With fire and sword my people to destroy, And conquer Venus twice, in conqu'ring Troy." She said; and straight her arms, of snowy hue, About her unresolving husband threw. Her soft embraces soon infuse desire; His bones and marrow sudden warmth inspire; And all the godhead feels the wonted fire. Not half so swift the rattling thunder flies, Or forky lightnings flash along the skies. The goddess, proud of her successful wiles, And conscious of her form, in secret smiles. Then thus the pow'r, obnoxious to her charms, Panting, and half dissolving in her arms: "Why seek you reasons for a cause so just, Or your own beauties or my love distrust? Long since, had you requir'd my helpful hand, Th' artificer and art you might command, To labor arms for Troy: nor Jove, nor fate, Confin'd their empire to so short a date. And, if you now desire new wars to wage, My skill I promise, and my pains engage. Whatever melting metals can conspire, Or breathing bellows, or the forming fire, Is freely yours: your anxious fears remove, And think no task is difficult to love." Trembling he spoke; and, eager of her charms, He snatch'd the willing goddess to his arms; Till in her lap infus'd, he lay possess'd Of full desire, and sunk to pleasing rest. Now when the Night her middle race had rode, And his first slumber had refresh'd the god- The time when early housewives leave the bed; When living embers on the hearth they spread, Supply the lamp, and call the maids to rise- With yawning mouths, and with half-open'd eyes, They ply the distaff by the winking light, And to their daily labor add the night: Thus frugally they earn their children's bread, And uncorrupted keep the nuptial bed- Not less concern'd, nor at a later hour, Rose from his downy couch the forging pow'r. Sacred to Vulcan's name, an isle there lay, Betwixt Sicilia's coasts and Lipare, Rais'd high on smoking rocks; and, deep below, In hollow caves the fires of Aetna glow. The Cyclops here their heavy hammers deal; Loud strokes, and hissings of tormented steel, Are heard around; the boiling waters roar, And smoky flames thro' fuming tunnels soar. Hether the Father of the Fire, by night, Thro' the brown air precipitates his flight. On their eternal anvils here he found The brethren beating, and the blows go round. A load of pointless thunder now there lies Before their hands, to ripen for the skies: These darts, for angry Jove, they daily cast; Consum'd on mortals with prodigious waste. Three rays of writhen rain, of fire three more, Of winged southern winds and cloudy store As many parts, the dreadful mixture frame; And fears are added, and avenging flame. Inferior ministers, for Mars, repair His broken axletrees and blunted war, And send him forth again with furbish'd arms, To wake the lazy war with trumpets' loud alarms. The rest refresh the scaly snakes that fold The shield of Pallas, and renew their gold. Full on the crest the Gorgon's head they place, With eyes that roll in death, and with distorted face. "My sons," said Vulcan, "set your tasks aside; Your strength and master-skill must now be tried. Arms for a hero forge; arms that require Your force, your speed, and all your forming fire." He said. They set their former work aside, And their new toils with eager haste divide. A flood of molten silver, brass, and gold, And deadly steel, in the large furnace roll'd; Of this, their artful hands a shield prepare, Alone sufficient to sustain the war. Sev'n orbs within a spacious round they close: One stirs the fire, and one the bellows blows. The hissing steel is in the smithy drown'd; The grot with beaten anvils groans around. By turns their arms advance, in equal time; By turns their hands descend, and hammers chime. They turn the glowing mass with crooked tongs; The fiery work proceeds, with rustic songs. While, at the Lemnian god's command, they urge Their labors thus, and ply th' Aeolian forge, The cheerful morn salutes Evander's eyes, And songs of chirping birds invite to rise. He leaves his lowly bed: his buskins meet Above his ankles; sandals sheathe his feet: He sets his trusty sword upon his side, And o'er his shoulder throws a panther's hide. Two menial dogs before their master press'd. Thus clad, and guarded thus, he seeks his kingly guest. Mindful of promis'd aid, he mends his pace, But meets Aeneas in the middle space. Young Pallas did his father's steps attend, And true Achates waited on his friend. They join their hands; a secret seat they choose; Th' Arcadian first their former talk renews: "Undaunted prince, I never can believe The Trojan empire lost, while you survive. Command th' assistance of a faithful friend; But feeble are the succors I can send. Our narrow kingdom here the Tiber bounds; That other side the Latian state surrounds, Insults our walls, and wastes our fruitful grounds. But mighty nations I prepare, to join Their arms with yours, and aid your just design. You come, as by your better genius sent, And fortune seems to favor your intent. Not far from hence there stands a hilly town, Of ancient building, and of high renown, Torn from the Tuscans by the Lydian race, Who gave the name of Caere to the place, Once Agyllina call'd. It flourish'd long, In pride of wealth and warlike people strong, Till curs'd Mezentius, in a fatal hour, Assum'd the crown, with arbitrary pow'r. What words can paint those execrable times, The subjects' suff'rings, and the tyrant's crimes! That blood, those murthers, O ye gods, replace On his own head, and on his impious race! The living and the dead at his command Were coupled, face to face, and hand to hand, Till, chok'd with stench, in loath'd embraces tied, The ling'ring wretches pin'd away and died. Thus plung'd in ills, and meditating more- The people's patience, tir'd, no longer bore The raging monster; but with arms beset His house, and vengeance and destruction threat. They fire his palace: while the flame ascends, They force his guards, and execute his friends. He cleaves the crowd, and, favor'd by the night, To Turnus' friendly court directs his flight. By just revenge the Tuscans set on fire, With arms, their king to punishment require: Their num'rous troops, now muster'd on the strand, My counsel shall submit to your command. Their navy swarms upon the coasts; they cry To hoist their anchors, but the gods deny. An ancient augur, skill'd in future fate, With these foreboding words restrains their hate: 'Ye brave in arms, ye Lydian blood, the flow'r Of Tuscan youth, and choice of all their pow'r, Whom just revenge against Mezentius arms, To seek your tyrant's death by lawful arms; Know this: no native of our land may lead This pow'rful people; seek a foreign head.' Aw'd with these words, in camps they still abide, And wait with longing looks their promis'd guide. Tarchon, the Tuscan chief, to me has sent Their crown, and ev'ry regal ornament: The people join their own with his desire; And all my conduct, as their king, require. But the chill blood that creeps within my veins, And age, and listless limbs unfit for pains, And a soul conscious of its own decay, Have forc'd me to refuse imperial sway. My Pallas were more fit to mount the throne, And should, but he's a Sabine mother's son, And half a native; but, in you, combine A manly vigor, and a foreign line. Where Fate and smiling Fortune shew the way, Pursue the ready path to sov'reign sway. The staff of my declining days, my son, Shall make your good or ill success his own; In fighting fields from you shall learn to dare, And serve the hard apprenticeship of war; Your matchless courage and your conduct view, And early shall begin t' admire and copy you. Besides, two hundred horse he shall command; Tho' few, a warlike and well-chosen band. These in my name are listed; and my son As many more has added in his own." Scarce had he said; Achates and his guest, With downcast eyes, their silent grief express'd; Who, short of succors, and in deep despair, Shook at the dismal prospect of the war. But his bright mother, from a breaking cloud, To cheer her issue, thunder'd thrice aloud; Thrice forky lightning flash'd along the sky, And Tyrrhene trumpets thrice were heard on high. Then, gazing up, repeated peals they hear; And, in a heav'n serene, refulgent arms appear: Redd'ning the skies, and glitt'ring all around, The temper'd metals clash, and yield a silver sound. The rest stood trembling, struck with awe divine; Aeneas only, conscious to the sign, Presag'd th' event, and joyful view'd, above, Th' accomplish'd promise of the Queen of Love. Then, to th' Arcadian king: "This prodigy (Dismiss your fear) belongs alone to me. Heav'n calls me to the war: th' expected sign Is giv'n of promis'd aid, and arms divine. My goddess mother, whose indulgent care Foresaw the dangers of the growing war, This omen gave, when bright Vulcanian arms, Fated from force of steel by Stygian charms, Suspended, shone on high: she then foreshow'd Approaching fights, and fields to float in blood. Turnus shall dearly pay for faith forsworn; And corps, and swords, and shields, on Tiber borne, Shall choke his flood: now sound the loud alarms; And, Latian troops, prepare your perjur'd arms." He said, and, rising from his homely throne, The solemn rites of Hercules begun, And on his altars wak'd the sleeping fires; Then cheerful to his household gods retires; There offers chosen sheep. Th' Arcadian king And Trojan youth the same oblations bring. Next, of his men and ships he makes review; Draws out the best and ablest of the crew. Down with the falling stream the refuse run, To raise with joyful news his drooping son. Steeds are prepar'd to mount the Trojan band, Who wait their leader to the Tyrrhene land. A sprightly courser, fairer than the rest, The king himself presents his royal guest: A lion's hide his back and limbs infold, Precious with studded work, and paws of gold. Fame thro' the little city spreads aloud Th' intended march, amid the fearful crowd: The matrons beat their breasts, dissolve in tears, And double their devotion in their fears. The war at hand appears with more affright, And rises ev'ry moment to the sight. Then old Evander, with a close embrace, Strain'd his departing friend; and tears o'erflow his face. "Would Heav'n," said he, "my strength and youth recall, Such as I was beneath Praeneste's wall; Then when I made the foremost foes retire, And set whole heaps of conquer'd shields on fire; When Herilus in single fight I slew, Whom with three lives Feronia did endue; And thrice I sent him to the Stygian shore, Till the last ebbing soul return'd no more- Such if I stood renew'd, not these alarms, Nor death, should rend me from my Pallas' arms; Nor proud Mezentius, thus unpunish'd, boast His rapes and murthers on the Tuscan coast. Ye gods, and mighty Jove, in pity bring Relief, and hear a father and a king! If fate and you reserve these eyes, to see My son return with peace and victory; If the lov'd boy shall bless his father's sight; If we shall meet again with more delight; Then draw my life in length; let me sustain, In hopes of his embrace, the worst of pain. But if your hard decrees- which, O! I dread- Have doom'd to death his undeserving head; This, O this very moment, let me die! While hopes and fears in equal balance lie; While, yet possess'd of all his youthful charms, I strain him close within these aged arms; Before that fatal news my soul shall wound!" He said, and, swooning, sunk upon the ground. His servants bore him off, and softly laid His languish'd limbs upon his homely bed. The horsemen march; the gates are open'd wide; Aeneas at their head, Achates by his side. Next these, the Trojan leaders rode along; Last follows in the rear th' Arcadian throng. Young Pallas shone conspicuous o'er the rest; Gilded his arms, embroider'd was his vest. So, from the seas, exerts his radiant head The star by whom the lights of heav'n are led; Shakes from his rosy locks the pearly dews, Dispels the darkness, and the day renews. The trembling wives the walls and turrets crowd, And follow, with their eyes, the dusty cloud, Which winds disperse by fits, and shew from far The blaze of arms, and shields, and shining war. The troops, drawn up in beautiful array, O'er heathy plains pursue the ready way. Repeated peals of shouts are heard around; The neighing coursers answer to the sound, And shake with horny hoofs the solid ground. A greenwood shade, for long religion known, Stands by the streams that wash the Tuscan town, Incompass'd round with gloomy hills above, Which add a holy horror to the grove. The first inhabitants of Grecian blood, That sacred forest to Silvanus vow'd, The guardian of their flocks and fields; and pay Their due devotions on his annual day. Not far from hence, along the river's side, In tents secure, the Tuscan troops abide, By Tarchon led. Now, from a rising ground, Aeneas cast his wond'ring eyes around, And all the Tyrrhene army had in sight, Stretch'd on the spacious plain from left to right. Thether his warlike train the Trojan led, Refresh'd his men, and wearied horses fed. Meantime the mother goddess, crown'd with charms, Breaks thro' the clouds, and brings the fated arms. Within a winding vale she finds her son, On the cool river's banks, retir'd alone. She shews her heav'nly form without disguise, And gives herself to his desiring eyes. "Behold," she said, "perform'd in ev'ry part, My promise made, and Vulcan's labor'd art. Now seek, secure, the Latian enemy, And haughty Turnus to the field defy." She said; and, having first her son embrac'd, The radiant arms beneath an oak she plac'd, Proud of the gift, he roll'd his greedy sight Around the work, and gaz'd with vast delight. He lifts, he turns, he poises, and admires The crested helm, that vomits radiant fires: His hands the fatal sword and corslet hold, One keen with temper'd steel, one stiff with gold: Both ample, flaming both, and beamy bright; So shines a cloud, when edg'd with adverse light. He shakes the pointed spear, and longs to try The plated cuishes on his manly thigh; But most admires the shield's mysterious mold, And Roman triumphs rising on the gold: For these, emboss'd, the heav'nly smith had wrought (Not in the rolls of future fate untaught) The wars in order, and the race divine Of warriors issuing from the Julian line. The cave of Mars was dress'd with mossy greens: There, by the wolf, were laid the martial twins. Intrepid on her swelling dugs they hung; The foster dam loll'd out her fawning tongue: They suck'd secure, while, bending back her head, She lick'd their tender limbs, and form'd them as they fed. Not far from thence new Rome appears, with games Projected for the rape of Sabine dames. The pit resounds with shrieks; a war succeeds, For breach of public faith, and unexampled deeds. Here for revenge the Sabine troops contend; The Romans there with arms the prey defend. Wearied with tedious war, at length they cease; And both the kings and kingdoms plight the peace. The friendly chiefs before Jove's altar stand, Both arm'd, with each a charger in his hand: A fatted sow for sacrifice is led, With imprecations on the perjur'd head. Near this, the traitor Metius, stretch'd between Four fiery steeds, is dragg'd along the green, By Tullus' doom: the brambles drink his blood, And his torn limbs are left the vulture's food. There, Porsena to Rome proud Tarquin brings, And would by force restore the banish'd kings. One tyrant for his fellow-tyrant fights; The Roman youth assert their native rights. Before the town the Tuscan army lies, To win by famine, or by fraud surprise. Their king, half-threat'ning, half-disdaining stood, While Cocles broke the bridge, and stemm'd the flood. The captive maids there tempt the raging tide, Scap'd from their chains, with Cloelia for their guide. High on a rock heroic Manlius stood, To guard the temple, and the temple's god. Then Rome was poor; and there you might behold The palace thatch'd with straw, now roof'd with gold. The silver goose before the shining gate There flew, and, by her cackle, sav'd the state. She told the Gauls' approach; th' approaching Gauls, Obscure in night, ascend, and seize the walls. The gold dissembled well their yellow hair, And golden chains on their white necks they wear. Gold are their vests; long Alpine spears they wield, And their left arm sustains a length of shield. Hard by, the leaping Salian priests advance; And naked thro' the streets the mad Luperci dance, In caps of wool; the targets dropp'd from heav'n. Here modest matrons, in soft litters driv'n, To pay their vows in solemn pomp appear, And odorous gums in their chaste hands they bear. Far hence remov'd, the Stygian seats are seen; Pains of the damn'd, and punish'd Catiline Hung on a rock- the traitor; and, around, The Furies hissing from the nether ground. Apart from these, the happy souls he draws, And Cato's holy ghost dispensing laws. Betwixt the quarters flows a golden sea; But foaming surges there in silver play. The dancing dolphins with their tails divide The glitt'ring waves, and cut the precious tide. Amid the main, two mighty fleets engage Their brazen beaks, oppos'd with equal rage. Actium surveys the well-disputed prize; Leucate's wat'ry plain with foamy billows fries. Young Caesar, on the stern, in armor bright, Here leads the Romans and their gods to fight: His beamy temples shoot their flames afar, And o'er his head is hung the Julian star. Agrippa seconds him, with prosp'rous gales, And, with propitious gods, his foes assails: A naval crown, that binds his manly brows, The happy fortune of the fight foreshows. Rang'd on the line oppos'd, Antonius brings Barbarian aids, and troops of Eastern kings; Th' Arabians near, and Bactrians from afar, Of tongues discordant, and a mingled war: And, rich in gaudy robes, amidst the strife, His ill fate follows him- th' Egyptian wife. Moving they fight; with oars and forky prows The froth is gather'd, and the water glows. It seems, as if the Cyclades again Were rooted up, and justled in the main; Or floating mountains floating mountains meet; Such is the fierce encounter of the fleet. Fireballs are thrown, and pointed jav'lins fly; The fields of Neptune take a purple dye. The queen herself, amidst the loud alarms, With cymbals toss'd her fainting soldiers warms- Fool as she was! who had not yet divin'd Her cruel fate, nor saw the snakes behind. Her country gods, the monsters of the sky, Great Neptune, Pallas, and Love's Queen defy: The dog Anubis barks, but barks in vain, Nor longer dares oppose th' ethereal train. Mars in the middle of the shining shield Is grav'd, and strides along the liquid field. The Dirae souse from heav'n with swift descent; And Discord, dyed in blood, with garments rent, Divides the prease: her steps Bellona treads, And shakes her iron rod above their heads. This seen, Apollo, from his Actian height, Pours down his arrows; at whose winged flight The trembling Indians and Egyptians yield, And soft Sabaeans quit the wat'ry field. The fatal mistress hoists her silken sails, And, shrinking from the fight, invokes the gales. Aghast she looks, and heaves her breast for breath, Panting, and pale with fear of future death. The god had figur'd her as driv'n along By winds and waves, and scudding thro' the throng. Just opposite, sad Nilus opens wide His arms and ample bosom to the tide, And spreads his mantle o'er the winding coast, In which he wraps his queen, and hides the flying host. The victor to the gods his thanks express'd, And Rome, triumphant, with his presence bless'd. Three hundred temples in the town he plac'd; With spoils and altars ev'ry temple grac'd. Three shining nights, and three succeeding days, The fields resound with shouts, the streets with praise, The domes with songs, the theaters with plays. All altars flame: before each altar lies, Drench'd in his gore, the destin'd sacrifice. Great Caesar sits sublime upon his throne, Before Apollo's porch of Parian stone; Accepts the presents vow'd for victory, And hangs the monumental crowns on high. Vast crowds of vanquish'd nations march along, Various in arms, in habit, and in tongue. Here, Mulciber assigns the proper place For Carians, and th' ungirt Numidian race; Then ranks the Thracians in the second row, With Scythians, expert in the dart and bow. And here the tam'd Euphrates humbly glides, And there the Rhine submits her swelling tides, And proud Araxes, whom no bridge could bind; The Danes' unconquer'd offspring march behind, And Morini, the last of humankind. These figures, on the shield divinely wrought, By Vulcan labor'd, and by Venus brought, With joy and wonder fill the hero's thought. Unknown the names, he yet admires the grace, And bears aloft the fame and fortune of his race.

Book VIII

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section8/

While Turnus gathers his forces, Aeneas readies the Trojan troops and solicits support from nearby cities in Latium. Still, he is troubled at his prospects in battle. That night, the river god Tiberinus speaks to him and tells him to approach and form an alliance with the Arcadians, who are also at war with the Latins. Aeneas takes two galleys and rows several days up the Tiber to the forest of the Arcadians. There, the Trojans address the Arcadian king, Evander, who gladly offers aid against their common enemy and invites Aeneas to a feast. After the feast, holy rites are performed in honor of Hercules, the patron of the Arcadians, who killed the monster Cacus near where Arcadia now stands. Evander also explains how Saturn descended to Italy long ago and formed a nation from the wild savages who inhabited the land, calling it Latium. The Arcadians still dwell in relative simplicity. Even Evander boasts only a small house but offers everything at his disposal to Aeneas in hospitality. Meanwhile, Venus frets over Aeneas's upcoming war. She speaks to her husband, Vulcan, the god of fire and forging, and persuades him to make Aeneas new weapons and armor that will give him an added advantage. Vulcan commands his workers--Cyclopes inside the great volcano Etna--to begin forging the items. The next morning, back in Arcadia, King Evander assigns what troops he can spare to Aeneas's command. He also bids neighboring kingdoms to send their aid. All told, several thousand soldiers are rallied to accompany the Trojans back to the front, but due to their increased numbers, they must march rather than row, which causes a delay. Finally, Evander dispatches Pallas, his own son, and requests that Aeneas teach Pallas the arts of war and return him home in safety. The new army marches all day. At the camp that night, Venus suddenly appears to Aeneas and presents him with the arms that Vulcan has completed: helmet, corselet, sword, spear, and shield, all of them beautifully crafted and stronger than metal forged by humans. The face of the shield is particularly notable, for on it Vulcan has depicted the story of the Roman glory that awaits Italy. Aeneas sees Romulus being nursed by the she-wolf, the defeat of the Gauls, Caesar Augustus as he defeats Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium, and much else.

After many books in which we see Aeneas being alternately tormented at the hands of Juno and rescued by Venus and her allies, the fates begin to balance out. A veritable coalition of immortals now fortifies Aeneas for the coming campaign: he receives help from the gods Tiberinus, Venus, and Vulcan. Tiberinus helps Aeneas by telling him how to find help from a mortal, King Evander. Evander's immediate recognition of Aeneas--Evander knew Anchises and notices the family resemblance--prompts him to offer his hand without hesitation to form a pact with Aeneas. This gesture of automatic trust and loyalty is founded both on Aeneas's reputation and on his family lineage, two elements of character that rank among the highest values of heroic culture. The Trojans obtain the reinforcements they need in large part because they are recognized and even expected--their coming has been heralded in prophecy far and wide. Everywhere they tread, the famous name of Troy earns them respect and hospitality. The rich description of Aeneas's shield parallels Homer's description, in the Iliad, of the shield that Vulcan--known in the Iliad by his Greek name, Hephaestus--makes for Achilles. By emulating Homer, Virgil responds to and attempts to surpass the Greek tradition with the Roman. This desire to surpass was also evident in Augustan Rome, the Golden Age during which Virgil wrote, as the Roman Empire strove to outshine the accomplishments of ancient Greece. Aeneas's taking up of the new armor also symbolizes the way he symbolically shoulders the whole weight of the destiny of Rome. Like Anchises's speech in Book VI, Virgil's description of the mural on the shield Vulcan forges for Aeneas promotes the Roman legend and stresses Augustus's position as the culmination of that legend. Repeating some of the scenes that Anchises describes in the underworld, Virgil particularly emphasizes the contrast between Romulus's humble beginnings and Caesar's far-reaching glory. As before, Virgil compresses the many centuries that separate Romulus from Augustus into a few lines, which heightens the impact of the contrast. This rags-to-riches progression is a good tool for Virgil because it parallels the Aeneid's plot: Aeneas and his followers leave Troy as refugees without a home, but go on to found a new and greater city in Italy. The city that the Trojans eventually establish--to be called Lavinium, after Lavinia--is not the site of Rome. Centuries later, Rome will be built by Romulus and Remus further up the Tiber, near where the Arcadians dwell when Aeneas approaches them to form an alliance. Aeneas's excursion away from the main scene of action brings him to the land that will become Rome. To Roman audiences, this powerful geographic connection would make more concrete their understanding of Aeneas as the founding father of their civilization.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_ix.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_8_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book ix

book ix

{"name": "Book IX", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section9/", "summary": "Never one to miss an opportunity, Juno sends her messenger, Iris, down from Olympus to inform Turnus that Aeneas is away from his camp. With their leader gone, the Trojans are particularly vulnerable to an attack, so Turnus immediately leads his army toward the enemy camp. The Trojans spot the army coming and secure themselves inside their newly constructed fortress, unwilling to risk an open battle while Aeneas is away. Finding no obvious weakness in their defenses, Turnus decides to circumnavigate the camp and set fire to the defenseless ships anchored on the shore. The fleet's destruction seems inevitable, but an old blessing prevents the ships' incineration. At the fleet's construction, Cybele--mother of the gods and sister of Saturn--requested her son Jupiter to render the vessels immortal because they were built of wood from trees in her sacred forest. As Turnus and his troops watch the ships burn, the vessels suddenly pull loose of their anchors, submerge, and reappear as sea nymphs. This sign vexes the Latins, but Turnus remains confident and determined to complete his annihilation of the Trojans, portents from the gods notwithstanding. Night falls, and the Latins make camp around the Trojan fortress. The Trojans know that they must send reports of the Latins' movements to Aeneas quickly. Nisus and Euryalus, two friends eager for glory and adventure, volunteer to sneak out in the dark of night. The Trojan captains applaud the bravery of the two men. Quietly leaving the fortress, the two find the entire Latin army fast asleep. They pull their swords and begin slaughtering many great captains. When daylight approaches, they finally make their way toward the woods, but not before Euryalus takes the high helmet of a Latin captain as a prize. As they approach the forest, a group of enemy horsemen returning to camp through the woods sees the helmet flash in the distance, and rides toward the two Trojans. Nisus manages to escape into the woods, but the horsemen capture Euryalus. Nisus rushes back to save his friend, but in the end both are killed. The Latins put the heads of the two Trojans on stakes and parade them before the Trojan fortress, to the dismay of those inside. Then the Latins attack. They cross the trenches surrounding the Trojan fortress and try to identify a weak spot in the walls, holding up their shields to block the barrage of spears that the Trojans hurl down from above. There is a high tower standing just outside the main gate, which Turnus lights on fire. Turnus and his men collapse the tower, killing many Trojans inside. The Trojans within the fortress begin to panic, but Ascanius renews their hope, getting his first taste of war when he fires an arrow through the head of Remulus, one of the Latin captains. Their confidence renewed, the Trojans open the gates and surprise the Latins by rushing out in attack, inflicting many Latin casualties in one quick strike. Unfortunately for the Trojans, Turnus joins the fray, suppresses the Trojans' surge, and begins to force them to retreat to the fortress. The Trojan Pandarus, observing the turning tide of battle, quickly shuts the gates again, allowing as many of his comrades as possible back inside--but letting Turnus through as well. Finally inside the enemy camp, the Latin leader kills Trojans as though it were an easy game. Eventually, though, Turnus is outnumbered, and narrowly escapes by jumping into the Tiber and floating back out to his comrades.", "analysis": "Throughout the poem, interventions on the part of the immortals tend to be spontaneous, responding to mortal affairs as they unfold. But Virgil's contention, while describing the burning Trojan fleet, that the fleet is immune to fire because of Cybele's blessing reads as a contrived act of retroactive deus ex machina. Deus ex machina literally means \"god from the machine,\" and it is a device used to diffuse or solve a seemingly impossible situation by means of the spontaneous act of a divine hand. It is strange that we are not told about the immunity of the ships beforehand, given that we are told, for instance, that when the Trojans eat their own tables they will know they have arrived at their final destination. Even stranger is the fact that the miraculous transformation of the Trojan ships into sea nymphs, though the result of a god's work, does not benefit the Trojans at all. Sea nymphs are not fit for sailing, so the Trojans lose their fleet despite divine intervention on their behalf. The Latins ultimately accomplish their mission of rendering the Trojan fleet useless, meaning that the Trojans are unable to flee the battle by sailing back out to sea. They are now grounded, and it is certain that the events of the epic are to be played out on Italian soil. Aesthetically, the transformation of the Trojan ships into sea nymphs is a sublime ending to the journey of a fleet of vessels that, from the epic's inception, has been buffeted by constant torments and trials. To go down in flames while at anchor ashore would be a fate unworthy of ships that have endured such harshness at sea. Their underwater metamorphosis proves their status as heroic objects of war. Virgil flirts with the defeat of the Trojans when, after Turnus gains access to the Trojan fortress, the author claims that if it had occurred to Turnus to open the gates and let his awaiting forces into the citadel, the Latins would have won the war then and there. By pointing to the possibility of other outcomes, Virgil heightens the dramatic import of the battle and establishes the Latins as worthy enemies. At the same time, this comment suggests that Turnus is not as amazing as he may seem, as it points out a shortcoming in his cunning and strategy. In Book IX, Virgil foregrounds the parallels between the Aeneid and the Iliad. Turnus, for example, openly claims to be in the same predicament as the Greek king Menelaus--a Trojan has swept away Turnus's bride, Lavinia, just as the Trojan Paris made off with Menelaus's bride, Helen, thus bringing about the Trojan War. Turnus boasts that the Latins will not need to use the trickery of a wooden horse, as Ulysses did to gain entrance to Troy. Rather, he claims, the Latins will defeat the Trojans outright. Knowing the destined outcome of the war, we see that Turnus spells out his doom here: there may be similarities between the Greek-Trojan conflict and the Latin-Trojan conflict, but their outcomes will not be the same. The gods have offered clear signs that the conflict will turn in Aeneas's favor, but Turnus chooses to ignore them, denying any faith in the oracles of his demise. Turnus is a fearsome warrior who is either too assured of his own ability--a quality that, when combined with defiance of divine powers, is known as hubris--or is resigned to his role as a pure destructive obstacle to the Trojans. He hints at the latter sentiment when he cries, \"I have my fate as well, to combat theirs\" . The ill-fated journey of the eager young soldiers Nisus and Euryalus provides a poignant counterpoint to the Trojans' success at staving off the fortress's siege. Their youthful bravery is extinguished because of Euryalus's desire for prizes before the completion of their mission. They could easily kill a few Latins and still make it into the forest in good time. Instead, Euryalus concerns himself with the spoils of battle, enabling the Latins to capture him. Nisus's willingness to sacrifice his own life for his friend is noble but largely useless, as he does not manage to save Euryalus but does manage to stab Euryalus's killer as he falls to his own death. Following this intense and emotional episode, Virgil offers a brief message of memorial to these two Trojans, writing: Fortunate, both ! If in the least my songs Avail, no future day will ever take you Out of the record of remembering Time. In narrating the episode, Virgil displays his skill at dramatizing the impulsive, emotional nature of friendship and loyalty. With these lines to Nisus and Euryalus, he displays his confidence in his work and legacy, asserting that his poetry can make men immortal."}

BOOK IX While these affairs in distant places pass'd, The various Iris Juno sends with haste, To find bold Turnus, who, with anxious thought, The secret shade of his great grandsire sought. Retir'd alone she found the daring man, And op'd her rosy lips, and thus began: "What none of all the gods could grant thy vows, That, Turnus, this auspicious day bestows. Aeneas, gone to seek th' Arcadian prince, Has left the Trojan camp without defense; And, short of succors there, employs his pains In parts remote to raise the Tuscan swains. Now snatch an hour that favors thy designs; Unite thy forces, and attack their lines." This said, on equal wings she pois'd her weight, And form'd a radiant rainbow in her flight. The Daunian hero lifts his hands eyes, And thus invokes the goddess as she flies: "Iris, the grace of heav'n, what pow'r divine Has sent thee down, thro' dusky clouds to shine? See, they divide; immortal day appears, And glitt'ring planets dancing in their spheres! With joy, these happy omens I obey, And follow to the war the god that leads the way." Thus having said, as by the brook he stood, He scoop'd the water from the crystal flood; Then with his hands the drops to heav'n he throws, And loads the pow'rs above with offer'd vows. Now march the bold confed'rates thro' the plain, Well hors'd, well clad; a rich and shining train. Messapus leads the van; and, in the rear, The sons of Tyrrheus in bright arms appear. In the main battle, with his flaming crest, The mighty Turnus tow'rs above the rest. Silent they move, majestically slow, Like ebbing Nile, or Ganges in his flow. The Trojans view the dusty cloud from far, And the dark menace of the distant war. Caicus from the rampire saw it rise, Black'ning the fields, and thick'ning thro' the skies. Then to his fellows thus aloud he calls: "What rolling clouds, my friends, approach the walls? Arm! arm! and man the works! prepare your spears And pointed darts! the Latian host appears." Thus warn'd, they shut their gates; with shouts ascend The bulwarks, and, secure, their foes attend: For their wise gen'ral, with foreseeing care, Had charg'd them not to tempt the doubtful war, Nor, tho' provok'd, in open fields advance, But close within their lines attend their chance. Unwilling, yet they keep the strict command, And sourly wait in arms the hostile band. The fiery Turnus flew before the rest: A piebald steed of Thracian strain he press'd; His helm of massy gold, and crimson was his crest. With twenty horse to second his designs, An unexpected foe, he fac'd the lines. "Is there," he said, "in arms, who bravely dare His leader's honor and his danger share?" Then spurring on, his brandish'd dart he threw, In sign of war: applauding shouts ensue. Amaz'd to find a dastard race, that run Behind the rampires and the battle shun, He rides around the camp, with rolling eyes, And stops at ev'ry post, and ev'ry passage tries. So roams the nightly wolf about the fold: Wet with descending show'rs, and stiff with cold, He howls for hunger, and he grins for pain, (His gnashing teeth are exercis'd in vain,) And, impotent of anger, finds no way In his distended paws to grasp the prey. The mothers listen; but the bleating lambs Securely swig the dug, beneath the dams. Thus ranges eager Turnus o'er the plain. Sharp with desire, and furious with disdain; Surveys each passage with a piercing sight, To force his foes in equal field to fight. Thus while he gazes round, at length he spies, Where, fenc'd with strong redoubts, their navy lies, Close underneath the walls; the washing tide Secures from all approach this weaker side. He takes the wish'd occasion, fills his hand With ready fires, and shakes a flaming brand. Urg'd by his presence, ev'ry soul is warm'd, And ev'ry hand with kindled firs is arm'd. From the fir'd pines the scatt'ring sparkles fly; Fat vapors, mix'd with flames, involve the sky. What pow'r, O Muses, could avert the flame Which threaten'd, in the fleet, the Trojan name? Tell: for the fact, thro' length of time obscure, Is hard to faith; yet shall the fame endure. 'T is said that, when the chief prepar'd his flight, And fell'd his timber from Mount Ida's height, The grandam goddess then approach'd her son, And with a mother's majesty begun: "Grant me," she said, "the sole request I bring, Since conquer'd heav'n has own'd you for its king. On Ida's brows, for ages past, there stood, With firs and maples fill'd, a shady wood; And on the summit rose a sacred grove, Where I was worship'd with religious love. Those woods, that holy grove, my long delight, I gave the Trojan prince, to speed his flight. Now, fill'd with fear, on their behalf I come; Let neither winds o'erset, nor waves intomb The floating forests of the sacred pine; But let it be their safety to be mine." Then thus replied her awful son, who rolls The radiant stars, and heav'n and earth controls: "How dare you, mother, endless date demand For vessels molded by a mortal hand? What then is fate? Shall bold Aeneas ride, Of safety certain, on th' uncertain tide? Yet, what I can, I grant; when, wafted o'er, The chief is landed on the Latian shore, Whatever ships escape the raging storms, At my command shall change their fading forms To nymphs divine, and plow the wat'ry way, Like Dotis and the daughters of the sea." To seal his sacred vow, by Styx he swore, The lake of liquid pitch, the dreary shore, And Phlegethon's innavigable flood, And the black regions of his brother god. He said; and shook the skies with his imperial nod. And now at length the number'd hours were come, Prefix'd by fate's irrevocable doom, When the great Mother of the Gods was free To save her ships, and finish Jove's decree. First, from the quarter of the morn, there sprung A light that sign'd the heav'ns, and shot along; Then from a cloud, fring'd round with golden fires, Were timbrels heard, and Berecynthian choirs; And, last, a voice, with more than mortal sounds, Both hosts, in arms oppos'd, with equal horror wounds: "O Trojan race, your needless aid forbear, And know, my ships are my peculiar care. With greater ease the bold Rutulian may, With hissing brands, attempt to burn the sea, Than singe my sacred pines. But you, my charge, Loos'd from your crooked anchors, launch at large, Exalted each a nymph: forsake the sand, And swim the seas, at Cybele's command." No sooner had the goddess ceas'd to speak, When, lo! th' obedient ships their haulsers break; And, strange to tell, like dolphins, in the main They plunge their prows, and dive, and spring again: As many beauteous maids the billows sweep, As rode before tall vessels on the deep. The foes, surpris'd with wonder, stood aghast; Messapus curb'd his fiery courser's haste; Old Tiber roar'd, and, raising up his head, Call'd back his waters to their oozy bed. Turnus alone, undaunted, bore the shock, And with these words his trembling troops bespoke: "These monsters for the Trojans' fate are meant, And are by Jove for black presages sent. He takes the cowards' last relief away; For fly they cannot, and, constrain'd to stay, Must yield unfought, a base inglorious prey. The liquid half of all the globe is lost; Heav'n shuts the seas, and we secure the coast. Theirs is no more than that small spot of ground Which myriads of our martial men surround. Their fates I fear not, or vain oracles. 'T was giv'n to Venus they should cross the seas, And land secure upon the Latian plains: Their promis'd hour is pass'd, and mine remains. 'T is in the fate of Turnus to destroy, With sword and fire, the faithless race of Troy. Shall such affronts as these alone inflame The Grecian brothers, and the Grecian name? My cause and theirs is one; a fatal strife, And final ruin, for a ravish'd wife. Was 't not enough, that, punish'd for the crime, They fell; but will they fall a second time? One would have thought they paid enough before, To curse the costly sex, and durst offend no more. Can they securely trust their feeble wall, A slight partition, a thin interval, Betwixt their fate and them; when Troy, tho' built By hands divine, yet perish'd by their guilt? Lend me, for once, my friends, your valiant hands, To force from out their lines these dastard bands. Less than a thousand ships will end this war, Nor Vulcan needs his fated arms prepare. Let all the Tuscans, all th' Arcadians, join! Nor these, nor those, shall frustrate my design. Let them not fear the treasons of the night, The robb'd Palladium, the pretended flight: Our onset shall be made in open light. No wooden engine shall their town betray; Fires they shall have around, but fires by day. No Grecian babes before their camp appear, Whom Hector's arms detain'd to the tenth tardy year. Now, since the sun is rolling to the west, Give we the silent night to needful rest: Refresh your bodies, and your arms prepare; The morn shall end the small remains of war." The post of honor to Messapus falls, To keep the nightly guard, to watch the walls, To pitch the fires at distances around, And close the Trojans in their scanty ground. Twice seven Rutulian captains ready stand, And twice seven hundred horse these chiefs command; All clad in shining arms the works invest, Each with a radiant helm and waving crest. Stretch'd at their length, they press the grassy ground; They laugh, they sing, (the jolly bowls go round,) With lights and cheerful fires renew the day, And pass the wakeful night in feasts and play. The Trojans, from above, their foes beheld, And with arm'd legions all the rampires fill'd. Seiz'd with affright, their gates they first explore; Join works to works with bridges, tow'r to tow'r: Thus all things needful for defense abound. Mnestheus and brave Seresthus walk the round, Commission'd by their absent prince to share The common danger, and divide the care. The soldiers draw their lots, and, as they fall, By turns relieve each other on the wall. Nigh where the foes their utmost guards advance, To watch the gate was warlike Nisus' chance. His father Hyrtacus of noble blood; His mother was a huntress of the wood, And sent him to the wars. Well could he bear His lance in fight, and dart the flying spear, But better skill'd unerring shafts to send. Beside him stood Euryalus, his friend: Euryalus, than whom the Trojan host No fairer face, or sweeter air, could boast- Scarce had the down to shade his cheeks begun. One was their care, and their delight was one: One common hazard in the war they shar'd, And now were both by choice upon the guard. Then Nisus thus: "Or do the gods inspire This warmth, or make we gods of our desire? A gen'rous ardor boils within my breast, Eager of action, enemy to rest: This urges me to fight, and fires my mind To leave a memorable name behind. Thou see'st the foe secure; how faintly shine Their scatter'd fires! the most, in sleep supine Along the ground, an easy conquest lie: The wakeful few the fuming flagon ply; All hush'd around. Now hear what I revolve- A thought unripe- and scarcely yet resolve. Our absent prince both camp and council mourn; By message both would hasten his return: If they confer what I demand on thee, (For fame is recompense enough for me,) Methinks, beneath yon hill, I have espied A way that safely will my passage guide." Euryalus stood list'ning while he spoke, With love of praise and noble envy struck; Then to his ardent friend expos'd his mind: "All this, alone, and leaving me behind! Am I unworthy, Nisus, to be join'd? Thinkist thou I can my share of glory yield, Or send thee unassisted to the field? Not so my father taught my childhood arms; Born in a siege, and bred among alarms! Nor is my youth unworthy of my friend, Nor of the heav'n-born hero I attend. The thing call'd life, with ease I can disclaim, And think it over-sold to purchase fame." Then Nisus thus: "Alas! thy tender years Would minister new matter to my fears. So may the gods, who view this friendly strife, Restore me to thy lov'd embrace with life, Condemn'd to pay my vows, (as sure I trust,) This thy request is cruel and unjust. But if some chance- as many chances are, And doubtful hazards, in the deeds of war- If one should reach my head, there let it fall, And spare thy life; I would not perish all. Thy bloomy youth deserves a longer date: Live thou to mourn thy love's unhappy fate; To bear my mangled body from the foe, Or buy it back, and fun'ral rites bestow. Or, if hard fortune shall those dues deny, Thou canst at least an empty tomb supply. O let not me the widow's tears renew! Nor let a mother's curse my name pursue: Thy pious parent, who, for love of thee, Forsook the coasts of friendly Sicily, Her age committing to the seas and wind, When ev'ry weary matron stay'd behind." To this, Euryalus: "You plead in vain, And but protract the cause you cannot gain. No more delays, but haste!" With that, he wakes The nodding watch; each to his office takes. The guard reliev'd, the gen'rous couple went To find the council at the royal tent. All creatures else forgot their daily care, And sleep, the common gift of nature, share; Except the Trojan peers, who wakeful sate In nightly council for th' indanger'd state. They vote a message to their absent chief, Shew their distress, and beg a swift relief. Amid the camp a silent seat they chose, Remote from clamor, and secure from foes. On their left arms their ample shields they bear, The right reclin'd upon the bending spear. Now Nisus and his friend approach the guard, And beg admission, eager to be heard: Th' affair important, not to be deferr'd. Ascanius bids 'em be conducted in, Ord'ring the more experienc'd to begin. Then Nisus thus: "Ye fathers, lend your ears; Nor judge our bold attempt beyond our years. The foe, securely drench'd in sleep and wine, Neglect their watch; the fires but thinly shine; And where the smoke in cloudy vapors flies, Cov'ring the plain, and curling to the skies, Betwixt two paths, which at the gate divide, Close by the sea, a passage we have spied, Which will our way to great Aeneas guide. Expect each hour to see him safe again, Loaded with spoils of foes in battle slain. Snatch we the lucky minute while we may; Nor can we be mistaken in the way; For, hunting in the vale, we both have seen The rising turrets, and the stream between, And know the winding course, with ev'ry ford." He ceas'd; and old Alethes took the word: "Our country gods, in whom our trust we place, Will yet from ruin save the Trojan race, While we behold such dauntless worth appear In dawning youth, and souls so void of fear." Then into tears of joy the father broke; Each in his longing arms by turns he took; Panted and paus'd; and thus again he spoke: "Ye brave young men, what equal gifts can we, In recompense of such desert, decree? The greatest, sure, and best you can receive, The gods and your own conscious worth will give. The rest our grateful gen'ral will bestow, And young Ascanius till his manhood owe." "And I, whose welfare in my father lies," Ascanius adds, "by the great deities, By my dear country, by my household gods, By hoary Vesta's rites and dark abodes, Adjure you both, (on you my fortune stands; That and my faith I plight into your hands,) Make me but happy in his safe return, Whose wanted presence I can only mourn; Your common gift shall two large goblets be Of silver, wrought with curious imagery, And high emboss'd, which, when old Priam reign'd, My conqu'ring sire at sack'd Arisba gain'd; And more, two tripods cast in antic mold, With two great talents of the finest gold; Beside a costly bowl, ingrav'd with art, Which Dido gave, when first she gave her heart. But, if in conquer'd Italy we reign, When spoils by lot the victor shall obtain- Thou saw'st the courser by proud Turnus press'd: That, Nisus, and his arms, and nodding crest, And shield, from chance exempt, shall be thy share: Twelve lab'ring slaves, twelve handmaids young and fair All clad in rich attire, and train'd with care; And, last, a Latian field with fruitful plains, And a large portion of the king's domains. But thou, whose years are more to mine allied- No fate my vow'd affection shall divide From thee, heroic youth! Be wholly mine; Take full possession; all my soul is thine. One faith, one fame, one fate, shall both attend; My life's companion, and my bosom friend: My peace shall be committed to thy care, And to thy conduct my concerns in war." Then thus the young Euryalus replied: "Whatever fortune, good or bad, betide, The same shall be my age, as now my youth; No time shall find me wanting to my truth. This only from your goodness let me gain (And, this ungranted, all rewards are vain) Of Priam's royal race my mother came- And sure the best that ever bore the name- Whom neither Troy nor Sicily could hold From me departing, but, o'erspent and old, My fate she follow'd. Ignorant of this (Whatever) danger, neither parting kiss, Nor pious blessing taken, her I leave, And in this only act of all my life deceive. By this right hand and conscious Night I swear, My soul so sad a farewell could not bear. Be you her comfort; fill my vacant place (Permit me to presume so great a grace) Support her age, forsaken and distress'd. That hope alone will fortify my breast Against the worst of fortunes, and of fears." He said. The mov'd assistants melt in tears. Then thus Ascanius, wonderstruck to see That image of his filial piety: "So great beginnings, in so green an age, Exact the faith which I again ingage. Thy mother all the dues shall justly claim, Creusa had, and only want the name. Whate'er event thy bold attempt shall have, 'T is merit to have borne a son so brave. Now by my head, a sacred oath, I swear, (My father us'd it,) what, returning here Crown'd with success, I for thyself prepare, That, if thou fail, shall thy lov'd mother share." He said, and weeping, while he spoke the word, From his broad belt he drew a shining sword, Magnificent with gold. Lycaon made, And in an ivory scabbard sheath'd the blade. This was his gift. Great Mnestheus gave his friend A lion's hide, his body to defend; And good Alethes furnish'd him, beside, With his own trusty helm, of temper tried. Thus arm'd they went. The noble Trojans wait Their issuing forth, and follow to the gate With prayers and vows. Above the rest appears Ascanius, manly far beyond his years, And messages committed to their care, Which all in winds were lost, and flitting air. The trenches first they pass'd; then took their way Where their proud foes in pitch'd pavilions lay; To many fatal, ere themselves were slain. They found the careless host dispers'd upon the plain, Who, gorg'd, and drunk with wine, supinely snore. Unharness'd chariots stand along the shore: Amidst the wheels and reins, the goblet by, A medley of debauch and war, they lie. Observing Nisus shew'd his friend the sight: "Behold a conquest gain'd without a fight. Occasion offers, and I stand prepar'd; There lies our way; be thou upon the guard, And look around, while I securely go, And hew a passage thro' the sleeping foe." Softly he spoke; then striding took his way, With his drawn sword, where haughty Rhamnes lay; His head rais'd high on tapestry beneath, And heaving from his breast, he drew his breath; A king and prophet, by King Turnus lov'd: But fate by prescience cannot be remov'd. Him and his sleeping slaves he slew; then spies Where Remus, with his rich retinue, lies. His armor-bearer first, and next he kills His charioteer, intrench'd betwixt the wheels And his lov'd horses; last invades their lord; Full on his neck he drives the fatal sword: The gasping head flies off; a purple flood Flows from the trunk, that welters in the blood, Which, by the spurning heels dispers'd around, The bed besprinkles and bedews the ground. Lamus the bold, and Lamyrus the strong, He slew, and then Serranus fair and young. From dice and wine the youth retir'd to rest, And puff'd the fumy god from out his breast: Ev'n then he dreamt of drink and lucky play- More lucky, had it lasted till the day. The famish'd lion thus, with hunger bold, O'erleaps the fences of the nightly fold, And tears the peaceful flocks: with silent awe Trembling they lie, and pant beneath his paw. Nor with less rage Euryalus employs The wrathful sword, or fewer foes destroys; But on th' ignoble crowd his fury flew; He Fadus, Hebesus, and Rhoetus slew. Oppress'd with heavy sleep the former fell, But Rhoetus wakeful, and observing all: Behind a spacious jar he slink'd for fear; The fatal iron found and reach'd him there; For, as he rose, it pierc'd his naked side, And, reeking, thence return'd in crimson dyed. The wound pours out a stream of wine and blood; The purple soul comes floating in the flood. Now, where Messapus quarter'd, they arrive. The fires were fainting there, and just alive; The warrior-horses, tied in order, fed. Nisus observ'd the discipline, and said: "Our eager thirst of blood may both betray; And see the scatter'd streaks of dawning day, Foe to nocturnal thefts. No more, my friend; Here let our glutted execution end. A lane thro' slaughter'd bodies we have made." The bold Euryalus, tho' loth, obey'd. Of arms, and arras, and of plate, they find A precious load; but these they leave behind. Yet, fond of gaudy spoils, the boy would stay To make the rich caparison his prey, Which on the steed of conquer'd Rhamnes lay. Nor did his eyes less longingly behold The girdle-belt, with nails of burnish'd gold. This present Caedicus the rich bestow'd On Remulus, when friendship first they vow'd, And, absent, join'd in hospitable ties: He, dying, to his heir bequeath'd the prize; Till, by the conqu'ring Ardean troops oppress'd, He fell; and they the glorious gift possess'd. These glitt'ring spoils (now made the victor's gain) He to his body suits, but suits in vain: Messapus' helm he finds among the rest, And laces on, and wears the waving crest. Proud of their conquest, prouder of their prey, They leave the camp, and take the ready way. But far they had not pass'd, before they spied Three hundred horse, with Volscens for their guide. The queen a legion to King Turnus sent; But the swift horse the slower foot prevent, And now, advancing, sought the leader's tent. They saw the pair; for, thro' the doubtful shade, His shining helm Euryalus betray'd, On which the moon with full reflection play'd. "'T is not for naught," cried Volscens from the crowd, "These men go there;" then rais'd his voice aloud: "Stand! stand! why thus in arms? And whither bent? From whence, to whom, and on what errand sent?" Silent they scud away, and haste their flight To neighb'ring woods, and trust themselves to night. The speedy horse all passages belay, And spur their smoking steeds to cross their way, And watch each entrance of the winding wood. Black was the forest: thick with beech it stood, Horrid with fern, and intricate with thorn; Few paths of human feet, or tracks of beasts, were worn. The darkness of the shades, his heavy prey, And fear, misled the younger from his way. But Nisus hit the turns with happier haste, And, thoughtless of his friend, the forest pass'd, And Alban plains, from Alba's name so call'd, Where King Latinus then his oxen stall'd; Till, turning at the length, he stood his ground, And miss'd his friend, and cast his eyes around: "Ah wretch!" he cried, "where have I left behind Th' unhappy youth? where shall I hope to find? Or what way take?" Again he ventures back, And treads the mazes of his former track. He winds the wood, and, list'ning, hears the noise Of tramping coursers, and the riders' voice. The sound approach'd; and suddenly he view'd The foes inclosing, and his friend pursued, Forelaid and taken, while he strove in vain The shelter of the friendly shades to gain. What should he next attempt? what arms employ, What fruitless force, to free the captive boy? Or desperate should he rush and lose his life, With odds oppress'd, in such unequal strife? Resolv'd at length, his pointed spear he shook; And, casting on the moon a mournful look: "Guardian of groves, and goddess of the night, Fair queen," he said, "direct my dart aright. If e'er my pious father, for my sake, Did grateful off'rings on thy altars make, Or I increas'd them with my sylvan toils, And hung thy holy roofs with savage spoils, Give me to scatter these." Then from his ear He pois'd, and aim'd, and launch'd the trembling spear. The deadly weapon, hissing from the grove, Impetuous on the back of Sulmo drove; Pierc'd his thin armor, drank his vital blood, And in his body left the broken wood. He staggers round; his eyeballs roll in death, And with short sobs he gasps away his breath. All stand amaz'd- a second jav'lin flies With equal strength, and quivers thro' the skies. This thro' thy temples, Tagus, forc'd the way, And in the brainpan warmly buried lay. Fierce Volscens foams with rage, and, gazing round, Descried not him who gave the fatal wound, Nor knew to fix revenge: "But thou," he cries, "Shalt pay for both," and at the pris'ner flies With his drawn sword. Then, struck with deep despair, That cruel sight the lover could not bear; But from his covert rush'd in open view, And sent his voice before him as he flew: "Me! me!" he cried- "turn all your swords alone On me- the fact confess'd, the fault my own. He neither could nor durst, the guiltless youth: Ye moon and stars, bear witness to the truth! His only crime (if friendship can offend) Is too much love to his unhappy friend." Too late he speaks: the sword, which fury guides, Driv'n with full force, had pierc'd his tender sides. Down fell the beauteous youth: the yawning wound Gush'd out a purple stream, and stain'd the ground. His snowy neck reclines upon his breast, Like a fair flow'r by the keen share oppress'd; Like a white poppy sinking on the plain, Whose heavy head is overcharg'd with rain. Despair, and rage, and vengeance justly vow'd, Drove Nisus headlong on the hostile crowd. Volscens he seeks; on him alone he bends: Borne back and bor'd by his surrounding friends, Onward he press'd, and kept him still in sight; Then whirl'd aloft his sword with all his might: Th' unerring steel descended while he spoke, Piered his wide mouth, and thro' his weazon broke. Dying, he slew; and, stagg'ring on the plain, With swimming eyes he sought his lover slain; Then quiet on his bleeding bosom fell, Content, in death, to be reveng'd so well. O happy friends! for, if my verse can give Immortal life, your fame shall ever live, Fix'd as the Capitol's foundation lies, And spread, where'er the Roman eagle flies! The conqu'ring party first divide the prey, Then their slain leader to the camp convey. With wonder, as they went, the troops were fill'd, To see such numbers whom so few had kill'd. Serranus, Rhamnes, and the rest, they found: Vast crowds the dying and the dead surround; And the yet reeking blood o'erflows the ground. All knew the helmet which Messapus lost, But mourn'd a purchase that so dear had cost. Now rose the ruddy morn from Tithon's bed, And with the dawn of day the skies o'erspread; Nor long the sun his daily course withheld, But added colors to the world reveal'd: When early Turnus, wak'ning with the light, All clad in armor, calls his troops to fight. His martial men with fierce harangue he fir'd, And his own ardor in their souls inspir'd. This done- to give new terror to his foes, The heads of Nisus and his friend he shows, Rais'd high on pointed spears- a ghastly sight: Loud peals of shouts ensue, and barbarous delight. Meantime the Trojans run, where danger calls; They line their trenches, and they man their walls. In front extended to the left they stood; Safe was the right, surrounded by the flood. But, casting from their tow'rs a frightful view, They saw the faces, which too well they knew, Tho' then disguis'd in death, and smear'd all o'er With filth obscene, and dropping putrid gore. Soon hasty fame thro' the sad city bears The mournful message to the mother's ears. An icy cold benumbs her limbs; she shakes; Her cheeks the blood, her hand the web forsakes. She runs the rampires round amidst the war, Nor fears the flying darts; she rends her hair, And fills with loud laments the liquid air. "Thus, then, my lov'd Euryalus appears! Thus looks the prop my declining years! Was't on this face my famish'd eyes I fed? Ah! how unlike the living is the dead! And could'st thou leave me, cruel, thus alone? Not one kind kiss from a departing son! No look, no last adieu before he went, In an ill-boding hour to slaughter sent! Cold on the ground, and pressing foreign clay, To Latian dogs and fowls he lies a prey! Nor was I near to close his dying eyes, To wash his wounds, to weep his obsequies, To call about his corpse his crying friends, Or spread the mantle (made for other ends) On his dear body, which I wove with care, Nor did my daily pains or nightly labor spare. Where shall I find his corpse? what earth sustains His trunk dismember'd, and his cold remains? For this, alas! I left my needful ease, Expos'd my life to winds and winter seas! If any pity touch Rutulian hearts, Here empty all your quivers, all your darts; Or, if they fail, thou, Jove, conclude my woe, And send me thunderstruck to shades below!" Her shrieks and clamors pierce the Trojans' ears, Unman their courage, and augment their fears; Nor young Ascanius could the sight sustain, Nor old Ilioneus his tears restrain, But Actor and Idaeus jointly sent, To bear the madding mother to her tent. And now the trumpets terribly, from far, With rattling clangor, rouse the sleepy war. The soldiers' shouts succeed the brazen sounds; And heav'n, from pole to pole, the noise rebounds. The Volscians bear their shields upon their head, And, rushing forward, form a moving shed. These fill the ditch; those pull the bulwarks down: Some raise the ladders; others scale the town. But, where void spaces on the walls appear, Or thin defense, they pour their forces there. With poles and missive weapons, from afar, The Trojans keep aloof the rising war. Taught, by their ten years' siege, defensive fight, They roll down ribs of rocks, an unresisted weight, To break the penthouse with the pond'rous blow, Which yet the patient Volscians undergo: But could not bear th' unequal combat long; For, where the Trojans find the thickest throng, The ruin falls: their shatter'd shields give way, And their crush'd heads become an easy prey. They shrink for fear, abated of their rage, Nor longer dare in a blind fight engage; Contented now to gall them from below With darts and slings, and with the distant bow. Elsewhere Mezentius, terrible to view, A blazing pine within the trenches threw. But brave Messapus, Neptune's warlike son, Broke down the palisades, the trenches won, And loud for ladders calls, to scale the town. Calliope, begin! Ye sacred Nine, Inspire your poet in his high design, To sing what slaughter manly Turnus made, What souls he sent below the Stygian shade, What fame the soldiers with their captain share, And the vast circuit of the fatal war; For you in singing martial facts excel; You best remember, and alone can tell. There stood a tow'r, amazing to the sight, Built up of beams, and of stupendous height: Art, and the nature of the place, conspir'd To furnish all the strength that war requir'd. To level this, the bold Italians join; The wary Trojans obviate their design; With weighty stones o'erwhelm their troops below, Shoot thro' the loopholes, and sharp jav'lins throw. Turnus, the chief, toss'd from his thund'ring hand Against the wooden walls, a flaming brand: It stuck, the fiery plague; the winds were high; The planks were season'd, and the timber dry. Contagion caught the posts; it spread along, Scorch'd, and to distance drove the scatter'd throng. The Trojans fled; the fire pursued amain, Still gath'ring fast upon the trembling train; Till, crowding to the corners of the wall, Down the defense and the defenders fall. The mighty flaw makes heav'n itself resound: The dead and dying Trojans strew the ground. The tow'r, that follow'd on the fallen crew, Whelm'd o'er their heads, and buried whom it slew: Some stuck upon the darts themselves had sent; All the same equal ruin underwent. Young Lycus and Helenor only scape; Sav'd- how, they know not- from the steepy leap. Helenor, elder of the two: by birth, On one side royal, one a son of earth, Whom to the Lydian king Licymnia bare, And sent her boasted bastard to the war (A privilege which none but freemen share). Slight were his arms, a sword and silver shield: No marks of honor charg'd its empty field. Light as he fell, so light the youth arose, And rising, found himself amidst his foes; Nor flight was left, nor hopes to force his way. Embolden'd by despair, he stood at bay; And- like a stag, whom all the troop surrounds Of eager huntsmen and invading hounds- Resolv'd on death, he dissipates his fears, And bounds aloft against the pointed spears: So dares the youth, secure of death; and throws His dying body on his thickest foes. But Lycus, swifter of his feet by far, Runs, doubles, winds and turns, amidst the war; Springs to the walls, and leaves his foes behind, And snatches at the beam he first can find; Looks up, and leaps aloft at all the stretch, In hopes the helping hand of some kind friend to reach. But Turnus follow'd hard his hunted prey (His spear had almost reach'd him in the way, Short of his reins, and scarce a span behind) "Fool!" said the chief, "tho' fleeter than the wind, Couldst thou presume to scape, when I pursue?" He said, and downward by the feet he drew The trembling dastard; at the tug he falls; Vast ruins come along, rent from the smoking walls. Thus on some silver swan, or tim'rous hare, Jove's bird comes sousing down from upper air; Her crooked talons truss the fearful prey: Then out of sight she soars, and wings her way. So seizes the grim wolf the tender lamb, In vain lamented by the bleating dam. Then rushing onward with a barb'rous cry, The troops of Turnus to the combat fly. The ditch with fagots fill'd, the daring foe Toss'd firebrands to the steepy turrets throw. Ilioneus, as bold Lucetius came To force the gate, and feed the kindling flame, Roll'd down the fragment of a rock so right, It crush'd him double underneath the weight. Two more young Liger and Asylas slew: To bend the bow young Liger better knew; Asylas best the pointed jav'lin threw. Brave Caeneus laid Ortygius on the plain; The victor Caeneus was by Turnus slain. By the same hand, Clonius and Itys fall, Sagar, and Ida, standing on the wall. From Capys' arms his fate Privernus found: Hurt by Themilla first-but slight the wound- His shield thrown by, to mitigate the smart, He clapp'd his hand upon the wounded part: The second shaft came swift and unespied, And pierc'd his hand, and nail'd it to his side, Transfix'd his breathing lungs and beating heart: The soul came issuing out, and hiss'd against the dart. The son of Arcens shone amid the rest, In glitt'ring armor and a purple vest, (Fair was his face, his eyes inspiring love,) Bred by his father in the Martian grove, Where the fat altars of Palicus flame, And send in arms to purchase early fame. Him when he spied from far, the Tuscan king Laid by the lance, and took him to the sling, Thrice whirl'd the thong around his head, and threw: The heated lead half melted as it flew; It pierc'd his hollow temples and his brain; The youth came tumbling down, and spurn'd the plain. Then young Ascanius, who, before this day, Was wont in woods to shoot the savage prey, First bent in martial strife the twanging bow, And exercis'd against a human foe- With this bereft Numanus of his life, Who Turnus' younger sister took to wife. Proud of his realm, and of his royal bride, Vaunting before his troops, and lengthen'd with a stride, In these insulting terms the Trojans he defied: "Twice-conquer'd cowards, now your shame is shown- Coop'd up a second time within your town! Who dare not issue forth in open field, But hold your walls before you for a shield. Thus threat you war? thus our alliance force? What gods, what madness, hether steer'd your course? You shall not find the sons of Atreus here, Nor need the frauds of sly Ulysses fear. Strong from the cradle, of a sturdy brood, We bear our newborn infants to the flood; There bath'd amid the stream, our boys we hold, With winter harden'd, and inur'd to cold. They wake before the day to range the wood, Kill ere they eat, nor taste unconquer'd food. No sports, but what belong to war, they know: To break the stubborn colt, to bend the bow. Our youth, of labor patient, earn their bread; Hardly they work, with frugal diet fed. From plows and harrows sent to seek renown, They fight in fields, and storm the shaken town. No part of life from toils of war is free, No change in age, or diff'rence in degree. We plow and till in arms; our oxen feel, Instead of goads, the spur and pointed steel; Th' inverted lance makes furrows in the plain. Ev'n time, that changes all, yet changes us in vain: The body, not the mind; nor can control Th' immortal vigor, or abate the soul. Our helms defend the young, disguise the gray: We live by plunder, and delight in prey. Your vests embroider'd with rich purple shine; In sloth you glory, and in dances join. Your vests have sweeping sleeves; with female pride Your turbants underneath your chins are tied. Go, Phrygians, to your Dindymus again! Go, less than women, in the shapes of men! Go, mix'd with eunuchs, in the Mother's rites, Where with unequal sound the flute invites; Sing, dance, and howl, by turns, in Ida's shade: Resign the war to men, who know the martial trade!" This foul reproach Ascanius could not hear With patience, or a vow'd revenge forbear. At the full stretch of both his hands he drew, And almost join'd the horns of the tough yew. But, first, before the throne of Jove he stood, And thus with lifted hands invok'd the god: "My first attempt, great Jupiter, succeed! An annual off'ring in thy grove shall bleed; A snow-white steer, before thy altar led, Who, like his mother, bears aloft his head, Butts with his threat'ning brows, and bellowing stands, And dares the fight, and spurns the yellow sands." Jove bow'd the heav'ns, and lent a gracious ear, And thunder'd on the left, amidst the clear. Sounded at once the bow; and swiftly flies The feather'd death, and hisses thro' the skies. The steel thro' both his temples forc'd the way: Extended on the ground, Numanus lay. "Go now, vain boaster, and true valor scorn! The Phrygians, twice subdued, yet make this third return." Ascanius said no more. The Trojans shake The heav'ns with shouting, and new vigor take. Apollo then bestrode a golden cloud, To view the feats of arms, and fighting crowd; And thus the beardless victor he bespoke aloud: "Advance, illustrious youth, increase in fame, And wide from east to west extend thy name; Offspring of gods thyself; and Rome shall owe To thee a race of demigods below. This is the way to heav'n: the pow'rs divine From this beginning date the Julian line. To thee, to them, and their victorious heirs, The conquer'd war is due, and the vast world is theirs. Troy is too narrow for thy name." He said, And plunging downward shot his radiant head; Dispell'd the breathing air, that broke his flight: Shorn of his beams, a man to mortal sight. Old Butes' form he took, Anchises' squire, Now left, to rule Ascanius, by his sire: His wrinkled visage, and his hoary hairs, His mien, his habit, and his arms, he wears, And thus salutes the boy, too forward for his years: "Suffice it thee, thy father's worthy son, The warlike prize thou hast already won. The god of archers gives thy youth a part Of his own praise, nor envies equal art. Now tempt the war no more." He said, and flew Obscure in air, and vanish'd from their view. The Trojans, by his arms, their patron know, And hear the twanging of his heav'nly bow. Then duteous force they use, and Phoebus' name, To keep from fight the youth too fond of fame. Undaunted, they themselves no danger shun; From wall to wall the shouts and clamors run. They bend their bows; they whirl their slings around; Heaps of spent arrows fall, and strew the ground; And helms, and shields, and rattling arms resound. The combat thickens, like the storm that flies From westward, when the show'ry Kids arise; Or patt'ring hail comes pouring on the main, When Jupiter descends in harden'd rain, Or bellowing clouds burst with a stormy sound, And with an armed winter strew the ground. Pand'rus and Bitias, thunderbolts of war, Whom Hiera to bold Alcanor bare On Ida's top, two youths of height and size Like firs that on their mother mountain rise, Presuming on their force, the gates unbar, And of their own accord invite the war. With fates averse, against their king's command, Arm'd, on the right and on the left they stand, And flank the passage: shining steel they wear, And waving crests above their heads appear. Thus two tall oaks, that Padus' banks adorn, Lift up to heav'n their leafy heads unshorn, And, overpress'd with nature's heavy load, Dance to the whistling winds, and at each other nod. In flows a tide of Latians, when they see The gate set open, and the passage free; Bold Quercens, with rash Tmarus, rushing on, Equicolus, that in bright armor shone, And Haemon first; but soon repuls'd they fly, Or in the well-defended pass they die. These with success are fir'd, and those with rage, And each on equal terms at length ingage. Drawn from their lines, and issuing on the plain, The Trojans hand to hand the fight maintain. Fierce Turnus in another quarter fought, When suddenly th' unhop'd-for news was brought, The foes had left the fastness of their place, Prevail'd in fight, and had his men in chase. He quits th' attack, and, to prevent their fate, Runs where the giant brothers guard the gate. The first he met, Antiphates the brave, But base-begotten on a Theban slave, Sarpedon's son, he slew: the deadly dart Found passage thro' his breast, and pierc'd his heart. Fix'd in the wound th' Italian cornel stood, Warm'd in his lungs, and in his vital blood. Aphidnus next, and Erymanthus dies, And Meropes, and the gigantic size Of Bitias, threat'ning with his ardent eyes. Not by the feeble dart he fell oppress'd (A dart were lost within that roomy breast), But from a knotted lance, large, heavy, strong, Which roar'd like thunder as it whirl'd along: Not two bull hides th' impetuous force withhold, Nor coat of double mail, with scales of gold. Down sunk the monster bulk and press'd the ground; His arms and clatt'ring shield on the vast body sound, Not with less ruin than the Bajan mole, Rais'd on the seas, the surges to control- At once comes tumbling down the rocky wall; Prone to the deep, the stones disjointed fall Of the vast pile; the scatter'd ocean flies; Black sands, discolor'd froth, and mingled mud arise: The frighted billows roll, and seek the shores; Then trembles Prochyta, then Ischia roars: Typhoeus, thrown beneath, by Jove's command, Astonish'd at the flaw that shakes the land, Soon shifts his weary side, and, scarce awake, With wonder feels the weight press lighter on his back. The warrior god the Latian troops inspir'd, New strung their sinews, and their courage fir'd, But chills the Trojan hearts with cold affright: Then black despair precipitates their flight. When Pandarus beheld his brother kill'd, The town with fear and wild confusion fill'd, He turns the hinges of the heavy gate With both his hands, and adds his shoulders to the weight Some happier friends within the walls inclos'd; The rest shut out, to certain death expos'd: Fool as he was, and frantic in his care, T' admit young Turnus, and include the war! He thrust amid the crowd, securely bold, Like a fierce tiger pent amid the fold. Too late his blazing buckler they descry, And sparkling fires that shot from either eye, His mighty members, and his ample breast, His rattling armor, and his crimson crest. Far from that hated face the Trojans fly, All but the fool who sought his destiny. Mad Pandarus steps forth, with vengeance vow'd For Bitias' death, and threatens thus aloud: "These are not Ardea's walls, nor this the town Amata proffers with Lavinia's crown: 'T is hostile earth you tread. Of hope bereft, No means of safe return by flight are left." To whom, with count'nance calm, and soul sedate, Thus Turnus: "Then begin, and try thy fate: My message to the ghost of Priam bear; Tell him a new Achilles sent thee there." A lance of tough ground ash the Trojan threw, Rough in the rind, and knotted as it grew: With his full force he whirl'd it first around; But the soft yielding air receiv'd the wound: Imperial Juno turn'd the course before, And fix'd the wand'ring weapon in the door. "But hope not thou," said Turnus, "when I strike, To shun thy fate: our force is not alike, Nor thy steel temper'd by the Lemnian god." Then rising, on his utmost stretch he stood, And aim'd from high: the full descending blow Cleaves the broad front and beardless cheeks in two. Down sinks the giant with a thund'ring sound: His pond'rous limbs oppress the trembling ground; Blood, brains, and foam gush from the gaping wound: Scalp, face, and shoulders the keen steel divides, And the shar'd visage hangs on equal sides. The Trojans fly from their approaching fate; And, had the victor then secur'd the gate, And to his troops without unclos'd the bars, One lucky day had ended all his wars. But boiling youth, and blind desire of blood, Push'd on his fury, to pursue the crowd. Hamstring'd behind, unhappy Gyges died; Then Phalaris is added to his side. The pointed jav'lins from the dead he drew, And their friends' arms against their fellows threw. Strong Halys stands in vain; weak Phlegys flies; Saturnia, still at hand, new force and fire supplies. Then Halius, Prytanis, Alcander fall- Ingag'd against the foes who scal'd the wall: But, whom they fear'd without, they found within. At last, tho' late, by Lynceus he was seen. He calls new succors, and assaults the prince: But weak his force, and vain is their defense. Turn'd to the right, his sword the hero drew, And at one blow the bold aggressor slew. He joints the neck; and, with a stroke so strong, The helm flies off, and bears the head along. Next him, the huntsman Amycus he kill'd, In darts invenom'd and in poison skill'd. Then Clytius fell beneath his fatal spear, And Creteus, whom the Muses held so dear: He fought with courage, and he sung the fight; Arms were his bus'ness, verses his delight. The Trojan chiefs behold, with rage and grief, Their slaughter'd friends, and hasten their relief. Bold Mnestheus rallies first the broken train, Whom brave Seresthus and his troop sustain. To save the living, and revenge the dead, Against one warrior's arms all Troy they led. "O, void of sense and courage!" Mnestheus cried, "Where can you hope your coward heads to hide? Ah! where beyond these rampires can you run? One man, and in your camp inclos'd, you shun! Shall then a single sword such slaughter boast, And pass unpunish'd from a num'rous host? Forsaking honor, and renouncing fame, Your gods, your country, and your king you shame!" This just reproach their virtue does excite: They stand, they join, they thicken to the fight. Now Turnus doubts, and yet disdains to yield, But with slow paces measures back the field, And inches to the walls, where Tiber's tide, Washing the camp, defends the weaker side. The more he loses, they advance the more, And tread in ev'ry step he trod before. They shout: they bear him back; and, whom by might They cannot conquer, they oppress with weight. As, compass'd with a wood of spears around, The lordly lion still maintains his ground; Grins horrible, retires, and turns again; Threats his distended paws, and shakes his mane; He loses while in vain he presses on, Nor will his courage let him dare to run: So Turnus fares, and, unresolved of flight, Moves tardy back, and just recedes from fight. Yet twice, inrag'd, the combat he renews, Twice breaks, and twice his broken foes pursues. But now they swarm, and, with fresh troops supplied, Come rolling on, and rush from ev'ry side: Nor Juno, who sustain'd his arms before, Dares with new strength suffice th' exhausted store; For Jove, with sour commands, sent Iris down, To force th' invader from the frighted town. With labor spent, no longer can he wield The heavy fanchion, or sustain the shield, O'erwhelm'd with darts, which from afar they fling: The weapons round his hollow temples ring; His golden helm gives way, with stony blows Batter'd, and flat, and beaten to his brows. His crest is rash'd away; his ample shield Is falsified, and round with jav'lins fill'd. The foe, now faint, the Trojans overwhelm; And Mnestheus lays hard load upon his helm. Sick sweat succeeds; he drops at ev'ry pore; With driving dust his cheeks are pasted o'er; Shorter and shorter ev'ry gasp he takes; And vain efforts and hurtless blows he makes. Plung'd in the flood, and made the waters fly. The yellow god the welcome burthen bore, And wip'd the sweat, and wash'd away the gore; Then gently wafts him to the farther coast, And sends him safe to cheer his anxious host.

Book IX

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section9/

Never one to miss an opportunity, Juno sends her messenger, Iris, down from Olympus to inform Turnus that Aeneas is away from his camp. With their leader gone, the Trojans are particularly vulnerable to an attack, so Turnus immediately leads his army toward the enemy camp. The Trojans spot the army coming and secure themselves inside their newly constructed fortress, unwilling to risk an open battle while Aeneas is away. Finding no obvious weakness in their defenses, Turnus decides to circumnavigate the camp and set fire to the defenseless ships anchored on the shore. The fleet's destruction seems inevitable, but an old blessing prevents the ships' incineration. At the fleet's construction, Cybele--mother of the gods and sister of Saturn--requested her son Jupiter to render the vessels immortal because they were built of wood from trees in her sacred forest. As Turnus and his troops watch the ships burn, the vessels suddenly pull loose of their anchors, submerge, and reappear as sea nymphs. This sign vexes the Latins, but Turnus remains confident and determined to complete his annihilation of the Trojans, portents from the gods notwithstanding. Night falls, and the Latins make camp around the Trojan fortress. The Trojans know that they must send reports of the Latins' movements to Aeneas quickly. Nisus and Euryalus, two friends eager for glory and adventure, volunteer to sneak out in the dark of night. The Trojan captains applaud the bravery of the two men. Quietly leaving the fortress, the two find the entire Latin army fast asleep. They pull their swords and begin slaughtering many great captains. When daylight approaches, they finally make their way toward the woods, but not before Euryalus takes the high helmet of a Latin captain as a prize. As they approach the forest, a group of enemy horsemen returning to camp through the woods sees the helmet flash in the distance, and rides toward the two Trojans. Nisus manages to escape into the woods, but the horsemen capture Euryalus. Nisus rushes back to save his friend, but in the end both are killed. The Latins put the heads of the two Trojans on stakes and parade them before the Trojan fortress, to the dismay of those inside. Then the Latins attack. They cross the trenches surrounding the Trojan fortress and try to identify a weak spot in the walls, holding up their shields to block the barrage of spears that the Trojans hurl down from above. There is a high tower standing just outside the main gate, which Turnus lights on fire. Turnus and his men collapse the tower, killing many Trojans inside. The Trojans within the fortress begin to panic, but Ascanius renews their hope, getting his first taste of war when he fires an arrow through the head of Remulus, one of the Latin captains. Their confidence renewed, the Trojans open the gates and surprise the Latins by rushing out in attack, inflicting many Latin casualties in one quick strike. Unfortunately for the Trojans, Turnus joins the fray, suppresses the Trojans' surge, and begins to force them to retreat to the fortress. The Trojan Pandarus, observing the turning tide of battle, quickly shuts the gates again, allowing as many of his comrades as possible back inside--but letting Turnus through as well. Finally inside the enemy camp, the Latin leader kills Trojans as though it were an easy game. Eventually, though, Turnus is outnumbered, and narrowly escapes by jumping into the Tiber and floating back out to his comrades.

Throughout the poem, interventions on the part of the immortals tend to be spontaneous, responding to mortal affairs as they unfold. But Virgil's contention, while describing the burning Trojan fleet, that the fleet is immune to fire because of Cybele's blessing reads as a contrived act of retroactive deus ex machina. Deus ex machina literally means "god from the machine," and it is a device used to diffuse or solve a seemingly impossible situation by means of the spontaneous act of a divine hand. It is strange that we are not told about the immunity of the ships beforehand, given that we are told, for instance, that when the Trojans eat their own tables they will know they have arrived at their final destination. Even stranger is the fact that the miraculous transformation of the Trojan ships into sea nymphs, though the result of a god's work, does not benefit the Trojans at all. Sea nymphs are not fit for sailing, so the Trojans lose their fleet despite divine intervention on their behalf. The Latins ultimately accomplish their mission of rendering the Trojan fleet useless, meaning that the Trojans are unable to flee the battle by sailing back out to sea. They are now grounded, and it is certain that the events of the epic are to be played out on Italian soil. Aesthetically, the transformation of the Trojan ships into sea nymphs is a sublime ending to the journey of a fleet of vessels that, from the epic's inception, has been buffeted by constant torments and trials. To go down in flames while at anchor ashore would be a fate unworthy of ships that have endured such harshness at sea. Their underwater metamorphosis proves their status as heroic objects of war. Virgil flirts with the defeat of the Trojans when, after Turnus gains access to the Trojan fortress, the author claims that if it had occurred to Turnus to open the gates and let his awaiting forces into the citadel, the Latins would have won the war then and there. By pointing to the possibility of other outcomes, Virgil heightens the dramatic import of the battle and establishes the Latins as worthy enemies. At the same time, this comment suggests that Turnus is not as amazing as he may seem, as it points out a shortcoming in his cunning and strategy. In Book IX, Virgil foregrounds the parallels between the Aeneid and the Iliad. Turnus, for example, openly claims to be in the same predicament as the Greek king Menelaus--a Trojan has swept away Turnus's bride, Lavinia, just as the Trojan Paris made off with Menelaus's bride, Helen, thus bringing about the Trojan War. Turnus boasts that the Latins will not need to use the trickery of a wooden horse, as Ulysses did to gain entrance to Troy. Rather, he claims, the Latins will defeat the Trojans outright. Knowing the destined outcome of the war, we see that Turnus spells out his doom here: there may be similarities between the Greek-Trojan conflict and the Latin-Trojan conflict, but their outcomes will not be the same. The gods have offered clear signs that the conflict will turn in Aeneas's favor, but Turnus chooses to ignore them, denying any faith in the oracles of his demise. Turnus is a fearsome warrior who is either too assured of his own ability--a quality that, when combined with defiance of divine powers, is known as hubris--or is resigned to his role as a pure destructive obstacle to the Trojans. He hints at the latter sentiment when he cries, "I have my fate as well, to combat theirs" . The ill-fated journey of the eager young soldiers Nisus and Euryalus provides a poignant counterpoint to the Trojans' success at staving off the fortress's siege. Their youthful bravery is extinguished because of Euryalus's desire for prizes before the completion of their mission. They could easily kill a few Latins and still make it into the forest in good time. Instead, Euryalus concerns himself with the spoils of battle, enabling the Latins to capture him. Nisus's willingness to sacrifice his own life for his friend is noble but largely useless, as he does not manage to save Euryalus but does manage to stab Euryalus's killer as he falls to his own death. Following this intense and emotional episode, Virgil offers a brief message of memorial to these two Trojans, writing: Fortunate, both ! If in the least my songs Avail, no future day will ever take you Out of the record of remembering Time. In narrating the episode, Virgil displays his skill at dramatizing the impulsive, emotional nature of friendship and loyalty. With these lines to Nisus and Euryalus, he displays his confidence in his work and legacy, asserting that his poetry can make men immortal.

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{"name": "Book X", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section10/", "summary": "From Olympus, Jupiter takes notice of the carnage in Italy. He had expected the Trojans to settle there peacefully, and he summons a council of all the gods to discuss the matter. There, Venus blames Juno for the continued suffering of Aeneas and the Trojans. Juno angrily responds that she did not force Aeneas to go to Italy. Annoyed at their bickering, Jupiter decrees that henceforth he will not help either side, so that the merits and efforts of men will decide their ends. Meanwhile, the Latins continue their siege of the Trojan fortress, and Aeneas journeys back toward the battle. By this point, the army no longer has to march, because another king, Tarchon of Tuscany, has provided Aeneas with a fleet of ships, along with many great warriors to augment his forces. Sped on by the sea nymphs that were born of the Trojan fleet's transformation, the new fleet reaches the beach near the battlefield shortly after dawn. Turnus spots the ships approaching and leads his troops toward the beach to confront them. The Trojans disembark, and the battle commences. Aeneas strikes the first blows, cutting down several of Turnus's men. The rest of the soldiers on both sides then fall into the fray, and blood begins to spill. Pallas leads the Arcadians, fighting fiercely and tipping the scales in favor of the Trojans. Already a great warrior in spite of his youth, he dispenses death with every blow, but attracts the attention of Turnus. Turnus swaggers forth and challenges Pallas alone in the center of the battle. They each toss their spears. Pallas's weapon penetrates Turnus's shield and armor, but leaves only a flesh wound on Turnus. Turnus's lance, on the other hand, tears through Pallas's corselet and lodges deep in his chest, killing him. Supremely arrogant after this kill, Turnus reaches down and rips off Pallas's belt as a prize. Word of Pallas's death reaches Aeneas, who flies into a rage. He hacks a bloody path through the Latin lines, looking for Turnus and bent on vengeance. Terrified, some of the Latin soldiers beg on their knees to be spared, but Aeneas slaughters them mercilessly, and Turnus's troops fall into chaos. Up on Olympus, Juno sees that the battle is lost and asks Jupiter to let her spare Turnus from death. Jupiter consents, so Juno flies down to the battlefield, creates a phantom Aeneas, and sends the vision within sight of Turnus. He chases the phantom onto one of the ships anchored nearby, but as soon as he boards the ship, Juno severs the moorings and the ship floats out to sea. Powerless to return to the battlefield, Turnus drifts until the wind carries him ashore far down the coast. In Turnus's absence, the great Latin warrior Mezentius takes up the fight. He slays many brave Trojans, but loses heart when Aeneas takes down his son, Lausus. He confronts the Trojan hero and casts a slew of spears at him, but the shield forged by Vulcan holds strong. In the end, Aeneas cuts down Mezentius as well, spelling defeat for the Latin army.", "analysis": "Jupiter's declaration that the rest of the battle will be waged entirely without divine interference comes as a surprise, as up to this point, humans have not had control over events. Though a divine hand does reach down once more before the battle's end when Juno persuades Jupiter to let her save Turnus, Jupiter grants Juno's request only because Venus herself is already protecting Aeneas. For the most part, the outcome of the battle is decided by the valor of the soldiers themselves. Yet Jupiter's suspension of divine influence does not release the combatants from their fates. Jupiter's prohibition of interference only lends weight to the tragedy of the events that follow. By their own actions, which are determined by their own wills and abilities, the warriors bring their fates to pass as the conflict plays out. Ironically, Turnus's killing of Pallas is the battle's turning point, as events then start to shift in the Trojans' favor. First, Virgil foreshadows the demise of the Latins when he says that by taking the belt of Pallas--an act of arrogance or hubris--Turnus spells his own doom. Pallas's death awakens in Aeneas a passion not witnessed since the fall of Troy--a mixture of ruthlessness, unrelenting anger, and hell-bent vengeance. The reappearance of Aeneas as a great warrior breaks the battle's stalemate. Turnus's humiliation when Juno lures him away from the battle and onto the ship plays out to the further advantage of the Trojans. Turnus feels alienated from Juno, as though his advocate has suddenly become his adversary. She protects his person but not his honor, and impedes him in his single-minded commitment to behave as a heroic warrior whatever the cost. If the Trojans were to kill Turnus, their victory would be complete, but the fact that Turnus is involuntarily plucked from the battlefield by his immortal benefactor represents a moral victory for the Trojans. It boosts their spirits while deflating the Latins' pride. Again in Book X, the Latins draw parallels between themselves and the Greeks who defeated the Trojans at Troy. This time, though, they invoke the Greeks as a contrast. The Greeks did not succeed in eliminating the Trojans altogether, as the Latins intend to do in Italy. The high irony is that the Latins are correct in saying that they are not like the Greeks--but primarily because they are not, in fact, capable of defeating the Trojans. Worse, the Greeks were able to defeat the Trojans on the Trojans' own ground; the Latins, on the other hand, prove incapable of defending their homeland. It is thus the Trojans, who can be viewed as invaders despite their invitation from King Latinus, who play the role of the Greeks, winning a war on enemy turf. The difference between the Greeks in Troy and the Trojans in Italy lies in the Trojans' intention to settle in Italy and found what will become an empire. When the Greeks sacked Troy, they did so to reclaim a woman, and, with Helen retrieved, they set sail for home. Aeneas, on the other hand, must claim rather than reclaim a land, and he and the Trojans must justify their invasion of Italy by proclaiming the superiority of the race and culture that will result from the conquest."}

BOOK X The gates of heav'n unfold: Jove summons all The gods to council in the common hall. Sublimely seated, he surveys from far The fields, the camp, the fortune of the war, And all th' inferior world. From first to last, The sov'reign senate in degrees are plac'd. Then thus th' almighty sire began: "Ye gods, Natives or denizens of blest abodes, From whence these murmurs, and this change of mind, This backward fate from what was first design'd? Why this protracted war, when my commands Pronounc'd a peace, and gave the Latian lands? What fear or hope on either part divides Our heav'ns, and arms our powers on diff'rent sides? A lawful time of war at length will come, (Nor need your haste anticipate the doom), When Carthage shall contend the world with Rome, Shall force the rigid rocks and Alpine chains, And, like a flood, come pouring on the plains. Then is your time for faction and debate, For partial favor, and permitted hate. Let now your immature dissension cease; Sit quiet, and compose your souls to peace." Thus Jupiter in few unfolds the charge; But lovely Venus thus replies at large: "O pow'r immense, eternal energy, (For to what else protection can we fly?) Seest thou the proud Rutulians, how they dare In fields, unpunish'd, and insult my care? How lofty Turnus vaunts amidst his train, In shining arms, triumphant on the plain? Ev'n in their lines and trenches they contend, And scarce their walls the Trojan troops defend: The town is fill'd with slaughter, and o'erfloats, With a red deluge, their increasing moats. Aeneas, ignorant, and far from thence, Has left a camp expos'd, without defense. This endless outrage shall they still sustain? Shall Troy renew'd be forc'd and fir'd again? A second siege my banish'd issue fears, And a new Diomede in arms appears. One more audacious mortal will be found; And I, thy daughter, wait another wound. Yet, if with fates averse, without thy leave, The Latian lands my progeny receive, Bear they the pains of violated law, And thy protection from their aid withdraw. But, if the gods their sure success foretell; If those of heav'n consent with those of hell, To promise Italy; who dare debate The pow'r of Jove, or fix another fate? What should I tell of tempests on the main, Of Aeolus usurping Neptune's reign? Of Iris sent, with Bacchanalian heat T' inspire the matrons, and destroy the fleet? Now Juno to the Stygian sky descends, Solicits hell for aid, and arms the fiends. That new example wanted yet above: An act that well became the wife of Jove! Alecto, rais'd by her, with rage inflames The peaceful bosoms of the Latian dames. Imperial sway no more exalts my mind; (Such hopes I had indeed, while Heav'n was kind;) Now let my happier foes possess my place, Whom Jove prefers before the Trojan race; And conquer they, whom you with conquest grace. Since you can spare, from all your wide command, No spot of earth, no hospitable land, Which may my wand'ring fugitives receive; (Since haughty Juno will not give you leave;) Then, father, (if I still may use that name,) By ruin'd Troy, yet smoking from the flame, I beg you, let Ascanius, by my care, Be freed from danger, and dismiss'd the war: Inglorious let him live, without a crown. The father may be cast on coasts unknown, Struggling with fate; but let me save the son. Mine is Cythera, mine the Cyprian tow'rs: In those recesses, and those sacred bow'rs, Obscurely let him rest; his right resign To promis'd empire, and his Julian line. Then Carthage may th' Ausonian towns destroy, Nor fear the race of a rejected boy. What profits it my son to scape the fire, Arm'd with his gods, and loaded with his sire; To pass the perils of the seas and wind; Evade the Greeks, and leave the war behind; To reach th' Italian shores; if, after all, Our second Pergamus is doom'd to fall? Much better had he curb'd his high desires, And hover'd o'er his ill-extinguish'd fires. To Simois' banks the fugitives restore, And give them back to war, and all the woes before." Deep indignation swell'd Saturnia's heart: "And must I own," she said, "my secret smart- What with more decence were in silence kept, And, but for this unjust reproach, had slept? Did god or man your fav'rite son advise, With war unhop'd the Latians to surprise? By fate, you boast, and by the gods' decree, He left his native land for Italy! Confess the truth; by mad Cassandra, more Than Heav'n inspir'd, he sought a foreign shore! Did I persuade to trust his second Troy To the raw conduct of a beardless boy, With walls unfinish'd, which himself forsakes, And thro' the waves a wand'ring voyage takes? When have I urg'd him meanly to demand The Tuscan aid, and arm a quiet land? Did I or Iris give this mad advice, Or made the fool himself the fatal choice? You think it hard, the Latians should destroy With swords your Trojans, and with fires your Troy! Hard and unjust indeed, for men to draw Their native air, nor take a foreign law! That Turnus is permitted still to live, To whom his birth a god and goddess give! But yet is just and lawful for your line To drive their fields, and force with fraud to join; Realms, not your own, among your clans divide, And from the bridegroom tear the promis'd bride; Petition, while you public arms prepare; Pretend a peace, and yet provoke a war! 'T was giv'n to you, your darling son to shroud, To draw the dastard from the fighting crowd, And, for a man, obtend an empty cloud. From flaming fleets you turn'd the fire away, And chang'd the ships to daughters of the sea. But is my crime- the Queen of Heav'n offends, If she presume to save her suff'ring friends! Your son, not knowing what his foes decree, You say, is absent: absent let him be. Yours is Cythera, yours the Cyprian tow'rs, The soft recesses, and the sacred bow'rs. Why do you then these needless arms prepare, And thus provoke a people prone to war? Did I with fire the Trojan town deface, Or hinder from return your exil'd race? Was I the cause of mischief, or the man Whose lawless lust the fatal war began? Think on whose faith th' adult'rous youth relied; Who promis'd, who procur'd, the Spartan bride? When all th' united states of Greece combin'd, To purge the world of the perfidious kind, Then was your time to fear the Trojan fate: Your quarrels and complaints are now too late." Thus Juno. Murmurs rise, with mix'd applause, Just as they favor or dislike the cause. So winds, when yet unfledg'd in woods they lie, In whispers first their tender voices try, Then issue on the main with bellowing rage, And storms to trembling mariners presage. Then thus to both replied th' imperial god, Who shakes heav'n's axles with his awful nod. (When he begins, the silent senate stand With rev'rence, list'ning to the dread command: The clouds dispel; the winds their breath restrain; And the hush'd waves lie flatted on the main.) "Celestials, your attentive ears incline! Since," said the god, "the Trojans must not join In wish'd alliance with the Latian line; Since endless jarrings and immortal hate Tend but to discompose our happy state; The war henceforward be resign'd to fate: Each to his proper fortune stand or fall; Equal and unconcern'd I look on all. Rutulians, Trojans, are the same to me; And both shall draw the lots their fates decree. Let these assault, if Fortune be their friend; And, if she favors those, let those defend: The Fates will find their way." The Thund'rer said, And shook the sacred honors of his head, Attesting Styx, th' inviolable flood, And the black regions of his brother god. Trembled the poles of heav'n, and earth confess'd the nod. This end the sessions had: the senate rise, And to his palace wait their sov'reign thro' the skies. Meantime, intent upon their siege, the foes Within their walls the Trojan host inclose: They wound, they kill, they watch at ev'ry gate; Renew the fires, and urge their happy fate. Th' Aeneans wish in vain their wanted chief, Hopeless of flight, more hopeless of relief. Thin on the tow'rs they stand; and ev'n those few A feeble, fainting, and dejected crew. Yet in the face of danger some there stood: The two bold brothers of Sarpedon's blood, Asius and Acmon; both th' Assaraci; Young Haemon, and tho' young, resolv'd to die. With these were Clarus and Thymoetes join'd; Tibris and Castor, both of Lycian kind. From Acmon's hands a rolling stone there came, So large, it half deserv'd a mountain's name: Strong-sinew'd was the youth, and big of bone; His brother Mnestheus could not more have done, Or the great father of th' intrepid son. Some firebrands throw, some flights of arrows send; And some with darts, and some with stones defend. Amid the press appears the beauteous boy, The care of Venus, and the hope of Troy. His lovely face unarm'd, his head was bare; In ringlets o'er his shoulders hung his hair. His forehead circled with a diadem; Distinguish'd from the crowd, he shines a gem, Enchas'd in gold, or polish'd iv'ry set, Amidst the meaner foil of sable jet. Nor Ismarus was wanting to the war, Directing pointed arrows from afar, And death with poison arm'd- in Lydia born, Where plenteous harvests the fat fields adorn; Where proud Pactolus floats the fruitful lands, And leaves a rich manure of golden sands. There Capys, author of the Capuan name, And there was Mnestheus too, increas'd in fame, Since Turnus from the camp he cast with shame. Thus mortal war was wag'd on either side. Meantime the hero cuts the nightly tide: For, anxious, from Evander when he went, He sought the Tyrrhene camp, and Tarchon's tent; Expos'd the cause of coming to the chief; His name and country told, and ask'd relief; Propos'd the terms; his own small strength declar'd; What vengeance proud Mezentius had prepar'd: What Turnus, bold and violent, design'd; Then shew'd the slipp'ry state of humankind, And fickle fortune; warn'd him to beware, And to his wholesome counsel added pray'r. Tarchon, without delay, the treaty signs, And to the Trojan troops the Tuscan joins. They soon set sail; nor now the fates withstand; Their forces trusted with a foreign hand. Aeneas leads; upon his stern appear Two lions carv'd, which rising Ida bear- Ida, to wand'ring Trojans ever dear. Under their grateful shade Aeneas sate, Revolving war's events, and various fate. His left young Pallas kept, fix'd to his side, And oft of winds enquir'd, and of the tide; Oft of the stars, and of their wat'ry way; And what he suffer'd both by land and sea. Now, sacred sisters, open all your spring! The Tuscan leaders, and their army sing, Which follow'd great Aeneas to the war: Their arms, their numbers, and their names declare. A thousand youths brave Massicus obey, Borne in the Tiger thro' the foaming sea; From Asium brought, and Cosa, by his care: For arms, light quivers, bows and shafts, they bear. Fierce Abas next: his men bright armor wore; His stern Apollo's golden statue bore. Six hundred Populonia sent along, All skill'd in martial exercise, and strong. Three hundred more for battle Ilva joins, An isle renown'd for steel, and unexhausted mines. Asylas on his prow the third appears, Who heav'n interprets, and the wand'ring stars; From offer'd entrails prodigies expounds, And peals of thunder, with presaging sounds. A thousand spears in warlike order stand, Sent by the Pisans under his command. Fair Astur follows in the wat'ry field, Proud of his manag'd horse and painted shield. Gravisca, noisome from the neighb'ring fen, And his own Caere, sent three hundred men; With those which Minio's fields and Pyrgi gave, All bred in arms, unanimous, and brave. Thou, Muse, the name of Cinyras renew, And brave Cupavo follow'd but by few; Whose helm confess'd the lineage of the man, And bore, with wings display'd, a silver swan. Love was the fault of his fam'd ancestry, Whose forms and fortunes in his ensigns fly. For Cycnus lov'd unhappy Phaeton, And sung his loss in poplar groves, alone, Beneath the sister shades, to soothe his grief. Heav'n heard his song, and hasten'd his relief, And chang'd to snowy plumes his hoary hair, And wing'd his flight, to chant aloft in air. His son Cupavo brush'd the briny flood: Upon his stern a brawny Centaur stood, Who heav'd a rock, and, threat'ning still to throw, With lifted hands alarm'd the seas below: They seem'd to fear the formidable sight, And roll'd their billows on, to speed his flight. Ocnus was next, who led his native train Of hardy warriors thro' the wat'ry plain: The son of Manto by the Tuscan stream, From whence the Mantuan town derives the name- An ancient city, but of mix'd descent: Three sev'ral tribes compose the government; Four towns are under each; but all obey The Mantuan laws, and own the Tuscan sway. Hate to Mezentius arm'd five hundred more, Whom Mincius from his sire Benacus bore: Mincius, with wreaths of reeds his forehead cover'd o'er. These grave Auletes leads: a hundred sweep With stretching oars at once the glassy deep. Him and his martial train the Triton bears; High on his poop the sea-green god appears: Frowning he seems his crooked shell to sound, And at the blast the billows dance around. A hairy man above the waist he shows; A porpoise tail beneath his belly grows; And ends a fish: his breast the waves divides, And froth and foam augment the murm'ring tides. Full thirty ships transport the chosen train For Troy's relief, and scour the briny main. Now was the world forsaken by the sun, And Phoebe half her nightly race had run. The careful chief, who never clos'd his eyes, Himself the rudder holds, the sails supplies. A choir of Nereids meet him on the flood, Once his own galleys, hewn from Ida's wood; But now, as many nymphs, the sea they sweep, As rode, before, tall vessels on the deep. They know him from afar; and in a ring Inclose the ship that bore the Trojan king. Cymodoce, whose voice excell'd the rest, Above the waves advanc'd her snowy breast; Her right hand stops the stern; her left divides The curling ocean, and corrects the tides. She spoke for all the choir, and thus began With pleasing words to warn th' unknowing man: "Sleeps our lov'd lord? O goddess-born, awake! Spread ev'ry sail, pursue your wat'ry track, And haste your course. Your navy once were we, From Ida's height descending to the sea; Till Turnus, as at anchor fix'd we stood, Presum'd to violate our holy wood. Then, loos'd from shore, we fled his fires profane (Unwillingly we broke our master's chain), And since have sought you thro' the Tuscan main. The mighty Mother chang'd our forms to these, And gave us life immortal in the seas. But young Ascanius, in his camp distress'd, By your insulting foes is hardly press'd. Th' Arcadian horsemen, and Etrurian host, Advance in order on the Latian coast: To cut their way the Daunian chief designs, Before their troops can reach the Trojan lines. Thou, when the rosy morn restores the light, First arm thy soldiers for th' ensuing fight: Thyself the fated sword of Vulcan wield, And bear aloft th' impenetrable shield. To-morrow's sun, unless my skill be vain, Shall see huge heaps of foes in battle slain." Parting, she spoke; and with immortal force Push'd on the vessel in her wat'ry course; For well she knew the way. Impell'd behind, The ship flew forward, and outstripp'd the wind. The rest make up. Unknowing of the cause, The chief admires their speed, and happy omens draws. Then thus he pray'd, and fix'd on heav'n his eyes: "Hear thou, great Mother of the deities. With turrets crown'd! (on Ida's holy hill Fierce tigers, rein'd and curb'd, obey thy will.) Firm thy own omens; lead us on to fight; And let thy Phrygians conquer in thy right." He said no more. And now renewing day Had chas'd the shadows of the night away. He charg'd the soldiers, with preventing care, Their flags to follow, and their arms prepare; Warn'd of th' ensuing fight, and bade 'em hope the war. Now, his lofty poop, he view'd below His camp incompass'd, and th' inclosing foe. His blazing shield, imbrac'd, he held on high; The camp receive the sign, and with loud shouts reply. Hope arms their courage: from their tow'rs they throw Their darts with double force, and drive the foe. Thus, at the signal giv'n, the cranes arise Before the stormy south, and blacken all the skies. King Turnus wonder'd at the fight renew'd, Till, looking back, the Trojan fleet he view'd, The seas with swelling canvas cover'd o'er, And the swift ships descending on the shore. The Latians saw from far, with dazzled eyes, The radiant crest that seem'd in flames to rise, And dart diffusive fires around the field, And the keen glitt'ring of the golden shield. Thus threat'ning comets, when by night they rise, Shoot sanguine streams, and sadden all the skies: So Sirius, flashing forth sinister lights, Pale humankind with plagues and with dry famine fright: Yet Turnus with undaunted mind is bent To man the shores, and hinder their descent, And thus awakes the courage of his friends: "What you so long have wish'd, kind Fortune sends; In ardent arms to meet th' invading foe: You find, and find him at advantage now. Yours is the day: you need but only dare; Your swords will make you masters of the war. Your sires, your sons, your houses, and your lands, And dearest wifes, are all within your hands. Be mindful of the race from whence you came, And emulate in arms your fathers' fame. Now take the time, while stagg'ring yet they stand With feet unfirm, and prepossess the strand: Fortune befriends the bold." Nor more he said, But balanc'd whom to leave, and whom to lead; Then these elects, the landing to prevent; And those he leaves, to keep the city pent. Meantime the Trojan sends his troops ashore: Some are by boats expos'd, by bridges more. With lab'ring oars they bear along the strand, Where the tide languishes, and leap aland. Tarchon observes the coast with careful eyes, And, where no ford he finds, no water fries, Nor billows with unequal murmurs roar, But smoothly slide along, and swell the shore, That course he steer'd, and thus he gave command: "Here ply your oars, and at all hazard land: Force on the vessel, that her keel may wound This hated soil, and furrow hostile ground. Let me securely land- I ask no more; Then sink my ships, or shatter on the shore." This fiery speech inflames his fearful friends: They tug at ev'ry oar, and ev'ry stretcher bends; They run their ships aground; the vessels knock, (Thus forc'd ashore,) and tremble with the shock. Tarchon's alone was lost, that stranded stood, Stuck on a bank, and beaten by the flood: She breaks her back; the loosen'd sides give way, And plunge the Tuscan soldiers in the sea. Their broken oars and floating planks withstand Their passage, while they labor to the land, And ebbing tides bear back upon th' uncertain sand. Now Turnus leads his troops without delay, Advancing to the margin of the sea. The trumpets sound: Aeneas first assail'd The clowns new-rais'd and raw, and soon prevail'd. Great Theron fell, an omen of the fight; Great Theron, large of limbs, of giant height. He first in open field defied the prince: But armor scal'd with gold was no defense Against the fated sword, which open'd wide His plated shield, and pierc'd his naked side. Next, Lichas fell, who, not like others born, Was from his wretched mother ripp'd and torn; Sacred, O Phoebus, from his birth to thee; For his beginning life from biting steel was free. Not far from him was Gyas laid along, Of monstrous bulk; with Cisseus fierce and strong: Vain bulk and strength! for, when the chief assail'd, Nor valor nor Herculean arms avail'd, Nor their fam'd father, wont in war to go With great Alcides, while he toil'd below. The noisy Pharos next receiv'd his death: Aeneas writh'd his dart, and stopp'd his bawling breath. Then wretched Cydon had receiv'd his doom, Who courted Clytius in his beardless bloom, And sought with lust obscene polluted joys: The Trojan sword had curd his love of boys, Had not his sev'n bold brethren stopp'd the course Of the fierce champions, with united force. Sev'n darts were thrown at once; and some rebound From his bright shield, some on his helmet sound: The rest had reach'd him; but his mother's care Prevented those, and turn'd aside in air. The prince then call'd Achates, to supply The spears that knew the way to victory- "Those fatal weapons, which, inur'd to blood, In Grecian bodies under Ilium stood: Not one of those my hand shall toss in vain Against our foes, on this contended plain." He said; then seiz'd a mighty spear, and threw; Which, wing'd with fate, thro' Maeon's buckler flew, Pierc'd all the brazen plates, and reach'd his heart: He stagger'd with intolerable smart. Alcanor saw; and reach'd, but reach'd in vain, His helping hand, his brother to sustain. A second spear, which kept the former course, From the same hand, and sent with equal force, His right arm pierc'd, and holding on, bereft His use of both, and pinion'd down his left. Then Numitor from his dead brother drew Th' ill-omen'd spear, and at the Trojan threw: Preventing fate directs the lance awry, Which, glancing, only mark'd Achates' thigh. In pride of youth the Sabine Clausus came, And, from afar, at Dryops took his aim. The spear flew hissing thro' the middle space, And pierc'd his throat, directed at his face; It stopp'd at once the passage of his wind, And the free soul to flitting air resign'd: His forehead was the first that struck the ground; Lifeblood and life rush'd mingled thro' the wound. He slew three brothers of the Borean race, And three, whom Ismarus, their native place, Had sent to war, but all the sons of Thrace. Halesus, next, the bold Aurunci leads: The son of Neptune to his aid succeeds, Conspicuous on his horse. On either hand, These fight to keep, and those to win, the land. With mutual blood th' Ausonian soil is dyed, While on its borders each their claim decide. As wintry winds, contending in the sky, With equal force of lungs their titles try: They rage, they roar; the doubtful rack of heav'n Stands without motion, and the tide undriv'n: Each bent to conquer, neither side to yield, They long suspend the fortune of the field. Both armies thus perform what courage can; Foot set to foot, and mingled man to man. But, in another part, th' Arcadian horse With ill success ingage the Latin force: For, where th' impetuous torrent, rushing down, Huge craggy stones and rooted trees had thrown, They left their coursers, and, unus'd to fight On foot, were scatter'd in a shameful flight. Pallas, who with disdain and grief had view'd His foes pursuing, and his friends pursued, Us'd threat'nings mix'd with pray'rs, his last resource, With these to move their minds, with those to fire their force "Which way, companions? whether would you run? By you yourselves, and mighty battles won, By my great sire, by his establish'd name, And early promise of my future fame; By my youth, emulous of equal right To share his honors- shun ignoble flight! Trust not your feet: your hands must hew way Thro' yon black body, and that thick array: 'T is thro' that forward path that we must come; There lies our way, and that our passage home. Nor pow'rs above, nor destinies below Oppress our arms: with equal strength we go, With mortal hands to meet a mortal foe. See on what foot we stand: a scanty shore, The sea behind, our enemies before; No passage left, unless we swim the main; Or, forcing these, the Trojan trenches gain." This said, he strode with eager haste along, And bore amidst the thickest of the throng. Lagus, the first he met, with fate to foe, Had heav'd a stone of mighty weight, to throw: Stooping, the spear descended on his chine, Just where the bone distinguished either loin: It stuck so fast, so deeply buried lay, That scarce the victor forc'd the steel away. Hisbon came on: but, while he mov'd too slow To wish'd revenge, the prince prevents his blow; For, warding his at once, at once he press'd, And plung'd the fatal weapon in his breast. Then lewd Anchemolus he laid in dust, Who stain'd his stepdam's bed with impious lust. And, after him, the Daucian twins were slain, Laris and Thymbrus, on the Latian plain; So wondrous like in feature, shape, and size, As caus'd an error in their parents' eyes- Grateful mistake! but soon the sword decides The nice distinction, and their fate divides: For Thymbrus' head was lopp'd; and Laris' hand, Dismember'd, sought its owner on the strand: The trembling fingers yet the fauchion strain, And threaten still th' intended stroke in vain. Now, to renew the charge, th' Arcadians came: Sight of such acts, and sense of honest shame, And grief, with anger mix'd, their minds inflame. Then, with a casual blow was Rhoeteus slain, Who chanc'd, as Pallas threw, to cross the plain: The flying spear was after Ilus sent; But Rhoeteus happen'd on a death unmeant: From Teuthras and from Tyres while he fled, The lance, athwart his body, laid him dead: Roll'd from his chariot with a mortal wound, And intercepted fate, he spurn'd the ground. As when, in summer, welcome winds arise, The watchful shepherd to the forest flies, And fires the midmost plants; contagion spreads, And catching flames infect the neighb'ring heads; Around the forest flies the furious blast, And all the leafy nation sinks at last, And Vulcan rides in triumph o'er the waste; The pastor, pleas'd with his dire victory, Beholds the satiate flames in sheets ascend the sky: So Pallas' troops their scatter'd strength unite, And, pouring on their foes, their prince delight. Halesus came, fierce with desire of blood; But first collected in his arms he stood: Advancing then, he plied the spear so well, Ladon, Demodocus, and Pheres fell. Around his head he toss'd his glitt'ring brand, And from Strymonius hew'd his better hand, Held up to guard his throat; then hurl'd a stone At Thoas' ample front, and pierc'd the bone: It struck beneath the space of either eye; And blood, and mingled brains, together fly. Deep skill'd in future fates, Halesus' sire Did with the youth to lonely groves retire: But, when the father's mortal race was run, Dire destiny laid hold upon the son, And haul'd him to the war, to find, beneath Th' Evandrian spear, a memorable death. Pallas th' encounter seeks, but, ere he throws, To Tuscan Tiber thus address'd his vows: "O sacred stream, direct my flying dart, And give to pass the proud Halesus' heart! His arms and spoils thy holy oak shall bear." Pleas'd with the bribe, the god receiv'd his pray'r: For, while his shield protects a friend distress'd, The dart came driving on, and pierc'd his breast. But Lausus, no small portion of the war, Permits not panic fear to reign too far, Caus'd by the death of so renown'd a knight; But by his own example cheers the fight. Fierce Abas first he slew; Abas, the stay Of Trojan hopes, and hindrance of the day. The Phrygian troops escap'd the Greeks in vain: They, and their mix'd allies, now load the plain. To the rude shock of war both armies came; Their leaders equal, and their strength the same. The rear so press'd the front, they could not wield Their angry weapons, to dispute the field. Here Pallas urges on, and Lausus there: Of equal youth and beauty both appear, But both by fate forbid to breathe their native air. Their congress in the field great Jove withstands: Both doom'd to fall, but fall by greater hands. Meantime Juturna warns the Daunian chief Of Lausus' danger, urging swift relief. With his driv'n chariot he divides the crowd, And, making to his friends, thus calls aloud: "Let none presume his needless aid to join; Retire, and clear the field; the fight is mine: To this right hand is Pallas only due; O were his father here, my just revenge to view!" From the forbidden space his men retir'd. Pallas their awe, and his stern words, admir'd; Survey'd him o'er and o'er with wond'ring sight, Struck with his haughty mien, and tow'ring height. Then to the king: "Your empty vaunts forbear; Success I hope, and fate I cannot fear; Alive or dead, I shall deserve a name; Jove is impartial, and to both the same." He said, and to the void advanc'd his pace: Pale horror sate on each Arcadian face. Then Turnus, from his chariot leaping light, Address'd himself on foot to single fight. And, as a lion- when he spies from far A bull that seems to meditate the war, Bending his neck, and spurning back the sand- Runs roaring downward from his hilly stand: Imagine eager Turnus not more slow, To rush from high on his unequal foe. Young Pallas, when he saw the chief advance Within due distance of his flying lance, Prepares to charge him first, resolv'd to try If fortune would his want of force supply; And thus to Heav'n and Hercules address'd: "Alcides, once on earth Evander's guest, His son adjures you by those holy rites, That hospitable board, those genial nights; Assist my great attempt to gain this prize, And let proud Turnus view, with dying eyes, His ravish'd spoils." 'T was heard, the vain request; Alcides mourn'd, and stifled sighs within his breast. Then Jove, to soothe his sorrow, thus began: "Short bounds of life are set to mortal man. 'T is virtue's work alone to stretch the narrow span. So many sons of gods, in bloody fight, Around the walls of Troy, have lost the light: My own Sarpedon fell beneath his foe; Nor I, his mighty sire, could ward the blow. Ev'n Turnus shortly shall resign his breath, And stands already on the verge of death." This said, the god permits the fatal fight, But from the Latian fields averts his sight. Now with full force his spear young Pallas threw, And, having thrown, his shining fauchion drew The steel just graz'd along the shoulder joint, And mark'd it slightly with the glancing point, Fierce Turnus first to nearer distance drew, And pois'd his pointed spear, before he threw: Then, as the winged weapon whizz'd along, "See now," said he, "whose arm is better strung." The spear kept on the fatal course, unstay'd By plates of ir'n, which o'er the shield were laid: Thro' folded brass and tough bull hides it pass'd, His corslet pierc'd, and reach'd his heart at last. In vain the youth tugs at the broken wood; The soul comes issuing with the vital blood: He falls; his arms upon his body sound; And with his bloody teeth he bites the ground. Turnus bestrode the corpse: "Arcadians, hear," Said he; "my message to your master bear: Such as the sire deserv'd, the son I send; It costs him dear to be the Phrygians' friend. The lifeless body, tell him, I bestow, Unask'd, to rest his wand'ring ghost below." He said, and trampled down with all the force Of his left foot, and spurn'd the wretched corse; Then snatch'd the shining belt, with gold inlaid; The belt Eurytion's artful hands had made, Where fifty fatal brides, express'd to sight, All in the compass of one mournful night, Depriv'd their bridegrooms of returning light. In an ill hour insulting Turnus tore Those golden spoils, and in a worse he wore. O mortals, blind in fate, who never know To bear high fortune, or endure the low! The time shall come, when Turnus, but in vain, Shall wish untouch'd the trophies of the slain; Shall wish the fatal belt were far away, And curse the dire remembrance of the day. The sad Arcadians, from th' unhappy field, Bear back the breathless body on a shield. O grace and grief of war! at once restor'd, With praises, to thy sire, at once deplor'd! One day first sent thee to the fighting field, Beheld whole heaps of foes in battle kill'd; One day beheld thee dead, and borne upon thy shield. This dismal news, not from uncertain fame, But sad spectators, to the hero came: His friends upon the brink of ruin stand, Unless reliev'd by his victorious hand. He whirls his sword around, without delay, And hews thro' adverse foes an ample way, To find fierce Turnus, of his conquest proud: Evander, Pallas, all that friendship ow'd To large deserts, are present to his eyes; His plighted hand, and hospitable ties. Four sons of Sulmo, four whom Ufens bred, He took in fight, and living victims led, To please the ghost of Pallas, and expire, In sacrifice, before his fun'ral fire. At Magus next he threw: he stoop'd below The flying spear, and shunn'd the promis'd blow; Then, creeping, clasp'd the hero's knees, and pray'd: "By young Iulus, by thy father's shade, O spare my life, and send me back to see My longing sire, and tender progeny! A lofty house I have, and wealth untold, In silver ingots, and in bars of gold: All these, and sums besides, which see no day, The ransom of this one poor life shall pay. If I survive, will Troy the less prevail? A single soul's too light to turn the scale." He said. The hero sternly thus replied: "Thy bars and ingots, and the sums beside, Leave for thy children's lot. Thy Turnus broke All rules of war by one relentless stroke, When Pallas fell: so deems, nor deems alone My father's shadow, but my living son." Thus having said, of kind remorse bereft, He seiz'd his helm, and dragg'd him with his left; Then with his right hand, while his neck he wreath'd, Up to the hilts his shining fauchion sheath'd. Apollo's priest, Emonides, was near; His holy fillets on his front appear; Glitt'ring in arms, he shone amidst the crowd; Much of his god, more of his purple, proud. Him the fierce Trojan follow'd thro' the field: The holy coward fell; and, forc'd to yield, The prince stood o'er the priest, and, at one blow, Sent him an off'ring to the shades below. His arms Seresthus on his shoulders bears, Design'd a trophy to the God of Wars. Vulcanian Caeculus renews the fight, And Umbro, born upon the mountains' height. The champion cheers his troops t' encounter those, And seeks revenge himself on other foes. At Anxur's shield he drove; and, at the blow, Both shield and arm to ground together go. Anxur had boasted much of magic charms, And thought he wore impenetrable arms, So made by mutter'd spells; and, from the spheres, Had life secur'd, in vain, for length of years. Then Tarquitus the field in triumph trod; A nymph his mother, his sire a god. Exulting in bright arms, he braves the prince: With his protended lance he makes defense; Bears back his feeble foe; then, pressing on, Arrests his better hand, and drags him down; Stands o'er the prostrate wretch, and, as he lay, Vain tales inventing, and prepar'd to pray, Mows off his head: the trunk a moment stood, Then sunk, and roll'd along the sand in blood. The vengeful victor thus upbraids the slain: "Lie there, proud man, unpitied, on the plain; Lie there, inglorious, and without a tomb, Far from thy mother and thy native home, Exposed to savage beasts, and birds of prey, Or thrown for food to monsters of the sea." On Lycas and Antaeus next he ran, Two chiefs of Turnus, and who led his van. They fled for fear; with these, he chas'd along Camers the yellow-lock'd, and Numa strong; Both great in arms, and both were fair and young. Camers was son to Volscens lately slain, In wealth surpassing all the Latian train, And in Amycla fix'd his silent easy reign. And, as Aegaeon, when with heav'n he strove, Stood opposite in arms to mighty Jove; Mov'd all his hundred hands, provok'd the war, Defied the forky lightning from afar; At fifty mouths his flaming breath expires, And flash for flash returns, and fires for fires; In his right hand as many swords he wields, And takes the thunder on as many shields: With strength like his, the Trojan hero stood; And soon the fields with falling corps were strow'd, When once his fauchion found the taste of blood. With fury scarce to be conceiv'd, he flew Against Niphaeus, whom four coursers drew. They, when they see the fiery chief advance, And pushing at their chests his pointed lance, Wheel'd with so swift a motion, mad with fear, They threw their master headlong from the chair. They stare, they start, nor stop their course, before They bear the bounding chariot to the shore. Now Lucagus and Liger scour the plains, With two white steeds; but Liger holds the reins, And Lucagus the lofty seat maintains: Bold brethren both. The former wav'd in air His flaming sword: Aeneas couch'd his spear, Unus'd to threats, and more unus'd to fear. Then Liger thus: "Thy confidence is vain To scape from hence, as from the Trojan plain: Nor these the steeds which Diomede bestrode, Nor this the chariot where Achilles rode; Nor Venus' veil is here, near Neptune's shield; Thy fatal hour is come, and this the field." Thus Liger vainly vaunts: the Trojan peer Return'd his answer with his flying spear. As Lucagus, to lash his horses, bends, Prone to the wheels, and his left foot protends, Prepar'd for fight; the fatal dart arrives, And thro' the borders of his buckler drives; Pass'd thro' and pierc'd his groin: the deadly wound, Cast from his chariot, roll'd him on the ground. Whom thus the chief upbraids with scornful spite: "Blame not the slowness of your steeds in flight; Vain shadows did not force their swift retreat; But you yourself forsake your empty seat." He said, and seiz'd at once the loosen'd rein; For Liger lay already on the plain, By the same shock: then, stretching out his hands, The recreant thus his wretched life demands: "Now, by thyself, O more than mortal man! By her and him from whom thy breath began, Who form'd thee thus divine, I beg thee, spare This forfeit life, and hear thy suppliant's pray'r." Thus much he spoke, and more he would have said; But the stern hero turn'd aside his head, And cut him short: "I hear another man; You talk'd not thus before the fight began. Now take your turn; and, as a brother should, Attend your brother to the Stygian flood." Then thro' his breast his fatal sword he sent, And the soul issued at the gaping vent. As storms the skies, and torrents tear the ground, Thus rag'd the prince, and scatter'd deaths around. At length Ascanius and the Trojan train Broke from the camp, so long besieg'd in vain. Meantime the King of Gods and Mortal Man Held conference with his queen, and thus began: "My sister goddess, and well-pleasing wife, Still think you Venus' aid supports the strife- Sustains her Trojans- or themselves, alone, With inborn valor force their fortune on? How fierce in fight, with courage undecay'd! Judge if such warriors want immortal aid." To whom the goddess with the charming eyes, Soft in her tone, submissively replies: "Why, O my sov'reign lord, whose frown I fear, And cannot, unconcern'd, your anger bear; Why urge you thus my grief? when, if I still (As once I was) were mistress of your will, From your almighty pow'r your pleasing wife Might gain the grace of length'ning Turnus' life, Securely snatch him from the fatal fight, And give him to his aged father's sight. Now let him perish, since you hold it good, And glut the Trojans with his pious blood. Yet from our lineage he derives his name, And, in the fourth degree, from god Pilumnus came; Yet he devoutly pays you rites divine, And offers daily incense at your shrine." Then shortly thus the sov'reign god replied: "Since in my pow'r and goodness you confide, If for a little space, a lengthen'd span, You beg reprieve for this expiring man, I grant you leave to take your Turnus hence From instant fate, and can so far dispense. But, if some secret meaning lies beneath, To save the short-liv'd youth from destin'd death, Or if a farther thought you entertain, To change the fates; you feed your hopes in vain." To whom the goddess thus, with weeping eyes: "And what if that request, your tongue denies, Your heart should grant; and not a short reprieve, But length of certain life, to Turnus give? Now speedy death attends the guiltless youth, If my presaging soul divines with truth; Which, O! I wish, might err thro' causeless fears, And you (for you have pow'r) prolong his years!" Thus having said, involv'd in clouds, she flies, And drives a storm before her thro' the skies. Swift she descends, alighting on the plain, Where the fierce foes a dubious fight maintain. Of air condens'd a specter soon she made; And, what Aeneas was, such seem'd the shade. Adorn'd with Dardan arms, the phantom bore His head aloft; a plumy crest he wore; This hand appear'd a shining sword to wield, And that sustain'd an imitated shield. With manly mien he stalk'd along the ground, Nor wanted voice belied, nor vaunting sound. (Thus haunting ghosts appear to waking sight, Or dreadful visions in our dreams by night.) The specter seems the Daunian chief to dare, And flourishes his empty sword in air. At this, advancing, Turnus hurl'd his spear: The phantom wheel'd, and seem'd to fly for fear. Deluded Turnus thought the Trojan fled, And with vain hopes his haughty fancy fed. "Whether, O coward?" (thus he calls aloud, Nor found he spoke to wind, and chas'd a cloud,) "Why thus forsake your bride! Receive from me The fated land you sought so long by sea." He said, and, brandishing at once his blade, With eager pace pursued the flying shade. By chance a ship was fasten'd to the shore, Which from old Clusium King Osinius bore: The plank was ready laid for safe ascent; For shelter there the trembling shadow bent, And skipp't and skulk'd, and under hatches went. Exulting Turnus, with regardless haste, Ascends the plank, and to the galley pass'd. Scarce had he reach'd the prow: Saturnia's hand The haulsers cuts, and shoots the ship from land. With wind in poop, the vessel plows the sea, And measures back with speed her former way. Meantime Aeneas seeks his absent foe, And sends his slaughter'd troops to shades below. The guileful phantom now forsook the shroud, And flew sublime, and vanish'd in a cloud. Too late young Turnus the delusion found, Far on the sea, still making from the ground. Then, thankless for a life redeem'd by shame, With sense of honor stung, and forfeit fame, Fearful besides of what in fight had pass'd, His hands and haggard eyes to heav'n he cast; "O Jove!" he cried, "for what offense have Deserv'd to bear this endless infamy? Whence am I forc'd, and whether am I borne? How, and with what reproach, shall I return? Shall ever I behold the Latian plain, Or see Laurentum's lofty tow'rs again? What will they say of their deserting chief The war was mine: I fly from their relief; I led to slaughter, and in slaughter leave; And ev'n from hence their dying groans receive. Here, overmatch'd in fight, in heaps they lie; There, scatter'd o'er the fields, ignobly fly. Gape wide, O earth, and draw me down alive! Or, O ye pitying winds, a wretch relieve! On sands or shelves the splitting vessel drive; Or set me shipwrack'd on some desart shore, Where no Rutulian eyes may see me more, Unknown to friends, or foes, or conscious Fame, Lest she should follow, and my flight proclaim." Thus Turnus rav'd, and various fates revolv'd: The choice was doubtful, but the death resolv'd. And now the sword, and now the sea took place, That to revenge, and this to purge disgrace. Sometimes he thought to swim the stormy main, By stretch of arms the distant shore to gain. Thrice he the sword assay'd, and thrice the flood; But Juno, mov'd with pity, both withstood. And thrice repress'd his rage; strong gales supplied, And push'd the vessel o'er the swelling tide. At length she lands him on his native shores, And to his father's longing arms restores. Meantime, by Jove's impulse, Mezentius arm'd, Succeeding Turnus, with his ardor warm'd His fainting friends, reproach'd their shameful flight, Repell'd the victors, and renew'd the fight. Against their king the Tuscan troops conspire; Such is their hate, and such their fierce desire Of wish'd revenge: on him, and him alone, All hands employ'd, and all their darts are thrown. He, like a solid rock by seas inclos'd, To raging winds and roaring waves oppos'd, From his proud summit looking down, disdains Their empty menace, and unmov'd remains. Beneath his feet fell haughty Hebrus dead, Then Latagus, and Palmus as he fled. At Latagus a weighty stone he flung: His face was flatted, and his helmet rung. But Palmus from behind receives his wound; Hamstring'd he falls, and grovels on the ground: His crest and armor, from his body torn, Thy shoulders, Lausus, and thy head adorn. Evas and Mimas, both of Troy, he slew. Mimas his birth from fair Theano drew, Born on that fatal night, when, big with fire, The queen produc'd young Paris to his sire: But Paris in the Phrygian fields was slain, Unthinking Mimas on the Latian plain. And, as a savage boar, on mountains bred, With forest mast and fatt'ning marshes fed, When once he sees himself in toils inclos'd, By huntsmen and their eager hounds oppos'd- He whets his tusks, and turns, and dares the war; Th' invaders dart their jav'lins from afar: All keep aloof, and safely shout around; But none presumes to give a nearer wound: He frets and froths, erects his bristled hide, And shakes a grove of lances from his side: Not otherwise the troops, with hate inspir'd, And just revenge against the tyrant fir'd, Their darts with clamor at a distance drive, And only keep the languish'd war alive. From Coritus came Acron to the fight, Who left his spouse betroth'd, and unconsummate night. Mezentius sees him thro' the squadrons ride, Proud of the purple favors of his bride. Then, as a hungry lion, who beholds A gamesome goat, who frisks about the folds, Or beamy stag, that grazes on the plain- He runs, he roars, he shakes his rising mane, He grins, and opens wide his greedy jaws; The prey lies panting underneath his paws: He fills his famish'd maw; his mouth runs o'er With unchew'd morsels, while he churns the gore: So proud Mezentius rushes on his foes, And first unhappy Acron overthrows: Stretch'd at his length, he spurns the swarthy ground; The lance, besmear'd with blood, lies broken in the wound. Then with disdain the haughty victor view'd Orodes flying, nor the wretch pursued, Nor thought the dastard's back deserv'd a wound, But, running, gain'd th' advantage of the ground: Then turning short, he met him face to face, To give his victor the better grace. Orodes falls, in equal fight oppress'd: Mezentius fix'd his foot upon his breast, And rested lance; and thus aloud he cries: "Lo! here the champion of my rebels lies!" The fields around with Io Paean! ring; And peals of shouts applaud the conqu'ring king. At this the vanquish'd, with his dying breath, Thus faintly spoke, and prophesied in death: "Nor thou, proud man, unpunish'd shalt remain: Like death attends thee on this fatal plain." Then, sourly smiling, thus the king replied: "For what belongs to me, let Jove provide; But die thou first, whatever chance ensue." He said, and from the wound the weapon drew. A hov'ring mist came swimming o'er his sight, And seal'd his eyes in everlasting night. By Caedicus, Alcathous was slain; Sacrator laid Hydaspes on the plain; Orses the strong to greater strength must yield; He, with Parthenius, were by Rapo kill'd. Then brave Messapus Ericetes slew, Who from Lycaon's blood his lineage drew. But from his headstrong horse his fate he found, Who threw his master, as he made a bound: The chief, alighting, stuck him to the ground; Then Clonius, hand to hand, on foot assails: The Trojan sinks, and Neptune's son prevails. Agis the Lycian, stepping forth with pride, To single fight the boldest foe defied; Whom Tuscan Valerus by force o'ercame, And not belied his mighty father's fame. Salius to death the great Antronius sent: But the same fate the victor underwent, Slain by Nealces' hand, well-skill'd to throw The flying dart, and draw the far-deceiving bow. Thus equal deaths are dealt with equal chance; By turns they quit their ground, by turns advance: Victors and vanquish'd, in the various field, Nor wholly overcome, nor wholly yield. The gods from heav'n survey the fatal strife, And mourn the miseries of human life. Above the rest, two goddesses appear Concern'd for each: here Venus, Juno there. Amidst the crowd, infernal Ate shakes Her scourge aloft, and crest of hissing snakes. Once more the proud Mezentius, with disdain, Brandish'd his spear, and rush'd into the plain, Where tow'ring in the midmost rank she stood, Like tall Orion stalking o'er the flood. (When with his brawny breast he cuts the waves, His shoulders scarce the topmost billow laves), Or like a mountain ash, whose roots are spread, Deep fix'd in earth; in clouds he hides his head. The Trojan prince beheld him from afar, And dauntless undertook the doubtful war. Collected in his strength, and like a rock, Pois'd on his base, Mezentius stood the shock. He stood, and, measuring first with careful eyes The space his spear could reach, aloud he cries: "My strong right hand, and sword, assist my stroke! (Those only gods Mezentius will invoke.) His armor, from the Trojan pirate torn, By my triumphant Lausus shall be worn." He said; and with his utmost force he threw The massy spear, which, hissing as it flew, Reach'd the celestial shield, that stopp'd the course; But, glancing thence, the yet unbroken force Took a new bent obliquely, and betwixt The side and bowels fam'd Anthores fix'd. Anthores had from Argos travel'd far, Alcides' friend, and brother of the war; Till, tir'd with toils, fair Italy he chose, And in Evander's palace sought repose. Now, falling by another's wound, his eyes He cast to heav'n, on Argos thinks, and dies. The pious Trojan then his jav'lin sent; The shield gave way; thro' treble plates it went Of solid brass, of linen trebly roll'd, And three bull hides which round the buckler fold. All these it pass'd, resistless in the course, Transpierc'd his thigh, and spent its dying force. The gaping wound gush'd out a crimson flood. The Trojan, glad with sight of hostile blood, His faunchion drew, to closer fight address'd, And with new force his fainting foe oppress'd. His father's peril Lausus view'd with grief; He sigh'd, he wept, he ran to his relief. And here, heroic youth, 't is here I must To thy immortal memory be just, And sing an act so noble and so new, Posterity will scarce believe 't is true. Pain'd with his wound, and useless for the fight, The father sought to save himself by flight: Incumber'd, slow he dragg'd the spear along, Which pierc'd his thigh, and in his buckler hung. The pious youth, resolv'd on death, below The lifted sword springs forth to face the foe; Protects his parent, and prevents the blow. Shouts of applause ran ringing thro' the field, To see the son the vanquish'd father shield. All, fir'd with gen'rous indignation, strive, And with a storm of darts to distance drive The Trojan chief, who, held at bay from far, On his Vulcanian orb sustain'd the war. As, when thick hail comes rattling in the wind, The plowman, passenger, and lab'ring hind For shelter to the neighb'ring covert fly, Or hous'd, or safe in hollow caverns lie; But, that o'erblown, when heav'n above 'em smiles, Return to travel, and renew their toils: Aeneas thus, o'erwhelmed on ev'ry side, The storm of darts, undaunted, did abide; And thus to Lausus loud with friendly threat'ning cried: "Why wilt thou rush to certain death, and rage In rash attempts, beyond thy tender age, Betray'd by pious love?" Nor, thus forborne, The youth desists, but with insulting scorn Provokes the ling'ring prince, whose patience, tir'd, Gave place; and all his breast with fury fir'd. For now the Fates prepar'd their sharpen'd shears; And lifted high the flaming sword appears, Which, full descending with a frightful sway, Thro' shield and corslet forc'd th' impetuous way, And buried deep in his fair bosom lay. The purple streams thro' the thin armor strove, And drench'd th' imbroider'd coat his mother wove; And life at length forsook his heaving heart, Loth from so sweet a mansion to depart. But when, with blood and paleness all o'erspread, The pious prince beheld young Lausus dead, He griev'd; he wept; the sight an image brought Of his own filial love, a sadly pleasing thought: Then stretch'd his hand to hold him up, and said: "Poor hapless youth! what praises can be paid To love so great, to such transcendent store Of early worth, and sure presage of more? Accept whate'er Aeneas can afford; Untouch'd thy arms, untaken be thy sword; And all that pleas'd thee living, still remain Inviolate, and sacred to the slain. Thy body on thy parents I bestow, To rest thy soul, at least, if shadows know, Or have a sense of human things below. There to thy fellow ghosts with glory tell: ''T was by the great Aeneas hand I fell.'" With this, his distant friends he beckons near, Provokes their duty, and prevents their fear: Himself assists to lift him from the ground, With clotted locks, and blood that well'd from out the wound. Meantime, his father, now no father, stood, And wash'd his wounds by Tiber's yellow flood: Oppress'd with anguish, panting, and o'erspent, His fainting limbs against an oak he leant. A bough his brazen helmet did sustain; His heavier arms lay scatter'd on the plain: A chosen train of youth around him stand; His drooping head was rested on his hand: His grisly beard his pensive bosom sought; And all on Lausus ran his restless thought. Careful, concern'd his danger to prevent, He much enquir'd, and many a message sent To warn him from the field- alas! in vain! Behold, his mournful followers bear him slain! O'er his broad shield still gush'd the yawning wound, And drew a bloody trail along the ground. Far off he heard their cries, far off divin'd The dire event, with a foreboding mind. With dust he sprinkled first his hoary head; Then both his lifted hands to heav'n he spread; Last, the dear corpse embracing, thus he said: "What joys, alas! could this frail being give, That I have been so covetous to live? To see my son, and such a son, resign His life, a ransom for preserving mine! And am I then preserv'd, and art thou lost? How much too dear has that redemption cost! 'T is now my bitter banishment I feel: This is a wound too deep for time to heal. My guilt thy growing virtues did defame; My blackness blotted thy unblemish'd name. Chas'd from a throne, abandon'd, and exil'd For foul misdeeds, were punishments too mild: I ow'd my people these, and, from their hate, With less resentment could have borne my fate. And yet I live, and yet sustain the sight Of hated men, and of more hated light: But will not long." With that he rais'd from ground His fainting limbs, that stagger'd with his wound; Yet, with a mind resolv'd, and unappall'd With pains or perils, for his courser call'd Well-mouth'd, well-manag'd, whom himself did dress With daily care, and mounted with success; His aid in arms, his ornament in peace. Soothing his courage with a gentle stroke, The steed seem'd sensible, while thus he spoke: "O Rhoebus, we have liv'd too long for me- If life and long were terms that could agree! This day thou either shalt bring back the head And bloody trophies of the Trojan dead; This day thou either shalt revenge my woe, For murther'd Lausus, on his cruel foe; Or, if inexorable fate deny Our conquest, with thy conquer'd master die: For, after such a lord, I rest secure, Thou wilt no foreign reins, or Trojan load endure." He said; and straight th' officious courser kneels, To take his wonted weight. His hands he fills With pointed jav'lins; on his head he lac'd His glitt'ring helm, which terribly was grac'd With waving horsehair, nodding from afar; Then spurr'd his thund'ring steed amidst the war. Love, anguish, wrath, and grief, to madness wrought, Despair, and secret shame, and conscious thought Of inborn worth, his lab'ring soul oppress'd, Roll'd in his eyes, and rag'd within his breast. Then loud he call'd Aeneas thrice by name: The loud repeated voice to glad Aeneas came. "Great Jove," he said, "and the far-shooting god, Inspire thy mind to make thy challenge good!" He spoke no more; but hasten'd, void of fear, And threaten'd with his long protended spear. To whom Mezentius thus: "Thy vaunts are vain. My Lausus lies extended on the plain: He's lost! thy conquest is already won; The wretched sire is murther'd in the son. Nor fate I fear, but all the gods defy. Forbear thy threats: my bus'ness is to die; But first receive this parting legacy." He said; and straight a whirling dart he sent; Another after, and another went. Round in a spacious ring he rides the field, And vainly plies th' impenetrable shield. Thrice rode he round; and thrice Aeneas wheel'd, Turn'd as he turn'd: the golden orb withstood The strokes, and bore about an iron wood. Impatient of delay, and weary grown, Still to defend, and to defend alone, To wrench the darts which in his buckler light, Urg'd and o'er-labor'd in unequal fight; At length resolv'd, he throws with all his force Full at the temples of the warrior horse. Just where the stroke was aim'd, th' unerring spear Made way, and stood transfix'd thro' either ear. Seiz'd with unwonted pain, surpris'd with fright, The wounded steed curvets, and, rais'd upright, Lights on his feet before; his hoofs behind Spring up in air aloft, and lash the wind. Down comes the rider headlong from his height: His horse came after with unwieldy weight, And, flound'ring forward, pitching on his head, His lord's incumber'd shoulder overlaid. From either host, the mingled shouts and cries Of Trojans and Rutulians rend the skies. Aeneas, hast'ning, wav'd his fatal sword High o'er his head, with this reproachful word: "Now; where are now thy vaunts, the fierce disdain Of proud Mezentius, and the lofty strain?" Struggling, and wildly staring on the skies, With scarce recover'd sight he thus replies: "Why these insulting words, this waste of breath, To souls undaunted, and secure of death? 'T is no dishonor for the brave to die, Nor came I here with hope victory; Nor ask I life, nor fought with that design: As I had us'd my fortune, use thou thine. My dying son contracted no such band; The gift is hateful from his murd'rer's hand. For this, this only favor let me sue, If pity can to conquer'd foes be due: Refuse it not; but let my body have The last retreat of humankind, a grave. Too well I know th' insulting people's hate; Protect me from their vengeance after fate: This refuge for my poor remains provide, And lay my much-lov'd Lausus by my side." He said, and to the sword his throat applied. The crimson stream distain'd his arms around, And the disdainful soul came rushing thro' the wound.

Book X

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section10/

From Olympus, Jupiter takes notice of the carnage in Italy. He had expected the Trojans to settle there peacefully, and he summons a council of all the gods to discuss the matter. There, Venus blames Juno for the continued suffering of Aeneas and the Trojans. Juno angrily responds that she did not force Aeneas to go to Italy. Annoyed at their bickering, Jupiter decrees that henceforth he will not help either side, so that the merits and efforts of men will decide their ends. Meanwhile, the Latins continue their siege of the Trojan fortress, and Aeneas journeys back toward the battle. By this point, the army no longer has to march, because another king, Tarchon of Tuscany, has provided Aeneas with a fleet of ships, along with many great warriors to augment his forces. Sped on by the sea nymphs that were born of the Trojan fleet's transformation, the new fleet reaches the beach near the battlefield shortly after dawn. Turnus spots the ships approaching and leads his troops toward the beach to confront them. The Trojans disembark, and the battle commences. Aeneas strikes the first blows, cutting down several of Turnus's men. The rest of the soldiers on both sides then fall into the fray, and blood begins to spill. Pallas leads the Arcadians, fighting fiercely and tipping the scales in favor of the Trojans. Already a great warrior in spite of his youth, he dispenses death with every blow, but attracts the attention of Turnus. Turnus swaggers forth and challenges Pallas alone in the center of the battle. They each toss their spears. Pallas's weapon penetrates Turnus's shield and armor, but leaves only a flesh wound on Turnus. Turnus's lance, on the other hand, tears through Pallas's corselet and lodges deep in his chest, killing him. Supremely arrogant after this kill, Turnus reaches down and rips off Pallas's belt as a prize. Word of Pallas's death reaches Aeneas, who flies into a rage. He hacks a bloody path through the Latin lines, looking for Turnus and bent on vengeance. Terrified, some of the Latin soldiers beg on their knees to be spared, but Aeneas slaughters them mercilessly, and Turnus's troops fall into chaos. Up on Olympus, Juno sees that the battle is lost and asks Jupiter to let her spare Turnus from death. Jupiter consents, so Juno flies down to the battlefield, creates a phantom Aeneas, and sends the vision within sight of Turnus. He chases the phantom onto one of the ships anchored nearby, but as soon as he boards the ship, Juno severs the moorings and the ship floats out to sea. Powerless to return to the battlefield, Turnus drifts until the wind carries him ashore far down the coast. In Turnus's absence, the great Latin warrior Mezentius takes up the fight. He slays many brave Trojans, but loses heart when Aeneas takes down his son, Lausus. He confronts the Trojan hero and casts a slew of spears at him, but the shield forged by Vulcan holds strong. In the end, Aeneas cuts down Mezentius as well, spelling defeat for the Latin army.

Jupiter's declaration that the rest of the battle will be waged entirely without divine interference comes as a surprise, as up to this point, humans have not had control over events. Though a divine hand does reach down once more before the battle's end when Juno persuades Jupiter to let her save Turnus, Jupiter grants Juno's request only because Venus herself is already protecting Aeneas. For the most part, the outcome of the battle is decided by the valor of the soldiers themselves. Yet Jupiter's suspension of divine influence does not release the combatants from their fates. Jupiter's prohibition of interference only lends weight to the tragedy of the events that follow. By their own actions, which are determined by their own wills and abilities, the warriors bring their fates to pass as the conflict plays out. Ironically, Turnus's killing of Pallas is the battle's turning point, as events then start to shift in the Trojans' favor. First, Virgil foreshadows the demise of the Latins when he says that by taking the belt of Pallas--an act of arrogance or hubris--Turnus spells his own doom. Pallas's death awakens in Aeneas a passion not witnessed since the fall of Troy--a mixture of ruthlessness, unrelenting anger, and hell-bent vengeance. The reappearance of Aeneas as a great warrior breaks the battle's stalemate. Turnus's humiliation when Juno lures him away from the battle and onto the ship plays out to the further advantage of the Trojans. Turnus feels alienated from Juno, as though his advocate has suddenly become his adversary. She protects his person but not his honor, and impedes him in his single-minded commitment to behave as a heroic warrior whatever the cost. If the Trojans were to kill Turnus, their victory would be complete, but the fact that Turnus is involuntarily plucked from the battlefield by his immortal benefactor represents a moral victory for the Trojans. It boosts their spirits while deflating the Latins' pride. Again in Book X, the Latins draw parallels between themselves and the Greeks who defeated the Trojans at Troy. This time, though, they invoke the Greeks as a contrast. The Greeks did not succeed in eliminating the Trojans altogether, as the Latins intend to do in Italy. The high irony is that the Latins are correct in saying that they are not like the Greeks--but primarily because they are not, in fact, capable of defeating the Trojans. Worse, the Greeks were able to defeat the Trojans on the Trojans' own ground; the Latins, on the other hand, prove incapable of defending their homeland. It is thus the Trojans, who can be viewed as invaders despite their invitation from King Latinus, who play the role of the Greeks, winning a war on enemy turf. The difference between the Greeks in Troy and the Trojans in Italy lies in the Trojans' intention to settle in Italy and found what will become an empire. When the Greeks sacked Troy, they did so to reclaim a woman, and, with Helen retrieved, they set sail for home. Aeneas, on the other hand, must claim rather than reclaim a land, and he and the Trojans must justify their invasion of Italy by proclaiming the superiority of the race and culture that will result from the conquest.

sparknotes

all_chapterized_books/228-chapters/book_xi.txt

finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Aeneid/section_10_part_0.txt

The Aeneid.book xi

book xi

{"name": "Book XI", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section11/", "summary": "The day after the battle, Aeneas views the body of young Pallas and, weeping, arranges for 1,000 men to escort the prince's corpse to King Evander and to join the king in mourning. When Evander hears of his son's death, he is crushed, but because Pallas died honorably, he forgives Aeneas in his heart and wishes only for the death of Turnus. Back at the battlefield, messengers arrive from the Latins, who request a twelve-day truce so that both sides may bury their dead. Aeneas agrees to the ceasefire. The messengers are impressed with Aeneas's piety. They think to themselves that Turnus should settle the quarrel over Lavinia in a duel with Aeneas to avoid further battle. At a council called by King Latinus, others echo the messengers' sentiment. There, the Latins learn that Diomedes, the great Greek warrior who fought at Troy and now reigns over a nearby kingdom, has rejected their plea for aid. Latinus confesses that he does not think they can win, and proposes the offering of some territory to the Trojans in exchange for peace. A man named Drances speaks, blaming the whole war on Turnus's arrogance. He claims that the rest of the Latins have lost the will to fight. The council begins to turn against Turnus, who, back from his foray on the ship, responds in anger. He challenges the courage and manhood of Drances and Latinus, insulting the former and begging the latter to continue fighting. Still, Turnus says, if the council wishes him to fight Aeneas alone, he will do so without fear. Just at that moment, a messenger arrives to warn the Latins that the Trojans are marching toward the city. Forgetting their debate, the Latins rush in a panic to prepare their defenses, joined now by Camilla, the famous leader of the Volscians, a race of warrior maidens. Turnus hears from a spy that Aeneas has divided his army: the light horses gallop toward the city while Aeneas and the heavily armored captains take a slower path through the mountains. Turnus rushes off to lay a trap for the Trojan leader on a particular mountain path, leaving the defense of the city to Camilla. Soon the Trojans reach the field in front of the city, and the battle begins. Camilla proves the fiercest warrior present, scattering Aeneas's troops with her deadly spears and arrows. She brings down many soldiers before a Tuscan named Arruns catches her off guard, piercing her with his javelin. Unfortunately for him, the goddess Diana holds Camilla in high favor and dispatches her attendant Opis down from Olympus to kill Arruns as an act of revenge, cutting his personal victory short. Having lost their leader in Camilla, the Latin troops scatter and flee back to the city. Many are killed in the retreat. Meanwhile, Camilla's companion Acca goes off to inform Turnus that the Latins lack a leader. Turnus is forced to return to the city just as Aeneas passes by the place of the ambush. Aeneas and Turnus return to their respective armies to make camp as night falls.", "analysis": "With the gods refraining from intervention in Aeneas's movements, Aeneas's words and actions reveal his integrity. His sincere mourning at Pallas's funeral shows how deeply he appreciates the youth's valor in arms and how seriously he took his promise to King Evander to protect the boy. Aeneas also honorably agrees to a truce so that the dead of both sides can be properly buried. His earlier descent to the underworld allows him to witness the terrible fate of those not properly buried on Earth--they roam the shores of the river Acheron, without a home and without rest. As a new aspect of his piety, Aeneas takes up the imperative that no one, not even his enemies in battle, should endure this awful punishment on his account. But Aeneas has not conducted himself entirely as a paragon of mercy in the struggle with the Latins. In Book X, he mercilessly kills two Latins who are on their knees, begging him to spare their lives. In portraying Aeneas as a man who expresses many different emotional extremes--anger, hatred, passivity, grief, love, and pious respect--Virgil risks introducing some inconsistencies in his hero's character. Of course, it is certainly possible that a man could be both brutally unforgiving in war and lovingly compassionate at other times. However, our attempt to reconcile these two contradictory sides of Aeneas's heroism resembles Dido's failure to comprehend Aeneas's expression of love for her just before his act of abandonment. In both cases, Aeneas's primary motivations lie in fate and piety, but in the brief moments when fate and piety do not govern his actions, Aeneas expresses his true emotions either tenderly or brutally. Turnus's character remains consistent, if somewhat one-dimensional. He is as stubborn and temperamental as ever. Drances' claim that the war is Turnus's fault holds some truth, for King Latinus has opposed battle from the very beginning. Originally, Turnus claims to be fighting for his promised bride, Lavinia, but in the council it appears that his own pride has usurped Lavinia as his motivation. Both Latinus and Drances insult Turnus by suggesting that he should be willing to lay down his arms in front of the Trojans after fighting for so long. Turnus's reply to the council is bitterly sarcastic, adding new depth to his character as he shows himself to be either ignorant or recklessly defiant. He seems hell-bent on destruction, despite the warning signs of the gods in the earlier battles. He has too much at stake in terms of honor and reputation to give up now. The action of Book XI suggests that the movement and success of the armies depend entirely upon visible and active leaders. The tide turns in battle when a leader either arrives on the scene or leaves it. When Camilla dies, for example, the Trojans scatter the Latins. Because the battles in the Aeneid always flow this way, it is necessary for Virgil, at times, to remove the greatest heroes from the fighting for a while in order to maintain some suspense--otherwise, Aeneas and Turnus would have met in single combat long ago. In Book XI, Turnus's planned ambush in the mountains removes the main characters from the fighting and then, coincidentally, keeps them from meeting at the last moment. Virgil delays this final confrontation for as long as possible, thus building the tension."}

BOOK XI Scarce had the rosy Morning rais'd her head Above the waves, and left her wat'ry bed; The pious chief, whom double cares attend For his unburied soldiers and his friend, Yet first to Heav'n perform'd a victor's vows: He bar'd an ancient oak of all her boughs; Then on a rising ground the trunk he plac'd, Which with the spoils of his dead foe he grac'd. The coat of arms by proud Mezentius worn, Now on a naked snag in triumph borne, Was hung on high, and glitter'd from afar, A trophy sacred to the God of War. Above his arms, fix'd on the leafless wood, Appear'd his plumy crest, besmear'd with blood: His brazen buckler on the left was seen; Truncheons of shiver'd lances hung between; And on the right was placed his corslet, bor'd; And to the neck was tied his unavailing sword. A crowd of chiefs inclose the godlike man, Who thus, conspicuous in the midst, began: "Our toils, my friends, are crown'd with sure success; The greater part perform'd, achieve the less. Now follow cheerful to the trembling town; Press but an entrance, and presume it won. Fear is no more, for fierce Mezentius lies, As the first fruits of war, a sacrifice. Turnus shall fall extended on the plain, And, in this omen, is already slain. Prepar'd in arms, pursue your happy chance; That none unwarn'd may plead his ignorance, And I, at Heav'n's appointed hour, may find Your warlike ensigns waving in the wind. Meantime the rites and fun'ral pomps prepare, Due to your dead companions of the war: The last respect the living can bestow, To shield their shadows from contempt below. That conquer'd earth be theirs, for which they fought, And which for us with their own blood they bought; But first the corpse of our unhappy friend To the sad city of Evander send, Who, not inglorious, in his age's bloom, Was hurried hence by too severe a doom." Thus, weeping while he spoke, he took his way, Where, new in death, lamented Pallas lay. Acoetes watch'd the corpse; whose youth deserv'd The father's trust; and now the son he serv'd With equal faith, but less auspicious care. Th' attendants of the slain his sorrow share. A troop of Trojans mix'd with these appear, And mourning matrons with dishevel'd hair. Soon as the prince appears, they raise a cry; All beat their breasts, and echoes rend the sky. They rear his drooping forehead from the ground; But, when Aeneas view'd the grisly wound Which Pallas in his manly bosom bore, And the fair flesh distain'd with purple gore; First, melting into tears, the pious man Deplor'd so sad a sight, then thus began: "Unhappy youth! when Fortune gave the rest Of my full wishes, she refus'd the best! She came; but brought not thee along, to bless My longing eyes, and share in my success: She grudg'd thy safe return, the triumphs due To prosp'rous valor, in the public view. Not thus I promis'd, when thy father lent Thy needless succor with a sad consent; Embrac'd me, parting for th' Etrurian land, And sent me to possess a large command. He warn'd, and from his own experience told, Our foes were warlike, disciplin'd, and bold. And now perhaps, in hopes of thy return, Rich odors on his loaded altars burn, While we, with vain officious pomp, prepare To send him back his portion of the war, A bloody breathless body, which can owe No farther debt, but to the pow'rs below. The wretched father, ere his race is run, Shall view the fun'ral honors of his son. These are my triumphs of the Latian war, Fruits of my plighted faith and boasted care! And yet, unhappy sire, thou shalt not see A son whose death disgrac'd his ancestry; Thou shalt not blush, old man, however griev'd: Thy Pallas no dishonest wound receiv'd. He died no death to make thee wish, too late, Thou hadst not liv'd to see his shameful fate: But what a champion has th' Ausonian coast, And what a friend hast thou, Ascanius, lost!" Thus having mourn'd, he gave the word around, To raise the breathless body from the ground; And chose a thousand horse, the flow'r of all His warlike troops, to wait the funeral, To bear him back and share Evander's grief: A well-becoming, but a weak relief. Of oaken twigs they twist an easy bier, Then on their shoulders the sad burden rear. The body on this rural hearse is borne: Strew'd leaves and funeral greens the bier adorn. All pale he lies, and looks a lovely flow'r, New cropp'd by virgin hands, to dress the bow'r: Unfaded yet, but yet unfed below, No more to mother earth or the green stern shall owe. Then two fair vests, of wondrous work and cost, Of purple woven, and with gold emboss'd, For ornament the Trojan hero brought, Which with her hands Sidonian Dido wrought. One vest array'd the corpse; and one they spread O'er his clos'd eyes, and wrapp'd around his head, That, when the yellow hair in flame should fall, The catching fire might burn the golden caul. Besides, the spoils of foes in battle slain, When he descended on the Latian plain; Arms, trappings, horses, by the hearse are led In long array- th' achievements of the dead. Then, pinion'd with their hands behind, appear Th' unhappy captives, marching in the rear, Appointed off'rings in the victor's name, To sprinkle with their blood the fun'ral flame. Inferior trophies by the chiefs are borne; Gauntlets and helms their loaded hands adorn; And fair inscriptions fix'd, and titles read Of Latian leaders conquer'd by the dead. Acoetes on his pupil's corpse attends, With feeble steps, supported by his friends. Pausing at ev'ry pace, in sorrow drown'd, Betwixt their arms he sinks upon the ground; Where grov'ling while he lies in deep despair, He beats his breast, and rends his hoary hair. The champion's chariot next is seen to roll, Besmear'd with hostile blood, and honorably foul. To close the pomp, Aethon, the steed of state, Is led, the fun'rals of his lord to wait. Stripp'd of his trappings, with a sullen pace He walks; and the big tears run rolling down his face. The lance of Pallas, and the crimson crest, Are borne behind: the victor seiz'd the rest. The march begins: the trumpets hoarsely sound; The pikes and lances trail along the ground. Thus while the Trojan and Arcadian horse To Pallantean tow'rs direct their course, In long procession rank'd, the pious chief Stopp'd in the rear, and gave a vent to grief: "The public care," he said, "which war attends, Diverts our present woes, at least suspends. Peace with the manes of great Pallas dwell! Hail, holy relics! and a last farewell!" He said no more, but, inly thro' he mourn'd, Restrained his tears, and to the camp return'd. Now suppliants, from Laurentum sent, demand A truce, with olive branches in their hand; Obtest his clemency, and from the plain Beg leave to draw the bodies of their slain. They plead, that none those common rites deny To conquer'd foes that in fair battle die. All cause of hate was ended in their death; Nor could he war with bodies void of breath. A king, they hop'd, would hear a king's request, Whose son he once was call'd, and once his guest. Their suit, which was too just to be denied, The hero grants, and farther thus replied: "O Latian princes, how severe a fate In causeless quarrels has involv'd your state, And arm'd against an unoffending man, Who sought your friendship ere the war began! You beg a truce, which I would gladly give, Not only for the slain, but those who live. I came not hither but by Heav'n's command, And sent by fate to share the Latian land. Nor wage I wars unjust: your king denied My proffer'd friendship, and my promis'd bride; Left me for Turnus. Turnus then should try His cause in arms, to conquer or to die. My right and his are in dispute: the slain Fell without fault, our quarrel to maintain. In equal arms let us alone contend; And let him vanquish, whom his fates befriend. This is the way (so tell him) to possess The royal virgin, and restore the peace. Bear this message back, with ample leave, That your slain friends may fun'ral rites receive." Thus having said- th' embassadors, amaz'd, Stood mute a while, and on each other gaz'd. Drances, their chief, who harbor'd in his breast Long hate to Turnus, as his foe profess'd, Broke silence first, and to the godlike man, With graceful action bowing, thus began: "Auspicious prince, in arms a mighty name, But yet whose actions far transcend your fame; Would I your justice or your force express, Thought can but equal; and all words are less. Your answer we shall thankfully relate, And favors granted to the Latian state. If wish'd success our labor shall attend, Think peace concluded, and the king your friend: Let Turnus leave the realm to your command, And seek alliance in some other land: Build you the city which your fates assign; We shall be proud in the great work to join." Thus Drances; and his words so well persuade The rest impower'd, that soon a truce is made. Twelve days the term allow'd: and, during those, Latians and Trojans, now no longer foes, Mix'd in the woods, for fun'ral piles prepare To fell the timber, and forget the war. Loud axes thro' the groaning groves resound; Oak, mountain ash, and poplar spread the ground; First fall from high; and some the trunks receive In loaden wains; with wedges some they cleave. And now the fatal news by Fame is blown Thro' the short circuit of th' Arcadian town, Of Pallas slain- by Fame, which just before His triumphs on distended pinions bore. Rushing from out the gate, the people stand, Each with a fun'ral flambeau in his hand. Wildly they stare, distracted with amaze: The fields are lighten'd with a fiery blaze, That cast a sullen splendor on their friends, The marching troop which their dead prince attends. Both parties meet: they raise a doleful cry; The matrons from the walls with shrieks reply, And their mix'd mourning rends the vaulted sky. The town is fill'd with tumult and with tears, Till the loud clamors reach Evander's ears: Forgetful of his state, he runs along, With a disorder'd pace, and cleaves the throng; Falls on the corpse; and groaning there he lies, With silent grief, that speaks but at his eyes. Short sighs and sobs succeed; till sorrow breaks A passage, and at once he weeps and speaks: "O Pallas! thou hast fail'd thy plighted word, To fight with caution, not to tempt the sword! I warn'd thee, but in vain; for well I knew What perils youthful ardor would pursue, That boiling blood would carry thee too far, Young as thou wert in dangers, raw to war! O curst essay of arms, disastrous doom, Prelude of bloody fields, and fights to come! Hard elements of unauspicious war, Vain vows to Heav'n, and unavailing care! Thrice happy thou, dear partner of my bed, Whose holy soul the stroke of Fortune fled, Praescious of ills, and leaving me behind, To drink the dregs of life by fate assign'd! Beyond the goal of nature I have gone: My Pallas late set out, but reach'd too soon. If, for my league against th' Ausonian state, Amidst their weapons I had found my fate, (Deserv'd from them,) then I had been return'd A breathless victor, and my son had mourn'd. Yet will I not my Trojan friend upbraid, Nor grudge th' alliance I so gladly made. 'T was not his fault, my Pallas fell so young, But my own crime, for having liv'd too long. Yet, since the gods had destin'd him to die, At least he led the way to victory: First for his friends he won the fatal shore, And sent whole herds of slaughter'd foes before; A death too great, too glorious to deplore. Nor will I add new honors to thy grave, Content with those the Trojan hero gave: That funeral pomp thy Phrygian friends design'd, In which the Tuscan chiefs and army join'd. Great spoils and trophies, gain'd by thee, they bear: Then let thy own achievements be thy share. Even thou, O Turnus, hadst a trophy stood, Whose mighty trunk had better grac'd the wood, If Pallas had arriv'd, with equal length Of years, to match thy bulk with equal strength. But why, unhappy man, dost thou detain These troops, to view the tears thou shedd'st in vain? Go, friends, this message to your lord relate: Tell him, that, if I bear my bitter fate, And, after Pallas' death, live ling'ring on, 'T is to behold his vengeance for my son. I stay for Turnus, whose devoted head Is owing to the living and the dead. My son and I expect it from his hand; 'T is all that he can give, or we demand. Joy is no more; but I would gladly go, To greet my Pallas with such news below." The morn had now dispell'd the shades of night, Restoring toils, when she restor'd the light. The Trojan king and Tuscan chief command To raise the piles along the winding strand. Their friends convey the dead fun'ral fires; Black smold'ring smoke from the green wood expires; The light of heav'n is chok'd, and the new day retires. Then thrice around the kindled piles they go (For ancient custom had ordain'd it so) Thrice horse and foot about the fires are led; And thrice, with loud laments, they hail the dead. Tears, trickling down their breasts, bedew the ground, And drums and trumpets mix their mournful sound. Amid the blaze, their pious brethren throw The spoils, in battle taken from the foe: Helms, bits emboss'd, and swords of shining steel; One casts a target, one a chariot wheel; Some to their fellows their own arms restore: The fauchions which in luckless fight they bore, Their bucklers pierc'd, their darts bestow'd in vain, And shiver'd lances gather'd from the plain. Whole herds of offer'd bulls, about the fire, And bristled boars, and woolly sheep expire. Around the piles a careful troop attends, To watch the wasting flames, and weep their burning friends; Ling'ring along the shore, till dewy night New decks the face of heav'n with starry light. The conquer'd Latians, with like pious care, Piles without number for their dead prepare. Part in the places where they fell are laid; And part are to the neighb'ring fields convey'd. The corps of kings, and captains of renown, Borne off in state, are buried in the town; The rest, unhonor'd, and without a name, Are cast a common heap to feed the flame. Trojans and Latians vie with like desires To make the field of battle shine with fires, And the promiscuous blaze to heav'n aspires. Now had the morning thrice renew'd the light, And thrice dispell'd the shadows of the night, When those who round the wasted fires remain, Perform the last sad office to the slain. They rake the yet warm ashes from below; These, and the bones unburn'd, in earth bestow; These relics with their country rites they grace, And raise a mount of turf to mark the place. But, in the palace of the king, appears A scene more solemn, and a pomp of tears. Maids, matrons, widows, mix their common moans; Orphans their sires, and sires lament their sons. All in that universal sorrow share, And curse the cause of this unhappy war: A broken league, a bride unjustly sought, A crown usurp'd, which with their blood is bought! These are the crimes with which they load the name Of Turnus, and on him alone exclaim: "Let him who lords it o'er th' Ausonian land Engage the Trojan hero hand to hand: His is the gain; our lot is but to serve; 'T is just, the sway he seeks, he should deserve." This Drances aggravates; and adds, with spite: "His foe expects, and dares him to the fight." Nor Turnus wants a party, to support His cause and credit in the Latian court. His former acts secure his present fame, And the queen shades him with her mighty name. While thus their factious minds with fury burn, The legates from th' Aetolian prince return: Sad news they bring, that, after all the cost And care employ'd, their embassy is lost; That Diomedes refus'd his aid in war, Unmov'd with presents, and as deaf to pray'r. Some new alliance must elsewhere be sought, Or peace with Troy on hard conditions bought. Latinus, sunk in sorrow, finds too late, A foreign son is pointed out by fate; And, till Aeneas shall Lavinia wed, The wrath of Heav'n is hov'ring o'er his head. The gods, he saw, espous'd the juster side, When late their titles in the field were tried: Witness the fresh laments, and fun'ral tears undried. Thus, full of anxious thought, he summons all The Latian senate to the council hall. The princes come, commanded by their head, And crowd the paths that to the palace lead. Supreme in pow'r, and reverenc'd for his years, He takes the throne, and in the midst appears. Majestically sad, he sits in state, And bids his envoys their success relate. When Venulus began, the murmuring sound Was hush'd, and sacred silence reign'd around. "We have," said he, "perform'd your high command, And pass'd with peril a long tract of land: We reach'd the place desir'd; with wonder fill'd, The Grecian tents and rising tow'rs beheld. Great Diomede has compass'd round with walls The city, which Argyripa he calls, From his own Argos nam'd. We touch'd, with joy, The royal hand that raz'd unhappy Troy. When introduc'd, our presents first we bring, Then crave an instant audience from the king. His leave obtain'd, our native soil we name, And tell th' important cause for which we came. Attentively he heard us, while we spoke; Then, with soft accents, and a pleasing look, Made this return: 'Ausonian race, of old Renown'd for peace, and for an age of gold, What madness has your alter'd minds possess'd, To change for war hereditary rest, Solicit arms unknown, and tempt the sword, A needless ill your ancestors abhorr'd? We- for myself I speak, and all the name Of Grecians, who to Troy's destruction came, Omitting those who were in battle slain, Or borne by rolling Simois to the main- Not one but suffer'd, and too dearly bought The prize of honor which in arms he sought; Some doom'd to death, and some in exile driv'n. Outcasts, abandon'd by the care of Heav'n; So worn, so wretched, so despis'd a crew, As ev'n old Priam might with pity view. Witness the vessels by Minerva toss'd In storms; the vengeful Capharean coast; Th' Euboean rocks! the prince, whose brother led Our armies to revenge his injur'd bed, In Egypt lost! Ulysses with his men Have seen Charybdis and the Cyclops' den. Why should I name Idomeneus, in vain Restor'd to scepters, and expell'd again? Or young Achilles, by his rival slain? Ev'n he, the King of Men, the foremost name Of all the Greeks, and most renown'd by fame, The proud revenger of another's wife, Yet by his own adult'ress lost his life; Fell at his threshold; and the spoils of Troy The foul polluters of his bed enjoy. The gods have envied me the sweets of life, My much lov'd country, and my more lov'd wife: Banish'd from both, I mourn; while in the sky, Transform'd to birds, my lost companions fly: Hov'ring about the coasts, they make their moan, And cuff the cliffs with pinions not their own. What squalid specters, in the dead of night, Break my short sleep, and skim before my sight! I might have promis'd to myself those harms, Mad as I was, when I, with mortal arms, Presum'd against immortal pow'rs to move, And violate with wounds the Queen of Love. Such arms this hand shall never more employ; No hate remains with me to ruin'd Troy. I war not with its dust; nor am I glad To think of past events, or good or bad. Your presents I return: whate'er you bring To buy my friendship, send the Trojan king. We met in fight; I know him, to my cost: With what a whirling force his lance he toss'd! Heav'ns! what a spring was in his arm, to throw! How high he held his shield, and rose at ev'ry blow! Had Troy produc'd two more his match in might, They would have chang'd the fortune of the fight: Th' invasion of the Greeks had been return'd, Our empire wasted, and our cities burn'd. The long defense the Trojan people made, The war protracted, and the siege delay'd, Were due to Hector's and this hero's hand: Both brave alike, and equal in command; Aeneas, not inferior in the field, In pious reverence to the gods excell'd. Make peace, ye Latians, and avoid with care Th' impending dangers of a fatal war.' He said no more; but, with this cold excuse, Refus'd th' alliance, and advis'd a truce." Thus Venulus concluded his report. A jarring murmur fill'd the factious court: As, when a torrent rolls with rapid force, And dashes o'er the stones that stop the course, The flood, constrain'd within a scanty space, Roars horrible along th' uneasy race; White foam in gath'ring eddies floats around; The rocky shores rebellow to the sound. The murmur ceas'd: then from his lofty throne The king invok'd the gods, and thus begun: "I wish, ye Latins, what we now debate Had been resolv'd before it was too late. Much better had it been for you and me, Unforc'd by this our last necessity, To have been earlier wise, than now to call A council, when the foe surrounds the wall. O citizens, we wage unequal war, With men not only Heav'n's peculiar care, But Heav'n's own race; unconquer'd in the field, Or, conquer'd, yet unknowing how to yield. What hopes you had in Diomedes, lay down: Our hopes must center on ourselves alone. Yet those how feeble, and, indeed, how vain, You see too well; nor need my words explain. Vanquish'd without resource; laid flat by fate; Factions within, a foe without the gate! Not but I grant that all perform'd their parts With manly force, and with undaunted hearts: With our united strength the war we wag'd; With equal numbers, equal arms, engag'd. You see th' event.- Now hear what I propose, To save our friends, and satisfy our foes. A tract of land the Latins have possess'd Along the Tiber, stretching to the west, Which now Rutulians and Auruncans till, And their mix'd cattle graze the fruitful hill. Those mountains fill'd with firs, that lower land, If you consent, the Trojan shall command, Call'd into part of what is ours; and there, On terms agreed, the common country share. There let'em build and settle, if they please; Unless they choose once more to cross the seas, In search of seats remote from Italy, And from unwelcome inmates set us free. Then twice ten galleys let us build with speed, Or twice as many more, if more they need. Materials are at hand; a well-grown wood Runs equal with the margin of the flood: Let them the number and the form assign; The care and cost of all the stores be mine. To treat the peace, a hundred senators Shall be commission'd hence with ample pow'rs, With olive the presents they shall bear, A purple robe, a royal iv'ry chair, And all the marks of sway that Latian monarchs wear, And sums of gold. Among yourselves debate This great affair, and save the sinking state." Then Drances took the word, who grudg'd, long since, The rising glories of the Daunian prince. Factious and rich, bold at the council board, But cautious in the field, he shunn'd the sword; A close caballer, and tongue-valiant lord. Noble his mother was, and near the throne; But, what his father's parentage, unknown. He rose, and took th' advantage of the times, To load young Turnus with invidious crimes. "Such truths, O king," said he, "your words contain, As strike the sense, and all replies are vain; Nor are your loyal subjects now to seek What common needs require, but fear to speak. Let him give leave of speech, that haughty man, Whose pride this unauspicious war began; For whose ambition (let me dare to say, Fear set apart, tho' death is in my way) The plains of Latium run with blood around. So many valiant heroes bite the ground; Dejected grief in ev'ry face appears; A town in mourning, and a land in tears; While he, th' undoubted author of our harms, The man who menaces the gods with arms, Yet, after all his boasts, forsook the fight, And sought his safety in ignoble flight. Now, best of kings, since you propose to send Such bounteous presents to your Trojan friend; Add yet a greater at our joint request, One which he values more than all the rest: Give him the fair Lavinia for his bride; With that alliance let the league be tied, And for the bleeding land a lasting peace provide. Let insolence no longer awe the throne; But, with a father's right, bestow your own. For this maligner of the general good, If still we fear his force, he must be woo'd; His haughty godhead we with pray'rs implore, Your scepter to release, and our just rights restore. O cursed cause of all our ills, must we Wage wars unjust, and fall in fight, for thee! What right hast thou to rule the Latian state, And send us out to meet our certain fate? 'T is a destructive war: from Turnus' hand Our peace and public safety we demand. Let the fair bride to the brave chief remain; If not, the peace, without the pledge, is vain. Turnus, I know you think me not your friend, Nor will I much with your belief contend: I beg your greatness not to give the law In others' realms, but, beaten, to withdraw. Pity your own, or pity our estate; Nor twist our fortunes with your sinking fate. Your interest is, the war should never cease; But we have felt enough to wish the peace: A land exhausted to the last remains, Depopulated towns, and driven plains. Yet, if desire of fame, and thirst of pow'r, A beauteous princess, with a crown in dow'r, So fire your mind, in arms assert your right, And meet your foe, who dares you to the fight. Mankind, it seems, is made for you alone; We, but the slaves who mount you to the throne: A base ignoble crowd, without a name, Unwept, unworthy, of the fun'ral flame, By duty bound to forfeit each his life, That Turnus may possess a royal wife. Permit not, mighty man, so mean a crew Should share such triumphs, and detain from you The post of honor, your undoubted due. Rather alone your matchless force employ, To merit what alone you must enjoy." These words, so full of malice mix'd with art, Inflam'd with rage the youthful hero's heart. Then, groaning from the bottom of his breast, He heav'd for wind, and thus his wrath express'd: "You, Drances, never want a stream of words, Then, when the public need requires our swords. First in the council hall to steer the state, And ever foremost in a tongue-debate, While our strong walls secure us from the foe, Ere yet with blood our ditches overflow: But let the potent orator declaim, And with the brand of coward blot my name; Free leave is giv'n him, when his fatal hand Has cover'd with more corps the sanguine strand, And high as mine his tow'ring trophies stand. If any doubt remains, who dares the most, Let us decide it at the Trojan's cost, And issue both abreast, where honor calls- Foes are not far to seek without the walls- Unless his noisy tongue can only fight, And feet were giv'n him but to speed his flight. I beaten from the field? I forc'd away? Who, but so known a dastard, dares to say? Had he but ev'n beheld the fight, his eyes Had witness'd for me what his tongue denies: What heaps of Trojans by this hand were slain, And how the bloody Tiber swell'd the main. All saw, but he, th' Arcadian troops retire In scatter'd squadrons, and their prince expire. The giant brothers, in their camp, have found, I was not forc'd with ease to quit my ground. Not such the Trojans tried me, when, inclos'd, I singly their united arms oppos'd: First forc'd an entrance thro' their thick array; Then, glutted with their slaughter, freed my way. 'T is a destructive war? So let it be, But to the Phrygian pirate, and to thee! Meantime proceed to fill the people's ears With false reports, their minds with panic fears: Extol the strength of a twice-conquer'd race; Our foes encourage, and our friends debase. Believe thy fables, and the Trojan town Triumphant stands; the Grecians are o'erthrown; Suppliant at Hector's feet Achilles lies, And Diomede from fierce Aeneas flies. Say rapid Aufidus with awful dread Runs backward from the sea, and hides his head, When the great Trojan on his bank appears; For that's as true as thy dissembled fears Of my revenge. Dismiss that vanity: Thou, Drances, art below a death from me. Let that vile soul in that vile body rest; The lodging is well worthy of the guest. "Now, royal father, to the present state Of our affairs, and of this high debate: If in your arms thus early you diffide, And think your fortune is already tried; If one defeat has brought us down so low, As never more in fields to meet the foe; Then I conclude for peace: 't is time to treat, And lie like vassals at the victor's feet. But, O! if any ancient blood remains, One drop of all our fathers', in our veins, That man would I prefer before the rest, Who dar'd his death with an undaunted breast; Who comely fell, by no dishonest wound, To shun that sight, and, dying, gnaw'd the ground. But, if we still have fresh recruits in store, If our confederates can afford us more; If the contended field we bravely fought, And not a bloodless victory was bought; Their losses equal'd ours; and, for their slain, With equal fires they fill'd the shining plain; Why thus, unforc'd, should we so tamely yield, And, ere the trumpet sounds, resign the field? Good unexpected, evils unforeseen, Appear by turns, as fortune shifts the scene: Some, rais'd aloft, come tumbling down amain; Then fall so hard, they bound and rise again. If Diomede refuse his aid to lend, The great Messapus yet remains our friend: Tolumnius, who foretells events, is ours; Th' Italian chiefs and princes join their pow'rs: Nor least in number, nor in name the last, Your own brave subjects have your cause embrac'd Above the rest, the Volscian Amazon Contains an army in herself alone, And heads a squadron, terrible to sight, With glitt'ring shields, in brazen armor bright. Yet, if the foe a single fight demand, And I alone the public peace withstand; If you consent, he shall not be refus'd, Nor find a hand to victory unus'd. This new Achilles, let him take the field, With fated armor, and Vulcanian shield! For you, my royal father, and my fame, I, Turnus, not the least of all my name, Devote my soul. He calls me hand to hand, And I alone will answer his demand. Drances shall rest secure, and neither share The danger, nor divide the prize of war." While they debate, nor these nor those will yield, Aeneas draws his forces to the field, And moves his camp. The scouts with flying speed Return, and thro' the frighted city spread Th' unpleasing news, the Trojans are descried, In battle marching by the river side, And bending to the town. They take th' alarm: Some tremble, some are bold; all in confusion arm. Th' impetuous youth press forward to the field; They clash the sword, and clatter on the shield: The fearful matrons raise a screaming cry; Old feeble men with fainter groans reply; A jarring sound results, and mingles in the sky, Like that of swans remurm'ring to the floods, Or birds of diff'ring kinds in hollow woods. Turnus th' occasion takes, and cries aloud: "Talk on, ye quaint haranguers of the crowd: Declaim in praise of peace, when danger calls, And the fierce foes in arms approach the walls." He said, and, turning short, with speedy pace, Casts back a scornful glance, and quits the place: "Thou, Volusus, the Volscian troops command To mount; and lead thyself our Ardean band. Messapus and Catillus, post your force Along the fields, to charge the Trojan horse. Some guard the passes, others man the wall; Drawn up in arms, the rest attend my call." They swarm from ev'ry quarter of the town, And with disorder'd haste the rampires crown. Good old Latinus, when he saw, too late, The gath'ring storm just breaking on the state, Dismiss'd the council till a fitter time, And own'd his easy temper as his crime, Who, forc'd against his reason, had complied To break the treaty for the promis'd bride. Some help to sink new trenches; others aid To ram the stones, or raise the palisade. Hoarse trumpets sound th' alarm; around the walls Runs a distracted crew, whom their last labor calls. A sad procession in the streets is seen, Of matrons, that attend the mother queen: High in her chair she sits, and, at her side, With downcast eyes, appears the fatal bride. They mount the cliff, where Pallas' temple stands; Pray'rs in their mouths, and presents in their hands, With censers first they fume the sacred shrine, Then in this common supplication join: "O patroness of arms, unspotted maid, Propitious hear, and lend thy Latins aid! Break short the pirate's lance; pronounce his fate, And lay the Phrygian low before the gate." Now Turnus arms for fight. His back and breast Well-temper'd steel and scaly brass invest: The cuishes which his brawny thighs infold Are mingled metal damask'd o'er with gold. His faithful fauchion sits upon his side; Nor casque, nor crest, his manly features hide: But, bare to view, amid surrounding friends, With godlike grace, he from the tow'r descends. Exulting in his strength, he seems to dare His absent rival, and to promise war. Freed from his keepers, thus, with broken reins, The wanton courser prances o'er the plains, Or in the pride of youth o'erleaps the mounds, And snuffs the females in forbidden grounds. Or seeks his wat'ring in the well-known flood, To quench his thirst, and cool his fiery blood: He swims luxuriant in the liquid plain, And o'er his shoulder flows his waving mane: He neighs, he snorts, he bears his head on high; Before his ample chest the frothy waters fly. Soon as the prince appears without the gate, The Volscians, with their virgin leader, wait His last commands. Then, with a graceful mien, Lights from her lofty steed the warrior queen: Her squadron imitates, and each descends; Whose common suit Camilla thus commends: "If sense of honor, if a soul secure Of inborn worth, that can all tests endure, Can promise aught, or on itself rely Greatly to dare, to conquer or to die; Then, I alone, sustain'd by these, will meet The Tyrrhene troops, and promise their defeat. Ours be the danger, ours the sole renown: You, gen'ral, stay behind, and guard the town:" Turnus a while stood mute, with glad surprise, And on the fierce virago fix'd his eyes; Then thus return'd: "O grace of Italy, With what becoming thanks can I reply? Not only words lie lab'ring in my breast, But thought itself is by thy praise oppress'd. Yet rob me not of all; but let me join My toils, my hazard, and my fame, with thine. The Trojan, not in stratagem unskill'd, Sends his light horse before to scour the field: Himself, thro' steep ascents and thorny brakes, A larger compass to the city takes. This news my scouts confirm, and I prepare To foil his cunning, and his force to dare; With chosen foot his passage to forelay, And place an ambush in the winding way. Thou, with thy Volscians, face the Tuscan horse; The brave Messapus shall thy troops inforce With those of Tibur, and the Latian band, Subjected all to thy supreme command." This said, he warns Messapus to the war, Then ev'ry chief exhorts with equal care. All thus encourag'd, his own troops he joins, And hastes to prosecute his deep designs. Inclos'd with hills, a winding valley lies, By nature form'd for fraud, and fitted for surprise. A narrow track, by human steps untrode, Leads, thro' perplexing thorns, to this obscure abode. High o'er the vale a steepy mountain stands, Whence the surveying sight the nether ground commands. The top is level, an offensive seat Of war; and from the war a safe retreat: For, on the right and left, is room to press The foes at hand, or from afar distress; To drive 'em headlong downward, and to pour On their descending backs a stony show'r. Thither young Turnus took the well-known way, Possess'd the pass, and in blind ambush lay. Meantime Latonian Phoebe, from the skies, Beheld th' approaching war with hateful eyes, And call'd the light-foot Opis to her aid, Her most belov'd and ever-trusty maid; Then with a sigh began: "Camilla goes To meet her death amidst her fatal foes: The nymphs I lov'd of all my mortal train, Invested with Diana's arms, in vain. Nor is my kindness for the virgin new: 'T was born with her; and with her years it grew. Her father Metabus, when forc'd away From old Privernum, for tyrannic sway, Snatch'd up, and sav'd from his prevailing foes, This tender babe, companion of his woes. Casmilla was her mother; but he drown'd One hissing letter in a softer sound, And call'd Camilla. Thro' the woods he flies; Wrapp'd in his robe the royal infant lies. His foes in sight, he mends his weary pace; With shout and clamors they pursue the chase. The banks of Amasene at length he gains: The raging flood his farther flight restrains, Rais'd o'er the borders with unusual rains. Prepar'd to plunge into the stream, he fears, Not for himself, but for the charge he bears. Anxious, he stops a while, and thinks in haste; Then, desp'rate in distress, resolves at last. A knotty lance of well-boil'd oak he bore; The middle part with cork he cover'd o'er: He clos'd the child within the hollow space; With twigs of bending osier bound the case; Then pois'd the spear, heavy with human weight, And thus invok'd my favor for the freight: 'Accept, great goddess of the woods,' he said, 'Sent by her sire, this dedicated maid! Thro' air she flies a suppliant to thy shrine; And the first weapons that she knows, are thine.' He said; and with full force the spear he threw: Above the sounding waves Camilla flew. Then, press'd by foes, he stemm'd the stormy tide, And gain'd, by stress of arms, the farther side. His fasten'd spear he pull'd from out the ground, And, victor of his vows, his infant nymph unbound; Nor, after that, in towns which walls inclose, Would trust his hunted life amidst his foes; But, rough, in open air he chose to lie; Earth was his couch, his cov'ring was the sky. On hills unshorn, or in a desart den, He shunn'd the dire society of men. A shepherd's solitary life he led; His daughter with the milk of mares he fed. The dugs of bears, and ev'ry salvage beast, He drew, and thro' her lips the liquor press'd. The little Amazon could scarcely go: He loads her with a quiver and a bow; And, that she might her stagg'ring steps command, He with a slender jav'lin fills her hand. Her flowing hair no golden fillet bound; Nor swept her trailing robe the dusty ground. Instead of these, a tiger's hide o'erspread Her back and shoulders, fasten'd to her head. The flying dart she first attempts to fling, And round her tender temples toss'd the sling; Then, as her strength with years increas'd, began To pierce aloft in air the soaring swan, And from the clouds to fetch the heron and the crane. The Tuscan matrons with each other vied, To bless their rival sons with such a bride; But she disdains their love, to share with me The sylvan shades and vow'd virginity. And, O! I wish, contented with my cares Of salvage spoils, she had not sought the wars! Then had she been of my celestial train, And shunn'd the fate that dooms her to be slain. But since, opposing Heav'n's decree, she goes To find her death among forbidden foes, Haste with these arms, and take thy steepy flight. Where, with the gods, averse, the Latins fight. This bow to thee, this quiver I bequeath, This chosen arrow, to revenge her death: By whate'er hand Camilla shall be slain, Or of the Trojan or Italian train, Let him not pass unpunish'd from the plain. Then, in a hollow cloud, myself will aid To bear the breathless body of my maid: Unspoil'd shall be her arms, and unprofan'd Her holy limbs with any human hand, And in a marble tomb laid in her native land." She said. The faithful nymph descends from high With rapid flight, and cuts the sounding sky: Black clouds and stormy winds around her body fly. By this, the Trojan and the Tuscan horse, Drawn up in squadrons, with united force, Approach the walls: the sprightly coursers bound, Press forward on their bits, and shift their ground. Shields, arms, and spears flash horribly from far; And the fields glitter with a waving war. Oppos'd to these, come on with furious force Messapus, Coras, and the Latian horse; These in the body plac'd, on either hand Sustain'd and clos'd by fair Camilla's band. Advancing in a line, they couch their spears; And less and less the middle space appears. Thick smoke obscures the field; and scarce are seen The neighing coursers, and the shouting men. In distance of their darts they stop their course; Then man to man they rush, and horse to horse. The face of heav'n their flying jav'lins hide, And deaths unseen are dealt on either side. Tyrrhenus, and Aconteus, void of fear, By mettled coursers borne in full career, Meet first oppos'd; and, with a mighty shock, Their horses' heads against each other knock. Far from his steed is fierce Aconteus cast, As with an engine's force, or lightning's blast: He rolls along in blood, and breathes his last. The Latin squadrons take a sudden fright, And sling their shields behind, to save their backs in flight Spurring at speed to their own walls they drew; Close in the rear the Tuscan troops pursue, And urge their flight: Asylas leads the chase; Till, seiz'd, with shame, they wheel about and face, Receive their foes, and raise a threat'ning cry. The Tuscans take their turn to fear and fly. So swelling surges, with a thund'ring roar, Driv'n on each other's backs, insult the shore, Bound o'er the rocks, incroach upon the land, And far upon the beach eject the sand; Then backward, with a swing, they take their way, Repuls'd from upper ground, and seek their mother sea; With equal hurry quit th' invaded shore, And swallow back the sand and stones they spew'd before. Twice were the Tuscans masters of the field, Twice by the Latins, in their turn, repell'd. Asham'd at length, to the third charge they ran; Both hosts resolv'd, and mingled man to man. Now dying groans are heard; the fields are strow'd With falling bodies, and are drunk with blood. Arms, horses, men, on heaps together lie: Confus'd the fight, and more confus'd the cry. Orsilochus, who durst not press too near Strong Remulus, at distance drove his spear, And stuck the steel beneath his horse's ear. The fiery steed, impatient of the wound, Curvets, and, springing upward with a bound, His helpless lord cast backward on the ground. Catillus pierc'd Iolas first; then drew His reeking lance, and at Herminius threw, The mighty champion of the Tuscan crew. His neck and throat unarm'd, his head was bare, But shaded with a length of yellow hair: Secure, he fought, expos'd on ev'ry part, A spacious mark for swords, and for the flying dart. Across the shoulders came the feather'd wound; Transfix'd he fell, and doubled to the ground. The sands with streaming blood are sanguine dyed, And death with honor sought on either side. Resistless thro' the war Camilla rode, In danger unappall'd, and pleas'd with blood. One side was bare for her exerted breast; One shoulder with her painted quiver press'd. Now from afar her fatal jav'lins play; Now with her ax's edge she hews her way: Diana's arms upon her shoulder sound; And when, too closely press'd, she quits the ground, From her bent bow she sends a backward wound. Her maids, in martial pomp, on either side, Larina, Tulla, fierce Tarpeia, ride: Italians all; in peace, their queen's delight; In war, the bold companions of the fight. So march'd the Tracian Amazons of old, When Thermodon with bloody billows roll'd: Such troops as these in shining arms were seen, When Theseus met in fight their maiden queen: Such to the field Penthisilea led, From the fierce virgin when the Grecians fled; With such, return'd triumphant from the war, Her maids with cries attend the lofty car; They clash with manly force their moony shields; With female shouts resound the Phrygian fields. Who foremost, and who last, heroic maid, On the cold earth were by thy courage laid? Thy spear, of mountain ash, Eumenius first, With fury driv'n, from side to side transpierc'd: A purple stream came spouting from the wound; Bath'd in his blood he lies, and bites the ground. Liris and Pegasus at once she slew: The former, as the slacken'd reins he drew Of his faint steed; the latter, as he stretch'd His arm to prop his friend, the jav'lin reach'd. By the same weapon, sent from the same hand, Both fall together, and both spurn the sand. Amastrus next is added to the slain: The rest in rout she follows o'er the plain: Tereus, Harpalycus, Demophoon, And Chromis, at full speed her fury shun. Of all her deadly darts, not one she lost; Each was attended with a Trojan ghost. Young Ornithus bestrode a hunter steed, Swift for the chase, and of Apulian breed. Him from afar she spied, in arms unknown: O'er his broad back an ox's hide was thrown; His helm a wolf, whose gaping jaws were spread A cov'ring for his cheeks, and grinn'd around his head, He clench'd within his hand an iron prong, And tower'd above the rest, conspicuous in the throng. Him soon she singled from the flying train, And slew with ease; then thus insults the slain: "Vain hunter, didst thou think thro' woods to chase The savage herd, a vile and trembling race? Here cease thy vaunts, and own my victory: A woman warrior was too strong for thee. Yet, if the ghosts demand the conqu'ror's name, Confessing great Camilla, save thy shame." Then Butes and Orsilochus she slew, The bulkiest bodies of the Trojan crew; But Butes breast to breast: the spear descends Above the gorget, where his helmet ends, And o'er the shield which his left side defends. Orsilochus and she their courses ply: He seems to follow, and she seems to fly; But in a narrower ring she makes the race; And then he flies, and she pursues the chase. Gath'ring at length on her deluded foe, She swings her ax, and rises to the blow Full on the helm behind, with such a sway The weapon falls, the riven steel gives way: He groans, he roars, he sues in vain for grace; Brains, mingled with his blood, besmear his face. Astonish'd Aunus just arrives by chance, To see his fall; nor farther dares advance; But, fixing on the horrid maid his eye, He stares, and shakes, and finds it vain to fly; Yet, like a true Ligurian, born to cheat, (At least while fortune favor'd his deceit,) Cries out aloud: "What courage have you shown, Who trust your courser's strength, and not your own? Forego the vantage of your horse, alight, And then on equal terms begin the fight: It shall be seen, weak woman, what you can, When, foot to foot, you combat with a man," He said. She glows with anger and disdain, Dismounts with speed to dare him on the plain, And leaves her horse at large among her train; With her drawn sword defies him to the field, And, marching, lifts aloft her maiden shield. The youth, who thought his cunning did succeed, Reins round his horse, and urges all his speed; Adds the remembrance of the spur, and hides The goring rowels in his bleeding sides. "Vain fool, and coward!" cries the lofty maid, "Caught in the train which thou thyself hast laid! On others practice thy Ligurian arts; Thin stratagems and tricks of little hearts Are lost on me: nor shalt thou safe retire, With vaunting lies, to thy fallacious sire." At this, so fast her flying feet she sped, That soon she strain'd beyond his horse's head: Then turning short, at once she seiz'd the rein, And laid the boaster grov'ling on the plain. Not with more ease the falcon, from above, Trusses in middle air the trembling dove, Then plumes the prey, in her strong pounces bound: The feathers, foul with blood, come tumbling to the ground. Now mighty Jove, from his superior height, With his broad eye surveys th' unequal fight. He fires the breast of Tarchon with disdain, And sends him to redeem th' abandon'd plain. Betwixt the broken ranks the Tuscan rides, And these encourages, and those he chides; Recalls each leader, by his name, from flight; Renews their ardor, and restores the fight. "What panic fear has seiz'd your souls? O shame, O brand perpetual of th' Etrurian name! Cowards incurable, a woman's hand Drives, breaks, and scatters your ignoble band! Now cast away the sword, and quit the shield! What use of weapons which you dare not wield? Not thus you fly your female foes by night, Nor shun the feast, when the full bowls invite; When to fat off'rings the glad augur calls, And the shrill hornpipe sounds to bacchanals. These are your studied cares, your lewd delight: Swift to debauch, but slow to manly fight." Thus having said, he spurs amid the foes, Not managing the life he meant to lose. The first he found he seiz'd with headlong haste, In his strong gripe, and clasp'd around the waist; 'T was Venulus, whom from his horse he tore, And, laid athwart his own, in triumph bore. Loud shouts ensue; the Latins turn their eyes, And view th' unusual sight with vast surprise. The fiery Tarchon, flying o'er the plains, Press'd in his arms the pond'rous prey sustains; Then, with his shorten'd spear, explores around His jointed arms, to fix a deadly wound. Nor less the captive struggles for his life: He writhes his body to prolong the strife, And, fencing for his naked throat, exerts His utmost vigor, and the point averts. So stoops the yellow eagle from on high, And bears a speckled serpent thro' the sky, Fast'ning his crooked talons on the prey: The pris'ner hisses thro' the liquid way; Resists the royal hawk; and, tho' oppress'd, She fights in volumes, and erects her crest: Turn'd to her foe, she stiffens ev'ry scale, And shoots her forky tongue, and whisks her threat'ning tail. Against the victor, all defense is weak: Th' imperial bird still plies her with his beak; He tears her bowels, and her breast he gores; Then claps his pinions, and securely soars. Thus, thro' the midst of circling enemies, Strong Tarchon snatch'd and bore away his prize. The Tyrrhene troops, that shrunk before, now press The Latins, and presume the like success. Then Aruns, doom'd to death, his arts assay'd, To murther, unespied, the Volscian maid: This way and that his winding course he bends, And, whereso'er she turns, her steps attends. When she retires victorious from the chase, He wheels about with care, and shifts his place; When, rushing on, she seeks her foes flight, He keeps aloof, but keeps her still in sight: He threats, and trembles, trying ev'ry way, Unseen to kill, and safely to betray. Chloreus, the priest of Cybele, from far, Glitt'ring in Phrygian arms amidst the war, Was by the virgin view'd. The steed he press'd Was proud with trappings, and his brawny chest With scales of gilded brass was cover'd o'er; A robe of Tyrian dye the rider wore. With deadly wounds he gall'd the distant foe; Gnossian his shafts, and Lycian was his bow: A golden helm his front and head surrounds A gilded quiver from his shoulder sounds. Gold, weav'd with linen, on his thighs he wore, With flowers of needlework distinguish'd o'er, With golden buckles bound, and gather'd up before. Him the fierce maid beheld with ardent eyes, Fond and ambitious of so rich a prize, Or that the temple might his trophies hold, Or else to shine herself in Trojan gold. Blind in her haste, she chases him alone. And seeks his life, regardless of her own. This lucky moment the sly traitor chose: Then, starting from his ambush, up he rose, And threw, but first to Heav'n address'd his vows: "O patron of Socrates' high abodes, Phoebus, the ruling pow'r among the gods, Whom first we serve, whole woods of unctuous pine Are fell'd for thee, and to thy glory shine; By thee protected with our naked soles, Thro' flames unsing'd we march, and tread the kindled coals Give me, propitious pow'r, to wash away The stains of this dishonorable day: Nor spoils, nor triumph, from the fact I claim, But with my future actions trust my fame. Let me, by stealth, this female plague o'ercome, And from the field return inglorious home." Apollo heard, and, granting half his pray'r, Shuffled in winds the rest, and toss'd in empty air. He gives the death desir'd; his safe return By southern tempests to the seas is borne. Now, when the jav'lin whizz'd along the skies, Both armies on Camilla turn'd their eyes, Directed by the sound. Of either host, Th' unhappy virgin, tho' concern'd the most, Was only deaf; so greedy was she bent On golden spoils, and on her prey intent; Till in her pap the winged weapon stood Infix'd, and deeply drunk the purple blood. Her sad attendants hasten to sustain Their dying lady, drooping on the plain. Far from their sight the trembling Aruns flies, With beating heart, and fear confus'd with joys; Nor dares he farther to pursue his blow, Or ev'n to bear the sight of his expiring foe. As, when the wolf has torn a bullock's hide At unawares, or ranch'd a shepherd's side, Conscious of his audacious deed, he flies, And claps his quiv'ring tail between his thighs: So, speeding once, the wretch no more attends, But, spurring forward, herds among his friends. She wrench'd the jav'lin with her dying hands, But wedg'd within her breast the weapon stands; The wood she draws, the steely point remains; She staggers in her seat with agonizing pains: (A gath'ring mist o'erclouds her cheerful eyes, And from her cheeks the rosy color flies:) Then turns to her, whom of her female train She trusted most, and thus she speaks with pain: "Acca, 't is past! he swims before my sight, Inexorable Death; and claims his right. Bear my last words to Turnus; fly with speed, And bid him timely to my charge succeed, Repel the Trojans, and the town relieve: Farewell! and in this kiss my parting breath receive." She said, and, sliding, sunk upon the plain: Dying, her open'd hand forsakes the rein; Short, and more short, she pants; by slow degrees Her mind the passage from her body frees. She drops her sword; she nods her plumy crest, Her drooping head declining on her breast: In the last sigh her struggling soul expires, And, murm'ring with disdain, to Stygian sounds retires. A shout, that struck the golden stars, ensued; Despair and rage the languish'd fight renew'd. The Trojan troops and Tuscans, in a line, Advance to charge; the mix'd Arcadians join. But Cynthia's maid, high seated, from afar Surveys the field, and fortune of the war, Unmov'd a while, till, prostrate on the plain, Welt'ring in blood, she sees Camilla slain, And, round her corpse, of friends and foes a fighting train. Then, from the bottom of her breast, she drew A mournful sigh, and these sad words ensue: "Too dear a fine, ah much lamented maid, For warring with the Trojans, thou hast paid! Nor aught avail'd, in this unhappy strife, Diana's sacred arms, to save thy life. Yet unreveng'd thy goddess will not leave Her vot'ry's death, nor; with vain sorrow grieve. Branded the wretch, and be his name abhorr'd; But after ages shall thy praise record. Th' inglorious coward soon shall press the plain: Thus vows thy queen, and thus the Fates ordain." High o'er the field there stood a hilly mound, Sacred the place, and spread with oaks around, Where, in a marble tomb, Dercennus lay, A king that once in Latium bore the sway. The beauteous Opis thither bent her flight, To mark the traitor Aruns from the height. Him in refulgent arms she soon espied, Swoln with success; and loudly thus she cried: "Thy backward steps, vain boaster, are too late; Turn like a man, at length, and meet thy fate. Charg'd with my message, to Camilla go, And say I sent thee to the shades below, An honor undeserv'd from Cynthia's bow." She said, and from her quiver chose with speed The winged shaft, predestin'd for the deed; Then to the stubborn yew her strength applied, Till the far distant horns approach'd on either side. The bowstring touch'd her breast, so strong she drew; Whizzing in air the fatal arrow flew. At once the twanging bow and sounding dart The traitor heard, and felt the point within his heart. Him, beating with his heels in pangs of death, His flying friends to foreign fields bequeath. The conqu'ring damsel, with expanded wings, The welcome message to her mistress brings. Their leader lost, the Volscians quit the field, And, unsustain'd, the chiefs of Turnus yield. The frighted soldiers, when their captains fly, More on their speed than on their strength rely. Confus'd in flight, they bear each other down, And spur their horses headlong to the town. Driv'n by their foes, and to their fears resign'd, Not once they turn, but take their wounds behind. These drop the shield, and those the lance forego, Or on their shoulders bear the slacken'd bow. The hoofs of horses, with a rattling sound, Beat short and thick, and shake the rotten ground. Black clouds of dust come rolling in the sky, And o'er the darken'd walls and rampires fly. The trembling matrons, from their lofty stands, Rend heav'n with female shrieks, and wring their hands. All pressing on, pursuers and pursued, Are crush'd in crowds, a mingled multitude. Some happy few escape: the throng too late Rush on for entrance, till they choke the gate. Ev'n in the sight of home, the wretched sire Looks on, and sees his helpless son expire. Then, in a fright, the folding gates they close, But leave their friends excluded with their foes. The vanquish'd cry; the victors loudly shout; 'T is terror all within, and slaughter all without. Blind in their fear, they bounce against the wall, Or, to the moats pursued, precipitate their fall. The Latian virgins, valiant with despair, Arm'd on the tow'rs, the common danger share: So much of zeal their country's cause inspir'd; So much Camilla's great example fir'd. Poles, sharpen'd in the flames, from high they throw, With imitated darts, to gall the foe. Their lives for godlike freedom they bequeath, And crowd each other to be first in death. Meantime to Turnus, ambush'd in the shade, With heavy tidings came th' unhappy maid: "The Volscians overthrown, Camilla kill'd; The foes, entirely masters of the field, Like a resistless flood, come rolling on: The cry goes off the plain, and thickens to the town." Inflam'd with rage, (for so the Furies fire The Daunian's breast, and so the Fates require,) He leaves the hilly pass, the woods in vain Possess'd, and downward issues on the plain. Scarce was he gone, when to the straits, now freed From secret foes, the Trojan troops succeed. Thro' the black forest and the ferny brake, Unknowingly secure, their way they take; From the rough mountains to the plain descend, And there, in order drawn, their line extend. Both armies now in open fields are seen; Nor far the distance of the space between. Both to the city bend. Aeneas sees, Thro' smoking fields, his hast'ning enemies; And Turnus views the Trojans in array, And hears th' approaching horses proudly neigh. Soon had their hosts in bloody battle join'd; But westward to the sea the sun declin'd. Intrench'd before the town both armies lie, While Night with sable wings involves the sky.

Book XI

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120131256/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/aeneid/section11/

The day after the battle, Aeneas views the body of young Pallas and, weeping, arranges for 1,000 men to escort the prince's corpse to King Evander and to join the king in mourning. When Evander hears of his son's death, he is crushed, but because Pallas died honorably, he forgives Aeneas in his heart and wishes only for the death of Turnus. Back at the battlefield, messengers arrive from the Latins, who request a twelve-day truce so that both sides may bury their dead. Aeneas agrees to the ceasefire. The messengers are impressed with Aeneas's piety. They think to themselves that Turnus should settle the quarrel over Lavinia in a duel with Aeneas to avoid further battle. At a council called by King Latinus, others echo the messengers' sentiment. There, the Latins learn that Diomedes, the great Greek warrior who fought at Troy and now reigns over a nearby kingdom, has rejected their plea for aid. Latinus confesses that he does not think they can win, and proposes the offering of some territory to the Trojans in exchange for peace. A man named Drances speaks, blaming the whole war on Turnus's arrogance. He claims that the rest of the Latins have lost the will to fight. The council begins to turn against Turnus, who, back from his foray on the ship, responds in anger. He challenges the courage and manhood of Drances and Latinus, insulting the former and begging the latter to continue fighting. Still, Turnus says, if the council wishes him to fight Aeneas alone, he will do so without fear. Just at that moment, a messenger arrives to warn the Latins that the Trojans are marching toward the city. Forgetting their debate, the Latins rush in a panic to prepare their defenses, joined now by Camilla, the famous leader of the Volscians, a race of warrior maidens. Turnus hears from a spy that Aeneas has divided his army: the light horses gallop toward the city while Aeneas and the heavily armored captains take a slower path through the mountains. Turnus rushes off to lay a trap for the Trojan leader on a particular mountain path, leaving the defense of the city to Camilla. Soon the Trojans reach the field in front of the city, and the battle begins. Camilla proves the fiercest warrior present, scattering Aeneas's troops with her deadly spears and arrows. She brings down many soldiers before a Tuscan named Arruns catches her off guard, piercing her with his javelin. Unfortunately for him, the goddess Diana holds Camilla in high favor and dispatches her attendant Opis down from Olympus to kill Arruns as an act of revenge, cutting his personal victory short. Having lost their leader in Camilla, the Latin troops scatter and flee back to the city. Many are killed in the retreat. Meanwhile, Camilla's companion Acca goes off to inform Turnus that the Latins lack a leader. Turnus is forced to return to the city just as Aeneas passes by the place of the ambush. Aeneas and Turnus return to their respective armies to make camp as night falls.

With the gods refraining from intervention in Aeneas's movements, Aeneas's words and actions reveal his integrity. His sincere mourning at Pallas's funeral shows how deeply he appreciates the youth's valor in arms and how seriously he took his promise to King Evander to protect the boy. Aeneas also honorably agrees to a truce so that the dead of both sides can be properly buried. His earlier descent to the underworld allows him to witness the terrible fate of those not properly buried on Earth--they roam the shores of the river Acheron, without a home and without rest. As a new aspect of his piety, Aeneas takes up the imperative that no one, not even his enemies in battle, should endure this awful punishment on his account. But Aeneas has not conducted himself entirely as a paragon of mercy in the struggle with the Latins. In Book X, he mercilessly kills two Latins who are on their knees, begging him to spare their lives. In portraying Aeneas as a man who expresses many different emotional extremes--anger, hatred, passivity, grief, love, and pious respect--Virgil risks introducing some inconsistencies in his hero's character. Of course, it is certainly possible that a man could be both brutally unforgiving in war and lovingly compassionate at other times. However, our attempt to reconcile these two contradictory sides of Aeneas's heroism resembles Dido's failure to comprehend Aeneas's expression of love for her just before his act of abandonment. In both cases, Aeneas's primary motivations lie in fate and piety, but in the brief moments when fate and piety do not govern his actions, Aeneas expresses his true emotions either tenderly or brutally. Turnus's character remains consistent, if somewhat one-dimensional. He is as stubborn and temperamental as ever. Drances' claim that the war is Turnus's fault holds some truth, for King Latinus has opposed battle from the very beginning. Originally, Turnus claims to be fighting for his promised bride, Lavinia, but in the council it appears that his own pride has usurped Lavinia as his motivation. Both Latinus and Drances insult Turnus by suggesting that he should be willing to lay down his arms in front of the Trojans after fighting for so long. Turnus's reply to the council is bitterly sarcastic, adding new depth to his character as he shows himself to be either ignorant or recklessly defiant. He seems hell-bent on destruction, despite the warning signs of the gods in the earlier battles. He has too much at stake in terms of honor and reputation to give up now. The action of Book XI suggests that the movement and success of the armies depend entirely upon visible and active leaders. The tide turns in battle when a leader either arrives on the scene or leaves it. When Camilla dies, for example, the Trojans scatter the Latins. Because the battles in the Aeneid always flow this way, it is necessary for Virgil, at times, to remove the greatest heroes from the fighting for a while in order to maintain some suspense--otherwise, Aeneas and Turnus would have met in single combat long ago. In Book XI, Turnus's planned ambush in the mountains removes the main characters from the fighting and then, coincidentally, keeps them from meeting at the last moment. Virgil delays this final confrontation for as long as possible, thus building the tension.

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Main Street.chapter 1

chapter 1

{"name": "Chapter 1", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-1", "summary": "We look in on a hill where the Chippewa people used to live. The Chippewa aren't there anymore, but instead we see a girl staring out at a bunch of flourmills. We quickly learn that this girl is Carol Milford, and she is taking a little break from life at a place called Blodgett College. We're totally reminded that the days of bear-killing pioneer men are over, and now the spirit of rebellion in the American Midwest exists in the figure of the rebellious girl. The narrator tells us a bit about Blodgett College, which is located on the edge of Minneapolis and is a \"bulwark of sound religion.\" In other words, you send your daughters to Blodgett to teach them good morals and to reject the theory of evolution. Carol likes to dream about doing something great with her life. She's always trying to figure out if she has any special hidden talents. As graduation approaches, Carol's friends talk about getting married and settling down. Carol isn't in love with anyone, so she decides that she'll work to make her own living. Now, it's sometime around 1910 here, so it would be expected that any woman who got married would give up her job. Meanwhile, Carol dreams about becoming someone super important in the professional world. Carol starts hanging out with a young law student named Stewart Snyder. Stewart likes Carol, but Carol finds him really boring. He tries to convince her to marry him but fails. As Carol studies for a sociology class, she reads about village improvement and neighborhood renewal. She instantly decides that she wants to dedicate her life to fixing up a town. We get a little insight into Carol's childhood, when she admired her father more than anyone in the world. Her mother died when Carol was nine years old, and her father died when she was eleven, which helps explain why she's much more independent than many other young women her age. As she gets closer to graduation, Carol loses interest in becoming a teacher. She knows that the routine of it all would bore her after a while. She eventually decides to study library work in a Chicago school. Before she graduates from college, Stewart Snyder makes one last effort and proposes to Carol. He nearly convinces her, but Carol rejects him in the end. After graduation, she never sees him again. Carol ends up spending a year in Chicago working as a librarian. For a short while, she falls in with some hipster-intellectual types, but it doesn't last long. One day, Carol is reminded of her desire to improve an American prairie town. It doesn't really matter which one, so she starts dreaming about it again. She moves back to Minnesota to work as a librarian there. Over time, Carol realizes that she isn't making a difference in the world by working in the St. Paul library. She works in this library for three years, during which time several men try to woo her, but she doesn't accept any of them. Then, one day, she meets Dr. Will Kennicott.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER I I ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her. She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears. A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth. It is Carol Milford, fleeing for an hour from Blodgett College. The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest. II Blodgett College is on the edge of Minneapolis. It is a bulwark of sound religion. It is still combating the recent heresies of Voltaire, Darwin, and Robert Ingersoll. Pious families in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas send their children thither, and Blodgett protects them from the wickedness of the universities. But it secretes friendly girls, young men who sing, and one lady instructress who really likes Milton and Carlyle. So the four years which Carol spent at Blodgett were not altogether wasted. The smallness of the school, the fewness of rivals, permitted her to experiment with her perilous versatility. She played tennis, gave chafing-dish parties, took a graduate seminar in the drama, went "twosing," and joined half a dozen societies for the practise of the arts or the tense stalking of a thing called General Culture. In her class there were two or three prettier girls, but none more eager. She was noticeable equally in the classroom grind and at dances, though out of the three hundred students of Blodgett, scores recited more accurately and dozens Bostoned more smoothly. Every cell of her body was alive--thin wrists, quince-blossom skin, ingenue eyes, black hair. The other girls in her dormitory marveled at the slightness of her body when they saw her in sheer negligee, or darting out wet from a shower-bath. She seemed then but half as large as they had supposed; a fragile child who must be cloaked with understanding kindness. "Psychic," the girls whispered, and "spiritual." Yet so radioactive were her nerves, so adventurous her trust in rather vaguely conceived sweetness and light, that she was more energetic than any of the hulking young women who, with calves bulging in heavy-ribbed woolen stockings beneath decorous blue serge bloomers, thuddingly galloped across the floor of the "gym" in practise for the Blodgett Ladies' Basket-Ball Team. Even when she was tired her dark eyes were observant. She did not yet know the immense ability of the world to be casually cruel and proudly dull, but if she should ever learn those dismaying powers, her eyes would never become sullen or heavy or rheumily amorous. For all her enthusiasms, for all the fondness and the "crushes" which she inspired, Carol's acquaintances were shy of her. When she was most ardently singing hymns or planning deviltry she yet seemed gently aloof and critical. She was credulous, perhaps; a born hero-worshipper; yet she did question and examine unceasingly. Whatever she might become she would never be static. Her versatility ensnared her. By turns she hoped to discover that she had an unusual voice, a talent for the piano, the ability to act, to write, to manage organizations. Always she was disappointed, but always she effervesced anew--over the Student Volunteers, who intended to become missionaries, over painting scenery for the dramatic club, over soliciting advertisements for the college magazine. She was on the peak that Sunday afternoon when she played in chapel. Out of the dusk her violin took up the organ theme, and the candle-light revealed her in a straight golden frock, her arm arched to the bow, her lips serious. Every man fell in love then with religion and Carol. Throughout Senior year she anxiously related all her experiments and partial successes to a career. Daily, on the library steps or in the hall of the Main Building, the co-eds talked of "What shall we do when we finish college?" Even the girls who knew that they were going to be married pretended to be considering important business positions; even they who knew that they would have to work hinted about fabulous suitors. As for Carol, she was an orphan; her only near relative was a vanilla-flavored sister married to an optician in St. Paul. She had used most of the money from her father's estate. She was not in love--that is, not often, nor ever long at a time. She would earn her living. But how she was to earn it, how she was to conquer the world--almost entirely for the world's own good--she did not see. Most of the girls who were not betrothed meant to be teachers. Of these there were two sorts: careless young women who admitted that they intended to leave the "beastly classroom and grubby children" the minute they had a chance to marry; and studious, sometimes bulbous-browed and pop-eyed maidens who at class prayer-meetings requested God to "guide their feet along the paths of greatest usefulness." Neither sort tempted Carol. The former seemed insincere (a favorite word of hers at this era). The earnest virgins were, she fancied, as likely to do harm as to do good by their faith in the value of parsing Caesar. At various times during Senior year Carol finally decided upon studying law, writing motion-picture scenarios, professional nursing, and marrying an unidentified hero. Then she found a hobby in sociology. The sociology instructor was new. He was married, and therefore taboo, but he had come from Boston, he had lived among poets and socialists and Jews and millionaire uplifters at the University Settlement in New York, and he had a beautiful white strong neck. He led a giggling class through the prisons, the charity bureaus, the employment agencies of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Trailing at the end of the line Carol was indignant at the prodding curiosity of the others, their manner of staring at the poor as at a Zoo. She felt herself a great liberator. She put her hand to her mouth, her forefinger and thumb quite painfully pinching her lower lip, and frowned, and enjoyed being aloof. A classmate named Stewart Snyder, a competent bulky young man in a gray flannel shirt, a rusty black bow tie, and the green-and-purple class cap, grumbled to her as they walked behind the others in the muck of the South St. Paul stockyards, "These college chumps make me tired. They're so top-lofty. They ought to of worked on the farm, the way I have. These workmen put it all over them." "I just love common workmen," glowed Carol. "Only you don't want to forget that common workmen don't think they're common!" "You're right! I apologize!" Carol's brows lifted in the astonishment of emotion, in a glory of abasement. Her eyes mothered the world. Stewart Snyder peered at her. He rammed his large red fists into his pockets, he jerked them out, he resolutely got rid of them by clenching his hands behind him, and he stammered: "I know. You _get_ people. Most of these darn co-eds----Say, Carol, you could do a lot for people." "Oh--oh well--you know--sympathy and everything--if you were--say you were a lawyer's wife. You'd understand his clients. I'm going to be a lawyer. I admit I fall down in sympathy sometimes. I get so dog-gone impatient with people that can't stand the gaff. You'd be good for a fellow that was too serious. Make him more--more--YOU know--sympathetic!" His slightly pouting lips, his mastiff eyes, were begging her to beg him to go on. She fled from the steam-roller of his sentiment. She cried, "Oh, see those poor sheep--millions and millions of them." She darted on. Stewart was not interesting. He hadn't a shapely white neck, and he had never lived among celebrated reformers. She wanted, just now, to have a cell in a settlement-house, like a nun without the bother of a black robe, and be kind, and read Bernard Shaw, and enormously improve a horde of grateful poor. The supplementary reading in sociology led her to a book on village-improvement--tree-planting, town pageants, girls' clubs. It had pictures of greens and garden-walls in France, New England, Pennsylvania. She had picked it up carelessly, with a slight yawn which she patted down with her finger-tips as delicately as a cat. She dipped into the book, lounging on her window-seat, with her slim, lisle-stockinged legs crossed, and her knees up under her chin. She stroked a satin pillow while she read. About her was the clothy exuberance of a Blodgett College room: cretonne-covered window-seat, photographs of girls, a carbon print of the Coliseum, a chafing-dish, and a dozen pillows embroidered or beaded or pyrographed. Shockingly out of place was a miniature of the Dancing Bacchante. It was the only trace of Carol in the room. She had inherited the rest from generations of girl students. It was as a part of all this commonplaceness that she regarded the treatise on village-improvement. But she suddenly stopped fidgeting. She strode into the book. She had fled half-way through it before the three o'clock bell called her to the class in English history. She sighed, "That's what I'll do after college! I'll get my hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I suppose I'd better become a teacher then, but--I won't be that kind of a teacher. I won't drone. Why should they have all the garden suburbs on Long Island? Nobody has done anything with the ugly towns here in the Northwest except hold revivals and build libraries to contain the Elsie books. I'll make 'em put in a village green, and darling cottages, and a quaint Main Street!" Thus she triumphed through the class, which was a typical Blodgett contest between a dreary teacher and unwilling children of twenty, won by the teacher because his opponents had to answer his questions, while their treacherous queries he could counter by demanding, "Have you looked that up in the library? Well then, suppose you do!" The history instructor was a retired minister. He was sarcastic today. He begged of sporting young Mr. Charley Holmberg, "Now Charles, would it interrupt your undoubtedly fascinating pursuit of that malevolent fly if I were to ask you to tell us that you do not know anything about King John?" He spent three delightful minutes in assuring himself of the fact that no one exactly remembered the date of Magna Charta. Carol did not hear him. She was completing the roof of a half-timbered town hall. She had found one man in the prairie village who did not appreciate her picture of winding streets and arcades, but she had assembled the town council and dramatically defeated him. III Though she was Minnesota-born Carol was not an intimate of the prairie villages. Her father, the smiling and shabby, the learned and teasingly kind, had come from Massachusetts, and through all her childhood he had been a judge in Mankato, which is not a prairie town, but in its garden-sheltered streets and aisles of elms is white and green New England reborn. Mankato lies between cliffs and the Minnesota River, hard by Traverse des Sioux, where the first settlers made treaties with the Indians, and the cattle-rustlers once came galloping before hell-for-leather posses. As she climbed along the banks of the dark river Carol listened to its fables about the wide land of yellow waters and bleached buffalo bones to the West; the Southern levees and singing darkies and palm trees toward which it was forever mysteriously gliding; and she heard again the startled bells and thick puffing of high-stacked river steamers wrecked on sand-reefs sixty years ago. Along the decks she saw missionaries, gamblers in tall pot hats, and Dakota chiefs with scarlet blankets. . . . Far off whistles at night, round the river bend, plunking paddles reechoed by the pines, and a glow on black sliding waters. Carol's family were self-sufficient in their inventive life, with Christmas a rite full of surprises and tenderness, and "dressing-up parties" spontaneous and joyously absurd. The beasts in the Milford hearth-mythology were not the obscene Night Animals who jump out of closets and eat little girls, but beneficent and bright-eyed creatures--the tam htab, who is woolly and blue and lives in the bathroom, and runs rapidly to warm small feet; the ferruginous oil stove, who purrs and knows stories; and the skitamarigg, who will play with children before breakfast if they spring out of bed and close the window at the very first line of the song about puellas which father sings while shaving. Judge Milford's pedagogical scheme was to let the children read whatever they pleased, and in his brown library Carol absorbed Balzac and Rabelais and Thoreau and Max Muller. He gravely taught them the letters on the backs of the encyclopedias, and when polite visitors asked about the mental progress of the "little ones," they were horrified to hear the children earnestly repeating A-And, And-Aus, Aus-Bis, Bis-Cal, Cal-Cha. Carol's mother died when she was nine. Her father retired from the judiciary when she was eleven, and took the family to Minneapolis. There he died, two years after. Her sister, a busy proper advisory soul, older than herself, had become a stranger to her even when they lived in the same house. From those early brown and silver days and from her independence of relatives Carol retained a willingness to be different from brisk efficient book-ignoring people; an instinct to observe and wonder at their bustle even when she was taking part in it. But, she felt approvingly, as she discovered her career of town-planning, she was now roused to being brisk and efficient herself. IV In a month Carol's ambition had clouded. Her hesitancy about becoming a teacher had returned. She was not, she worried, strong enough to endure the routine, and she could not picture herself standing before grinning children and pretending to be wise and decisive. But the desire for the creation of a beautiful town remained. When she encountered an item about small-town women's clubs or a photograph of a straggling Main Street, she was homesick for it, she felt robbed of her work. It was the advice of the professor of English which led her to study professional library-work in a Chicago school. Her imagination carved and colored the new plan. She saw herself persuading children to read charming fairy tales, helping young men to find books on mechanics, being ever so courteous to old men who were hunting for newspapers--the light of the library, an authority on books, invited to dinners with poets and explorers, reading a paper to an association of distinguished scholars. V The last faculty reception before commencement. In five days they would be in the cyclone of final examinations. The house of the president had been massed with palms suggestive of polite undertaking parlors, and in the library, a ten-foot room with a globe and the portraits of Whittier and Martha Washington, the student orchestra was playing "Carmen" and "Madame Butterfly." Carol was dizzy with music and the emotions of parting. She saw the palms as a jungle, the pink-shaded electric globes as an opaline haze, and the eye-glassed faculty as Olympians. She was melancholy at sight of the mousey girls with whom she had "always intended to get acquainted," and the half dozen young men who were ready to fall in love with her. But it was Stewart Snyder whom she encouraged. He was so much manlier than the others; he was an even warm brown, like his new ready-made suit with its padded shoulders. She sat with him, and with two cups of coffee and a chicken patty, upon a pile of presidential overshoes in the coat-closet under the stairs, and as the thin music seeped in, Stewart whispered: "I can't stand it, this breaking up after four years! The happiest years of life." She believed it. "Oh, I know! To think that in just a few days we'll be parting, and we'll never see some of the bunch again!" "Carol, you got to listen to me! You always duck when I try to talk seriously to you, but you got to listen to me. I'm going to be a big lawyer, maybe a judge, and I need you, and I'd protect you----" His arm slid behind her shoulders. The insinuating music drained her independence. She said mournfully, "Would you take care of me?" She touched his hand. It was warm, solid. "You bet I would! We'd have, Lord, we'd have bully times in Yankton, where I'm going to settle----" "But I want to do something with life." "What's better than making a comfy home and bringing up some cute kids and knowing nice homey people?" It was the immemorial male reply to the restless woman. Thus to the young Sappho spake the melon-venders; thus the captains to Zenobia; and in the damp cave over gnawed bones the hairy suitor thus protested to the woman advocate of matriarchy. In the dialect of Blodgett College but with the voice of Sappho was Carol's answer: "Of course. I know. I suppose that's so. Honestly, I do love children. But there's lots of women that can do housework, but I--well, if you HAVE got a college education, you ought to use it for the world." "I know, but you can use it just as well in the home. And gee, Carol, just think of a bunch of us going out on an auto picnic, some nice spring evening." "Yes." "And sleigh-riding in winter, and going fishing----" Blarrrrrrr! The orchestra had crashed into the "Soldiers' Chorus"; and she was protesting, "No! No! You're a dear, but I want to do things. I don't understand myself but I want--everything in the world! Maybe I can't sing or write, but I know I can be an influence in library work. Just suppose I encouraged some boy and he became a great artist! I will! I will do it! Stewart dear, I can't settle down to nothing but dish-washing!" Two minutes later--two hectic minutes--they were disturbed by an embarrassed couple also seeking the idyllic seclusion of the overshoe-closet. After graduation she never saw Stewart Snyder again. She wrote to him once a week--for one month. VI A year Carol spent in Chicago. Her study of library-cataloguing, recording, books of reference, was easy and not too somniferous. She reveled in the Art Institute, in symphonies and violin recitals and chamber music, in the theater and classic dancing. She almost gave up library work to become one of the young women who dance in cheese-cloth in the moonlight. She was taken to a certified Studio Party, with beer, cigarettes, bobbed hair, and a Russian Jewess who sang the Internationale. It cannot be reported that Carol had anything significant to say to the Bohemians. She was awkward with them, and felt ignorant, and she was shocked by the free manners which she had for years desired. But she heard and remembered discussions of Freud, Romain Rolland, syndicalism, the Confederation Generale du Travail, feminism vs. haremism, Chinese lyrics, nationalization of mines, Christian Science, and fishing in Ontario. She went home, and that was the beginning and end of her Bohemian life. The second cousin of Carol's sister's husband lived in Winnetka, and once invited her out to Sunday dinner. She walked back through Wilmette and Evanston, discovered new forms of suburban architecture, and remembered her desire to recreate villages. She decided that she would give up library work and, by a miracle whose nature was not very clearly revealed to her, turn a prairie town into Georgian houses and Japanese bungalows. The next day in library class she had to read a theme on the use of the Cumulative Index, and she was taken so seriously in the discussion that she put off her career of town-planning--and in the autumn she was in the public library of St. Paul. VII Carol was not unhappy and she was not exhilarated, in the St. Paul Library. She slowly confessed that she was not visibly affecting lives. She did, at first, put into her contact with the patrons a willingness which should have moved worlds. But so few of these stolid worlds wanted to be moved. When she was in charge of the magazine room the readers did not ask for suggestions about elevated essays. They grunted, "Wanta find the Leather Goods Gazette for last February." When she was giving out books the principal query was, "Can you tell me of a good, light, exciting love story to read? My husband's going away for a week." She was fond of the other librarians; proud of their aspirations. And by the chance of propinquity she read scores of books unnatural to her gay white littleness: volumes of anthropology with ditches of foot-notes filled with heaps of small dusty type, Parisian imagistes, Hindu recipes for curry, voyages to the Solomon Isles, theosophy with modern American improvements, treatises upon success in the real-estate business. She took walks, and was sensible about shoes and diet. And never did she feel that she was living. She went to dances and suppers at the houses of college acquaintances. Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life's slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her throat tense, as she slid down the room. During her three years of library work several men showed diligent interest in her--the treasurer of a fur-manufacturing firm, a teacher, a newspaper reporter, and a petty railroad official. None of them made her more than pause in thought. For months no male emerged from the mass. Then, at the Marburys', she met Dr. Will Kennicott.

Chapter 1

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-1

We look in on a hill where the Chippewa people used to live. The Chippewa aren't there anymore, but instead we see a girl staring out at a bunch of flourmills. We quickly learn that this girl is Carol Milford, and she is taking a little break from life at a place called Blodgett College. We're totally reminded that the days of bear-killing pioneer men are over, and now the spirit of rebellion in the American Midwest exists in the figure of the rebellious girl. The narrator tells us a bit about Blodgett College, which is located on the edge of Minneapolis and is a "bulwark of sound religion." In other words, you send your daughters to Blodgett to teach them good morals and to reject the theory of evolution. Carol likes to dream about doing something great with her life. She's always trying to figure out if she has any special hidden talents. As graduation approaches, Carol's friends talk about getting married and settling down. Carol isn't in love with anyone, so she decides that she'll work to make her own living. Now, it's sometime around 1910 here, so it would be expected that any woman who got married would give up her job. Meanwhile, Carol dreams about becoming someone super important in the professional world. Carol starts hanging out with a young law student named Stewart Snyder. Stewart likes Carol, but Carol finds him really boring. He tries to convince her to marry him but fails. As Carol studies for a sociology class, she reads about village improvement and neighborhood renewal. She instantly decides that she wants to dedicate her life to fixing up a town. We get a little insight into Carol's childhood, when she admired her father more than anyone in the world. Her mother died when Carol was nine years old, and her father died when she was eleven, which helps explain why she's much more independent than many other young women her age. As she gets closer to graduation, Carol loses interest in becoming a teacher. She knows that the routine of it all would bore her after a while. She eventually decides to study library work in a Chicago school. Before she graduates from college, Stewart Snyder makes one last effort and proposes to Carol. He nearly convinces her, but Carol rejects him in the end. After graduation, she never sees him again. Carol ends up spending a year in Chicago working as a librarian. For a short while, she falls in with some hipster-intellectual types, but it doesn't last long. One day, Carol is reminded of her desire to improve an American prairie town. It doesn't really matter which one, so she starts dreaming about it again. She moves back to Minnesota to work as a librarian there. Over time, Carol realizes that she isn't making a difference in the world by working in the St. Paul library. She works in this library for three years, during which time several men try to woo her, but she doesn't accept any of them. Then, one day, she meets Dr. Will Kennicott.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/2.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_1_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 2

chapter 2

{"name": "Chapter 2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-2", "summary": "Carol walks to a friend's home for dinner. When she gets there, she meets a doctor in his mid-thirties named Will Kennicott. The host introduces Carol to Will, and they get to talking. Later that evening, Will and Carol talk on the sofa. Will asks Carol about her life and says he's not a fan of big cities like she is. He likes living in his small town of Gopher Prairie. Will talks about how Gopher Prairie is a growing town with a great future ahead of it. This gets Carol's attention, since it's her dream to help build a great American town. Will says that Gopher Prairie needs a woman like Carol in it to keep people on their toes and to make sure they don't settle for less than what's good. Before they part that evening, Will asks Carol if he can see her again next time he's in town. She tells him to ask the host of the party for her address, since she won't give it to him herself. Carol and Will start hanging out a lot and going for walks around St. Paul. Carol realizes quickly that they're fond of each other. One day, Will tells Carol he loves her. Then he says that she could fulfill all her dreams of improving an American town if she moved with him to Gopher Prairie. The chapter ends with Will hugging Carol close to him while she says, \"Sweet, so sweet\" .", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER II IT was a frail and blue and lonely Carol who trotted to the flat of the Johnson Marburys for Sunday evening supper. Mrs. Marbury was a neighbor and friend of Carol's sister; Mr. Marbury a traveling representative of an insurance company. They made a specialty of sandwich-salad-coffee lap suppers, and they regarded Carol as their literary and artistic representative. She was the one who could be depended upon to appreciate the Caruso phonograph record, and the Chinese lantern which Mr. Marbury had brought back as his present from San Francisco. Carol found the Marburys admiring and therefore admirable. This September Sunday evening she wore a net frock with a pale pink lining. A nap had soothed away the faint lines of tiredness beside her eyes. She was young, naive, stimulated by the coolness. She flung her coat at the chair in the hall of the flat, and exploded into the green-plush living-room. The familiar group were trying to be conversational. She saw Mr. Marbury, a woman teacher of gymnastics in a high school, a chief clerk from the Great Northern Railway offices, a young lawyer. But there was also a stranger, a thick tall man of thirty-six or -seven, with stolid brown hair, lips used to giving orders, eyes which followed everything good-naturedly, and clothes which you could never quite remember. Mr. Marbury boomed, "Carol, come over here and meet Doc Kennicott--Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie. He does all our insurance-examining up in that neck of the woods, and they do say he's some doctor!" As she edged toward the stranger and murmured nothing in particular, Carol remembered that Gopher Prairie was a Minnesota wheat-prairie town of something over three thousand people. "Pleased to meet you," stated Dr. Kennicott. His hand was strong; the palm soft, but the back weathered, showing golden hairs against firm red skin. He looked at her as though she was an agreeable discovery. She tugged her hand free and fluttered, "I must go out to the kitchen and help Mrs. Marbury." She did not speak to him again till, after she had heated the rolls and passed the paper napkins, Mr. Marbury captured her with a loud, "Oh, quit fussing now. Come over here and sit down and tell us how's tricks." He herded her to a sofa with Dr. Kennicott, who was rather vague about the eyes, rather drooping of bulky shoulder, as though he was wondering what he was expected to do next. As their host left them, Kennicott awoke: "Marbury tells me you're a high mogul in the public library. I was surprised. Didn't hardly think you were old enough. I thought you were a girl, still in college maybe." "Oh, I'm dreadfully old. I expect to take to a lip-stick, and to find a gray hair any morning now." "Huh! You must be frightfully old--prob'ly too old to be my granddaughter, I guess!" Thus in the Vale of Arcady nymph and satyr beguiled the hours; precisely thus, and not in honeyed pentameters, discoursed Elaine and the worn Sir Launcelot in the pleached alley. "How do you like your work?" asked the doctor. "It's pleasant, but sometimes I feel shut off from things--the steel stacks, and the everlasting cards smeared all over with red rubber stamps." "Don't you get sick of the city?" "St. Paul? Why, don't you like it? I don't know of any lovelier view than when you stand on Summit Avenue and look across Lower Town to the Mississippi cliffs and the upland farms beyond." "I know but----Of course I've spent nine years around the Twin Cities--took my B.A. and M.D. over at the U., and had my internship in a hospital in Minneapolis, but still, oh well, you don't get to know folks here, way you do up home. I feel I've got something to say about running Gopher Prairie, but you take it in a big city of two-three hundred thousand, and I'm just one flea on the dog's back. And then I like country driving, and the hunting in the fall. Do you know Gopher Prairie at all?" "No, but I hear it's a very nice town." "Nice? Say honestly----Of course I may be prejudiced, but I've seen an awful lot of towns--one time I went to Atlantic City for the American Medical Association meeting, and I spent practically a week in New York! But I never saw a town that had such up-and-coming people as Gopher Prairie. Bresnahan--you know--the famous auto manufacturer--he comes from Gopher Prairie. Born and brought up there! And it's a darn pretty town. Lots of fine maples and box-elders, and there's two of the dandiest lakes you ever saw, right near town! And we've got seven miles of cement walks already, and building more every day! Course a lot of these towns still put up with plank walks, but not for us, you bet!" "Really?" (Why was she thinking of Stewart Snyder?) "Gopher Prairie is going to have a great future. Some of the best dairy and wheat land in the state right near there--some of it selling right now at one-fifty an acre, and I bet it will go up to two and a quarter in ten years!" "Is----Do you like your profession?" "Nothing like it. Keeps you out, and yet you have a chance to loaf in the office for a change." "I don't mean that way. I mean--it's such an opportunity for sympathy." Dr. Kennicott launched into a heavy, "Oh, these Dutch farmers don't want sympathy. All they need is a bath and a good dose of salts." Carol must have flinched, for instantly he was urging, "What I mean is--I don't want you to think I'm one of these old salts-and-quinine peddlers, but I mean: so many of my patients are husky farmers that I suppose I get kind of case-hardened." "It seems to me that a doctor could transform a whole community, if he wanted to--if he saw it. He's usually the only man in the neighborhood who has any scientific training, isn't he?" "Yes, that's so, but I guess most of us get rusty. We land in a rut of obstetrics and typhoid and busted legs. What we need is women like you to jump on us. It'd be you that would transform the town." "No, I couldn't. Too flighty. I did used to think about doing just that, curiously enough, but I seem to have drifted away from the idea. Oh, I'm a fine one to be lecturing you!" "No! You're just the one. You have ideas without having lost feminine charm. Say! Don't you think there's a lot of these women that go out for all these movements and so on that sacrifice----" After his remarks upon suffrage he abruptly questioned her about herself. His kindliness and the firmness of his personality enveloped her and she accepted him as one who had a right to know what she thought and wore and ate and read. He was positive. He had grown from a sketched-in stranger to a friend, whose gossip was important news. She noticed the healthy solidity of his chest. His nose, which had seemed irregular and large, was suddenly virile. She was jarred out of this serious sweetness when Marbury bounced over to them and with horrible publicity yammered, "Say, what do you two think you're doing? Telling fortunes or making love? Let me warn you that the doc is a frisky bacheldore, Carol. Come on now, folks, shake a leg. Let's have some stunts or a dance or something." She did not have another word with Dr. Kennicott until their parting: "Been a great pleasure to meet you, Miss Milford. May I see you some time when I come down again? I'm here quite often--taking patients to hospitals for majors, and so on." "Why----" "What's your address?" "You can ask Mr. Marbury next time you come down--if you really want to know!" "Want to know? Say, you wait!" II Of the love-making of Carol and Will Kennicott there is nothing to be told which may not be heard on every summer evening, on every shadowy block. They were biology and mystery; their speech was slang phrases and flares of poetry; their silences were contentment, or shaky crises when his arm took her shoulder. All the beauty of youth, first discovered when it is passing--and all the commonplaceness of a well-to-do unmarried man encountering a pretty girl at the time when she is slightly weary of her employment and sees no glory ahead nor any man she is glad to serve. They liked each other honestly--they were both honest. She was disappointed by his devotion to making money, but she was sure that he did not lie to patients, and that he did keep up with the medical magazines. What aroused her to something more than liking was his boyishness when they went tramping. They walked from St. Paul down the river to Mendota, Kennicott more elastic-seeming in a cap and a soft crepe shirt, Carol youthful in a tam-o'-shanter of mole velvet, a blue serge suit with an absurdly and agreeably broad turn-down linen collar, and frivolous ankles above athletic shoes. The High Bridge crosses the Mississippi, mounting from low banks to a palisade of cliffs. Far down beneath it on the St. Paul side, upon mud flats, is a wild settlement of chicken-infested gardens and shanties patched together from discarded sign-boards, sheets of corrugated iron, and planks fished out of the river. Carol leaned over the rail of the bridge to look down at this Yang-tse village; in delicious imaginary fear she shrieked that she was dizzy with the height; and it was an extremely human satisfaction to have a strong male snatch her back to safety, instead of having a logical woman teacher or librarian sniff, "Well, if you're scared, why don't you get away from the rail, then?" From the cliffs across the river Carol and Kennicott looked back at St. Paul on its hills; an imperial sweep from the dome of the cathedral to the dome of the state capitol. The river road led past rocky field slopes, deep glens, woods flamboyant now with September, to Mendota, white walls and a spire among trees beneath a hill, old-world in its placid ease. And for this fresh land, the place is ancient. Here is the bold stone house which General Sibley, the king of fur-traders, built in 1835, with plaster of river mud, and ropes of twisted grass for laths. It has an air of centuries. In its solid rooms Carol and Kennicott found prints from other days which the house had seen--tail-coats of robin's-egg blue, clumsy Red River carts laden with luxurious furs, whiskered Union soldiers in slant forage caps and rattling sabers. It suggested to them a common American past, and it was memorable because they had discovered it together. They talked more trustingly, more personally, as they trudged on. They crossed the Minnesota River in a rowboat ferry. They climbed the hill to the round stone tower of Fort Snelling. They saw the junction of the Mississippi and the Minnesota, and recalled the men who had come here eighty years ago--Maine lumbermen, York traders, soldiers from the Maryland hills. "It's a good country, and I'm proud of it. Let's make it all that those old boys dreamed about," the unsentimental Kennicott was moved to vow. "Let's!" "Come on. Come to Gopher Prairie. Show us. Make the town--well--make it artistic. It's mighty pretty, but I'll admit we aren't any too darn artistic. Probably the lumber-yard isn't as scrumptious as all these Greek temples. But go to it! Make us change!" "I would like to. Some day!" "Now! You'd love Gopher Prairie. We've been doing a lot with lawns and gardening the past few years, and it's so homey--the big trees and----And the best people on earth. And keen. I bet Luke Dawson----" Carol but half listened to the names. She could not fancy their ever becoming important to her. "I bet Luke Dawson has got more money than most of the swells on Summit Avenue; and Miss Sherwin in the high school is a regular wonder--reads Latin like I do English; and Sam Clark, the hardware man, he's a corker--not a better man in the state to go hunting with; and if you want culture, besides Vida Sherwin there's Reverend Warren, the Congregational preacher, and Professor Mott, the superintendent of schools, and Guy Pollock, the lawyer--they say he writes regular poetry and--and Raymie Wutherspoon, he's not such an awful boob when you get to KNOW him, and he sings swell. And----And there's plenty of others. Lym Cass. Only of course none of them have your finesse, you might call it. But they don't make 'em any more appreciative and so on. Come on! We're ready for you to boss us!" They sat on the bank below the parapet of the old fort, hidden from observation. He circled her shoulder with his arm. Relaxed after the walk, a chill nipping her throat, conscious of his warmth and power, she leaned gratefully against him. "You know I'm in love with you, Carol!" She did not answer, but she touched the back of his hand with an exploring finger. "You say I'm so darn materialistic. How can I help it, unless I have you to stir me up?" She did not answer. She could not think. "You say a doctor could cure a town the way he does a person. Well, you cure the town of whatever ails it, if anything does, and I'll be your surgical kit." She did not follow his words, only the burring resoluteness of them. She was shocked, thrilled, as he kissed her cheek and cried, "There's no use saying things and saying things and saying things. Don't my arms talk to you--now?" "Oh, please, please!" She wondered if she ought to be angry, but it was a drifting thought, and she discovered that she was crying. Then they were sitting six inches apart, pretending that they had never been nearer, while she tried to be impersonal: "I would like to--would like to see Gopher Prairie." "Trust me! Here she is! Brought some snapshots down to show you." Her cheek near his sleeve, she studied a dozen village pictures. They were streaky; she saw only trees, shrubbery, a porch indistinct in leafy shadows. But she exclaimed over the lakes: dark water reflecting wooded bluffs, a flight of ducks, a fisherman in shirt sleeves and a wide straw hat, holding up a string of croppies. One winter picture of the edge of Plover Lake had the air of an etching: lustrous slide of ice, snow in the crevices of a boggy bank, the mound of a muskrat house, reeds in thin black lines, arches of frosty grasses. It was an impression of cool clear vigor. "How'd it be to skate there for a couple of hours, or go zinging along on a fast ice-boat, and skip back home for coffee and some hot wienies?" he demanded. "It might be--fun." "But here's the picture. Here's where you come in." A photograph of a forest clearing: pathetic new furrows straggling among stumps, a clumsy log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with hay. In front of it a sagging woman with tight-drawn hair, and a baby bedraggled, smeary, glorious-eyed. "Those are the kind of folks I practise among, good share of the time. Nels Erdstrom, fine clean young Svenska. He'll have a corking farm in ten years, but now----I operated his wife on a kitchen table, with my driver giving the anesthetic. Look at that scared baby! Needs some woman with hands like yours. Waiting for you! Just look at that baby's eyes, look how he's begging----" "Don't! They hurt me. Oh, it would be sweet to help him--so sweet." As his arms moved toward her she answered all her doubts with "Sweet, so sweet."

Chapter 2

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-2

Carol walks to a friend's home for dinner. When she gets there, she meets a doctor in his mid-thirties named Will Kennicott. The host introduces Carol to Will, and they get to talking. Later that evening, Will and Carol talk on the sofa. Will asks Carol about her life and says he's not a fan of big cities like she is. He likes living in his small town of Gopher Prairie. Will talks about how Gopher Prairie is a growing town with a great future ahead of it. This gets Carol's attention, since it's her dream to help build a great American town. Will says that Gopher Prairie needs a woman like Carol in it to keep people on their toes and to make sure they don't settle for less than what's good. Before they part that evening, Will asks Carol if he can see her again next time he's in town. She tells him to ask the host of the party for her address, since she won't give it to him herself. Carol and Will start hanging out a lot and going for walks around St. Paul. Carol realizes quickly that they're fond of each other. One day, Will tells Carol he loves her. Then he says that she could fulfill all her dreams of improving an American town if she moved with him to Gopher Prairie. The chapter ends with Will hugging Carol close to him while she says, "Sweet, so sweet" .

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/3.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_2_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 3

chapter 3

{"name": "Chapter 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-3", "summary": "The next time we see Dr. Will Kennicott and Carol, they're married and on their way to Gopher Prairie. Even on the train, Carol knows she'll have her work cut out for her if she wants to improve the lives of farmers and their families. All she can do is look around and mourn how dirty and dumb they all look. As Carol stares out the train window, all she sees is miles after miles of endless prairie. She is totally terrified of calling this land home, and she thinks she has made a huge mistake in marrying Will. Carol finally sees Gopher Prairie and realizes that the town is a bit of a dump and nothing like Will said it was. She realizes that he sees the place through rose-colored glasses. When they get to the train platform, Will's friends are waiting for him and his new wife. They introduce themselves, and Carol realizes she has trouble telling them apart.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER III UNDER the rolling clouds of the prairie a moving mass of steel. An irritable clank and rattle beneath a prolonged roar. The sharp scent of oranges cutting the soggy smell of unbathed people and ancient baggage. Towns as planless as a scattering of pasteboard boxes on an attic floor. The stretch of faded gold stubble broken only by clumps of willows encircling white houses and red barns. No. 7, the way train, grumbling through Minnesota, imperceptibly climbing the giant tableland that slopes in a thousand-mile rise from hot Mississippi bottoms to the Rockies. It is September, hot, very dusty. There is no smug Pullman attached to the train, and the day coaches of the East are replaced by free chair cars, with each seat cut into two adjustable plush chairs, the head-rests covered with doubtful linen towels. Halfway down the car is a semi-partition of carved oak columns, but the aisle is of bare, splintery, grease-blackened wood. There is no porter, no pillows, no provision for beds, but all today and all tonight they will ride in this long steel box-farmers with perpetually tired wives and children who seem all to be of the same age; workmen going to new jobs; traveling salesmen with derbies and freshly shined shoes. They are parched and cramped, the lines of their hands filled with grime; they go to sleep curled in distorted attitudes, heads against the window-panes or propped on rolled coats on seat-arms, and legs thrust into the aisle. They do not read; apparently they do not think. They wait. An early-wrinkled, young-old mother, moving as though her joints were dry, opens a suit-case in which are seen creased blouses, a pair of slippers worn through at the toes, a bottle of patent medicine, a tin cup, a paper-covered book about dreams which the news-butcher has coaxed her into buying. She brings out a graham cracker which she feeds to a baby lying flat on a seat and wailing hopelessly. Most of the crumbs drop on the red plush of the seat, and the woman sighs and tries to brush them away, but they leap up impishly and fall back on the plush. A soiled man and woman munch sandwiches and throw the crusts on the floor. A large brick-colored Norwegian takes off his shoes, grunts in relief, and props his feet in their thick gray socks against the seat in front of him. An old woman whose toothless mouth shuts like a mud-turtle's, and whose hair is not so much white as yellow like moldy linen, with bands of pink skull apparent between the tresses, anxiously lifts her bag, opens it, peers in, closes it, puts it under the seat, and hastily picks it up and opens it and hides it all over again. The bag is full of treasures and of memories: a leather buckle, an ancient band-concert program, scraps of ribbon, lace, satin. In the aisle beside her is an extremely indignant parrakeet in a cage. Two facing seats, overflowing with a Slovene iron-miner's family, are littered with shoes, dolls, whisky bottles, bundles wrapped in newspapers, a sewing bag. The oldest boy takes a mouth-organ out of his coat pocket, wipes the tobacco crumbs off, and plays "Marching through Georgia" till every head in the car begins to ache. The news-butcher comes through selling chocolate bars and lemon drops. A girl-child ceaselessly trots down to the water-cooler and back to her seat. The stiff paper envelope which she uses for cup drips in the aisle as she goes, and on each trip she stumbles over the feet of a carpenter, who grunts, "Ouch! Look out!" The dust-caked doors are open, and from the smoking-car drifts back a visible blue line of stinging tobacco smoke, and with it a crackle of laughter over the story which the young man in the bright blue suit and lavender tie and light yellow shoes has just told to the squat man in garage overalls. The smell grows constantly thicker, more stale. II To each of the passengers his seat was his temporary home, and most of the passengers were slatternly housekeepers. But one seat looked clean and deceptively cool. In it were an obviously prosperous man and a black-haired, fine-skinned girl whose pumps rested on an immaculate horsehide bag. They were Dr. Will Kennicott and his bride, Carol. They had been married at the end of a year of conversational courtship, and they were on their way to Gopher Prairie after a wedding journey in the Colorado mountains. The hordes of the way-train were not altogether new to Carol. She had seen them on trips from St. Paul to Chicago. But now that they had become her own people, to bathe and encourage and adorn, she had an acute and uncomfortable interest in them. They distressed her. They were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks. But the older people, Yankees as well as Norwegians, Germans, Finns, Canucks, had settled into submission to poverty. They were peasants, she groaned. "Isn't there any way of waking them up? What would happen if they understood scientific agriculture?" she begged of Kennicott, her hand groping for his. It had been a transforming honeymoon. She had been frightened to discover how tumultuous a feeling could be roused in her. Will had been lordly--stalwart, jolly, impressively competent in making camp, tender and understanding through the hours when they had lain side by side in a tent pitched among pines high up on a lonely mountain spur. His hand swallowed hers as he started from thoughts of the practise to which he was returning. "These people? Wake 'em up? What for? They're happy." "But they're so provincial. No, that isn't what I mean. They're--oh, so sunk in the mud." "Look here, Carrie. You want to get over your city idea that because a man's pants aren't pressed, he's a fool. These farmers are mighty keen and up-and-coming." "I know! That's what hurts. Life seems so hard for them--these lonely farms and this gritty train." "Oh, they don't mind it. Besides, things are changing. The auto, the telephone, rural free delivery; they're bringing the farmers in closer touch with the town. Takes time, you know, to change a wilderness like this was fifty years ago. But already, why, they can hop into the Ford or the Overland and get in to the movies on Saturday evening quicker than you could get down to 'em by trolley in St. Paul." "But if it's these towns we've been passing that the farmers run to for relief from their bleakness----Can't you understand? Just LOOK at them!" Kennicott was amazed. Ever since childhood he had seen these towns from trains on this same line. He grumbled, "Why, what's the matter with 'em? Good hustling burgs. It would astonish you to know how much wheat and rye and corn and potatoes they ship in a year." "But they're so ugly." "I'll admit they aren't comfy like Gopher Prairie. But give 'em time." "What's the use of giving them time unless some one has desire and training enough to plan them? Hundreds of factories trying to make attractive motor cars, but these towns--left to chance. No! That can't be true. It must have taken genius to make them so scrawny!" "Oh, they're not so bad," was all he answered. He pretended that his hand was the cat and hers the mouse. For the first time she tolerated him rather than encouraged him. She was staring out at Schoenstrom, a hamlet of perhaps a hundred and fifty inhabitants, at which the train was stopping. A bearded German and his pucker-mouthed wife tugged their enormous imitation-leather satchel from under a seat and waddled out. The station agent hoisted a dead calf aboard the baggage-car. There were no other visible activities in Schoenstrom. In the quiet of the halt, Carol could hear a horse kicking his stall, a carpenter shingling a roof. The business-center of Schoenstrom took up one side of one block, facing the railroad. It was a row of one-story shops covered with galvanized iron, or with clapboards painted red and bilious yellow. The buildings were as ill-assorted, as temporary-looking, as a mining-camp street in the motion-pictures. The railroad station was a one-room frame box, a mirey cattle-pen on one side and a crimson wheat-elevator on the other. The elevator, with its cupola on the ridge of a shingled roof, resembled a broad-shouldered man with a small, vicious, pointed head. The only habitable structures to be seen were the florid red-brick Catholic church and rectory at the end of Main Street. Carol picked at Kennicott's sleeve. "You wouldn't call this a not-so-bad town, would you?" "These Dutch burgs ARE kind of slow. Still, at that----See that fellow coming out of the general store there, getting into the big car? I met him once. He owns about half the town, besides the store. Rauskukle, his name is. He owns a lot of mortgages, and he gambles in farm-lands. Good nut on him, that fellow. Why, they say he's worth three or four hundred thousand dollars! Got a dandy great big yellow brick house with tiled walks and a garden and everything, other end of town--can't see it from here--I've gone past it when I've driven through here. Yes sir!" "Then, if he has all that, there's no excuse whatever for this place! If his three hundred thousand went back into the town, where it belongs, they could burn up these shacks, and build a dream-village, a jewel! Why do the farmers and the town-people let the Baron keep it?" "I must say I don't quite get you sometimes, Carrie. Let him? They can't help themselves! He's a dumm old Dutchman, and probably the priest can twist him around his finger, but when it comes to picking good farming land, he's a regular wiz!" "I see. He's their symbol of beauty. The town erects him, instead of erecting buildings." "Honestly, don't know what you're driving at. You're kind of played out, after this long trip. You'll feel better when you get home and have a good bath, and put on the blue negligee. That's some vampire costume, you witch!" He squeezed her arm, looked at her knowingly. They moved on from the desert stillness of the Schoenstrom station. The train creaked, banged, swayed. The air was nauseatingly thick. Kennicott turned her face from the window, rested her head on his shoulder. She was coaxed from her unhappy mood. But she came out of it unwillingly, and when Kennicott was satisfied that he had corrected all her worries and had opened a magazine of saffron detective stories, she sat upright. Here--she meditated--is the newest empire of the world; the Northern Middlewest; a land of dairy herds and exquisite lakes, of new automobiles and tar-paper shanties and silos like red towers, of clumsy speech and a hope that is boundless. An empire which feeds a quarter of the world--yet its work is merely begun. They are pioneers, these sweaty wayfarers, for all their telephones and bank-accounts and automatic pianos and co-operative leagues. And for all its fat richness, theirs is a pioneer land. What is its future? she wondered. A future of cities and factory smut where now are loping empty fields? Homes universal and secure? Or placid chateaux ringed with sullen huts? Youth free to find knowledge and laughter? Willingness to sift the sanctified lies? Or creamy-skinned fat women, smeared with grease and chalk, gorgeous in the skins of beasts and the bloody feathers of slain birds, playing bridge with puffy pink-nailed jeweled fingers, women who after much expenditure of labor and bad temper still grotesquely resemble their own flatulent lap-dogs? The ancient stale inequalities, or something different in history, unlike the tedious maturity of other empires? What future and what hope? Carol's head ached with the riddle. She saw the prairie, flat in giant patches or rolling in long hummocks. The width and bigness of it, which had expanded her spirit an hour ago, began to frighten her. It spread out so; it went on so uncontrollably; she could never know it. Kennicott was closeted in his detective story. With the loneliness which comes most depressingly in the midst of many people she tried to forget problems, to look at the prairie objectively. The grass beside the railroad had been burnt over; it was a smudge prickly with charred stalks of weeds. Beyond the undeviating barbed-wire fences were clumps of golden rod. Only this thin hedge shut them off from the plains-shorn wheat-lands of autumn, a hundred acres to a field, prickly and gray near-by but in the blurred distance like tawny velvet stretched over dipping hillocks. The long rows of wheat-shocks marched like soldiers in worn yellow tabards. The newly plowed fields were black banners fallen on the distant slope. It was a martial immensity, vigorous, a little harsh, unsoftened by kindly gardens. The expanse was relieved by clumps of oaks with patches of short wild grass; and every mile or two was a chain of cobalt slews, with the flicker of blackbirds' wings across them. All this working land was turned into exuberance by the light. The sunshine was dizzy on open stubble; shadows from immense cumulus clouds were forever sliding across low mounds; and the sky was wider and loftier and more resolutely blue than the sky of cities . . . she declared. "It's a glorious country; a land to be big in," she crooned. Then Kennicott startled her by chuckling, "D' you realize the town after the next is Gopher Prairie? Home!" III That one word--home--it terrified her. Had she really bound herself to live, inescapably, in this town called Gopher Prairie? And this thick man beside her, who dared to define her future, he was a stranger! She turned in her seat, stared at him. Who was he? Why was he sitting with her? He wasn't of her kind! His neck was heavy; his speech was heavy; he was twelve or thirteen years older than she; and about him was none of the magic of shared adventures and eagerness. She could not believe that she had ever slept in his arms. That was one of the dreams which you had but did not officially admit. She told herself how good he was, how dependable and understanding. She touched his ear, smoothed the plane of his solid jaw, and, turning away again, concentrated upon liking his town. It wouldn't be like these barren settlements. It couldn't be! Why, it had three thousand population. That was a great many people. There would be six hundred houses or more. And----The lakes near it would be so lovely. She'd seen them in the photographs. They had looked charming . . . hadn't they? As the train left Wahkeenyan she began nervously to watch for the lakes--the entrance to all her future life. But when she discovered them, to the left of the track, her only impression of them was that they resembled the photographs. A mile from Gopher Prairie the track mounts a curving low ridge, and she could see the town as a whole. With a passionate jerk she pushed up the window, looked out, the arched fingers of her left hand trembling on the sill, her right hand at her breast. And she saw that Gopher Prairie was merely an enlargement of all the hamlets which they had been passing. Only to the eyes of a Kennicott was it exceptional. The huddled low wooden houses broke the plains scarcely more than would a hazel thicket. The fields swept up to it, past it. It was unprotected and unprotecting; there was no dignity in it nor any hope of greatness. Only the tall red grain-elevator and a few tinny church-steeples rose from the mass. It was a frontier camp. It was not a place to live in, not possibly, not conceivably. The people--they'd be as drab as their houses, as flat as their fields. She couldn't stay here. She would have to wrench loose from this man, and flee. She peeped at him. She was at once helpless before his mature fixity, and touched by his excitement as he sent his magazine skittering along the aisle, stooped for their bags, came up with flushed face, and gloated, "Here we are!" She smiled loyally, and looked away. The train was entering town. The houses on the outskirts were dusky old red mansions with wooden frills, or gaunt frame shelters like grocery boxes, or new bungalows with concrete foundations imitating stone. Now the train was passing the elevator, the grim storage-tanks for oil, a creamery, a lumber-yard, a stock-yard muddy and trampled and stinking. Now they were stopping at a squat red frame station, the platform crowded with unshaven farmers and with loafers--unadventurous people with dead eyes. She was here. She could not go on. It was the end--the end of the world. She sat with closed eyes, longing to push past Kennicott, hide somewhere in the train, flee on toward the Pacific. Something large arose in her soul and commanded, "Stop it! Stop being a whining baby!" She stood up quickly; she said, "Isn't it wonderful to be here at last!" He trusted her so. She would make herself like the place. And she was going to do tremendous things---- She followed Kennicott and the bobbing ends of the two bags which he carried. They were held back by the slow line of disembarking passengers. She reminded herself that she was actually at the dramatic moment of the bride's home-coming. She ought to feel exalted. She felt nothing at all except irritation at their slow progress toward the door. Kennicott stooped to peer through the windows. He shyly exulted: "Look! Look! There's a bunch come down to welcome us! Sam Clark and the missus and Dave Dyer and Jack Elder, and, yes sir, Harry Haydock and Juanita, and a whole crowd! I guess they see us now. Yuh, yuh sure, they see us! See 'em waving!" She obediently bent her head to look out at them. She had hold of herself. She was ready to love them. But she was embarrassed by the heartiness of the cheering group. From the vestibule she waved to them, but she clung a second to the sleeve of the brakeman who helped her down before she had the courage to dive into the cataract of hand-shaking people, people whom she could not tell apart. She had the impression that all the men had coarse voices, large damp hands, tooth-brush mustaches, bald spots, and Masonic watch-charms. She knew that they were welcoming her. Their hands, their smiles, their shouts, their affectionate eyes overcame her. She stammered, "Thank you, oh, thank you!" One of the men was clamoring at Kennicott, "I brought my machine down to take you home, doc." "Fine business, Sam!" cried Kennicott; and, to Carol, "Let's jump in. That big Paige over there. Some boat, too, believe me! Sam can show speed to any of these Marmons from Minneapolis!" Only when she was in the motor car did she distinguish the three people who were to accompany them. The owner, now at the wheel, was the essence of decent self-satisfaction; a baldish, largish, level-eyed man, rugged of neck but sleek and round of face--face like the back of a spoon bowl. He was chuckling at her, "Have you got us all straight yet?" "Course she has! Trust Carrie to get things straight and get 'em darn quick! I bet she could tell you every date in history!" boasted her husband. But the man looked at her reassuringly and with a certainty that he was a person whom she could trust she confessed, "As a matter of fact I haven't got anybody straight." "Course you haven't, child. Well, I'm Sam Clark, dealer in hardware, sporting goods, cream separators, and almost any kind of heavy junk you can think of. You can call me Sam--anyway, I'm going to call you Carrie, seein' 's you've been and gone and married this poor fish of a bum medic that we keep round here." Carol smiled lavishly, and wished that she called people by their given names more easily. "The fat cranky lady back there beside you, who is pretending that she can't hear me giving her away, is Mrs. Sam'l Clark; and this hungry-looking squirt up here beside me is Dave Dyer, who keeps his drug store running by not filling your hubby's prescriptions right--fact you might say he's the guy that put the 'shun' in 'prescription.' So! Well, leave us take the bonny bride home. Say, doc, I'll sell you the Candersen place for three thousand plunks. Better be thinking about building a new home for Carrie. Prettiest Frau in G. P., if you asks me!" Contentedly Sam Clark drove off, in the heavy traffic of three Fords and the Minniemashie House Free 'Bus. "I shall like Mr. Clark . . . I CAN'T call him 'Sam'! They're all so friendly." She glanced at the houses; tried not to see what she saw; gave way in: "Why do these stories lie so? They always make the bride's home-coming a bower of roses. Complete trust in noble spouse. Lies about marriage. I'm NOT changed. And this town--O my God! I can't go through with it. This junk-heap!" Her husband bent over her. "You look like you were in a brown study. Scared? I don't expect you to think Gopher Prairie is a paradise, after St. Paul. I don't expect you to be crazy about it, at first. But you'll come to like it so much--life's so free here and best people on earth." She whispered to him (while Mrs. Clark considerately turned away), "I love you for understanding. I'm just--I'm beastly over-sensitive. Too many books. It's my lack of shoulder-muscles and sense. Give me time, dear." "You bet! All the time you want!" She laid the back of his hand against her cheek, snuggled near him. She was ready for her new home. Kennicott had told her that, with his widowed mother as housekeeper, he had occupied an old house, "but nice and roomy, and well-heated, best furnace I could find on the market." His mother had left Carol her love, and gone back to Lac-qui-Meurt. It would be wonderful, she exulted, not to have to live in Other People's Houses, but to make her own shrine. She held his hand tightly and stared ahead as the car swung round a corner and stopped in the street before a prosaic frame house in a small parched lawn. IV A concrete sidewalk with a "parking" of grass and mud. A square smug brown house, rather damp. A narrow concrete walk up to it. Sickly yellow leaves in a windrow with dried wings of box-elder seeds and snags of wool from the cotton-woods. A screened porch with pillars of thin painted pine surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed wood. No shrubbery to shut off the public gaze. A lugubrious bay-window to the right of the porch. Window curtains of starched cheap lace revealing a pink marble table with a conch shell and a Family Bible. "You'll find it old-fashioned--what do you call it?--Mid-Victorian. I left it as is, so you could make any changes you felt were necessary." Kennicott sounded doubtful for the first time since he had come back to his own. "It's a real home!" She was moved by his humility. She gaily motioned good-by to the Clarks. He unlocked the door--he was leaving the choice of a maid to her, and there was no one in the house. She jiggled while he turned the key, and scampered in. . . . It was next day before either of them remembered that in their honeymoon camp they had planned that he should carry her over the sill. In hallway and front parlor she was conscious of dinginess and lugubriousness and airlessness, but she insisted, "I'll make it all jolly." As she followed Kennicott and the bags up to their bedroom she quavered to herself the song of the fat little-gods of the hearth: I have my own home, To do what I please with, To do what I please with, My den for me and my mate and my cubs, My own! She was close in her husband's arms; she clung to him; whatever of strangeness and slowness and insularity she might find in him, none of that mattered so long as she could slip her hands beneath his coat, run her fingers over the warm smoothness of the satin back of his waistcoat, seem almost to creep into his body, find in him strength, find in the courage and kindness of her man a shelter from the perplexing world. "Sweet, so sweet," she whispered.

Chapter 3

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-3

The next time we see Dr. Will Kennicott and Carol, they're married and on their way to Gopher Prairie. Even on the train, Carol knows she'll have her work cut out for her if she wants to improve the lives of farmers and their families. All she can do is look around and mourn how dirty and dumb they all look. As Carol stares out the train window, all she sees is miles after miles of endless prairie. She is totally terrified of calling this land home, and she thinks she has made a huge mistake in marrying Will. Carol finally sees Gopher Prairie and realizes that the town is a bit of a dump and nothing like Will said it was. She realizes that he sees the place through rose-colored glasses. When they get to the train platform, Will's friends are waiting for him and his new wife. They introduce themselves, and Carol realizes she has trouble telling them apart.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/4.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_3_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 4

chapter 4

{"name": "Chapter 4", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-4", "summary": "Will tells Carol that his friends--the Clarks--have invited them over to meet some of the townsfolk after they've gotten settled. Carol thinks this'll be nice. Before he does anything else, Will wants to drop by his office for an hour to make sure everything's all right with his work. Carol tells him to go but is secretly disappointed when he does. When she looks around Will's home, Carol realizes how ugly everything is. She basically has a panic attack when she realizes that this home and town will be her prison for the rest of her life. Carol runs into the street to take a walk, but the town doesn't make her feel any better. She only confirms what she already thought: that the place is awful, and she has no chance of changing it. Carol looks at the buildings on Main Street one by one and finds nothing in them worth exploring. Eventually, she gives up and retreats to her new home. We find out that a woman named Bea Sorenson was travelling on the same train to Gopher Prairie as Carol and Will. We look in on her now to find her arriving in her cousin's home and looking to find a job in the town. Bea takes a walk down Main Street and sees the exact opposite of what Carol has. She loves all the stores and the people, which just goes to show how much of a difference your perspective can make. Now we look in on the party that Sam Clark and his wife are hosting for Will and his new bride Carol. Will takes Carol and shows her to the room, telling her about the people before introducing her to them. Carol feels vulnerable and exposed, especially considering how much she dislikes the town so far. She never feels like she's saying anything good to the people because she can't tell how judgmental they are. She's certainly judgmental of them and their boring lives. Eventually, Carol gives up and just tries to say whatever the people around her want to hear. Carol's phony acting soon exhausts her, so she retreats to a chair to sit by herself. The host, Sam Clark, decides to make the party more exciting by calling people to tell stories and give short performances. Carol doesn't realize that she's about to hear the same stories at every party she attends that winter. She also listens to a bunch of petty gossip that makes the people spreading it seem like losers. Then the conversation turns to workers' rights, which the people in Sam's house are not fond of. They think that as businessmen, they should be able to run their businesses however they bloody well want. Carol doesn't agree with any of it. Finally, the evening ends, and Carol heads home with Will. On their way, Will cautions her about being too edgy with some of her comments. For example, she might not want to bring up any labor-related politics from now on.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER IV I "THE Clarks have invited some folks to their house to meet us, tonight," said Kennicott, as he unpacked his suit-case. "Oh, that is nice of them!" "You bet. I told you you'd like 'em. Squarest people on earth. Uh, Carrie----Would you mind if I sneaked down to the office for an hour, just to see how things are?" "Why, no. Of course not. I know you're keen to get back to work." "Sure you don't mind?" "Not a bit. Out of my way. Let me unpack." But the advocate of freedom in marriage was as much disappointed as a drooping bride at the alacrity with which he took that freedom and escaped to the world of men's affairs. She gazed about their bedroom, and its full dismalness crawled over her: the awkward knuckly L-shape of it; the black walnut bed with apples and spotty pears carved on the headboard; the imitation maple bureau, with pink-daubed scent-bottles and a petticoated pin-cushion on a marble slab uncomfortably like a gravestone; the plain pine washstand and the garlanded water-pitcher and bowl. The scent was of horsehair and plush and Florida Water. "How could people ever live with things like this?" she shuddered. She saw the furniture as a circle of elderly judges, condemning her to death by smothering. The tottering brocade chair squeaked, "Choke her--choke her--smother her." The old linen smelled of the tomb. She was alone in this house, this strange still house, among the shadows of dead thoughts and haunting repressions. "I hate it! I hate it!" she panted. "Why did I ever----" She remembered that Kennicott's mother had brought these family relics from the old home in Lac-qui-Meurt. "Stop it! They're perfectly comfortable things. They're--comfortable. Besides----Oh, they're horrible! We'll change them, right away." Then, "But of course he HAS to see how things are at the office----" She made a pretense of busying herself with unpacking. The chintz-lined, silver-fitted bag which had seemed so desirable a luxury in St. Paul was an extravagant vanity here. The daring black chemise of frail chiffon and lace was a hussy at which the deep-bosomed bed stiffened in disgust, and she hurled it into a bureau drawer, hid it beneath a sensible linen blouse. She gave up unpacking. She went to the window, with a purely literary thought of village charm--hollyhocks and lanes and apple-cheeked cottagers. What she saw was the side of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church--a plain clapboard wall of a sour liver color; the ash-pile back of the church; an unpainted stable; and an alley in which a Ford delivery-wagon had been stranded. This was the terraced garden below her boudoir; this was to be her scenery for---- "I mustn't! I mustn't! I'm nervous this afternoon. Am I sick? . . . Good Lord, I hope it isn't that! Not now! How people lie! How these stories lie! They say the bride is always so blushing and proud and happy when she finds that out, but--I'd hate it! I'd be scared to death! Some day but----Please, dear nebulous Lord, not now! Bearded sniffy old men sitting and demanding that we bear children. If THEY had to bear them----! I wish they did have to! Not now! Not till I've got hold of this job of liking the ash-pile out there! . . . I must shut up. I'm mildly insane. I'm going out for a walk. I'll see the town by myself. My first view of the empire I'm going to conquer!" She fled from the house. She stared with seriousness at every concrete crossing, every hitching-post, every rake for leaves; and to each house she devoted all her speculation. What would they come to mean? How would they look six months from now? In which of them would she be dining? Which of these people whom she passed, now mere arrangements of hair and clothes, would turn into intimates, loved or dreaded, different from all the other people in the world? As she came into the small business-section she inspected a broad-beamed grocer in an alpaca coat who was bending over the apples and celery on a slanted platform in front of his store. Would she ever talk to him? What would he say if she stopped and stated, "I am Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. Some day I hope to confide that a heap of extremely dubious pumpkins as a window-display doesn't exhilarate me much." (The grocer was Mr. Frederick F. Ludelmeyer, whose market is at the corner of Main Street and Lincoln Avenue. In supposing that only she was observant Carol was ignorant, misled by the indifference of cities. She fancied that she was slipping through the streets invisible; but when she had passed, Mr. Ludelmeyer puffed into the store and coughed at his clerk, "I seen a young woman, she come along the side street. I bet she iss Doc Kennicott's new bride, good-looker, nice legs, but she wore a hell of a plain suit, no style, I wonder will she pay cash, I bet she goes to Howland & Gould's more as she does here, what you done with the poster for Fluffed Oats?") II When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had completely covered the town, east and west, north and south; and she stood at the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue and despaired. Main Street with its two-story brick shops, its story-and-a-half wooden residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle of Fords and lumber-wagons, was too small to absorb her. The broad, straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side. She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land. The skeleton iron windmill on the farm a few blocks away, at the north end of Main Street, was like the ribs of a dead cow. She thought of the coming of the Northern winter, when the unprotected houses would crouch together in terror of storms galloping out of that wild waste. They were so small and weak, the little brown houses. They were shelters for sparrows, not homes for warm laughing people. She told herself that down the street the leaves were a splendor. The maples were orange; the oaks a solid tint of raspberry. And the lawns had been nursed with love. But the thought would not hold. At best the trees resembled a thinned woodlot. There was no park to rest the eyes. And since not Gopher Prairie but Wakamin was the county-seat, there was no court-house with its grounds. She glanced through the fly-specked windows of the most pretentious building in sight, the one place which welcomed strangers and determined their opinion of the charm and luxury of Gopher Prairie--the Minniemashie House. It was a tall lean shabby structure, three stories of yellow-streaked wood, the corners covered with sanded pine slabs purporting to symbolize stone. In the hotel office she could see a stretch of bare unclean floor, a line of rickety chairs with brass cuspidors between, a writing-desk with advertisements in mother-of-pearl letters upon the glass-covered back. The dining-room beyond was a jungle of stained table-cloths and catsup bottles. She looked no more at the Minniemashie House. A man in cuffless shirt-sleeves with pink arm-garters, wearing a linen collar but no tie, yawned his way from Dyer's Drug Store across to the hotel. He leaned against the wall, scratched a while, sighed, and in a bored way gossiped with a man tilted back in a chair. A lumber-wagon, its long green box filled with large spools of barbed-wire fencing, creaked down the block. A Ford, in reverse, sounded as though it were shaking to pieces, then recovered and rattled away. In the Greek candy-store was the whine of a peanut-roaster, and the oily smell of nuts. There was no other sound nor sign of life. She wanted to run, fleeing from the encroaching prairie, demanding the security of a great city. Her dreams of creating a beautiful town were ludicrous. Oozing out from every drab wall, she felt a forbidding spirit which she could never conquer. She trailed down the street on one side, back on the other, glancing into the cross streets. It was a private Seeing Main Street tour. She was within ten minutes beholding not only the heart of a place called Gopher Prairie, but ten thousand towns from Albany to San Diego: Dyer's Drug Store, a corner building of regular and unreal blocks of artificial stone. Inside the store, a greasy marble soda-fountain with an electric lamp of red and green and curdled-yellow mosaic shade. Pawed-over heaps of tooth-brushes and combs and packages of shaving-soap. Shelves of soap-cartons, teething-rings, garden-seeds, and patent medicines in yellow "packages-nostrums" for consumption, for "women's diseases"--notorious mixtures of opium and alcohol, in the very shop to which her husband sent patients for the filling of prescriptions. From a second-story window the sign "W. P. Kennicott, Phys. & Surgeon," gilt on black sand. A small wooden motion-picture theater called "The Rosebud Movie Palace." Lithographs announcing a film called "Fatty in Love." Howland & Gould's Grocery. In the display window, black, overripe bananas and lettuce on which a cat was sleeping. Shelves lined with red crepe paper which was now faded and torn and concentrically spotted. Flat against the wall of the second story the signs of lodges--the Knights of Pythias, the Maccabees, the Woodmen, the Masons. Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market--a reek of blood. A jewelry shop with tinny-looking wrist-watches for women. In front of it, at the curb, a huge wooden clock which did not go. A fly-buzzing saloon with a brilliant gold and enamel whisky sign across the front. Other saloons down the block. From them a stink of stale beer, and thick voices bellowing pidgin German or trolling out dirty songs--vice gone feeble and unenterprising and dull--the delicacy of a mining-camp minus its vigor. In front of the saloons, farmwives sitting on the seats of wagons, waiting for their husbands to become drunk and ready to start home. A tobacco shop called "The Smoke House," filled with young men shaking dice for cigarettes. Racks of magazines, and pictures of coy fat prostitutes in striped bathing-suits. A clothing store with a display of "ox-blood-shade Oxfords with bull-dog toes." Suits which looked worn and glossless while they were still new, flabbily draped on dummies like corpses with painted cheeks. The Bon Ton Store--Haydock & Simons'--the largest shop in town. The first-story front of clear glass, the plates cleverly bound at the edges with brass. The second story of pleasant tapestry brick. One window of excellent clothes for men, interspersed with collars of floral pique which showed mauve daisies on a saffron ground. Newness and an obvious notion of neatness and service. Haydock & Simons. Haydock. She had met a Haydock at the station; Harry Haydock; an active person of thirty-five. He seemed great to her, now, and very like a saint. His shop was clean! Axel Egge's General Store, frequented by Scandinavian farmers. In the shallow dark window-space heaps of sleazy sateens, badly woven galateas, canvas shoes designed for women with bulging ankles, steel and red glass buttons upon cards with broken edges, a cottony blanket, a granite-ware frying-pan reposing on a sun-faded crepe blouse. Sam Clark's Hardware Store. An air of frankly metallic enterprise. Guns and churns and barrels of nails and beautiful shiny butcher knives. Chester Dashaway's House Furnishing Emporium. A vista of heavy oak rockers with leather seats, asleep in a dismal row. Billy's Lunch. Thick handleless cups on the wet oilcloth-covered counter. An odor of onions and the smoke of hot lard. In the doorway a young man audibly sucking a toothpick. The warehouse of the buyer of cream and potatoes. The sour smell of a dairy. The Ford Garage and the Buick Garage, competent one-story brick and cement buildings opposite each other. Old and new cars on grease-blackened concrete floors. Tire advertisements. The roaring of a tested motor; a racket which beat at the nerves. Surly young men in khaki union-overalls. The most energetic and vital places in town. A large warehouse for agricultural implements. An impressive barricade of green and gold wheels, of shafts and sulky seats, belonging to machinery of which Carol knew nothing--potato-planters, manure-spreaders, silage-cutters, disk-harrows, breaking-plows. A feed store, its windows opaque with the dust of bran, a patent medicine advertisement painted on its roof. Ye Art Shoppe, Prop. Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks, Christian Science Library open daily free. A touching fumble at beauty. A one-room shanty of boards recently covered with rough stucco. A show-window delicately rich in error: vases starting out to imitate tree-trunks but running off into blobs of gilt--an aluminum ash-tray labeled "Greetings from Gopher Prairie"--a Christian Science magazine--a stamped sofa-cushion portraying a large ribbon tied to a small poppy, the correct skeins of embroidery-silk lying on the pillow. Inside the shop, a glimpse of bad carbon prints of bad and famous pictures, shelves of phonograph records and camera films, wooden toys, and in the midst an anxious small woman sitting in a padded rocking chair. A barber shop and pool room. A man in shirt sleeves, presumably Del Snafflin the proprietor, shaving a man who had a large Adam's apple. Nat Hicks's Tailor Shop, on a side street off Main. A one-story building. A fashion-plate showing human pitchforks in garments which looked as hard as steel plate. On another side street a raw red-brick Catholic Church with a varnished yellow door. The post-office--merely a partition of glass and brass shutting off the rear of a mildewed room which must once have been a shop. A tilted writing-shelf against a wall rubbed black and scattered with official notices and army recruiting-posters. The damp, yellow-brick schoolbuilding in its cindery grounds. The State Bank, stucco masking wood. The Farmers' National Bank. An Ionic temple of marble. Pure, exquisite, solitary. A brass plate with "Ezra Stowbody, Pres't." A score of similar shops and establishments. Behind them and mixed with them, the houses, meek cottages or large, comfortable, soundly uninteresting symbols of prosperity. In all the town not one building save the Ionic bank which gave pleasure to Carol's eyes; not a dozen buildings which suggested that, in the fifty years of Gopher Prairie's existence, the citizens had realized that it was either desirable or possible to make this, their common home, amusing or attractive. It was not only the unsparing unapologetic ugliness and the rigid straightness which overwhelmed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy temporariness of the buildings, their faded unpleasant colors. The street was cluttered with electric-light poles, telephone poles, gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods. Each man had built with the most valiant disregard of all the others. Between a large new "block" of two-story brick shops on one side, and the fire-brick Overland garage on the other side, was a one-story cottage turned into a millinery shop. The white temple of the Farmers' Bank was elbowed back by a grocery of glaring yellow brick. One store-building had a patchy galvanized iron cornice; the building beside it was crowned with battlements and pyramids of brick capped with blocks of red sandstone. She escaped from Main Street, fled home. She wouldn't have cared, she insisted, if the people had been comely. She had noted a young man loafing before a shop, one unwashed hand holding the cord of an awning; a middle-aged man who had a way of staring at women as though he had been married too long and too prosaically; an old farmer, solid, wholesome, but not clean--his face like a potato fresh from the earth. None of them had shaved for three days. "If they can't build shrines, out here on the prairie, surely there's nothing to prevent their buying safety-razors!" she raged. She fought herself: "I must be wrong. People do live here. It CAN'T be as ugly as--as I know it is! I must be wrong. But I can't do it. I can't go through with it." She came home too seriously worried for hysteria; and when she found Kennicott waiting for her, and exulting, "Have a walk? Well, like the town? Great lawns and trees, eh?" she was able to say, with a self-protective maturity new to her, "It's very interesting." III The train which brought Carol to Gopher Prairie also brought Miss Bea Sorenson. Miss Bea was a stalwart, corn-colored, laughing young woman, and she was bored by farm-work. She desired the excitements of city-life, and the way to enjoy city-life was, she had decided, to "go get a yob as hired girl in Gopher Prairie." She contentedly lugged her pasteboard telescope from the station to her cousin, Tina Malmquist, maid of all work in the residence of Mrs. Luke Dawson. "Vell, so you come to town," said Tina. "Ya. Ay get a yob," said Bea. "Vell. . . . You got a fella now?" "Ya. Yim Yacobson." "Vell. I'm glat to see you. How much you vant a veek?" "Sex dollar." "There ain't nobody pay dat. Vait! Dr. Kennicott, I t'ink he marry a girl from de Cities. Maybe she pay dat. Vell. You go take a valk." "Ya," said Bea. So it chanced that Carol Kennicott and Bea Sorenson were viewing Main Street at the same time. Bea had never before been in a town larger than Scandia Crossing, which has sixty-seven inhabitants. As she marched up the street she was meditating that it didn't hardly seem like it was possible there could be so many folks all in one place at the same time. My! It would take years to get acquainted with them all. And swell people, too! A fine big gentleman in a new pink shirt with a diamond, and not no washed-out blue denim working-shirt. A lovely lady in a longery dress (but it must be an awful hard dress to wash). And the stores! Not just three of them, like there were at Scandia Crossing, but more than four whole blocks! The Bon Ton Store--big as four barns--my! it would simply scare a person to go in there, with seven or eight clerks all looking at you. And the men's suits, on figures just like human. And Axel Egge's, like home, lots of Swedes and Norskes in there, and a card of dandy buttons, like rubies. A drug store with a soda fountain that was just huge, awful long, and all lovely marble; and on it there was a great big lamp with the biggest shade you ever saw--all different kinds colored glass stuck together; and the soda spouts, they were silver, and they came right out of the bottom of the lamp-stand! Behind the fountain there were glass shelves, and bottles of new kinds of soft drinks, that nobody ever heard of. Suppose a fella took you THERE! A hotel, awful high, higher than Oscar Tollefson's new red barn; three stories, one right on top of another; you had to stick your head back to look clear up to the top. There was a swell traveling man in there--probably been to Chicago, lots of times. Oh, the dandiest people to know here! There was a lady going by, you wouldn't hardly say she was any older than Bea herself; she wore a dandy new gray suit and black pumps. She almost looked like she was looking over the town, too. But you couldn't tell what she thought. Bea would like to be that way--kind of quiet, so nobody would get fresh. Kind of--oh, elegant. A Lutheran Church. Here in the city there'd be lovely sermons, and church twice on Sunday, EVERY Sunday! And a movie show! A regular theater, just for movies. With the sign "Change of bill every evening." Pictures every evening! There were movies in Scandia Crossing, but only once every two weeks, and it took the Sorensons an hour to drive in--papa was such a tightwad he wouldn't get a Ford. But here she could put on her hat any evening, and in three minutes' walk be to the movies, and see lovely fellows in dress-suits and Bill Hart and everything! How could they have so many stores? Why! There was one just for tobacco alone, and one (a lovely one--the Art Shoppy it was) for pictures and vases and stuff, with oh, the dandiest vase made so it looked just like a tree trunk! Bea stood on the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue. The roar of the city began to frighten her. There were five automobiles on the street all at the same time--and one of 'em was a great big car that must of cost two thousand dollars--and the 'bus was starting for a train with five elegant-dressed fellows, and a man was pasting up red bills with lovely pictures of washing-machines on them, and the jeweler was laying out bracelets and wrist-watches and EVERYTHING on real velvet. What did she care if she got six dollars a week? Or two! It was worth while working for nothing, to be allowed to stay here. And think how it would be in the evening, all lighted up--and not with no lamps, but with electrics! And maybe a gentleman friend taking you to the movies and buying you a strawberry ice cream soda! Bea trudged back. "Vell? You lak it?" said Tina. "Ya. Ay lak it. Ay t'ink maybe Ay stay here," said Bea. IV The recently built house of Sam Clark, in which was given the party to welcome Carol, was one of the largest in Gopher Prairie. It had a clean sweep of clapboards, a solid squareness, a small tower, and a large screened porch. Inside, it was as shiny, as hard, and as cheerful as a new oak upright piano. Carol looked imploringly at Sam Clark as he rolled to the door and shouted, "Welcome, little lady! The keys of the city are yourn!" Beyond him, in the hallway and the living-room, sitting in a vast prim circle as though they were attending a funeral, she saw the guests. They were WAITING so! They were waiting for her! The determination to be all one pretty flowerlet of appreciation leaked away. She begged of Sam, "I don't dare face them! They expect so much. They'll swallow me in one mouthful--glump!--like that!" "Why, sister, they're going to love you--same as I would if I didn't think the doc here would beat me up!" "B-but----I don't dare! Faces to the right of me, faces in front of me, volley and wonder!" She sounded hysterical to herself; she fancied that to Sam Clark she sounded insane. But he chuckled, "Now you just cuddle under Sam's wing, and if anybody rubbers at you too long, I'll shoo 'em off. Here we go! Watch my smoke--Sam'l, the ladies' delight and the bridegrooms' terror!" His arm about her, he led her in and bawled, "Ladies and worser halves, the bride! We won't introduce her round yet, because she'll never get your bum names straight anyway. Now bust up this star-chamber!" They tittered politely, but they did not move from the social security of their circle, and they did not cease staring. Carol had given creative energy to dressing for the event. Her hair was demure, low on her forehead with a parting and a coiled braid. Now she wished that she had piled it high. Her frock was an ingenue slip of lawn, with a wide gold sash and a low square neck, which gave a suggestion of throat and molded shoulders. But as they looked her over she was certain that it was all wrong. She wished alternately that she had worn a spinsterish high-necked dress, and that she had dared to shock them with a violent brick-red scarf which she had bought in Chicago. She was led about the circle. Her voice mechanically produced safe remarks: "Oh, I'm sure I'm going to like it here ever so much," and "Yes, we did have the best time in Colorado--mountains," and "Yes, I lived in St. Paul several years. Euclid P. Tinker? No, I don't REMEMBER meeting him, but I'm pretty sure I've heard of him." Kennicott took her aside and whispered, "Now I'll introduce you to them, one at a time." "Tell me about them first." "Well, the nice-looking couple over there are Harry Haydock and his wife, Juanita. Harry's dad owns most of the Bon Ton, but it's Harry who runs it and gives it the pep. He's a hustler. Next to him is Dave Dyer the druggist--you met him this afternoon--mighty good duck-shot. The tall husk beyond him is Jack Elder--Jackson Elder--owns the planing-mill, and the Minniemashie House, and quite a share in the Farmers' National Bank. Him and his wife are good sports--him and Sam and I go hunting together a lot. The old cheese there is Luke Dawson, the richest man in town. Next to him is Nat Hicks, the tailor." "Really? A tailor?" "Sure. Why not? Maybe we're slow, but we are democratic. I go hunting with Nat same as I do with Jack Elder." "I'm glad. I've never met a tailor socially. It must be charming to meet one and not have to think about what you owe him. And do you----Would you go hunting with your barber, too?" "No but----No use running this democracy thing into the ground. Besides, I've known Nat for years, and besides, he's a mighty good shot and----That's the way it is, see? Next to Nat is Chet Dashaway. Great fellow for chinning. He'll talk your arm off, about religion or politics or books or anything." Carol gazed with a polite approximation to interest at Mr. Dashaway, a tan person with a wide mouth. "Oh, I know! He's the furniture-store man!" She was much pleased with herself. "Yump, and he's the undertaker. You'll like him. Come shake hands with him." "Oh no, no! He doesn't--he doesn't do the embalming and all that--himself? I couldn't shake hands with an undertaker!" "Why not? You'd be proud to shake hands with a great surgeon, just after he'd been carving up people's bellies." She sought to regain her afternoon's calm of maturity. "Yes. You're right. I want--oh, my dear, do you know how much I want to like the people you like? I want to see people as they are." "Well, don't forget to see people as other folks see them as they are! They have the stuff. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here? Born and brought up here!" "Bresnahan?" "Yes--you know--president of the Velvet Motor Company of Boston, Mass.--make the Velvet Twelve--biggest automobile factory in New England." "I think I've heard of him." "Sure you have. Why, he's a millionaire several times over! Well, Perce comes back here for the black-bass fishing almost every summer, and he says if he could get away from business, he'd rather live here than in Boston or New York or any of those places. HE doesn't mind Chet's undertaking." "Please! I'll--I'll like everybody! I'll be the community sunbeam!" He led her to the Dawsons. Luke Dawson, lender of money on mortgages, owner of Northern cut-over land, was a hesitant man in unpressed soft gray clothes, with bulging eyes in a milky face. His wife had bleached cheeks, bleached hair, bleached voice, and a bleached manner. She wore her expensive green frock, with its passementeried bosom, bead tassels, and gaps between the buttons down the back, as though she had bought it second-hand and was afraid of meeting the former owner. They were shy. It was "Professor" George Edwin Mott, superintendent of schools, a Chinese mandarin turned brown, who held Carol's hand and made her welcome. When the Dawsons and Mr. Mott had stated that they were "pleased to meet her," there seemed to be nothing else to say, but the conversation went on automatically. "Do you like Gopher Prairie?" whimpered Mrs. Dawson. "Oh, I'm sure I'm going to be ever so happy." "There's so many nice people." Mrs. Dawson looked to Mr. Mott for social and intellectual aid. He lectured: "There's a fine class of people. I don't like some of these retired farmers who come here to spend their last days--especially the Germans. They hate to pay school-taxes. They hate to spend a cent. But the rest are a fine class of people. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here? Used to go to school right at the old building!" "I heard he did." "Yes. He's a prince. He and I went fishing together, last time he was here." The Dawsons and Mr. Mott teetered upon weary feet, and smiled at Carol with crystallized expressions. She went on: "Tell me, Mr. Mott: Have you ever tried any experiments with any of the new educational systems? The modern kindergarten methods or the Gary system?" "Oh. Those. Most of these would-be reformers are simply notoriety-seekers. I believe in manual training, but Latin and mathematics always will be the backbone of sound Americanism, no matter what these faddists advocate--heaven knows what they do want--knitting, I suppose, and classes in wiggling the ears!" The Dawsons smiled their appreciation of listening to a savant. Carol waited till Kennicott should rescue her. The rest of the party waited for the miracle of being amused. Harry and Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons and Dr. Terry Gould--the young smart set of Gopher Prairie. She was led to them. Juanita Haydock flung at her in a high, cackling, friendly voice: "Well, this is SO nice to have you here. We'll have some good parties--dances and everything. You'll have to join the Jolly Seventeen. We play bridge and we have a supper once a month. You play, of course?" "N-no, I don't." "Really? In St. Paul?" "I've always been such a book-worm." "We'll have to teach you. Bridge is half the fun of life." Juanita had become patronizing, and she glanced disrespectfully at Carol's golden sash, which she had previously admired. Harry Haydock said politely, "How do you think you're going to like the old burg?" "I'm sure I shall like it tremendously." "Best people on earth here. Great hustlers, too. Course I've had lots of chances to go live in Minneapolis, but we like it here. Real he-town. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan came from here?" Carol perceived that she had been weakened in the biological struggle by disclosing her lack of bridge. Roused to nervous desire to regain her position she turned on Dr. Terry Gould, the young and pool-playing competitor of her husband. Her eyes coquetted with him while she gushed: "I'll learn bridge. But what I really love most is the outdoors. Can't we all get up a boating party, and fish, or whatever you do, and have a picnic supper afterwards?" "Now you're talking!" Dr. Gould affirmed. He looked rather too obviously at the cream-smooth slope of her shoulder. "Like fishing? Fishing is my middle name. I'll teach you bridge. Like cards at all?" "I used to be rather good at bezique." She knew that bezique was a game of cards--or a game of something else. Roulette, possibly. But her lie was a triumph. Juanita's handsome, high-colored, horsey face showed doubt. Harry stroked his nose and said humbly, "Bezique? Used to be great gambling game, wasn't it?" While others drifted to her group, Carol snatched up the conversation. She laughed and was frivolous and rather brittle. She could not distinguish their eyes. They were a blurry theater-audience before which she self-consciously enacted the comedy of being the Clever Little Bride of Doc Kennicott: "These-here celebrated Open Spaces, that's what I'm going out for. I'll never read anything but the sporting-page again. Will converted me on our Colorado trip. There were so many mousey tourists who were afraid to get out of the motor 'bus that I decided to be Annie Oakley, the Wild Western Wampire, and I bought oh! a vociferous skirt which revealed my perfectly nice ankles to the Presbyterian glare of all the Ioway schoolma'ams, and I leaped from peak to peak like the nimble chamoys, and----You may think that Herr Doctor Kennicott is a Nimrod, but you ought to have seen me daring him to strip to his B. V. D.'s and go swimming in an icy mountain brook." She knew that they were thinking of becoming shocked, but Juanita Haydock was admiring, at least. She swaggered on: "I'm sure I'm going to ruin Will as a respectable practitioner----Is he a good doctor, Dr. Gould?" Kennicott's rival gasped at this insult to professional ethics, and he took an appreciable second before he recovered his social manner. "I'll tell you, Mrs. Kennicott." He smiled at Kennicott, to imply that whatever he might say in the stress of being witty was not to count against him in the commercio-medical warfare. "There's some people in town that say the doc is a fair to middlin' diagnostician and prescription-writer, but let me whisper this to you--but for heaven's sake don't tell him I said so--don't you ever go to him for anything more serious than a pendectomy of the left ear or a strabismus of the cardiograph." No one save Kennicott knew exactly what this meant, but they laughed, and Sam Clark's party assumed a glittering lemon-yellow color of brocade panels and champagne and tulle and crystal chandeliers and sporting duchesses. Carol saw that George Edwin Mott and the blanched Mr. and Mrs. Dawson were not yet hypnotized. They looked as though they wondered whether they ought to look as though they disapproved. She concentrated on them: "But I know whom I wouldn't have dared to go to Colorado with! Mr. Dawson there! I'm sure he's a regular heart-breaker. When we were introduced he held my hand and squeezed it frightfully." "Haw! Haw! Haw!" The entire company applauded. Mr. Dawson was beatified. He had been called many things--loan-shark, skinflint, tightwad, pussyfoot--but he had never before been called a flirt. "He is wicked, isn't he, Mrs. Dawson? Don't you have to lock him up?" "Oh no, but maybe I better," attempted Mrs. Dawson, a tint on her pallid face. For fifteen minutes Carol kept it up. She asserted that she was going to stage a musical comedy, that she preferred cafe parfait to beefsteak, that she hoped Dr. Kennicott would never lose his ability to make love to charming women, and that she had a pair of gold stockings. They gaped for more. But she could not keep it up. She retired to a chair behind Sam Clark's bulk. The smile-wrinkles solemnly flattened out in the faces of all the other collaborators in having a party, and again they stood about hoping but not expecting to be amused. Carol listened. She discovered that conversation did not exist in Gopher Prairie. Even at this affair, which brought out the young smart set, the hunting squire set, the respectable intellectual set, and the solid financial set, they sat up with gaiety as with a corpse. Juanita Haydock talked a good deal in her rattling voice but it was invariably of personalities: the rumor that Raymie Wutherspoon was going to send for a pair of patent leather shoes with gray buttoned tops; the rheumatism of Champ Perry; the state of Guy Pollock's grippe; and the dementia of Jim Howland in painting his fence salmon-pink. Sam Clark had been talking to Carol about motor cars, but he felt his duties as host. While he droned, his brows popped up and down. He interrupted himself, "Must stir 'em up." He worried at his wife, "Don't you think I better stir 'em up?" He shouldered into the center of the room, and cried: "Let's have some stunts, folks." "Yes, let's!" shrieked Juanita Haydock. "Say, Dave, give us that stunt about the Norwegian catching a hen." "You bet; that's a slick stunt; do that, Dave!" cheered Chet Dashaway. Mr. Dave Dyer obliged. All the guests moved their lips in anticipation of being called on for their own stunts. "Ella, come on and recite 'Old Sweetheart of Mine,' for us," demanded Sam. Miss Ella Stowbody, the spinster daughter of the Ionic bank, scratched her dry palms and blushed. "Oh, you don't want to hear that old thing again." "Sure we do! You bet!" asserted Sam. "My voice is in terrible shape tonight." "Tut! Come on!" Sam loudly explained to Carol, "Ella is our shark at elocuting. She's had professional training. She studied singing and oratory and dramatic art and shorthand for a year, in Milwaukee." Miss Stowbody was reciting. As encore to "An Old Sweetheart of Mine," she gave a peculiarly optimistic poem regarding the value of smiles. There were four other stunts: one Jewish, one Irish, one juvenile, and Nat Hicks's parody of Mark Antony's funeral oration. During the winter Carol was to hear Dave Dyer's hen-catching impersonation seven times, "An Old Sweetheart of Mine" nine times, the Jewish story and the funeral oration twice; but now she was ardent and, because she did so want to be happy and simple-hearted, she was as disappointed as the others when the stunts were finished, and the party instantly sank back into coma. They gave up trying to be festive; they began to talk naturally, as they did at their shops and homes. The men and women divided, as they had been tending to do all evening. Carol was deserted by the men, left to a group of matrons who steadily pattered of children, sickness, and cooks--their own shop-talk. She was piqued. She remembered visions of herself as a smart married woman in a drawing-room, fencing with clever men. Her dejection was relieved by speculation as to what the men were discussing, in the corner between the piano and the phonograph. Did they rise from these housewifely personalities to a larger world of abstractions and affairs? She made her best curtsy to Mrs. Dawson; she twittered, "I won't have my husband leaving me so soon! I'm going over and pull the wretch's ears." She rose with a jeune fille bow. She was self-absorbed and self-approving because she had attained that quality of sentimentality. She proudly dipped across the room and, to the interest and commendation of all beholders, sat on the arm of Kennicott's chair. He was gossiping with Sam Clark, Luke Dawson, Jackson Elder of the planing-mill, Chet Dashaway, Dave Dyer, Harry Haydock, and Ezra Stowbody, president of the Ionic bank. Ezra Stowbody was a troglodyte. He had come to Gopher Prairie in 1865. He was a distinguished bird of prey--swooping thin nose, turtle mouth, thick brows, port-wine cheeks, floss of white hair, contemptuous eyes. He was not happy in the social changes of thirty years. Three decades ago, Dr. Westlake, Julius Flickerbaugh the lawyer, Merriman Peedy the Congregational pastor and himself had been the arbiters. That was as it should be; the fine arts--medicine, law, religion, and finance--recognized as aristocratic; four Yankees democratically chatting with but ruling the Ohioans and Illini and Swedes and Germans who had ventured to follow them. But Westlake was old, almost retired; Julius Flickerbaugh had lost much of his practice to livelier attorneys; Reverend (not The Reverend) Peedy was dead; and nobody was impressed in this rotten age of automobiles by the "spanking grays" which Ezra still drove. The town was as heterogeneous as Chicago. Norwegians and Germans owned stores. The social leaders were common merchants. Selling nails was considered as sacred as banking. These upstarts--the Clarks, the Haydocks--had no dignity. They were sound and conservative in politics, but they talked about motor cars and pump-guns and heaven only knew what new-fangled fads. Mr. Stowbody felt out of place with them. But his brick house with the mansard roof was still the largest residence in town, and he held his position as squire by occasionally appearing among the younger men and reminding them by a wintry eye that without the banker none of them could carry on their vulgar businesses. As Carol defied decency by sitting down with the men, Mr. Stowbody was piping to Mr. Dawson, "Say, Luke, when was't Biggins first settled in Winnebago Township? Wa'n't it in 1879?" "Why no 'twa'n't!" Mr. Dawson was indignant. "He come out from Vermont in 1867--no, wait, in 1868, it must have been--and took a claim on the Rum River, quite a ways above Anoka." "He did not!" roared Mr. Stowbody. "He settled first in Blue Earth County, him and his father!" ("What's the point at issue?") Carol whispered to Kennicott. ("Whether this old duck Biggins had an English setter or a Llewellyn. They've been arguing it all evening!") Dave Dyer interrupted to give tidings, "D' tell you that Clara Biggins was in town couple days ago? She bought a hot-water bottle--expensive one, too--two dollars and thirty cents!" "Yaaaaaah!" snarled Mr. Stowbody. "Course. She's just like her grandad was. Never save a cent. Two dollars and twenty--thirty, was it?--two dollars and thirty cents for a hot-water bottle! Brick wrapped up in a flannel petticoat just as good, anyway!" "How's Ella's tonsils, Mr. Stowbody?" yawned Chet Dashaway. While Mr. Stowbody gave a somatic and psychic study of them, Carol reflected, "Are they really so terribly interested in Ella's tonsils, or even in Ella's esophagus? I wonder if I could get them away from personalities? Let's risk damnation and try." "There hasn't been much labor trouble around here, has there, Mr. Stowbody?" she asked innocently. "No, ma'am, thank God, we've been free from that, except maybe with hired girls and farm-hands. Trouble enough with these foreign farmers; if you don't watch these Swedes they turn socialist or populist or some fool thing on you in a minute. Of course, if they have loans you can make 'em listen to reason. I just have 'em come into the bank for a talk, and tell 'em a few things. I don't mind their being democrats, so much, but I won't stand having socialists around. But thank God, we ain't got the labor trouble they have in these cities. Even Jack Elder here gets along pretty well, in the planing-mill, don't you, Jack?" "Yep. Sure. Don't need so many skilled workmen in my place, and it's a lot of these cranky, wage-hogging, half-baked skilled mechanics that start trouble--reading a lot of this anarchist literature and union papers and all." "Do you approve of union labor?" Carol inquired of Mr. Elder. "Me? I should say not! It's like this: I don't mind dealing with my men if they think they've got any grievances--though Lord knows what's come over workmen, nowadays--don't appreciate a good job. But still, if they come to me honestly, as man to man, I'll talk things over with them. But I'm not going to have any outsider, any of these walking delegates, or whatever fancy names they call themselves now--bunch of rich grafters, living on the ignorant workmen! Not going to have any of those fellows butting in and telling ME how to run MY business!" Mr. Elder was growing more excited, more belligerent and patriotic. "I stand for freedom and constitutional rights. If any man don't like my shop, he can get up and git. Same way, if I don't like him, he gits. And that's all there is to it. I simply can't understand all these complications and hoop-te-doodles and government reports and wage-scales and God knows what all that these fellows are balling up the labor situation with, when it's all perfectly simple. They like what I pay 'em, or they get out. That's all there is to it!" "What do you think of profit-sharing?" Carol ventured. Mr. Elder thundered his answer, while the others nodded, solemnly and in tune, like a shop-window of flexible toys, comic mandarins and judges and ducks and clowns, set quivering by a breeze from the open door: "All this profit-sharing and welfare work and insurance and old-age pension is simply poppycock. Enfeebles a workman's independence--and wastes a lot of honest profit. The half-baked thinker that isn't dry behind the ears yet, and these suffragettes and God knows what all buttinskis there are that are trying to tell a business man how to run his business, and some of these college professors are just about as bad, the whole kit and bilin' of 'em are nothing in God's world but socialism in disguise! And it's my bounden duty as a producer to resist every attack on the integrity of American industry to the last ditch. Yes--SIR!" Mr. Elder wiped his brow. Dave Dyer added, "Sure! You bet! What they ought to do is simply to hang every one of these agitators, and that would settle the whole thing right off. Don't you think so, doc?" "You bet," agreed Kennicott. The conversation was at last relieved of the plague of Carol's intrusions and they settled down to the question of whether the justice of the peace had sent that hobo drunk to jail for ten days or twelve. It was a matter not readily determined. Then Dave Dyer communicated his carefree adventures on the gipsy trail: "Yep. I get good time out of the flivver. 'Bout a week ago I motored down to New Wurttemberg. That's forty-three----No, let's see: It's seventeen miles to Belldale, and 'bout six and three-quarters, call it seven, to Torgenquist, and it's a good nineteen miles from there to New Wurttemberg--seventeen and seven and nineteen, that makes, uh, let me see: seventeen and seven 's twenty-four, plus nineteen, well say plus twenty, that makes forty-four, well anyway, say about forty-three or -four miles from here to New Wurttemberg. We got started about seven-fifteen, prob'ly seven-twenty, because I had to stop and fill the radiator, and we ran along, just keeping up a good steady gait----" Mr. Dyer did finally, for reasons and purposes admitted and justified, attain to New Wurttemberg. Once--only once--the presence of the alien Carol was recognized. Chet Dashaway leaned over and said asthmatically, "Say, uh, have you been reading this serial 'Two Out' in Tingling Tales? Corking yarn! Gosh, the fellow that wrote it certainly can sling baseball slang!" The others tried to look literary. Harry Haydock offered, "Juanita is a great hand for reading high-class stuff, like 'Mid the Magnolias' by this Sara Hetwiggin Butts, and 'Riders of Ranch Reckless.' Books. But me," he glanced about importantly, as one convinced that no other hero had ever been in so strange a plight, "I'm so darn busy I don't have much time to read." "I never read anything I can't check against," said Sam Clark. Thus ended the literary portion of the conversation, and for seven minutes Jackson Elder outlined reasons for believing that the pike-fishing was better on the west shore of Lake Minniemashie than on the east--though it was indeed quite true that on the east shore Nat Hicks had caught a pike altogether admirable. The talk went on. It did go on! Their voices were monotonous, thick, emphatic. They were harshly pompous, like men in the smoking-compartments of Pullman cars. They did not bore Carol. They frightened her. She panted, "They will be cordial to me, because my man belongs to their tribe. God help me if I were an outsider!" Smiling as changelessly as an ivory figurine she sat quiescent, avoiding thought, glancing about the living-room and hall, noting their betrayal of unimaginative commercial prosperity. Kennicott said, "Dandy interior, eh? My idea of how a place ought to be furnished. Modern." She looked polite, and observed the oiled floors, hard-wood staircase, unused fireplace with tiles which resembled brown linoleum, cut-glass vases standing upon doilies, and the barred, shut, forbidding unit bookcases that were half filled with swashbuckler novels and unread-looking sets of Dickens, Kipling, O. Henry, and Elbert Hubbard. She perceived that even personalities were failing to hold the party. The room filled with hesitancy as with a fog. People cleared their throats, tried to choke down yawns. The men shot their cuffs and the women stuck their combs more firmly into their back hair. Then a rattle, a daring hope in every eye, the swinging of a door, the smell of strong coffee, Dave Dyer's mewing voice in a triumphant, "The eats!" They began to chatter. They had something to do. They could escape from themselves. They fell upon the food--chicken sandwiches, maple cake, drug-store ice cream. Even when the food was gone they remained cheerful. They could go home, any time now, and go to bed! They went, with a flutter of coats, chiffon scarfs, and good-bys. Carol and Kennicott walked home. "Did you like them?" he asked. "They were terribly sweet to me." "Uh, Carrie----You ought to be more careful about shocking folks. Talking about gold stockings, and about showing your ankles to schoolteachers and all!" More mildly: "You gave 'em a good time, but I'd watch out for that, 'f I were you. Juanita Haydock is such a damn cat. I wouldn't give her a chance to criticize me." "My poor effort to lift up the party! Was I wrong to try to amuse them?" "No! No! Honey, I didn't mean----You were the only up-and-coming person in the bunch. I just mean----Don't get onto legs and all that immoral stuff. Pretty conservative crowd." She was silent, raw with the shameful thought that the attentive circle might have been criticizing her, laughing at her. "Don't, please don't worry!" he pleaded. "Silence." "Gosh; I'm sorry I spoke about it. I just meant----But they were crazy about you. Sam said to me, 'That little lady of yours is the slickest thing that ever came to this town,' he said; and Ma Dawson--I didn't hardly know whether she'd like you or not, she's such a dried-up old bird, but she said, 'Your bride is so quick and bright, I declare, she just wakes me up.'" Carol liked praise, the flavor and fatness of it, but she was so energetically being sorry for herself that she could not taste this commendation. "Please! Come on! Cheer up!" His lips said it, his anxious shoulder said it, his arm about her said it, as they halted on the obscure porch of their house. "Do you care if they think I'm flighty, Will?" "Me? Why, I wouldn't care if the whole world thought you were this or that or anything else. You're my--well, you're my soul!" He was an undefined mass, as solid-seeming as rock. She found his sleeve, pinched it, cried, "I'm glad! It's sweet to be wanted! You must tolerate my frivolousness. You're all I have!" He lifted her, carried her into the house, and with her arms about his neck she forgot Main Street.

Chapter 4

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Will tells Carol that his friends--the Clarks--have invited them over to meet some of the townsfolk after they've gotten settled. Carol thinks this'll be nice. Before he does anything else, Will wants to drop by his office for an hour to make sure everything's all right with his work. Carol tells him to go but is secretly disappointed when he does. When she looks around Will's home, Carol realizes how ugly everything is. She basically has a panic attack when she realizes that this home and town will be her prison for the rest of her life. Carol runs into the street to take a walk, but the town doesn't make her feel any better. She only confirms what she already thought: that the place is awful, and she has no chance of changing it. Carol looks at the buildings on Main Street one by one and finds nothing in them worth exploring. Eventually, she gives up and retreats to her new home. We find out that a woman named Bea Sorenson was travelling on the same train to Gopher Prairie as Carol and Will. We look in on her now to find her arriving in her cousin's home and looking to find a job in the town. Bea takes a walk down Main Street and sees the exact opposite of what Carol has. She loves all the stores and the people, which just goes to show how much of a difference your perspective can make. Now we look in on the party that Sam Clark and his wife are hosting for Will and his new bride Carol. Will takes Carol and shows her to the room, telling her about the people before introducing her to them. Carol feels vulnerable and exposed, especially considering how much she dislikes the town so far. She never feels like she's saying anything good to the people because she can't tell how judgmental they are. She's certainly judgmental of them and their boring lives. Eventually, Carol gives up and just tries to say whatever the people around her want to hear. Carol's phony acting soon exhausts her, so she retreats to a chair to sit by herself. The host, Sam Clark, decides to make the party more exciting by calling people to tell stories and give short performances. Carol doesn't realize that she's about to hear the same stories at every party she attends that winter. She also listens to a bunch of petty gossip that makes the people spreading it seem like losers. Then the conversation turns to workers' rights, which the people in Sam's house are not fond of. They think that as businessmen, they should be able to run their businesses however they bloody well want. Carol doesn't agree with any of it. Finally, the evening ends, and Carol heads home with Will. On their way, Will cautions her about being too edgy with some of her comments. For example, she might not want to bring up any labor-related politics from now on.

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Main Street.chapter 5

chapter 5

{"name": "Chapter 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-5", "summary": "Will wants to take Carol hunting so she can experience the great outdoors of Gopher Prairie. He borrows a buddy's dog and bustles Carol into his motorcar. Will and Carol reach the prairies, where Will kills a few birds with his rifle. Afterward, they stop by a Scandinavian farmer's house and ask for a glass of milk. Carol is impressed by how much these people adore Will. She admires him for a moment. Carol even wonders for a moment if the farmers are the true leaders of Gopher Prairie, since the town depends so heavily on them. Will takes exception to the idea that the townsfolk are parasites. He says that the farmers depend entirely on the money and goods the town provides them, and he argues that the townsfolk are better-educated and generally superior people. Still, Carol finds a dignity and greatness in the farmland that she doesn't find on Main Street. That evening, Carol meets a guy named Raymie Wutherspoon, who likes to put on little shows for the community. Carol thinks he might turn out to be an interesting guy--but she's disappointed to find out that he's just as boring as anyone else. Carol is surprised to find herself feeling content with being a simple housewife in Gopher Prairie--at least for the first few months of her marriage. She ends up hiring Bea Sorenson as a maid and becomes good chums with her. Carol soon finds herself thinking about having a baby. She decides to wait on this one, but she secretly wishes for someone she can tell all her deepest thoughts to. One day, a woman named Vida Sherwin comes calling on Carol. Vida agrees with Carol that Gopher Prairie is ugly and that it needs some sensible women to clean it up. But Vida is less radical than Carol when it comes to how they'll do this. Vida thinks they should start small, maybe with Carol teaching at the Sunday School. Carol would rather invite a famous architect to come to the town and give a lecture. Vida also invites Carol to join the Thanatopsis Club, which is a reading group that some of the women in the town have organized. When Will gets home from work, Carol invites Vida to stay for supper, and Will invites a lawyer named Guy Pollock to join them. When Guy arrives, he turns out to know a lot about literature. Carol wonders why Guy's working such a routine job and living in Gopher Prairie. She asks Pollock whether he thinks Gopher Prairie should have a dramatic club to host shows for the community.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER V I "WE'LL steal the whole day, and go hunting. I want you to see the country round here," Kennicott announced at breakfast. "I'd take the car--want you to see how swell she runs since I put in a new piston. But we'll take a team, so we can get right out into the fields. Not many prairie chickens left now, but we might just happen to run onto a small covey." He fussed over his hunting-kit. He pulled his hip boots out to full length and examined them for holes. He feverishly counted his shotgun shells, lecturing her on the qualities of smokeless powder. He drew the new hammerless shotgun out of its heavy tan leather case and made her peep through the barrels to see how dazzlingly free they were from rust. The world of hunting and camping-outfits and fishing-tackle was unfamiliar to her, and in Kennicott's interest she found something creative and joyous. She examined the smooth stock, the carved hard rubber butt of the gun. The shells, with their brass caps and sleek green bodies and hieroglyphics on the wads, were cool and comfortably heavy in her hands. Kennicott wore a brown canvas hunting-coat with vast pockets lining the inside, corduroy trousers which bulged at the wrinkles, peeled and scarred shoes, a scarecrow felt hat. In this uniform he felt virile. They clumped out to the livery buggy, they packed the kit and the box of lunch into the back, crying to each other that it was a magnificent day. Kennicott had borrowed Jackson Elder's red and white English setter, a complacent dog with a waving tail of silver hair which flickered in the sunshine. As they started, the dog yelped, and leaped at the horses' heads, till Kennicott took him into the buggy, where he nuzzled Carol's knees and leaned out to sneer at farm mongrels. The grays clattered out on the hard dirt road with a pleasant song of hoofs: "Ta ta ta rat! Ta ta ta rat!" It was early and fresh, the air whistling, frost bright on the golden rod. As the sun warmed the world of stubble into a welter of yellow they turned from the highroad, through the bars of a farmer's gate, into a field, slowly bumping over the uneven earth. In a hollow of the rolling prairie they lost sight even of the country road. It was warm and placid. Locusts trilled among the dry wheat-stalks, and brilliant little flies hurtled across the buggy. A buzz of content filled the air. Crows loitered and gossiped in the sky. The dog had been let out and after a dance of excitement he settled down to a steady quartering of the field, forth and back, forth and back, his nose down. "Pete Rustad owns this farm, and he told me he saw a small covey of chickens in the west forty, last week. Maybe we'll get some sport after all," Kennicott chuckled blissfully. She watched the dog in suspense, breathing quickly every time he seemed to halt. She had no desire to slaughter birds, but she did desire to belong to Kennicott's world. The dog stopped, on the point, a forepaw held up. "By golly! He's hit a scent! Come on!" squealed Kennicott. He leaped from the buggy, twisted the reins about the whip-socket, swung her out, caught up his gun, slipped in two shells, stalked toward the rigid dog, Carol pattering after him. The setter crawled ahead, his tail quivering, his belly close to the stubble. Carol was nervous. She expected clouds of large birds to fly up instantly. Her eyes were strained with staring. But they followed the dog for a quarter of a mile, turning, doubling, crossing two low hills, kicking through a swale of weeds, crawling between the strands of a barbed-wire fence. The walking was hard on her pavement-trained feet. The earth was lumpy, the stubble prickly and lined with grass, thistles, abortive stumps of clover. She dragged and floundered. She heard Kennicott gasp, "Look!" Three gray birds were starting up from the stubble. They were round, dumpy, like enormous bumble bees. Kennicott was sighting, moving the barrel. She was agitated. Why didn't he fire? The birds would be gone! Then a crash, another, and two birds turned somersaults in the air, plumped down. When he showed her the birds she had no sensation of blood. These heaps of feathers were so soft and unbruised--there was about them no hint of death. She watched her conquering man tuck them into his inside pocket, and trudged with him back to the buggy. They found no more prairie chickens that morning. At noon they drove into her first farmyard, a private village, a white house with no porches save a low and quite dirty stoop at the back, a crimson barn with white trimmings, a glazed brick silo, an ex-carriage-shed, now the garage of a Ford, an unpainted cow-stable, a chicken-house, a pig-pen, a corn-crib, a granary, the galvanized-iron skeleton tower of a wind-mill. The dooryard was of packed yellow clay, treeless, barren of grass, littered with rusty plowshares and wheels of discarded cultivators. Hardened trampled mud, like lava, filled the pig-pen. The doors of the house were grime-rubbed, the corners and eaves were rusted with rain, and the child who stared at them from the kitchen window was smeary-faced. But beyond the barn was a clump of scarlet geraniums; the prairie breeze was sunshine in motion; the flashing metal blades of the windmill revolved with a lively hum; a horse neighed, a rooster crowed, martins flew in and out of the cow-stable. A small spare woman with flaxen hair trotted from the house. She was twanging a Swedish patois--not in monotone, like English, but singing it, with a lyrical whine: "Pete he say you kom pretty soon hunting, doctor. My, dot's fine you kom. Is dis de bride? Ohhhh! Ve yoost say las' night, ve hope maybe ve see her som day. My, soch a pretty lady!" Mrs. Rustad was shining with welcome. "Vell, vell! Ay hope you lak dis country! Von't you stay for dinner, doctor?" "No, but I wonder if you wouldn't like to give us a glass of milk?" condescended Kennicott. "Vell Ay should say Ay vill! You vait har a second and Ay run on de milk-house!" She nervously hastened to a tiny red building beside the windmill; she came back with a pitcher of milk from which Carol filled the thermos bottle. As they drove off Carol admired, "She's the dearest thing I ever saw. And she adores you. You are the Lord of the Manor." "Oh no," much pleased, "but still they do ask my advice about things. Bully people, these Scandinavian farmers. And prosperous, too. Helga Rustad, she's still scared of America, but her kids will be doctors and lawyers and governors of the state and any darn thing they want to." "I wonder----" Carol was plunged back into last night's Weltschmerz. "I wonder if these farmers aren't bigger than we are? So simple and hard-working. The town lives on them. We townies are parasites, and yet we feel superior to them. Last night I heard Mr. Haydock talking about 'hicks.' Apparently he despises the farmers because they haven't reached the social heights of selling thread and buttons." "Parasites? Us? Where'd the farmers be without the town? Who lends them money? Who--why, we supply them with everything!" "Don't you find that some of the farmers think they pay too much for the services of the towns?" "Oh, of course there's a lot of cranks among the farmers same as there are among any class. Listen to some of these kickers, a fellow'd think that the farmers ought to run the state and the whole shooting-match--probably if they had their way they'd fill up the legislature with a lot of farmers in manure-covered boots--yes, and they'd come tell me I was hired on a salary now, and couldn't fix my fees! That'd be fine for you, wouldn't it!" "But why shouldn't they?" "Why? That bunch of----Telling ME----Oh, for heaven's sake, let's quit arguing. All this discussing may be all right at a party but----Let's forget it while we're hunting." "I know. The Wonderlust--probably it's a worse affliction than the Wanderlust. I just wonder----" She told herself that she had everything in the world. And after each self-rebuke she stumbled again on "I just wonder----" They ate their sandwiches by a prairie slew: long grass reaching up out of clear water, mossy bogs, red-winged black-birds, the scum a splash of gold-green. Kennicott smoked a pipe while she leaned back in the buggy and let her tired spirit be absorbed in the Nirvana of the incomparable sky. They lurched to the highroad and awoke from their sun-soaked drowse at the sound of the clopping hoofs. They paused to look for partridges in a rim of woods, little woods, very clean and shiny and gay, silver birches and poplars with immaculate green trunks, encircling a lake of sandy bottom, a splashing seclusion demure in the welter of hot prairie. Kennicott brought down a fat red squirrel and at dusk he had a dramatic shot at a flight of ducks whirling down from the upper air, skimming the lake, instantly vanishing. They drove home under the sunset. Mounds of straw, and wheat-stacks like bee-hives, stood out in startling rose and gold, and the green-tufted stubble glistened. As the vast girdle of crimson darkened, the fulfilled land became autumnal in deep reds and browns. The black road before the buggy turned to a faint lavender, then was blotted to uncertain grayness. Cattle came in a long line up to the barred gates of the farmyards, and over the resting land was a dark glow. Carol had found the dignity and greatness which had failed her in Main Street. II Till they had a maid they took noon dinner and six o'clock supper at Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house. Mrs. Elisha Gurrey, relict of Deacon Gurrey the dealer in hay and grain, was a pointed-nosed, simpering woman with iron-gray hair drawn so tight that it resembled a soiled handkerchief covering her head. But she was unexpectedly cheerful, and her dining-room, with its thin tablecloth on a long pine table, had the decency of clean bareness. In the line of unsmiling, methodically chewing guests, like horses at a manger, Carol came to distinguish one countenance: the pale, long, spectacled face and sandy pompadour hair of Mr. Raymond P. Wutherspoon, known as "Raymie," professional bachelor, manager and one half the sales-force in the shoe-department of the Bon Ton Store. "You will enjoy Gopher Prairie very much, Mrs. Kennicott," petitioned Raymie. His eyes were like those of a dog waiting to be let in out of the cold. He passed the stewed apricots effusively. "There are a great many bright cultured people here. Mrs. Wilks, the Christian Science reader, is a very bright woman--though I am not a Scientist myself, in fact I sing in the Episcopal choir. And Miss Sherwin of the high school--she is such a pleasing, bright girl--I was fitting her to a pair of tan gaiters yesterday, I declare, it really was a pleasure." "Gimme the butter, Carrie," was Kennicott's comment. She defied him by encouraging Raymie: "Do you have amateur dramatics and so on here?" "Oh yes! The town's just full of talent. The Knights of Pythias put on a dandy minstrel show last year." "It's nice you're so enthusiastic." "Oh, do you really think so? Lots of folks jolly me for trying to get up shows and so on. I tell them they have more artistic gifts than they know. Just yesterday I was saying to Harry Haydock: if he would read poetry, like Longfellow, or if he would join the band--I get so much pleasure out of playing the cornet, and our band-leader, Del Snafflin, is such a good musician, I often say he ought to give up his barbering and become a professional musician, he could play the clarinet in Minneapolis or New York or anywhere, but--but I couldn't get Harry to see it at all and--I hear you and the doctor went out hunting yesterday. Lovely country, isn't it. And did you make some calls? The mercantile life isn't inspiring like medicine. It must be wonderful to see how patients trust you, doctor." "Huh. It's me that's got to do all the trusting. Be damn sight more wonderful 'f they'd pay their bills," grumbled Kennicott and, to Carol, he whispered something which sounded like "gentleman hen." But Raymie's pale eyes were watering at her. She helped him with, "So you like to read poetry?" "Oh yes, so much--though to tell the truth, I don't get much time for reading, we're always so busy at the store and----But we had the dandiest professional reciter at the Pythian Sisters sociable last winter." Carol thought she heard a grunt from the traveling salesman at the end of the table, and Kennicott's jerking elbow was a grunt embodied. She persisted: "Do you get to see many plays, Mr. Wutherspoon?" He shone at her like a dim blue March moon, and sighed, "No, but I do love the movies. I'm a real fan. One trouble with books is that they're not so thoroughly safeguarded by intelligent censors as the movies are, and when you drop into the library and take out a book you never know what you're wasting your time on. What I like in books is a wholesome, really improving story, and sometimes----Why, once I started a novel by this fellow Balzac that you read about, and it told how a lady wasn't living with her husband, I mean she wasn't his wife. It went into details, disgustingly! And the English was real poor. I spoke to the library about it, and they took it off the shelves. I'm not narrow, but I must say I don't see any use in this deliberately dragging in immorality! Life itself is so full of temptations that in literature one wants only that which is pure and uplifting." "What's the name of that Balzac yarn? Where can I get hold of it?" giggled the traveling salesman. Raymie ignored him. "But the movies, they are mostly clean, and their humor----Don't you think that the most essential quality for a person to have is a sense of humor?" "I don't know. I really haven't much," said Carol. He shook his finger at her. "Now, now, you're too modest. I'm sure we can all see that you have a perfectly corking sense of humor. Besides, Dr. Kennicott wouldn't marry a lady that didn't have. We all know how he loves his fun!" "You bet. I'm a jokey old bird. Come on, Carrie; let's beat it," remarked Kennicott. Raymie implored, "And what is your chief artistic interest, Mrs. Kennicott?" "Oh----" Aware that the traveling salesman had murmured, "Dentistry," she desperately hazarded, "Architecture." "That's a real nice art. I've always said--when Haydock & Simons were finishing the new front on the Bon Ton building, the old man came to me, you know, Harry's father, 'D. H.,' I always call him, and he asked me how I liked it, and I said to him, 'Look here, D. H.,' I said--you see, he was going to leave the front plain, and I said to him, 'It's all very well to have modern lighting and a big display-space,' I said, 'but when you get that in, you want to have some architecture, too,' I said, and he laughed and said he guessed maybe I was right, and so he had 'em put on a cornice." "Tin!" observed the traveling salesman. Raymie bared his teeth like a belligerent mouse. "Well, what if it is tin? That's not my fault. I told D. H. to make it polished granite. You make me tired!" "Leave us go! Come on, Carrie, leave us go!" from Kennicott. Raymie waylaid them in the hall and secretly informed Carol that she musn't mind the traveling salesman's coarseness--he belonged to the hwa pollwa. Kennicott chuckled, "Well, child, how about it? Do you prefer an artistic guy like Raymie to stupid boobs like Sam Clark and me?" "My dear! Let's go home, and play pinochle, and laugh, and be foolish, and slip up to bed, and sleep without dreaming. It's beautiful to be just a solid citizeness!" III From the Gopher Prairie Weekly Dauntless: One of the most charming affairs of the season was held Tuesday evening at the handsome new residence of Sam and Mrs. Clark when many of our most prominent citizens gathered to greet the lovely new bride of our popular local physician, Dr. Will Kennicott. All present spoke of the many charms of the bride, formerly Miss Carol Milford of St. Paul. Games and stunts were the order of the day, with merry talk and conversation. At a late hour dainty refreshments were served, and the party broke up with many expressions of pleasure at the pleasant affair. Among those present were Mesdames Kennicott, Elder---- * * * * * Dr. Will Kennicott, for the past several years one of our most popular and skilful physicians and surgeons, gave the town a delightful surprise when he returned from an extended honeymoon tour in Colorado this week with his charming bride, nee Miss Carol Milford of St. Paul, whose family are socially prominent in Minneapolis and Mankato. Mrs. Kennicott is a lady of manifold charms, not only of striking charm of appearance but is also a distinguished graduate of a school in the East and has for the past year been prominently connected in an important position of responsibility with the St. Paul Public Library, in which city Dr. "Will" had the good fortune to meet her. The city of Gopher Prairie welcomes her to our midst and prophesies for her many happy years in the energetic city of the twin lakes and the future. The Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott will reside for the present at the Doctor's home on Poplar Street which his charming mother has been keeping for him who has now returned to her own home at Lac-qui-Meurt leaving a host of friends who regret her absence and hope to see her soon with us again. IV She knew that if she was ever to effect any of the "reforms" which she had pictured, she must have a starting-place. What confused her during the three or four months after her marriage was not lack of perception that she must be definite, but sheer careless happiness of her first home. In the pride of being a housewife she loved every detail--the brocade armchair with the weak back, even the brass water-cock on the hot-water reservoir, when she had become familiar with it by trying to scour it to brilliance. She found a maid--plump radiant Bea Sorenson from Scandia Crossing. Bea was droll in her attempt to be at once a respectful servant and a bosom friend. They laughed together over the fact that the stove did not draw, over the slipperiness of fish in the pan. Like a child playing Grandma in a trailing skirt, Carol paraded uptown for her marketing, crying greetings to housewives along the way. Everybody bowed to her, strangers and all, and made her feel that they wanted her, that she belonged here. In city shops she was merely A Customer--a hat, a voice to bore a harassed clerk. Here she was Mrs. Doc Kennicott, and her preferences in grape-fruit and manners were known and remembered and worth discussing . . . even if they weren't worth fulfilling. Shopping was a delight of brisk conferences. The very merchants whose droning she found the dullest at the two or three parties which were given to welcome her were the pleasantest confidants of all when they had something to talk about--lemons or cotton voile or floor-oil. With that skip-jack Dave Dyer, the druggist, she conducted a long mock-quarrel. She pretended that he cheated her in the price of magazines and candy; he pretended she was a detective from the Twin Cities. He hid behind the prescription-counter, and when she stamped her foot he came out wailing, "Honest, I haven't done nothing crooked today--not yet." She never recalled her first impression of Main Street; never had precisely the same despair at its ugliness. By the end of two shopping-tours everything had changed proportions. As she never entered it, the Minniemashie House ceased to exist for her. Clark's Hardware Store, Dyer's Drug Store, the groceries of Ole Jenson and Frederick Ludelmeyer and Howland & Gould, the meat markets, the notions shop--they expanded, and hid all other structures. When she entered Mr. Ludelmeyer's store and he wheezed, "Goot mornin', Mrs. Kennicott. Vell, dis iss a fine day," she did not notice the dustiness of the shelves nor the stupidity of the girl clerk; and she did not remember the mute colloquy with him on her first view of Main Street. She could not find half the kinds of food she wanted, but that made shopping more of an adventure. When she did contrive to get sweetbreads at Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market the triumph was so vast that she buzzed with excitement and admired the strong wise butcher, Mr. Dahl. She appreciated the homely ease of village life. She liked the old men, farmers, G.A.R. veterans, who when they gossiped sometimes squatted on their heels on the sidewalk, like resting Indians, and reflectively spat over the curb. She found beauty in the children. She had suspected that her married friends exaggerated their passion for children. But in her work in the library, children had become individuals to her, citizens of the State with their own rights and their own senses of humor. In the library she had not had much time to give them, but now she knew the luxury of stopping, gravely asking Bessie Clark whether her doll had yet recovered from its rheumatism, and agreeing with Oscar Martinsen that it would be Good Fun to go trapping "mushrats." She touched the thought, "It would be sweet to have a baby of my own. I do want one. Tiny----No! Not yet! There's so much to do. And I'm still tired from the job. It's in my bones." She rested at home. She listened to the village noises common to all the world, jungle or prairie; sounds simple and charged with magic--dogs barking, chickens making a gurgling sound of content, children at play, a man beating a rug, wind in the cottonwood trees, a locust fiddling, a footstep on the walk, jaunty voices of Bea and a grocer's boy in the kitchen, a clinking anvil, a piano--not too near. Twice a week, at least, she drove into the country with Kennicott, to hunt ducks in lakes enameled with sunset, or to call on patients who looked up to her as the squire's lady and thanked her for toys and magazines. Evenings she went with her husband to the motion pictures and was boisterously greeted by every other couple; or, till it became too cold, they sat on the porch, bawling to passers-by in motors, or to neighbors who were raking the leaves. The dust became golden in the low sun; the street was filled with the fragrance of burning leaves. V But she hazily wanted some one to whom she could say what she thought. On a slow afternoon when she fidgeted over sewing and wished that the telephone would ring, Bea announced Miss Vida Sherwin. Despite Vida Sherwin's lively blue eyes, if you had looked at her in detail you would have found her face slightly lined, and not so much sallow as with the bloom rubbed off; you would have found her chest flat, and her fingers rough from needle and chalk and penholder; her blouses and plain cloth skirts undistinguished; and her hat worn too far back, betraying a dry forehead. But you never did look at Vida Sherwin in detail. You couldn't. Her electric activity veiled her. She was as energetic as a chipmunk. Her fingers fluttered; her sympathy came out in spurts; she sat on the edge of a chair in eagerness to be near her auditor, to send her enthusiasms and optimism across. She rushed into the room pouring out: "I'm afraid you'll think the teachers have been shabby in not coming near you, but we wanted to give you a chance to get settled. I am Vida Sherwin, and I try to teach French and English and a few other things in the high school." "I've been hoping to know the teachers. You see, I was a librarian----" "Oh, you needn't tell me. I know all about you! Awful how much I know--this gossipy village. We need you so much here. It's a dear loyal town (and isn't loyalty the finest thing in the world!) but it's a rough diamond, and we need you for the polishing, and we're ever so humble----" She stopped for breath and finished her compliment with a smile. "If I COULD help you in any way----Would I be committing the unpardonable sin if I whispered that I think Gopher Prairie is a tiny bit ugly?" "Of course it's ugly. Dreadfully! Though I'm probably the only person in town to whom you could safely say that. (Except perhaps Guy Pollock the lawyer--have you met him?--oh, you MUST!--he's simply a darling--intelligence and culture and so gentle.) But I don't care so much about the ugliness. That will change. It's the spirit that gives me hope. It's sound. Wholesome. But afraid. It needs live creatures like you to awaken it. I shall slave-drive you!" "Splendid. What shall I do? I've been wondering if it would be possible to have a good architect come here to lecture." "Ye-es, but don't you think it would be better to work with existing agencies? Perhaps it will sound slow to you, but I was thinking----It would be lovely if we could get you to teach Sunday School." Carol had the empty expression of one who finds that she has been affectionately bowing to a complete stranger. "Oh yes. But I'm afraid I wouldn't be much good at that. My religion is so foggy." "I know. So is mine. I don't care a bit for dogma. Though I do stick firmly to the belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and the leadership of Jesus. As you do, of course." Carol looked respectable and thought about having tea. "And that's all you need teach in Sunday School. It's the personal influence. Then there's the library-board. You'd be so useful on that. And of course there's our women's study club--the Thanatopsis Club." "Are they doing anything? Or do they read papers made out of the Encyclopedia?" Miss Sherwin shrugged. "Perhaps. But still, they are so earnest. They will respond to your fresher interest. And the Thanatopsis does do a good social work--they've made the city plant ever so many trees, and they run the rest-room for farmers' wives. And they do take such an interest in refinement and culture. So--in fact, so very unique." Carol was disappointed--by nothing very tangible. She said politely, "I'll think them all over. I must have a while to look around first." Miss Sherwin darted to her, smoothed her hair, peered at her. "Oh, my dear, don't you suppose I know? These first tender days of marriage--they're sacred to me. Home, and children that need you, and depend on you to keep them alive, and turn to you with their wrinkly little smiles. And the hearth and----" She hid her face from Carol as she made an activity of patting the cushion of her chair, but she went on with her former briskness: "I mean, you must help us when you're ready. . . . I'm afraid you'll think I'm conservative. I am! So much to conserve. All this treasure of American ideals. Sturdiness and democracy and opportunity. Maybe not at Palm Beach. But, thank heaven, we're free from such social distinctions in Gopher Prairie. I have only one good quality--overwhelming belief in the brains and hearts of our nation, our state, our town. It's so strong that sometimes I do have a tiny effect on the haughty ten-thousandaires. I shake 'em up and make 'em believe in ideals--yes, in themselves. But I get into a rut of teaching. I need young critical things like you to punch me up. Tell me, what are you reading?" "I've been re-reading 'The Damnation of Theron Ware.' Do you know it?" "Yes. It was clever. But hard. Man wanted to tear down, not build up. Cynical. Oh, I do hope I'm not a sentimentalist. But I can't see any use in this high-art stuff that doesn't encourage us day-laborers to plod on." Ensued a fifteen-minute argument about the oldest topic in the world: It's art but is it pretty? Carol tried to be eloquent regarding honesty of observation. Miss Sherwin stood out for sweetness and a cautious use of the uncomfortable properties of light. At the end Carol cried: "I don't care how much we disagree. It's a relief to have somebody talk something besides crops. Let's make Gopher Prairie rock to its foundations: let's have afternoon tea instead of afternoon coffee." The delighted Bea helped her bring out the ancestral folding sewing-table, whose yellow and black top was scarred with dotted lines from a dressmaker's tracing-wheel, and to set it with an embroidered lunch-cloth, and the mauve-glazed Japanese tea-set which she had brought from St. Paul. Miss Sherwin confided her latest scheme--moral motion pictures for country districts, with light from a portable dynamo hitched to a Ford engine. Bea was twice called to fill the hot-water pitcher and to make cinnamon toast. When Kennicott came home at five he tried to be courtly, as befits the husband of one who has afternoon tea. Carol suggested that Miss Sherwin stay for supper, and that Kennicott invite Guy Pollock, the much-praised lawyer, the poetic bachelor. Yes, Pollock could come. Yes, he was over the grippe which had prevented his going to Sam Clark's party. Carol regretted her impulse. The man would be an opinionated politician, heavily jocular about The Bride. But at the entrance of Guy Pollock she discovered a personality. Pollock was a man of perhaps thirty-eight, slender, still, deferential. His voice was low. "It was very good of you to want me," he said, and he offered no humorous remarks, and did not ask her if she didn't think Gopher Prairie was "the livest little burg in the state." She fancied that his even grayness might reveal a thousand tints of lavender and blue and silver. At supper he hinted his love for Sir Thomas Browne, Thoreau, Agnes Repplier, Arthur Symons, Claude Washburn, Charles Flandrau. He presented his idols diffidently, but he expanded in Carol's bookishness, in Miss Sherwin's voluminous praise, in Kennicott's tolerance of any one who amused his wife. Carol wondered why Guy Pollock went on digging at routine law-cases; why he remained in Gopher Prairie. She had no one whom she could ask. Neither Kennicott nor Vida Sherwin would understand that there might be reasons why a Pollock should not remain in Gopher Prairie. She enjoyed the faint mystery. She felt triumphant and rather literary. She already had a Group. It would be only a while now before she provided the town with fanlights and a knowledge of Galsworthy. She was doing things! As she served the emergency dessert of cocoanut and sliced oranges, she cried to Pollock, "Don't you think we ought to get up a dramatic club?"

Chapter 5

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Will wants to take Carol hunting so she can experience the great outdoors of Gopher Prairie. He borrows a buddy's dog and bustles Carol into his motorcar. Will and Carol reach the prairies, where Will kills a few birds with his rifle. Afterward, they stop by a Scandinavian farmer's house and ask for a glass of milk. Carol is impressed by how much these people adore Will. She admires him for a moment. Carol even wonders for a moment if the farmers are the true leaders of Gopher Prairie, since the town depends so heavily on them. Will takes exception to the idea that the townsfolk are parasites. He says that the farmers depend entirely on the money and goods the town provides them, and he argues that the townsfolk are better-educated and generally superior people. Still, Carol finds a dignity and greatness in the farmland that she doesn't find on Main Street. That evening, Carol meets a guy named Raymie Wutherspoon, who likes to put on little shows for the community. Carol thinks he might turn out to be an interesting guy--but she's disappointed to find out that he's just as boring as anyone else. Carol is surprised to find herself feeling content with being a simple housewife in Gopher Prairie--at least for the first few months of her marriage. She ends up hiring Bea Sorenson as a maid and becomes good chums with her. Carol soon finds herself thinking about having a baby. She decides to wait on this one, but she secretly wishes for someone she can tell all her deepest thoughts to. One day, a woman named Vida Sherwin comes calling on Carol. Vida agrees with Carol that Gopher Prairie is ugly and that it needs some sensible women to clean it up. But Vida is less radical than Carol when it comes to how they'll do this. Vida thinks they should start small, maybe with Carol teaching at the Sunday School. Carol would rather invite a famous architect to come to the town and give a lecture. Vida also invites Carol to join the Thanatopsis Club, which is a reading group that some of the women in the town have organized. When Will gets home from work, Carol invites Vida to stay for supper, and Will invites a lawyer named Guy Pollock to join them. When Guy arrives, he turns out to know a lot about literature. Carol wonders why Guy's working such a routine job and living in Gopher Prairie. She asks Pollock whether he thinks Gopher Prairie should have a dramatic club to host shows for the community.

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chapter 6

{"name": "Chapter 6", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-6", "summary": "Carol vents her boredom by completely redecorating Will's home and giving it an edgy Japanese vibe. Once she's done, Will admits that it's nicer than it was before. Everyone in the town snoops around the redecorating and gossips about it. A neighbor named Mrs. Bogart is especially nosy: she comes over to visit and says some passive-aggressive, judgmental things about Carol's morals, and Carol is glad when she leaves. As time goes by, Carol quickly learns that she hates asking her husband for money. She especially hates the way the men of the town make fun of women for always spending so much. Carol quickly decides that she needs a set allowance in order to make budgets and control her spending. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bogart's sniping comments about the price of Carol's new furniture has made Carol self-consciously cheap. She does everything she can to save money around her house. When it comes to her first housewarming party, though, Carol goes all out with the expenses. Meanwhile, Will starts to feel like a stranger in his own house. Whenever he gets home from work, he feels like Carol is nagging him. At first, Carol's party is lively, but soon the gravitational pull of Gopher Prairie takes over, and the party becomes boring. Vida whispers to Carol that she should ask Raymie Wutherspoon to sing because he has a beautiful voice. Carol gives the go-ahead only to find that Raymie's voice is awful. It's just good enough for people in Gopher Prairie to think it's good. Carol gets everyone to play a scandalous game in the dark where people try to steal each other's shoes. When the lights come back on, people are freed from their usual reserve and everyone starts giggling. Carol is optimistic that she can get these people to loosen up. Next, Carol asks everyone to put on some Asian-inspired outfits and to pretend that they are from Asia instead of Minnesota. Her good time is ruined when her husband Will tells her not to cross her legs, because her costume shows too much of her knees. When the party is over, Will congratulates Carol on having a party that got people out of their shells. He's hopeful that she'll be able to change the attitudes of the whole town. But after a week, Carol's party is forgotten. The next party at another person's house is just as boring as any party before Carol arrived in Gopher Prairie.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER VI I WHEN the first dubious November snow had filtered down, shading with white the bare clods in the plowed fields, when the first small fire had been started in the furnace, which is the shrine of a Gopher Prairie home, Carol began to make the house her own. She dismissed the parlor furniture--the golden oak table with brass knobs, the moldy brocade chairs, the picture of "The Doctor." She went to Minneapolis, to scamper through department stores and small Tenth Street shops devoted to ceramics and high thought. She had to ship her treasures, but she wanted to bring them back in her arms. Carpenters had torn out the partition between front parlor and back parlor, thrown it into a long room on which she lavished yellow and deep blue; a Japanese obi with an intricacy of gold thread on stiff ultramarine tissue, which she hung as a panel against the maize wall; a couch with pillows of sapphire velvet and gold bands; chairs which, in Gopher Prairie, seemed flippant. She hid the sacred family phonograph in the dining-room, and replaced its stand with a square cabinet on which was a squat blue jar between yellow candles. Kennicott decided against a fireplace. "We'll have a new house in a couple of years, anyway." She decorated only one room. The rest, Kennicott hinted, she'd better leave till he "made a ten-strike." The brown cube of a house stirred and awakened; it seemed to be in motion; it welcomed her back from shopping; it lost its mildewed repression. The supreme verdict was Kennicott's "Well, by golly, I was afraid the new junk wouldn't be so comfortable, but I must say this divan, or whatever you call it, is a lot better than that bumpy old sofa we had, and when I look around----Well, it's worth all it cost, I guess." Every one in town took an interest in the refurnishing. The carpenters and painters who did not actually assist crossed the lawn to peer through the windows and exclaim, "Fine! Looks swell!" Dave Dyer at the drug store, Harry Haydock and Raymie Wutherspoon at the Bon Ton, repeated daily, "How's the good work coming? I hear the house is getting to be real classy." Even Mrs. Bogart. Mrs. Bogart lived across the alley from the rear of Carol's house. She was a widow, and a Prominent Baptist, and a Good Influence. She had so painfully reared three sons to be Christian gentlemen that one of them had become an Omaha bartender, one a professor of Greek, and one, Cyrus N. Bogart, a boy of fourteen who was still at home, the most brazen member of the toughest gang in Boytown. Mrs. Bogart was not the acid type of Good Influence. She was the soft, damp, fat, sighing, indigestive, clinging, melancholy, depressingly hopeful kind. There are in every large chicken-yard a number of old and indignant hens who resemble Mrs. Bogart, and when they are served at Sunday noon dinner, as fricasseed chicken with thick dumplings, they keep up the resemblance. Carol had noted that Mrs. Bogart from her side window kept an eye upon the house. The Kennicotts and Mrs. Bogart did not move in the same sets--which meant precisely the same in Gopher Prairie as it did on Fifth Avenue or in Mayfair. But the good widow came calling. She wheezed in, sighed, gave Carol a pulpy hand, sighed, glanced sharply at the revelation of ankles as Carol crossed her legs, sighed, inspected the new blue chairs, smiled with a coy sighing sound, and gave voice: "I've wanted to call on you so long, dearie, you know we're neighbors, but I thought I'd wait till you got settled, you must run in and see me, how much did that big chair cost?" "Seventy-seven dollars!" "Sev----Sakes alive! Well, I suppose it's all right for them that can afford it, though I do sometimes think----Of course as our pastor said once, at Baptist Church----By the way, we haven't seen you there yet, and of course your husband was raised up a Baptist, and I do hope he won't drift away from the fold, of course we all know there isn't anything, not cleverness or gifts of gold or anything, that can make up for humility and the inward grace and they can say what they want to about the P. E. church, but of course there's no church that has more history or has stayed by the true principles of Christianity better than the Baptist Church and----In what church were you raised, Mrs. Kennicott?" "W-why, I went to Congregational, as a girl in Mankato, but my college was Universalist." "Well----But of course as the Bible says, is it the Bible, at least I know I have heard it in church and everybody admits it, it's proper for the little bride to take her husband's vessel of faith, so we all hope we shall see you at the Baptist Church and----As I was saying, of course I agree with Reverend Zitterel in thinking that the great trouble with this nation today is lack of spiritual faith--so few going to church, and people automobiling on Sunday and heaven knows what all. But still I do think that one trouble is this terrible waste of money, people feeling that they've got to have bath-tubs and telephones in their houses----I heard you were selling the old furniture cheap." "Yes!" "Well--of course you know your own mind, but I can't help thinking, when Will's ma was down here keeping house for him--SHE used to run in to SEE me, real OFTEN!--it was good enough furniture for her. But there, there, I mustn't croak, I just wanted to let you know that when you find you can't depend on a lot of these gadding young folks like the Haydocks and the Dyers--and heaven only knows how much money Juanita Haydock blows in in a year--why then you may be glad to know that slow old Aunty Bogart is always right there, and heaven knows----" A portentous sigh. "--I HOPE you and your husband won't have any of the troubles, with sickness and quarreling and wasting money and all that so many of these young couples do have and----But I must be running along now, dearie. It's been such a pleasure and----Just run in and see me any time. I hope Will is well? I thought he looked a wee mite peaked." It was twenty minutes later when Mrs. Bogart finally oozed out of the front door. Carol ran back into the living-room and jerked open the windows. "That woman has left damp finger-prints in the air," she said. II Carol was extravagant, but at least she did not try to clear herself of blame by going about whimpering, "I know I'm terribly extravagant but I don't seem to be able to help it." Kennicott had never thought of giving her an allowance. His mother had never had one! As a wage-earning spinster Carol had asserted to her fellow librarians that when she was married, she was going to have an allowance and be business-like and modern. But it was too much trouble to explain to Kennicott's kindly stubbornness that she was a practical housekeeper as well as a flighty playmate. She bought a budget-plan account book and made her budgets as exact as budgets are likely to be when they lack budgets. For the first month it was a honeymoon jest to beg prettily, to confess, "I haven't a cent in the house, dear," and to be told, "You're an extravagant little rabbit." But the budget book made her realize how inexact were her finances. She became self-conscious; occasionally she was indignant that she should always have to petition him for the money with which to buy his food. She caught herself criticizing his belief that, since his joke about trying to keep her out of the poorhouse had once been accepted as admirable humor, it should continue to be his daily bon mot. It was a nuisance to have to run down the street after him because she had forgotten to ask him for money at breakfast. But she couldn't "hurt his feelings," she reflected. He liked the lordliness of giving largess. She tried to reduce the frequency of begging by opening accounts and having the bills sent to him. She had found that staple groceries, sugar, flour, could be most cheaply purchased at Axel Egge's rustic general store. She said sweetly to Axel: "I think I'd better open a charge account here." "I don't do no business except for cash," grunted Axel. She flared, "Do you know who I am?" "Yuh, sure, I know. The doc is good for it. But that's yoost a rule I made. I make low prices. I do business for cash." She stared at his red impassive face, and her fingers had the undignified desire to slap him, but her reason agreed with him. "You're quite right. You shouldn't break your rule for me." Her rage had not been lost. It had been transferred to her husband. She wanted ten pounds of sugar in a hurry, but she had no money. She ran up the stairs to Kennicott's office. On the door was a sign advertising a headache cure and stating, "The doctor is out, back at----" Naturally, the blank space was not filled out. She stamped her foot. She ran down to the drug store--the doctor's club. As she entered she heard Mrs. Dyer demanding, "Dave, I've got to have some money." Carol saw that her husband was there, and two other men, all listening in amusement. Dave Dyer snapped, "How much do you want? Dollar be enough?" "No, it won't! I've got to get some underclothes for the kids." "Why, good Lord, they got enough now to fill the closet so I couldn't find my hunting boots, last time I wanted them." "I don't care. They're all in rags. You got to give me ten dollars----" Carol perceived that Mrs. Dyer was accustomed to this indignity. She perceived that the men, particularly Dave, regarded it as an excellent jest. She waited--she knew what would come--it did. Dave yelped, "Where's that ten dollars I gave you last year?" and he looked to the other men to laugh. They laughed. Cold and still, Carol walked up to Kennicott and commanded, "I want to see you upstairs." "Why--something the matter?" "Yes!" He clumped after her, up the stairs, into his barren office. Before he could get out a query she stated: "Yesterday, in front of a saloon, I heard a German farm-wife beg her husband for a quarter, to get a toy for the baby--and he refused. Just now I've heard Mrs. Dyer going through the same humiliation. And I--I'm in the same position! I have to beg you for money. Daily! I have just been informed that I couldn't have any sugar because I hadn't the money to pay for it!" "Who said that? By God, I'll kill any----" "Tut. It wasn't his fault. It was yours. And mine. I now humbly beg you to give me the money with which to buy meals for you to eat. And hereafter to remember it. The next time, I sha'n't beg. I shall simply starve. Do you understand? I can't go on being a slave----" Her defiance, her enjoyment of the role, ran out. She was sobbing against his overcoat, "How can you shame me so?" and he was blubbering, "Dog-gone it, I meant to give you some, and I forgot it. I swear I won't again. By golly I won't!" He pressed fifty dollars upon her, and after that he remembered to give her money regularly . . . sometimes. Daily she determined, "But I must have a stated amount--be business-like. System. I must do something about it." And daily she didn't do anything about it. III Mrs. Bogart had, by the simpering viciousness of her comments on the new furniture, stirred Carol to economy. She spoke judiciously to Bea about left-overs. She read the cookbook again and, like a child with a picture-book, she studied the diagram of the beef which gallantly continues to browse though it is divided into cuts. But she was a deliberate and joyous spendthrift in her preparations for her first party, the housewarming. She made lists on every envelope and laundry-slip in her desk. She sent orders to Minneapolis "fancy grocers." She pinned patterns and sewed. She was irritated when Kennicott was jocular about "these frightful big doings that are going on." She regarded the affair as an attack on Gopher Prairie's timidity in pleasure. "I'll make 'em lively, if nothing else. I'll make 'em stop regarding parties as committee-meetings." Kennicott usually considered himself the master of the house. At his desire, she went hunting, which was his symbol of happiness, and she ordered porridge for breakfast, which was his symbol of morality. But when he came home on the afternoon before the housewarming he found himself a slave, an intruder, a blunderer. Carol wailed, "Fix the furnace so you won't have to touch it after supper. And for heaven's sake take that horrible old door-mat off the porch. And put on your nice brown and white shirt. Why did you come home so late? Would you mind hurrying? Here it is almost suppertime, and those fiends are just as likely as not to come at seven instead of eight. PLEASE hurry!" She was as unreasonable as an amateur leading woman on a first night, and he was reduced to humility. When she came down to supper, when she stood in the doorway, he gasped. She was in a silver sheath, the calyx of a lily, her piled hair like black glass; she had the fragility and costliness of a Viennese goblet; and her eyes were intense. He was stirred to rise from the table and to hold the chair for her; and all through supper he ate his bread dry because he felt that she would think him common if he said "Will you hand me the butter?" IV She had reached the calmness of not caring whether her guests liked the party or not, and a state of satisfied suspense in regard to Bea's technique in serving, before Kennicott cried from the bay-window in the living-room, "Here comes somebody!" and Mr. and Mrs. Luke Dawson faltered in, at a quarter to eight. Then in a shy avalanche arrived the entire aristocracy of Gopher Prairie: all persons engaged in a profession, or earning more than twenty-five hundred dollars a year, or possessed of grandparents born in America. Even while they were removing their overshoes they were peeping at the new decorations. Carol saw Dave Dyer secretively turn over the gold pillows to find a price-tag, and heard Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh, the attorney, gasp, "Well, I'll be switched," as he viewed the vermilion print hanging against the Japanese obi. She was amused. But her high spirits slackened as she beheld them form in dress parade, in a long, silent, uneasy circle clear round the living-room. She felt that she had been magically whisked back to her first party, at Sam Clark's. "Have I got to lift them, like so many pigs of iron? I don't know that I can make them happy, but I'll make them hectic." A silver flame in the darkling circle, she whirled around, drew them with her smile, and sang, "I want my party to be noisy and undignified! This is the christening of my house, and I want you to help me have a bad influence on it, so that it will be a giddy house. For me, won't you all join in an old-fashioned square dance? And Mr. Dyer will call." She had a record on the phonograph; Dave Dyer was capering in the center of the floor, loose-jointed, lean, small, rusty headed, pointed of nose, clapping his hands and shouting, "Swing y' pardners--alamun lef!" Even the millionaire Dawsons and Ezra Stowbody and "Professor" George Edwin Mott danced, looking only slightly foolish; and by rushing about the room and being coy and coaxing to all persons over forty-five, Carol got them into a waltz and a Virginia Reel. But when she left them to disenjoy themselves in their own way Harry Haydock put a one-step record on the phonograph, the younger people took the floor, and all the elders sneaked back to their chairs, with crystallized smiles which meant, "Don't believe I'll try this one myself, but I do enjoy watching the youngsters dance." Half of them were silent; half resumed the discussions of that afternoon in the store. Ezra Stowbody hunted for something to say, hid a yawn, and offered to Lyman Cass, the owner of the flour-mill, "How d' you folks like the new furnace, Lym? Huh? So." "Oh, let them alone. Don't pester them. They must like it, or they wouldn't do it." Carol warned herself. But they gazed at her so expectantly when she flickered past that she was reconvinced that in their debauches of respectability they had lost the power of play as well as the power of impersonal thought. Even the dancers were gradually crushed by the invisible force of fifty perfectly pure and well-behaved and negative minds; and they sat down, two by two. In twenty minutes the party was again elevated to the decorum of a prayer-meeting. "We're going to do something exciting," Carol exclaimed to her new confidante, Vida Sherwin. She saw that in the growing quiet her voice had carried across the room. Nat Hicks, Ella Stowbody, and Dave Dyer were abstracted, fingers and lips slightly moving. She knew with a cold certainty that Dave was rehearsing his "stunt" about the Norwegian catching the hen, Ella running over the first lines of "An Old Sweetheart of Mine," and Nat thinking of his popular parody on Mark Antony's oration. "But I will not have anybody use the word 'stunt' in my house," she whispered to Miss Sherwin. "That's good. I tell you: why not have Raymond Wutherspoon sing?" "Raymie? Why, my dear, he's the most sentimental yearner in town!" "See here, child! Your opinions on house-decorating are sound, but your opinions of people are rotten! Raymie does wag his tail. But the poor dear----Longing for what he calls 'self-expression' and no training in anything except selling shoes. But he can sing. And some day when he gets away from Harry Haydock's patronage and ridicule, he'll do something fine." Carol apologized for her superciliousness. She urged Raymie, and warned the planners of "stunts," "We all want you to sing, Mr. Wutherspoon. You're the only famous actor I'm going to let appear on the stage tonight." While Raymie blushed and admitted, "Oh, they don't want to hear me," he was clearing his throat, pulling his clean handkerchief farther out of his breast pocket, and thrusting his fingers between the buttons of his vest. In her affection for Raymie's defender, in her desire to "discover artistic talent," Carol prepared to be delighted by the recital. Raymie sang "Fly as a Bird," "Thou Art My Dove," and "When the Little Swallow Leaves Its Tiny Nest," all in a reasonably bad offertory tenor. Carol was shuddering with the vicarious shame which sensitive people feel when they listen to an "elocutionist" being humorous, or to a precocious child publicly doing badly what no child should do at all. She wanted to laugh at the gratified importance in Raymie's half-shut eyes; she wanted to weep over the meek ambitiousness which clouded like an aura his pale face, flap ears, and sandy pompadour. She tried to look admiring, for the benefit of Miss Sherwin, that trusting admirer of all that was or conceivably could be the good, the true, and the beautiful. At the end of the third ornithological lyric Miss Sherwin roused from her attitude of inspired vision and breathed to Carol, "My! That was sweet! Of course Raymond hasn't an unusually good voice, but don't you think he puts such a lot of feeling into it?" Carol lied blackly and magnificently, but without originality: "Oh yes, I do think he has so much FEELING!" She saw that after the strain of listening in a cultured manner the audience had collapsed; had given up their last hope of being amused. She cried, "Now we're going to play an idiotic game which I learned in Chicago. You will have to take off your shoes, for a starter! After that you will probably break your knees and shoulder-blades." Much attention and incredulity. A few eyebrows indicating a verdict that Doc Kennicott's bride was noisy and improper. "I shall choose the most vicious, like Juanita Haydock and myself, as the shepherds. The rest of you are wolves. Your shoes are the sheep. The wolves go out into the hall. The shepherds scatter the sheep through this room, then turn off all the lights, and the wolves crawl in from the hall and in the darkness they try to get the shoes away from the shepherds--who are permitted to do anything except bite and use black-jacks. The wolves chuck the captured shoes out into the hall. No one excused! Come on! Shoes off!" Every one looked at every one else and waited for every one else to begin. Carol kicked off her silver slippers, and ignored the universal glance at her arches. The embarrassed but loyal Vida Sherwin unbuttoned her high black shoes. Ezra Stowbody cackled, "Well, you're a terror to old folks. You're like the gals I used to go horseback-riding with, back in the sixties. Ain't much accustomed to attending parties barefoot, but here goes!" With a whoop and a gallant jerk Ezra snatched off his elastic-sided Congress shoes. The others giggled and followed. When the sheep had been penned up, in the darkness the timorous wolves crept into the living-room, squealing, halting, thrown out of their habit of stolidity by the strangeness of advancing through nothingness toward a waiting foe, a mysterious foe which expanded and grew more menacing. The wolves peered to make out landmarks, they touched gliding arms which did not seem to be attached to a body, they quivered with a rapture of fear. Reality had vanished. A yelping squabble suddenly rose, then Juanita Haydock's high titter, and Guy Pollock's astonished, "Ouch! Quit! You're scalping me!" Mrs. Luke Dawson galloped backward on stiff hands and knees into the safety of the lighted hallway, moaning, "I declare, I nev' was so upset in my life!" But the propriety was shaken out of her, and she delightedly continued to ejaculate "Nev' in my LIFE" as she saw the living-room door opened by invisible hands and shoes hurling through it, as she heard from the darkness beyond the door a squawling, a bumping, a resolute "Here's a lot of shoes. Come on, you wolves. Ow! Y' would, would you!" When Carol abruptly turned on the lights in the embattled living-room, half of the company were sitting back against the walls, where they had craftily remained throughout the engagement, but in the middle of the floor Kennicott was wrestling with Harry Haydock--their collars torn off, their hair in their eyes; and the owlish Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh was retreating from Juanita Haydock, and gulping with unaccustomed laughter. Guy Pollock's discreet brown scarf hung down his back. Young Rita Simons's net blouse had lost two buttons, and betrayed more of her delicious plump shoulder than was regarded as pure in Gopher Prairie. Whether by shock, disgust, joy of combat, or physical activity, all the party were freed from their years of social decorum. George Edwin Mott giggled; Luke Dawson twisted his beard; Mrs. Clark insisted, "I did too, Sam--I got a shoe--I never knew I could fight so terrible!" Carol was certain that she was a great reformer. She mercifully had combs, mirrors, brushes, needle and thread ready. She permitted them to restore the divine decency of buttons. The grinning Bea brought down-stairs a pile of soft thick sheets of paper with designs of lotos blossoms, dragons, apes, in cobalt and crimson and gray, and patterns of purple birds flying among sea-green trees in the valleys of Nowhere. "These," Carol announced, "are real Chinese masquerade costumes. I got them from an importing shop in Minneapolis. You are to put them on over your clothes, and please forget that you are Minnesotans, and turn into mandarins and coolies and--and samurai (isn't it?), and anything else you can think of." While they were shyly rustling the paper costumes she disappeared. Ten minutes after she gazed down from the stairs upon grotesquely ruddy Yankee heads above Oriental robes, and cried to them, "The Princess Winky Poo salutes her court!" As they looked up she caught their suspense of admiration. They saw an airy figure in trousers and coat of green brocade edged with gold; a high gold collar under a proud chin; black hair pierced with jade pins; a languid peacock fan in an out-stretched hand; eyes uplifted to a vision of pagoda towers. When she dropped her pose and smiled down she discovered Kennicott apoplectic with domestic pride--and gray Guy Pollock staring beseechingly. For a second she saw nothing in all the pink and brown mass of their faces save the hunger of the two men. She shook off the spell and ran down. "We're going to have a real Chinese concert. Messrs. Pollock, Kennicott, and, well, Stowbody are drummers; the rest of us sing and play the fife." The fifes were combs with tissue paper; the drums were tabourets and the sewing-table. Loren Wheeler, editor of the Dauntless, led the orchestra, with a ruler and a totally inaccurate sense of rhythm. The music was a reminiscence of tom-toms heard at circus fortune-telling tents or at the Minnesota State Fair, but the whole company pounded and puffed and whined in a sing-song, and looked rapturous. Before they were quite tired of the concert Carol led them in a dancing procession to the dining-room, to blue bowls of chow mein, with Lichee nuts and ginger preserved in syrup. None of them save that city-rounder Harry Haydock had heard of any Chinese dish except chop sooey. With agreeable doubt they ventured through the bamboo shoots into the golden fried noodles of the chow mein; and Dave Dyer did a not very humorous Chinese dance with Nat Hicks; and there was hubbub and contentment. Carol relaxed, and found that she was shockingly tired. She had carried them on her thin shoulders. She could not keep it up. She longed for her father, that artist at creating hysterical parties. She thought of smoking a cigarette, to shock them, and dismissed the obscene thought before it was quite formed. She wondered whether they could for five minutes be coaxed to talk about something besides the winter top of Knute Stamquist's Ford, and what Al Tingley had said about his mother-in-law. She sighed, "Oh, let 'em alone. I've done enough." She crossed her trousered legs, and snuggled luxuriously above her saucer of ginger; she caught Pollock's congratulatory still smile, and thought well of herself for having thrown a rose light on the pallid lawyer; repented the heretical supposition that any male save her husband existed; jumped up to find Kennicott and whisper, "Happy, my lord? . . . No, it didn't cost much!" "Best party this town ever saw. Only----Don't cross your legs in that costume. Shows your knees too plain." She was vexed. She resented his clumsiness. She returned to Guy Pollock and talked of Chinese religions--not that she knew anything whatever about Chinese religions, but he had read a book on the subject as, on lonely evenings in his office, he had read at least one book on every subject in the world. Guy's thin maturity was changing in her vision to flushed youth and they were roaming an island in the yellow sea of chatter when she realized that the guests were beginning that cough which indicated, in the universal instinctive language, that they desired to go home and go to bed. While they asserted that it had been "the nicest party they'd ever seen--my! so clever and original," she smiled tremendously, shook hands, and cried many suitable things regarding children, and being sure to wrap up warmly, and Raymie's singing and Juanita Haydock's prowess at games. Then she turned wearily to Kennicott in a house filled with quiet and crumbs and shreds of Chinese costumes. He was gurgling, "I tell you, Carrie, you certainly are a wonder, and guess you're right about waking folks up. Now you've showed 'em how, they won't go on having the same old kind of parties and stunts and everything. Here! Don't touch a thing! Done enough. Pop up to bed, and I'll clear up." His wise surgeon's-hands stroked her shoulder, and her irritation at his clumsiness was lost in his strength. V From the Weekly Dauntless: One of the most delightful social events of recent months was held Wednesday evening in the housewarming of Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott, who have completely redecorated their charming home on Poplar Street, and is now extremely nifty in modern color scheme. The doctor and his bride were at home to their numerous friends and a number of novelties in diversions were held, including a Chinese orchestra in original and genuine Oriental costumes, of which Ye Editor was leader. Dainty refreshments were served in true Oriental style, and one and all voted a delightful time. VI The week after, the Chet Dashaways gave a party. The circle of mourners kept its place all evening, and Dave Dyer did the "stunt" of the Norwegian and the hen.

Chapter 6

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Carol vents her boredom by completely redecorating Will's home and giving it an edgy Japanese vibe. Once she's done, Will admits that it's nicer than it was before. Everyone in the town snoops around the redecorating and gossips about it. A neighbor named Mrs. Bogart is especially nosy: she comes over to visit and says some passive-aggressive, judgmental things about Carol's morals, and Carol is glad when she leaves. As time goes by, Carol quickly learns that she hates asking her husband for money. She especially hates the way the men of the town make fun of women for always spending so much. Carol quickly decides that she needs a set allowance in order to make budgets and control her spending. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bogart's sniping comments about the price of Carol's new furniture has made Carol self-consciously cheap. She does everything she can to save money around her house. When it comes to her first housewarming party, though, Carol goes all out with the expenses. Meanwhile, Will starts to feel like a stranger in his own house. Whenever he gets home from work, he feels like Carol is nagging him. At first, Carol's party is lively, but soon the gravitational pull of Gopher Prairie takes over, and the party becomes boring. Vida whispers to Carol that she should ask Raymie Wutherspoon to sing because he has a beautiful voice. Carol gives the go-ahead only to find that Raymie's voice is awful. It's just good enough for people in Gopher Prairie to think it's good. Carol gets everyone to play a scandalous game in the dark where people try to steal each other's shoes. When the lights come back on, people are freed from their usual reserve and everyone starts giggling. Carol is optimistic that she can get these people to loosen up. Next, Carol asks everyone to put on some Asian-inspired outfits and to pretend that they are from Asia instead of Minnesota. Her good time is ruined when her husband Will tells her not to cross her legs, because her costume shows too much of her knees. When the party is over, Will congratulates Carol on having a party that got people out of their shells. He's hopeful that she'll be able to change the attitudes of the whole town. But after a week, Carol's party is forgotten. The next party at another person's house is just as boring as any party before Carol arrived in Gopher Prairie.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/7.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_6_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 7

chapter 7

{"name": "Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-7", "summary": "The long winter is coming, and everyone in Gopher Prairie is getting their houses ready. The man who performs a lot of the winterizing work is a dude named Miles Bjornstam. The guy isn't very popular, because he's an agitator for workers' rights. Carol gets a group of people to go skiing and tobogganing. Everyone has a great time, and again it looks like people are coming out of their shells. Yet as much as people say they loved the afternoon, none of them will come out to do it again. One night, Will is called into the country while Bea, the maid, has her night off. Alone in her home, Carol realizes that she has nothing to do, especially now that the novelty of the town has worn off. She also realizes that all of her imagined reforms for the town aren't coming to pass. When there's an early thaw, Carol takes a moment to run and shout like a little girl. But she soon realizes that people from the town are looking at her like she's crazy. She's mortified and runs away. Carol goes to a meeting of a women's bridge group called \"The Jolly Seventeen.\" She's sad to realize that she's not a social star at this event; she's just the new girl in town. She tries to fit in, but she doesn't do a great job of it. She's secretly enraged by how mindless the women's conversation is. Carol tries to bring up how much she admires the farmers and mill workers of the area. The women all scold her for sounding like a socialist and say that all the farmers and workers in the area are dirty, lazy thugs. When the women find out how much Carol pays her maid Bea every week, they nearly lose their minds. They think Carol is spoiling the help, and they don't want their own maids getting any ideas. Before she knows it, Carol also gets into a tiff with the village librarian, who doesn't like to lend books to children, because she's more interested in preserving the books' condition than in improving young minds. Carol goes home that evening mourning the fact that these women will have to be her friends for the rest of her life.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER VII I GOPHER PRAIRIE was digging in for the winter. Through late November and all December it snowed daily; the thermometer was at zero and might drop to twenty below, or thirty. Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry. Storm sheds were erected at every door. In every block the householders, Sam Clark, the wealthy Mr. Dawson, all save asthmatic Ezra Stowbody who extravagantly hired a boy, were seen perilously staggering up ladders, carrying storm windows and screwing them to second-story jambs. While Kennicott put up his windows Carol danced inside the bedrooms and begged him not to swallow the screws, which he held in his mouth like an extraordinary set of external false teeth. The universal sign of winter was the town handyman--Miles Bjornstam, a tall, thick, red-mustached bachelor, opinionated atheist, general-store arguer, cynical Santa Claus. Children loved him, and he sneaked away from work to tell them improbable stories of sea-faring and horse-trading and bears. The children's parents either laughed at him or hated him. He was the one democrat in town. He called both Lyman Cass the miller and the Finn homesteader from Lost Lake by their first names. He was known as "The Red Swede," and considered slightly insane. Bjornstam could do anything with his hands--solder a pan, weld an automobile spring, soothe a frightened filly, tinker a clock, carve a Gloucester schooner which magically went into a bottle. Now, for a week, he was commissioner general of Gopher Prairie. He was the only person besides the repairman at Sam Clark's who understood plumbing. Everybody begged him to look over the furnace and the water-pipes. He rushed from house to house till after bedtime--ten o'clock. Icicles from burst water-pipes hung along the skirt of his brown dog-skin overcoat; his plush cap, which he never took off in the house, was a pulp of ice and coal-dust; his red hands were cracked to rawness; he chewed the stub of a cigar. But he was courtly to Carol. He stooped to examine the furnace flues; he straightened, glanced down at her, and hemmed, "Got to fix your furnace, no matter what else I do." The poorer houses of Gopher Prairie, where the services of Miles Bjornstam were a luxury--which included the shanty of Miles Bjornstam--were banked to the lower windows with earth and manure. Along the railroad the sections of snow fence, which had been stacked all summer in romantic wooden tents occupied by roving small boys, were set up to prevent drifts from covering the track. The farmers came into town in home-made sleighs, with bed-quilts and hay piled in the rough boxes. Fur coats, fur caps, fur mittens, overshoes buckling almost to the knees, gray knitted scarfs ten feet long, thick woolen socks, canvas jackets lined with fluffy yellow wool like the plumage of ducklings, moccasins, red flannel wristlets for the blazing chapped wrists of boys--these protections against winter were busily dug out of moth-ball-sprinkled drawers and tar-bags in closets, and all over town small boys were squealing, "Oh, there's my mittens!" or "Look at my shoe-packs!" There is so sharp a division between the panting summer and the stinging winter of the Northern plains that they rediscovered with surprise and a feeling of heroism this armor of an Artic explorer. Winter garments surpassed even personal gossip as the topic at parties. It was good form to ask, "Put on your heavies yet?" There were as many distinctions in wraps as in motor cars. The lesser sort appeared in yellow and black dogskin coats, but Kennicott was lordly in a long raccoon ulster and a new seal cap. When the snow was too deep for his motor he went off on country calls in a shiny, floral, steel-tipped cutter, only his ruddy nose and his cigar emerging from the fur. Carol herself stirred Main Street by a loose coat of nutria. Her finger-tips loved the silken fur. Her liveliest activity now was organizing outdoor sports in the motor-paralyzed town. The automobile and bridge-whist had not only made more evident the social divisions in Gopher Prairie but they had also enfeebled the love of activity. It was so rich-looking to sit and drive--and so easy. Skiing and sliding were "stupid" and "old-fashioned." In fact, the village longed for the elegance of city recreations almost as much as the cities longed for village sports; and Gopher Prairie took as much pride in neglecting coasting as St. Paul--or New York--in going coasting. Carol did inspire a successful skating-party in mid-November. Plover Lake glistened in clear sweeps of gray-green ice, ringing to the skates. On shore the ice-tipped reeds clattered in the wind, and oak twigs with stubborn last leaves hung against a milky sky. Harry Haydock did figure-eights, and Carol was certain that she had found the perfect life. But when snow had ended the skating and she tried to get up a moonlight sliding party, the matrons hesitated to stir away from their radiators and their daily bridge-whist imitations of the city. She had to nag them. They scooted down a long hill on a bob-sled, they upset and got snow down their necks they shrieked that they would do it again immediately--and they did not do it again at all. She badgered another group into going skiing. They shouted and threw snowballs, and informed her that it was SUCH fun, and they'd have another skiing expedition right away, and they jollily returned home and never thereafter left their manuals of bridge. Carol was discouraged. She was grateful when Kennicott invited her to go rabbit-hunting in the woods. She waded down stilly cloisters between burnt stump and icy oak, through drifts marked with a million hieroglyphics of rabbit and mouse and bird. She squealed as he leaped on a pile of brush and fired at the rabbit which ran out. He belonged there, masculine in reefer and sweater and high-laced boots. That night she ate prodigiously of steak and fried potatoes; she produced electric sparks by touching his ear with her finger-tip; she slept twelve hours; and awoke to think how glorious was this brave land. She rose to a radiance of sun on snow. Snug in her furs she trotted up-town. Frosted shingles smoked against a sky colored like flax-blossoms, sleigh-bells clinked, shouts of greeting were loud in the thin bright air, and everywhere was a rhythmic sound of wood-sawing. It was Saturday, and the neighbors' sons were getting up the winter fuel. Behind walls of corded wood in back yards their sawbucks stood in depressions scattered with canary-yellow flakes of sawdust. The frames of their buck-saws were cherry-red, the blades blued steel, and the fresh cut ends of the sticks--poplar, maple, iron-wood, birch--were marked with engraved rings of growth. The boys wore shoe-packs, blue flannel shirts with enormous pearl buttons, and mackinaws of crimson, lemon yellow, and foxy brown. Carol cried "Fine day!" to the boys; she came in a glow to Howland & Gould's grocery, her collar white with frost from her breath; she bought a can of tomatoes as though it were Orient fruit; and returned home planning to surprise Kennicott with an omelet creole for dinner. So brilliant was the snow-glare that when she entered the house she saw the door-knobs, the newspaper on the table, every white surface as dazzling mauve, and her head was dizzy in the pyrotechnic dimness. When her eyes had recovered she felt expanded, drunk with health, mistress of life. The world was so luminous that she sat down at her rickety little desk in the living-room to make a poem. (She got no farther than "The sky is bright, the sun is warm, there ne'er will be another storm.") In the mid-afternoon of this same day Kennicott was called into the country. It was Bea's evening out--her evening for the Lutheran Dance. Carol was alone from three till midnight. She wearied of reading pure love stories in the magazines and sat by a radiator, beginning to brood. Thus she chanced to discover that she had nothing to do. II She had, she meditated, passed through the novelty of seeing the town and meeting people, of skating and sliding and hunting. Bea was competent; there was no household labor except sewing and darning and gossipy assistance to Bea in bed-making. She couldn't satisfy her ingenuity in planning meals. At Dahl & Oleson's Meat Market you didn't give orders--you wofully inquired whether there was anything today besides steak and pork and ham. The cuts of beef were not cuts. They were hacks. Lamb chops were as exotic as sharks' fins. The meat-dealers shipped their best to the city, with its higher prices. In all the shops there was the same lack of choice. She could not find a glass-headed picture-nail in town; she did not hunt for the sort of veiling she wanted--she took what she could get; and only at Howland & Gould's was there such a luxury as canned asparagus. Routine care was all she could devote to the house. Only by such fussing as the Widow Bogart's could she make it fill her time. She could not have outside employment. To the village doctor's wife it was taboo. She was a woman with a working brain and no work. There were only three things which she could do: Have children; start her career of reforming; or become so definitely a part of the town that she would be fulfilled by the activities of church and study-club and bridge-parties. Children, yes, she wanted them, but----She was not quite ready. She had been embarrassed by Kennicott's frankness, but she agreed with him that in the insane condition of civilization, which made the rearing of citizens more costly and perilous than any other crime, it was inadvisable to have children till he had made more money. She was sorry----Perhaps he had made all the mystery of love a mechanical cautiousness but----She fled from the thought with a dubious, "Some day." Her "reforms," her impulses toward beauty in raw Main Street, they had become indistinct. But she would set them going now. She would! She swore it with soft fist beating the edges of the radiator. And at the end of all her vows she had no notion as to when and where the crusade was to begin. Become an authentic part of the town? She began to think with unpleasant lucidity. She reflected that she did not know whether the people liked her. She had gone to the women at afternoon-coffees, to the merchants in their stores, with so many outpouring comments and whimsies that she hadn't given them a chance to betray their opinions of her. The men smiled--but did they like her? She was lively among the women--but was she one of them? She could not recall many times when she had been admitted to the whispering of scandal which is the secret chamber of Gopher Prairie conversation. She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to bed. Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back and observed. Dave Dyer and Sam Clark were as cordial as she had been fancying; but wasn't there an impersonal abruptness in the "H' are yuh?" of Chet Dashaway? Howland the grocer was curt. Was that merely his usual manner? "It's infuriating to have to pay attention to what people think. In St. Paul I didn't care. But here I'm spied on. They're watching me. I mustn't let it make me self-conscious," she coaxed herself--overstimulated by the drug of thought, and offensively on the defensive. III A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks; a ringing iron night when the lakes could be heard booming; a clear roistering morning. In tam o'shanter and tweed skirt Carol felt herself a college junior going out to play hockey. She wanted to whoop, her legs ached to run. On the way home from shopping she yielded, as a pup would have yielded. She galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of slush, she gave a student "Yippee!" She saw that in a window three old women were gasping. Their triple glare was paralyzing. Across the street, at another window, the curtain had secretively moved. She stopped, walked on sedately, changed from the girl Carol into Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. She never again felt quite young enough and defiant enough and free enough to run and halloo in the public streets; and it was as a Nice Married Woman that she attended the next weekly bridge of the Jolly Seventeen. IV The Jolly Seventeen (the membership of which ranged from fourteen to twenty-six) was the social cornice of Gopher Prairie. It was the country club, the diplomatic set, the St. Cecilia, the Ritz oval room, the Club de Vingt. To belong to it was to be "in." Though its membership partly coincided with that of the Thanatopsis study club, the Jolly Seventeen as a separate entity guffawed at the Thanatopsis, and considered it middle-class and even "highbrow." Most of the Jolly Seventeen were young married women, with their husbands as associate members. Once a week they had a women's afternoon-bridge; once a month the husbands joined them for supper and evening-bridge; twice a year they had dances at I. O. O. F. Hall. Then the town exploded. Only at the annual balls of the Firemen and of the Eastern Star was there such prodigality of chiffon scarfs and tangoing and heart-burnings, and these rival institutions were not select--hired girls attended the Firemen's Ball, with section-hands and laborers. Ella Stowbody had once gone to a Jolly Seventeen Soiree in the village hack, hitherto confined to chief mourners at funerals; and Harry Haydock and Dr. Terry Gould always appeared in the town's only specimens of evening clothes. The afternoon-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen which followed Carol's lonely doubting was held at Juanita Haydock's new concrete bungalow, with its door of polished oak and beveled plate-glass, jar of ferns in the plastered hall, and in the living-room, a fumed oak Morris chair, sixteen color-prints, and a square varnished table with a mat made of cigar-ribbons on which was one Illustrated Gift Edition and one pack of cards in a burnt-leather case. Carol stepped into a sirocco of furnace heat. They were already playing. Despite her flabby resolves she had not yet learned bridge. She was winningly apologetic about it to Juanita, and ashamed that she should have to go on being apologetic. Mrs. Dave Dyer, a sallow woman with a thin prettiness devoted to experiments in religious cults, illnesses, and scandal-bearing, shook her finger at Carol and trilled, "You're a naughty one! I don't believe you appreciate the honor, when you got into the Jolly Seventeen so easy!" Mrs. Chet Dashaway nudged her neighbor at the second table. But Carol kept up the appealing bridal manner so far as possible. She twittered, "You're perfectly right. I'm a lazy thing. I'll make Will start teaching me this very evening." Her supplication had all the sound of birdies in the nest, and Easter church-bells, and frosted Christmas cards. Internally she snarled, "That ought to be saccharine enough." She sat in the smallest rocking-chair, a model of Victorian modesty. But she saw or she imagined that the women who had gurgled at her so welcomingly when she had first come to Gopher Prairie were nodding at her brusquely. During the pause after the first game she petitioned Mrs. Jackson Elder, "Don't you think we ought to get up another bob-sled party soon?" "It's so cold when you get dumped in the snow," said Mrs. Elder, indifferently. "I hate snow down my neck," volunteered Mrs. Dave Dyer, with an unpleasant look at Carol and, turning her back, she bubbled at Rita Simons, "Dearie, won't you run in this evening? I've got the loveliest new Butterick pattern I want to show you." Carol crept back to her chair. In the fervor of discussing the game they ignored her. She was not used to being a wallflower. She struggled to keep from oversensitiveness, from becoming unpopular by the sure method of believing that she was unpopular; but she hadn't much reserve of patience, and at the end of the second game, when Ella Stowbody sniffily asked her, "Are you going to send to Minneapolis for your dress for the next soiree--heard you were," Carol said "Don't know yet" with unnecessary sharpness. She was relieved by the admiration with which the jeune fille Rita Simons looked at the steel buckles on her pumps; but she resented Mrs. Howland's tart demand, "Don't you find that new couch of yours is too broad to be practical?" She nodded, then shook her head, and touchily left Mrs. Howland to get out of it any meaning she desired. Immediately she wanted to make peace. She was close to simpering in the sweetness with which she addressed Mrs Howland: "I think that is the prettiest display of beef-tea your husband has in his store." "Oh yes, Gopher Prairie isn't so much behind the times," gibed Mrs. Howland. Some one giggled. Their rebuffs made her haughty; her haughtiness irritated them to franker rebuffs; they were working up to a state of painfully righteous war when they were saved by the coming of food. Though Juanita Haydock was highly advanced in the matters of finger-bowls, doilies, and bath-mats, her "refreshments" were typical of all the afternoon-coffees. Juanita's best friends, Mrs. Dyer and Mrs. Dashaway, passed large dinner plates, each with a spoon, a fork, and a coffee cup without saucer. They apologized and discussed the afternoon's game as they passed through the thicket of women's feet. Then they distributed hot buttered rolls, coffee poured from an enamel-ware pot, stuffed olives, potato salad, and angel's-food cake. There was, even in the most strictly conforming Gopher Prairie circles, a certain option as to collations. The olives need not be stuffed. Doughnuts were in some houses well thought of as a substitute for the hot buttered rolls. But there was in all the town no heretic save Carol who omitted angel's-food. They ate enormously. Carol had a suspicion that the thriftier housewives made the afternoon treat do for evening supper. She tried to get back into the current. She edged over to Mrs. McGanum. Chunky, amiable, young Mrs. McGanum with her breast and arms of a milkmaid, and her loud delayed laugh which burst startlingly from a sober face, was the daughter of old Dr. Westlake, and the wife of Westlake's partner, Dr. McGanum. Kennicott asserted that Westlake and McGanum and their contaminated families were tricky, but Carol had found them gracious. She asked for friendliness by crying to Mrs. McGanum, "How is the baby's throat now?" and she was attentive while Mrs. McGanum rocked and knitted and placidly described symptoms. Vida Sherwin came in after school, with Miss Ethel Villets, the town librarian. Miss Sherwin's optimistic presence gave Carol more confidence. She talked. She informed the circle "I drove almost down to Wahkeenyan with Will, a few days ago. Isn't the country lovely! And I do admire the Scandinavian farmers down there so: their big red barns and silos and milking-machines and everything. Do you all know that lonely Lutheran church, with the tin-covered spire, that stands out alone on a hill? It's so bleak; somehow it seems so brave. I do think the Scandinavians are the hardiest and best people----" "Oh, do you THINK so?" protested Mrs. Jackson Elder. "My husband says the Svenskas that work in the planing-mill are perfectly terrible--so silent and cranky, and so selfish, the way they keep demanding raises. If they had their way they'd simply ruin the business." "Yes, and they're simply GHASTLY hired girls!" wailed Mrs. Dave Dyer. "I swear, I work myself to skin and bone trying to please my hired girls--when I can get them! I do everything in the world for them. They can have their gentleman friends call on them in the kitchen any time, and they get just the same to eat as we do, if there's, any left over, and I practically never jump on them." Juanita Haydock rattled, "They're ungrateful, all that class of people. I do think the domestic problem is simply becoming awful. I don't know what the country's coming to, with these Scandahoofian clodhoppers demanding every cent you can save, and so ignorant and impertinent, and on my word, demanding bath-tubs and everything--as if they weren't mighty good and lucky at home if they got a bath in the wash-tub." They were off, riding hard. Carol thought of Bea and waylaid them: "But isn't it possibly the fault of the mistresses if the maids are ungrateful? For generations we've given them the leavings of food, and holes to live in. I don't want to boast, but I must say I don't have much trouble with Bea. She's so friendly. The Scandinavians are sturdy and honest----" Mrs. Dave Dyer snapped, "Honest? Do you call it honest to hold us up for every cent of pay they can get? I can't say that I've had any of them steal anything (though you might call it stealing to eat so much that a roast of beef hardly lasts three days), but just the same I don't intend to let them think they can put anything over on ME! I always make them pack and unpack their trunks down-stairs, right under my eyes, and then I know they aren't being tempted to dishonesty by any slackness on MY part!" "How much do the maids get here?" Carol ventured. Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker, stated in a shocked manner, "Any place from three-fifty to five-fifty a week! I know positively that Mrs. Clark, after swearing that she wouldn't weaken and encourage them in their outrageous demands, went and paid five-fifty--think of it! practically a dollar a day for unskilled work and, of course, her food and room and a chance to do her own washing right in with the rest of the wash. HOW MUCH DO YOU PAY, Mrs. KENNICOTT?" "Yes! How much do you pay?" insisted half a dozen. "W-why, I pay six a week," she feebly confessed. They gasped. Juanita protested, "Don't you think it's hard on the rest of us when you pay so much?" Juanita's demand was reinforced by the universal glower. Carol was angry. "I don't care! A maid has one of the hardest jobs on earth. She works from ten to eighteen hours a day. She has to wash slimy dishes and dirty clothes. She tends the children and runs to the door with wet chapped hands and----" Mrs. Dave Dyer broke into Carol's peroration with a furious, "That's all very well, but believe me, I do those things myself when I'm without a maid--and that's a good share of the time for a person that isn't willing to yield and pay exorbitant wages!" Carol was retorting, "But a maid does it for strangers, and all she gets out of it is the pay----" Their eyes were hostile. Four of them were talking at once. Vida Sherwin's dictatorial voice cut through, took control of the revolution: "Tut, tut, tut, tut! What angry passions--and what an idiotic discussion! All of you getting too serious. Stop it! Carol Kennicott, you're probably right, but you're too much ahead of the times. Juanita, quit looking so belligerent. What is this, a card party or a hen fight? Carol, you stop admiring yourself as the Joan of Arc of the hired girls, or I'll spank you. You come over here and talk libraries with Ethel Villets. Boooooo! If there's any more pecking, I'll take charge of the hen roost myself!" They all laughed artificially, and Carol obediently "talked libraries." A small-town bungalow, the wives of a village doctor and a village dry-goods merchant, a provincial teacher, a colloquial brawl over paying a servant a dollar more a week. Yet this insignificance echoed cellar-plots and cabinet meetings and labor conferences in Persia and Prussia, Rome and Boston, and the orators who deemed themselves international leaders were but the raised voices of a billion Juanitas denouncing a million Carols, with a hundred thousand Vida Sherwins trying to shoo away the storm. Carol felt guilty. She devoted herself to admiring the spinsterish Miss Villets--and immediately committed another offense against the laws of decency. "We haven't seen you at the library yet," Miss Villets reproved. "I've wanted to run in so much but I've been getting settled and----I'll probably come in so often you'll get tired of me! I hear you have such a nice library." "There are many who like it. We have two thousand more books than Wakamin." "Isn't that fine. I'm sure you are largely responsible. I've had some experience, in St. Paul." "So I have been informed. Not that I entirely approve of library methods in these large cities. So careless, letting tramps and all sorts of dirty persons practically sleep in the reading-rooms." "I know, but the poor souls----Well, I'm sure you will agree with me in one thing: The chief task of a librarian is to get people to read." "You feel so? My feeling, Mrs. Kennicott, and I am merely quoting the librarian of a very large college, is that the first duty of the CONSCIENTIOUS librarian is to preserve the books." "Oh!" Carol repented her "Oh." Miss Villets stiffened, and attacked: "It may be all very well in cities, where they have unlimited funds, to let nasty children ruin books and just deliberately tear them up, and fresh young men take more books out than they are entitled to by the regulations, but I'm never going to permit it in this library!" "What if some children are destructive? They learn to read. Books are cheaper than minds." "Nothing is cheaper than the minds of some of these children that come in and bother me simply because their mothers don't keep them home where they belong. Some librarians may choose to be so wishy-washy and turn their libraries into nursing-homes and kindergartens, but as long as I'm in charge, the Gopher Prairie library is going to be quiet and decent, and the books well kept!" Carol saw that the others were listening, waiting for her to be objectionable. She flinched before their dislike. She hastened to smile in agreement with Miss Villets, to glance publicly at her wrist-watch, to warble that it was "so late--have to hurry home--husband--such nice party--maybe you were right about maids, prejudiced because Bea so nice--such perfectly divine angel's-food, Mrs. Haydock must give me the recipe--good-by, such happy party----" She walked home. She reflected, "It was my fault. I was touchy. And I opposed them so much. Only----I can't! I can't be one of them if I must damn all the maids toiling in filthy kitchens, all the ragged hungry children. And these women are to be my arbiters, the rest of my life!" She ignored Bea's call from the kitchen; she ran up-stairs to the unfrequented guest-room; she wept in terror, her body a pale arc as she knelt beside a cumbrous black-walnut bed, beside a puffy mattress covered with a red quilt, in a shuttered and airless room.

Chapter 7

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-7

The long winter is coming, and everyone in Gopher Prairie is getting their houses ready. The man who performs a lot of the winterizing work is a dude named Miles Bjornstam. The guy isn't very popular, because he's an agitator for workers' rights. Carol gets a group of people to go skiing and tobogganing. Everyone has a great time, and again it looks like people are coming out of their shells. Yet as much as people say they loved the afternoon, none of them will come out to do it again. One night, Will is called into the country while Bea, the maid, has her night off. Alone in her home, Carol realizes that she has nothing to do, especially now that the novelty of the town has worn off. She also realizes that all of her imagined reforms for the town aren't coming to pass. When there's an early thaw, Carol takes a moment to run and shout like a little girl. But she soon realizes that people from the town are looking at her like she's crazy. She's mortified and runs away. Carol goes to a meeting of a women's bridge group called "The Jolly Seventeen." She's sad to realize that she's not a social star at this event; she's just the new girl in town. She tries to fit in, but she doesn't do a great job of it. She's secretly enraged by how mindless the women's conversation is. Carol tries to bring up how much she admires the farmers and mill workers of the area. The women all scold her for sounding like a socialist and say that all the farmers and workers in the area are dirty, lazy thugs. When the women find out how much Carol pays her maid Bea every week, they nearly lose their minds. They think Carol is spoiling the help, and they don't want their own maids getting any ideas. Before she knows it, Carol also gets into a tiff with the village librarian, who doesn't like to lend books to children, because she's more interested in preserving the books' condition than in improving young minds. Carol goes home that evening mourning the fact that these women will have to be her friends for the rest of her life.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/8.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_7_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 8

chapter 8

{"name": "Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-8", "summary": "The next time Will comes home, Carol asks to hear all about his cases. Will doesn't have anything interesting to tell her, though: it's just been a few people with stomachaches lately. Four days after Carol's first meeting with the Jolly Seventeen, Vida Sherwin comes to visit and tells Carol that the women of the town keep talking about Carol behind her back. Vida advises Carol to tone down her rebellious side if she wants to fit in with the town. Carol learns that there's basically nothing creative she can do without setting off gossip among these women. She despairs and starts to cry, but Vida comforts her. Later on, Carol asks Will if any of the men around Gopher Prairie say things about her behind her back. Will admits that some of them do. Carol hates the way that people are constantly judging her. Will asks Carol to give more of her household business to merchants who are patients of his.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER VIII "DON'T I, in looking for things to do, show that I'm not attentive enough to Will? Am I impressed enough by his work? I will be. Oh, I will be. If I can't be one of the town, if I must be an outcast----" When Kennicott came home she bustled, "Dear, you must tell me a lot more about your cases. I want to know. I want to understand." "Sure. You bet." And he went down to fix the furnace. At supper she asked, "For instance, what did you do today?" "Do today? How do you mean?" "Medically. I want to understand----" "Today? Oh, there wasn't much of anything: couple chumps with bellyaches, and a sprained wrist, and a fool woman that thinks she wants to kill herself because her husband doesn't like her and----Just routine work." "But the unhappy woman doesn't sound routine!" "Her? Just case of nerves. You can't do much with these marriage mix-ups." "But dear, PLEASE, will you tell me about the next case that you do think is interesting?" "Sure. You bet. Tell you about anything that----Say that's pretty good salmon. Get it at Howland's?" II Four days after the Jolly Seventeen debacle Vida Sherwin called and casually blew Carol's world to pieces. "May I come in and gossip a while?" she said, with such excess of bright innocence that Carol was uneasy. Vida took off her furs with a bounce, she sat down as though it were a gymnasium exercise, she flung out: "Feel disgracefully good, this weather! Raymond Wutherspoon says if he had my energy he'd be a grand opera singer. I always think this climate is the finest in the world, and my friends are the dearest people in the world, and my work is the most essential thing in the world. Probably I fool myself. But I know one thing for certain: You're the pluckiest little idiot in the world." "And so you are about to flay me alive." Carol was cheerful about it. "Am I? Perhaps. I've been wondering--I know that the third party to a squabble is often the most to blame: the one who runs between A and B having a beautiful time telling each of them what the other has said. But I want you to take a big part in vitalizing Gopher Prairie and so----Such a very unique opportunity and----Am I silly?" "I know what you mean. I was too abrupt at the Jolly Seventeen." "It isn't that. Matter of fact, I'm glad you told them some wholesome truths about servants. (Though perhaps you were just a bit tactless.) It's bigger than that. I wonder if you understand that in a secluded community like this every newcomer is on test? People cordial to her but watching her all the time. I remember when a Latin teacher came here from Wellesley, they resented her broad A. Were sure it was affected. Of course they have discussed you----" "Have they talked about me much?" "My dear!" "I always feel as though I walked around in a cloud, looking out at others but not being seen. I feel so inconspicuous and so normal--so normal that there's nothing about me to discuss. I can't realize that Mr. and Mrs. Haydock must gossip about me." Carol was working up a small passion of distaste. "And I don't like it. It makes me crawly to think of their daring to talk over all I do and say. Pawing me over! I resent it. I hate----" "Wait, child! Perhaps they resent some things in you. I want you to try and be impersonal. They'd paw over anybody who came in new. Didn't you, with newcomers in College?" "Yes." "Well then! Will you be impersonal? I'm paying you the compliment of supposing that you can be. I want you to be big enough to help me make this town worth while." "I'll be as impersonal as cold boiled potatoes. (Not that I shall ever be able to help you 'make the town worth while.') What do they say about me? Really. I want to know." "Of course the illiterate ones resent your references to anything farther away than Minneapolis. They're so suspicious--that's it, suspicious. And some think you dress too well." "Oh, they do, do they! Shall I dress in gunny-sacking to suit them?" "Please! Are you going to be a baby?" "I'll be good," sulkily. "You certainly will, or I won't tell you one single thing. You must understand this: I'm not asking you to change yourself. Just want you to know what they think. You must do that, no matter how absurd their prejudices are, if you're going to handle them. Is it your ambition to make this a better town, or isn't it?" "I don't know whether it is or not!" "Why--why----Tut, tut, now, of course it is! Why, I depend on you. You're a born reformer." "I am not--not any more!" "Of course you are." "Oh, if I really could help----So they think I'm affected?" "My lamb, they do! Now don't say they're nervy. After all, Gopher Prairie standards are as reasonable to Gopher Prairie as Lake Shore Drive standards are to Chicago. And there's more Gopher Prairies than there are Chicagos. Or Londons. And----I'll tell you the whole story: They think you're showing off when you say 'American' instead of 'Ammurrican.' They think you're too frivolous. Life's so serious to them that they can't imagine any kind of laughter except Juanita's snortling. Ethel Villets was sure you were patronizing her when----" "Oh, I was not!" "----you talked about encouraging reading; and Mrs. Elder thought you were patronizing when you said she had 'such a pretty little car.' She thinks it's an enormous car! And some of the merchants say you're too flip when you talk to them in the store and----" "Poor me, when I was trying to be friendly!" "----every housewife in town is doubtful about your being so chummy with your Bea. All right to be kind, but they say you act as though she were your cousin. (Wait now! There's plenty more.) And they think you were eccentric in furnishing this room--they think the broad couch and that Japanese dingus are absurd. (Wait! I know they're silly.) And I guess I've heard a dozen criticize you because you don't go to church oftener and----" "I can't stand it--I can't bear to realize that they've been saying all these things while I've been going about so happily and liking them. I wonder if you ought to have told me? It will make me self-conscious." "I wonder the same thing. Only answer I can get is the old saw about knowledge being power. And some day you'll see how absorbing it is to have power, even here; to control the town----Oh, I'm a crank. But I do like to see things moving." "It hurts. It makes these people seem so beastly and treacherous, when I've been perfectly natural with them. But let's have it all. What did they say about my Chinese house-warming party?" "Why, uh----" "Go on. Or I'll make up worse things than anything you can tell me." "They did enjoy it. But I guess some of them felt you were showing off--pretending that your husband is richer than he is." "I can't----Their meanness of mind is beyond any horrors I could imagine. They really thought that I----And you want to 'reform' people like that when dynamite is so cheap? Who dared to say that? The rich or the poor?" "Fairly well assorted." "Can't they at least understand me well enough to see that though I might be affected and culturine, at least I simply couldn't commit that other kind of vulgarity? If they must know, you may tell them, with my compliments, that Will makes about four thousand a year, and the party cost half of what they probably thought it did. Chinese things are not very expensive, and I made my own costume----" "Stop it! Stop beating me! I know all that. What they meant was: they felt you were starting dangerous competition by giving a party such as most people here can't afford. Four thousand is a pretty big income for this town." "I never thought of starting competition. Will you believe that it was in all love and friendliness that I tried to give them the gayest party I could? It was foolish; it was childish and noisy. But I did mean it so well." "I know, of course. And it certainly is unfair of them to make fun of your having that Chinese food--chow men, was it?--and to laugh about your wearing those pretty trousers----" Carol sprang up, whimpering, "Oh, they didn't do that! They didn't poke fun at my feast, that I ordered so carefully for them! And my little Chinese costume that I was so happy making--I made it secretly, to surprise them. And they've been ridiculing it, all this while!" She was huddled on the couch. Vida was stroking her hair, muttering, "I shouldn't----" Shrouded in shame, Carol did not know when Vida slipped away. The clock's bell, at half past five, aroused her. "I must get hold of myself before Will comes. I hope he never knows what a fool his wife is. . . . Frozen, sneering, horrible hearts." Like a very small, very lonely girl she trudged up-stairs, slow step by step, her feet dragging, her hand on the rail. It was not her husband to whom she wanted to run for protection--it was her father, her smiling understanding father, dead these twelve years. III Kennicott was yawning, stretched in the largest chair, between the radiator and a small kerosene stove. Cautiously, "Will dear, I wonder if the people here don't criticize me sometimes? They must. I mean: if they ever do, you mustn't let it bother you." "Criticize you? Lord, I should say not. They all keep telling me you're the swellest girl they ever saw." "Well, I've just fancied----The merchants probably think I'm too fussy about shopping. I'm afraid I bore Mr. Dashaway and Mr. Howland and Mr. Ludelmeyer." "I can tell you how that is. I didn't want to speak of it but since you've brought it up: Chet Dashaway probably resents the fact that you got this new furniture down in the Cities instead of here. I didn't want to raise any objection at the time but----After all, I make my money here and they naturally expect me to spend it here." "If Mr. Dashaway will kindly tell me how any civilized person can furnish a room out of the mortuary pieces that he calls----" She remembered. She said meekly, "But I understand." "And Howland and Ludelmeyer----Oh, you've probably handed 'em a few roasts for the bum stocks they carry, when you just meant to jolly 'em. But rats, what do we care! This is an independent town, not like these Eastern holes where you have to watch your step all the time, and live up to fool demands and social customs, and a lot of old tabbies always busy criticizing. Everybody's free here to do what he wants to." He said it with a flourish, and Carol perceived that he believed it. She turned her breath of fury into a yawn. "By the way, Carrie, while we're talking of this: Of course I like to keep independent, and I don't believe in this business of binding yourself to trade with the man that trades with you unless you really want to, but same time: I'd be just as glad if you dealt with Jenson or Ludelmeyer as much as you ran, instead of Howland & Gould, who go to Dr. Gould every last time, and the whole tribe of 'em the same way. I don't see why I should be paying out my good money for groceries and having them pass it on to Terry Gould!" "I've gone to Howland & Gould because they're better, and cleaner." "I know. I don't mean cut them out entirely. Course Jenson is tricky--give you short weight--and Ludelmeyer is a shiftless old Dutch hog. But same time, I mean let's keep the trade in the family whenever it is convenient, see how I mean?" "I see." "Well, guess it's about time to turn in." He yawned, went out to look at the thermometer, slammed the door, patted her head, unbuttoned his waistcoat, yawned, wound the clock, went down to look at the furnace, yawned, and clumped up-stairs to bed, casually scratching his thick woolen undershirt. Till he bawled, "Aren't you ever coming up to bed?" she sat unmoving.

Chapter 8

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-8

The next time Will comes home, Carol asks to hear all about his cases. Will doesn't have anything interesting to tell her, though: it's just been a few people with stomachaches lately. Four days after Carol's first meeting with the Jolly Seventeen, Vida Sherwin comes to visit and tells Carol that the women of the town keep talking about Carol behind her back. Vida advises Carol to tone down her rebellious side if she wants to fit in with the town. Carol learns that there's basically nothing creative she can do without setting off gossip among these women. She despairs and starts to cry, but Vida comforts her. Later on, Carol asks Will if any of the men around Gopher Prairie say things about her behind her back. Will admits that some of them do. Carol hates the way that people are constantly judging her. Will asks Carol to give more of her household business to merchants who are patients of his.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/9.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_8_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 9

chapter 9

{"name": "Chapter 9", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-9", "summary": "As the weeks go by, Carol becomes completely paranoid that people are constantly making fun of her. She feels like every day is like high school, walking through a minefield of possible insults and ridicule. The more she walks around Gopher Prairie, the more Carol decides that the people she can't stand most are the young men who loiter and make catcalls at her as she walks by. One day, Carol overhears a boy named Cyrus Bogart talking with another kid named Earl Haydock. She overhears them talking about her and about how the people of the town say she's stuck up. Carol also finds out that Cyrus has watched her through the windows of her house before while she was tidying up. He laughs at how anal she is about tidiness. It kills Carol to think that she's not even in private inside her own home--that's how closely the town is always watching her. She also notices that Cyrus has paid special attention to the part of her dresses that show a little skin. That night, Carol pulls down every window blind in her house. She also wonders if she made a mistake in marrying Will Kennicott. Will takes Carol away from Gopher Prairie for a vacation. They spend time with Will's mother, which Carol finds enjoyable. When Carol and Will return to Gopher Prairie, Carol is heartened by how happy people are to see them back. But things quickly go back to their old unsatisfying ways. One day, Will has to head out of town for three days, leaving Carol alone. When her maid Bea goes out, too, Carol doesn't know what to do with herself.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER IX I SHE had tripped into the meadow to teach the lambs a pretty educational dance and found that the lambs were wolves. There was no way out between their pressing gray shoulders. She was surrounded by fangs and sneering eyes. She could not go on enduring the hidden derision. She wanted to flee. She wanted to hide in the generous indifference of cities. She practised saying to Kennicott, "Think perhaps I'll run down to St. Paul for a few days." But she could not trust herself to say it carelessly; could not abide his certain questioning. Reform the town? All she wanted was to be tolerated! She could not look directly at people. She flushed and winced before citizens who a week ago had been amusing objects of study, and in their good-mornings she heard a cruel sniggering. She encountered Juanita Haydock at Ole Jenson's grocery. She besought, "Oh, how do you do! Heavens, what beautiful celery that is!" "Yes, doesn't it look fresh. Harry simply has to have his celery on Sunday, drat the man!" Carol hastened out of the shop exulting, "She didn't make fun of me. . . . Did she?" In a week she had recovered from consciousness of insecurity, of shame and whispering notoriety, but she kept her habit of avoiding people. She walked the streets with her head down. When she spied Mrs. McGanum or Mrs. Dyer ahead she crossed over with an elaborate pretense of looking at a billboard. Always she was acting, for the benefit of every one she saw--and for the benefit of the ambushed leering eyes which she did not see. She perceived that Vida Sherwin had told the truth. Whether she entered a store, or swept the back porch, or stood at the bay-window in the living-room, the village peeped at her. Once she had swung along the street triumphant in making a home. Now she glanced at each house, and felt, when she was safely home, that she had won past a thousand enemies armed with ridicule. She told herself that her sensitiveness was preposterous, but daily she was thrown into panic. She saw curtains slide back into innocent smoothness. Old women who had been entering their houses slipped out again to stare at her--in the wintry quiet she could hear them tiptoeing on their porches. When she had for a blessed hour forgotten the searchlight, when she was scampering through a chill dusk, happy in yellow windows against gray night, her heart checked as she realized that a head covered with a shawl was thrust up over a snow-tipped bush to watch her. She admitted that she was taking herself too seriously; that villagers gape at every one. She became placid, and thought well of her philosophy. But next morning she had a shock of shame as she entered Ludelmeyer's. The grocer, his clerk, and neurotic Mrs. Dave Dyer had been giggling about something. They halted, looked embarrassed, babbled about onions. Carol felt guilty. That evening when Kennicott took her to call on the crochety Lyman Casses, their hosts seemed flustered at their arrival. Kennicott jovially hooted, "What makes you so hang-dog, Lym?" The Casses tittered feebly. Except Dave Dyer, Sam Clark, and Raymie Wutherspoon, there were no merchants of whose welcome Carol was certain. She knew that she read mockery into greetings but she could not control her suspicion, could not rise from her psychic collapse. She alternately raged and flinched at the superiority of the merchants. They did not know that they were being rude, but they meant to have it understood that they were prosperous and "not scared of no doctor's wife." They often said, "One man's as good as another--and a darn sight better." This motto, however, they did not commend to farmer customers who had had crop failures. The Yankee merchants were crabbed; and Ole Jenson, Ludelmeyer, and Gus Dahl, from the "Old Country," wished to be taken for Yankees. James Madison Howland, born in New Hampshire, and Ole Jenson, born in Sweden, both proved that they were free American citizens by grunting, "I don't know whether I got any or not," or "Well, you can't expect me to get it delivered by noon." It was good form for the customers to fight back. Juanita Haydock cheerfully jabbered, "You have it there by twelve or I'll snatch that fresh delivery-boy bald-headed." But Carol had never been able to play the game of friendly rudeness; and now she was certain that she never would learn it. She formed the cowardly habit of going to Axel Egge's. Axel was not respectable and rude. He was still a foreigner, and he expected to remain one. His manner was heavy and uninterrogative. His establishment was more fantastic than any cross-roads store. No one save Axel himself could find anything. A part of the assortment of children's stockings was under a blanket on a shelf, a part in a tin ginger-snap box, the rest heaped like a nest of black-cotton snakes upon a flour-barrel which was surrounded by brooms, Norwegian Bibles, dried cod for ludfisk, boxes of apricots, and a pair and a half of lumbermen's rubber-footed boots. The place was crowded with Scandinavian farmwives, standing aloof in shawls and ancient fawn-colored leg o' mutton jackets, awaiting the return of their lords. They spoke Norwegian or Swedish, and looked at Carol uncomprehendingly. They were a relief to her--they were not whispering that she was a poseur. But what she told herself was that Axel Egge's was "so picturesque and romantic." It was in the matter of clothes that she was most self-conscious. When she dared to go shopping in her new checked suit with the black-embroidered sulphur collar, she had as good as invited all of Gopher Prairie (which interested itself in nothing so intimately as in new clothes and the cost thereof) to investigate her. It was a smart suit with lines unfamiliar to the dragging yellow and pink frocks of the town. The Widow Bogart's stare, from her porch, indicated, "Well I never saw anything like that before!" Mrs. McGanum stopped Carol at the notions shop to hint, "My, that's a nice suit--wasn't it terribly expensive?" The gang of boys in front of the drug store commented, "Hey, Pudgie, play you a game of checkers on that dress." Carol could not endure it. She drew her fur coat over the suit and hastily fastened the buttons, while the boys snickered. II No group angered her quite so much as these staring young roues. She had tried to convince herself that the village, with its fresh air, its lakes for fishing and swimming, was healthier than the artificial city. But she was sickened by glimpses of the gang of boys from fourteen to twenty who loafed before Dyer's Drug Store, smoking cigarettes, displaying "fancy" shoes and purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped buttons, whistling the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling, "Oh, you baby-doll" at every passing girl. She saw them playing pool in the stinking room behind Del Snafflin's barber shop, and shaking dice in "The Smoke House," and gathered in a snickering knot to listen to the "juicy stories" of Bert Tybee, the bartender of the Minniemashie House. She heard them smacking moist lips over every love-scene at the Rosebud Movie Palace. At the counter of the Greek Confectionery Parlor, while they ate dreadful messes of decayed bananas, acid cherries, whipped cream, and gelatinous ice-cream, they screamed to one another, "Hey, lemme 'lone," "Quit dog-gone you, looka what you went and done, you almost spilled my glass swater," "Like hell I did," "Hey, gol darn your hide, don't you go sticking your coffin nail in my i-scream," "Oh you Batty, how juh like dancing with Tillie McGuire, last night? Some squeezing, heh, kid?" By diligent consultation of American fiction she discovered that this was the only virile and amusing manner in which boys could function; that boys who were not compounded of the gutter and the mining-camp were mollycoddles and unhappy. She had taken this for granted. She had studied the boys pityingly, but impersonally. It had not occurred to her that they might touch her. Now she was aware that they knew all about her; that they were waiting for some affectation over which they could guffaw. No schoolgirl passed their observation-posts more flushingly than did Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. In shame she knew that they glanced appraisingly at her snowy overshoes, speculating about her legs. Theirs were not young eyes--there was no youth in all the town, she agonized. They were born old, grim and old and spying and censorious. She cried again that their youth was senile and cruel on the day when she overheard Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock. Cyrus N. Bogart, son of the righteous widow who lived across the alley, was at this time a boy of fourteen or fifteen. Carol had already seen quite enough of Cy Bogart. On her first evening in Gopher Prairie Cy had appeared at the head of a "charivari," banging immensely upon a discarded automobile fender. His companions were yelping in imitation of coyotes. Kennicott had felt rather complimented; had gone out and distributed a dollar. But Cy was a capitalist in charivaris. He returned with an entirely new group, and this time there were three automobile fenders and a carnival rattle. When Kennicott again interrupted his shaving, Cy piped, "Naw, you got to give us two dollars," and he got it. A week later Cy rigged a tic-tac to a window of the living-room, and the tattoo out of the darkness frightened Carol into screaming. Since then, in four months, she had beheld Cy hanging a cat, stealing melons, throwing tomatoes at the Kennicott house, and making ski-tracks across the lawn, and had heard him explaining the mysteries of generation, with great audibility and dismaying knowledge. He was, in fact, a museum specimen of what a small town, a well-disciplined public school, a tradition of hearty humor, and a pious mother could produce from the material of a courageous and ingenious mind. Carol was afraid of him. Far from protesting when he set his mongrel on a kitten, she worked hard at not seeing him. The Kennicott garage was a shed littered with paint-cans, tools, a lawn-mower, and ancient wisps of hay. Above it was a loft which Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock, young brother of Harry, used as a den, for smoking, hiding from whippings, and planning secret societies. They climbed to it by a ladder on the alley side of the shed. This morning of late January, two or three weeks after Vida's revelations, Carol had gone into the stable-garage to find a hammer. Snow softened her step. She heard voices in the loft above her: "Ah gee, lez--oh, lez go down the lake and swipe some mushrats out of somebody's traps," Cy was yawning. "And get our ears beat off!" grumbled Earl Haydock. "Gosh, these cigarettes are dandy. 'Member when we were just kids, and used to smoke corn-silk and hayseed?" "Yup. Gosh!" Spit. "Silence." "Say Earl, ma says if you chew tobacco you get consumption." "Aw rats, your old lady is a crank." "Yuh, that's so." Pause. "But she says she knows a fella that did." "Aw, gee whiz, didn't Doc Kennicott used to chew tobacco all the time before he married this-here girl from the Cities? He used to spit---Gee! Some shot! He could hit a tree ten feet off." This was news to the girl from the Cities. "Say, how is she?" continued Earl. "Huh? How's who?" "You know who I mean, smarty." A tussle, a thumping of loose boards, silence, weary narration from Cy: "Mrs. Kennicott? Oh, she's all right, I guess." Relief to Carol, below. "She gimme a hunk o' cake, one time. But Ma says she's stuck-up as hell. Ma's always talking about her. Ma says if Mrs. Kennicott thought as much about the doc as she does about her clothes, the doc wouldn't look so peaked." Spit. Silence. "Yuh. Juanita's always talking about her, too," from Earl. "She says Mrs. Kennicott thinks she knows it all. Juanita says she has to laugh till she almost busts every time she sees Mrs. Kennicott peerading along the street with that 'take a look--I'm a swell skirt' way she's got. But gosh, I don't pay no attention to Juanita. She's meaner 'n a crab." "Ma was telling somebody that she heard that Mrs. Kennicott claimed she made forty dollars a week when she was on some job in the Cities, and Ma says she knows posolutely that she never made but eighteen a week--Ma says that when she's lived here a while she won't go round making a fool of herself, pulling that bighead stuff on folks that know a whole lot more than she does. They're all laughing up their sleeves at her." "Say, jever notice how Mrs. Kennicott fusses around the house? Other evening when I was coming over here, she'd forgot to pull down the curtain, and I watched her for ten minutes. Jeeze, you'd 'a' died laughing. She was there all alone, and she must 'a' spent five minutes getting a picture straight. It was funny as hell the way she'd stick out her finger to straighten the picture--deedle-dee, see my tunnin' 'ittle finger, oh my, ain't I cute, what a fine long tail my cat's got!" "But say, Earl, she's some good-looker, just the same, and O Ignatz! the glad rags she must of bought for her wedding. Jever notice these low-cut dresses and these thin shimmy-shirts she wears? I had a good squint at 'em when they were out on the line with the wash. And some ankles she's got, heh?" Then Carol fled. In her innocence she had not known that the whole town could discuss even her garments, her body. She felt that she was being dragged naked down Main Street. The moment it was dusk she pulled down the window-shades, all the shades flush with the sill, but beyond them she felt moist fleering eyes. III She remembered, and tried to forget, and remembered more sharply the vulgar detail of her husband's having observed the ancient customs of the land by chewing tobacco. She would have preferred a prettier vice--gambling or a mistress. For these she might have found a luxury of forgiveness. She could not remember any fascinatingly wicked hero of fiction who chewed tobacco. She asserted that it proved him to be a man of the bold free West. She tried to align him with the hairy-chested heroes of the motion-pictures. She curled on the couch a pallid softness in the twilight, and fought herself, and lost the battle. Spitting did not identify him with rangers riding the buttes; it merely bound him to Gopher Prairie--to Nat Hicks the tailor and Bert Tybee the bartender. "But he gave it up for me. Oh, what does it matter! We're all filthy in some things. I think of myself as so superior, but I do eat and digest, I do wash my dirty paws and scratch. I'm not a cool slim goddess on a column. There aren't any! He gave it up for me. He stands by me, believing that every one loves me. He's the Rock of Ages--in a storm of meanness that's driving me mad . . . it will drive me mad." All evening she sang Scotch ballads to Kennicott, and when she noticed that he was chewing an unlighted cigar she smiled maternally at his secret. She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental intonations which a thousand million women, dairy wenches and mischief-making queens, had used before her, and which a million million women will know hereafter), "Was it all a horrible mistake, my marrying him?" She quieted the doubt--without answering it. IV Kennicott had taken her north to Lac-qui-Meurt, in the Big Woods. It was the entrance to a Chippewa Indian reservation, a sandy settlement among Norway pines on the shore of a huge snow-glaring lake. She had her first sight of his mother, except the glimpse at the wedding. Mrs. Kennicott had a hushed and delicate breeding which dignified her woodeny over-scrubbed cottage with its worn hard cushions in heavy rockers. She had never lost the child's miraculous power of wonder. She asked questions about books and cities. She murmured: "Will is a dear hard-working boy but he's inclined to be too serious, and you've taught him how to play. Last night I heard you both laughing about the old Indian basket-seller, and I just lay in bed and enjoyed your happiness." Carol forgot her misery-hunting in this solidarity of family life. She could depend upon them; she was not battling alone. Watching Mrs. Kennicott flit about the kitchen she was better able to translate Kennicott himself. He was matter-of-fact, yes, and incurably mature. He didn't really play; he let Carol play with him. But he had his mother's genius for trusting, her disdain for prying, her sure integrity. From the two days at Lac-qui-Meurt Carol drew confidence in herself, and she returned to Gopher Prairie in a throbbing calm like those golden drugged seconds when, because he is for an instant free from pain, a sick man revels in living. A bright hard winter day, the wind shrill, black and silver clouds booming across the sky, everything in panicky motion during the brief light. They struggled against the surf of wind, through deep snow. Kennicott was cheerful. He hailed Loren Wheeler, "Behave yourself while I been away?" The editor bellowed, "B' gosh you stayed so long that all your patients have got well!" and importantly took notes for the Dauntless about their journey. Jackson Elder cried, "Hey, folks! How's tricks up North?" Mrs. McGanum waved to them from her porch. "They're glad to see us. We mean something here. These people are satisfied. Why can't I be? But can I sit back all my life and be satisfied with 'Hey, folks'? They want shouts on Main Street, and I want violins in a paneled room. Why----?" V Vida Sherwin ran in after school a dozen times. She was tactful, torrentially anecdotal. She had scuttled about town and plucked compliments: Mrs. Dr. Westlake had pronounced Carol a "very sweet, bright, cultured young woman," and Brad Bemis, the tinsmith at Clark's Hardware Store, had declared that she was "easy to work for and awful easy to look at." But Carol could not yet take her in. She resented this outsider's knowledge of her shame. Vida was not too long tolerant. She hinted, "You're a great brooder, child. Buck up now. The town's quit criticizing you, almost entirely. Come with me to the Thanatopsis Club. They have some of the BEST papers, and current-events discussions--SO interesting." In Vida's demands Carol felt a compulsion, but she was too listless to obey. It was Bea Sorenson who was really her confidante. However charitable toward the Lower Classes she may have thought herself, Carol had been reared to assume that servants belong to a distinct and inferior species. But she discovered that Bea was extraordinarily like girls she had loved in college, and as a companion altogether superior to the young matrons of the Jolly Seventeen. Daily they became more frankly two girls playing at housework. Bea artlessly considered Carol the most beautiful and accomplished lady in the country; she was always shrieking, "My, dot's a swell hat!" or, "Ay t'ink all dese ladies yoost die when dey see how elegant you do your hair!" But it was not the humbleness of a servant, nor the hypocrisy of a slave; it was the admiration of Freshman for Junior. They made out the day's menus together. Though they began with propriety, Carol sitting by the kitchen table and Bea at the sink or blacking the stove, the conference was likely to end with both of them by the table, while Bea gurgled over the ice-man's attempt to kiss her, or Carol admitted, "Everybody knows that the doctor is lots more clever than Dr. McGanum." When Carol came in from marketing, Bea plunged into the hall to take off her coat, rub her frostied hands, and ask, "Vos dere lots of folks up-town today?" This was the welcome upon which Carol depended. VI Through her weeks of cowering there was no change in her surface life. No one save Vida was aware of her agonizing. On her most despairing days she chatted to women on the street, in stores. But without the protection of Kennicott's presence she did not go to the Jolly Seventeen; she delivered herself to the judgment of the town only when she went shopping and on the ritualistic occasions of formal afternoon calls, when Mrs. Lyman Cass or Mrs. George Edwin Mott, with clean gloves and minute handkerchiefs and sealskin card-cases and countenances of frozen approbation, sat on the edges of chairs and inquired, "Do you find Gopher Prairie pleasing?" When they spent evenings of social profit-and-loss at the Haydocks' or the Dyers' she hid behind Kennicott, playing the simple bride. Now she was unprotected. Kennicott had taken a patient to Rochester for an operation. He would be away for two or three days. She had not minded; she would loosen the matrimonial tension and be a fanciful girl for a time. But now that he was gone the house was listeningly empty. Bea was out this afternoon--presumably drinking coffee and talking about "fellows" with her cousin Tina. It was the day for the monthly supper and evening-bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, but Carol dared not go. She sat alone.

Chapter 9

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-9

As the weeks go by, Carol becomes completely paranoid that people are constantly making fun of her. She feels like every day is like high school, walking through a minefield of possible insults and ridicule. The more she walks around Gopher Prairie, the more Carol decides that the people she can't stand most are the young men who loiter and make catcalls at her as she walks by. One day, Carol overhears a boy named Cyrus Bogart talking with another kid named Earl Haydock. She overhears them talking about her and about how the people of the town say she's stuck up. Carol also finds out that Cyrus has watched her through the windows of her house before while she was tidying up. He laughs at how anal she is about tidiness. It kills Carol to think that she's not even in private inside her own home--that's how closely the town is always watching her. She also notices that Cyrus has paid special attention to the part of her dresses that show a little skin. That night, Carol pulls down every window blind in her house. She also wonders if she made a mistake in marrying Will Kennicott. Will takes Carol away from Gopher Prairie for a vacation. They spend time with Will's mother, which Carol finds enjoyable. When Carol and Will return to Gopher Prairie, Carol is heartened by how happy people are to see them back. But things quickly go back to their old unsatisfying ways. One day, Will has to head out of town for three days, leaving Carol alone. When her maid Bea goes out, too, Carol doesn't know what to do with herself.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/10.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_9_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 10

chapter 10

{"name": "Chapter 10", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-10", "summary": "Carol sits alone in her house having no clue what to do. She knows there's a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen women's club, but she can't bring herself to go and be phony around them. Instead, she wishes that someone would come see her. Carol makes tea for herself and a visitor, since she has faith someone will call on her. But no one does, and the tea goes cold. Carol is bitterly disappointed. Carol asks Bea about her day off when she gets back. She envies Bea for being so satisfied with everything around her and decides that she's going to try to create change in her own home before she tries it on Gopher Prairie. She decides she's going to get her husband Will to like poetry. The next day, Carol goes for a walk around Gopher Prairie and wanders by a working-class slum called \"Swede Hollow.\" She feels more connected to reality when she's around these poor people. Carol runs into Miles Bjornstam, the town handyman. Miles speaks to her plainly and criticizes the phoniness of the town. Carol is uncomfortable but also exhilarated to have someone to talk to about this subject. He invites her into his shack, which strikes Carol as improper, but she says yes, anyway. Carol looks around Miles's shack and sees how poor he is compared to her husband Will. But Miles is not self-conscious at all in front of her; he truly doesn't care what people think, and Carol admires him for it. After Carol gets home that day, her husband Will returns from his country trip. The next time Carol heads into the town, everyone acts like they're really happy to see her. It turns out that just a few days' absence is enough to make them want her back. Carol sticks by her resolution to make her husband Will interested in poetry. She sits down with him one night and reads some to him... but it's no use. Will isn't the poetic type, and it's clear that he's suffering just for her sake. In the end, Will and Carol just decide to go to a movie, where Carol finds herself laughing just as much as Will at a stupid comedy. The next time she goes to a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen, Carol avoids saying anything controversial, and she volunteers to have the club's next meeting at her house.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER X THE house was haunted, long before evening. Shadows slipped down the walls and waited behind every chair. Did that door move? No. She wouldn't go to the Jolly Seventeen. She hadn't energy enough to caper before them, to smile blandly at Juanita's rudeness. Not today. But she did want a party. Now! If some one would come in this afternoon, some one who liked her--Vida or Mrs. Sam Clark or old Mrs. Champ Perry or gentle Mrs. Dr. Westlake. Or Guy Pollock! She'd telephone---- No. That wouldn't be it. They must come of themselves. Perhaps they would. Why not? She'd have tea ready, anyway. If they came--splendid. If not--what did she care? She wasn't going to yield to the village and let down; she was going to keep up a belief in the rite of tea, to which she had always looked forward as the symbol of a leisurely fine existence. And it would be just as much fun, even if it was so babyish, to have tea by herself and pretend that she was entertaining clever men. It would! She turned the shining thought into action. She bustled to the kitchen, stoked the wood-range, sang Schumann while she boiled the kettle, warmed up raisin cookies on a newspaper spread on the rack in the oven. She scampered up-stairs to bring down her filmiest tea-cloth. She arranged a silver tray. She proudly carried it into the living-room and set it on the long cherrywood table, pushing aside a hoop of embroidery, a volume of Conrad from the library, copies of the Saturday Evening Post, the Literary Digest, and Kennicott's National Geographic Magazine. She moved the tray back and forth and regarded the effect. She shook her head. She busily unfolded the sewing-table set it in the bay-window, patted the tea-cloth to smoothness, moved the tray. "Some time I'll have a mahogany tea-table," she said happily. She had brought in two cups, two plates. For herself, a straight chair, but for the guest the big wing-chair, which she pantingly tugged to the table. She had finished all the preparations she could think of. She sat and waited. She listened for the door-bell, the telephone. Her eagerness was stilled. Her hands drooped. Surely Vida Sherwin would hear the summons. She glanced through the bay-window. Snow was sifting over the ridge of the Howland house like sprays of water from a hose. The wide yards across the street were gray with moving eddies. The black trees shivered. The roadway was gashed with ruts of ice. She looked at the extra cup and plate. She looked at the wing-chair. It was so empty. The tea was cold in the pot. With wearily dipping fingertip she tested it. Yes. Quite cold. She couldn't wait any longer. The cup across from her was icily clean, glisteningly empty. Simply absurd to wait. She poured her own cup of tea. She sat and stared at it. What was it she was going to do now? Oh yes; how idiotic; take a lump of sugar. She didn't want the beastly tea. She was springing up. She was on the couch, sobbing. II She was thinking more sharply than she had for weeks. She reverted to her resolution to change the town--awaken it, prod it, "reform" it. What if they were wolves instead of lambs? They'd eat her all the sooner if she was meek to them. Fight or be eaten. It was easier to change the town completely than to conciliate it! She could not take their point of view; it was a negative thing; an intellectual squalor; a swamp of prejudices and fears. She would have to make them take hers. She was not a Vincent de Paul, to govern and mold a people. What of that? The tiniest change in their distrust of beauty would be the beginning of the end; a seed to sprout and some day with thickening roots to crack their wall of mediocrity. If she could not, as she desired, do a great thing nobly and with laughter, yet she need not be content with village nothingness. She would plant one seed in the blank wall. Was she just? Was it merely a blank wall, this town which to three thousand and more people was the center of the universe? Hadn't she, returning from Lac-qui-Meurt, felt the heartiness of their greetings? No. The ten thousand Gopher Prairies had no monopoly of greetings and friendly hands. Sam Clark was no more loyal than girl librarians she knew in St. Paul, the people she had met in Chicago. And those others had so much that Gopher Prairie complacently lacked--the world of gaiety and adventure, of music and the integrity of bronze, of remembered mists from tropic isles and Paris nights and the walls of Bagdad, of industrial justice and a God who spake not in doggerel hymns. One seed. Which seed it was did not matter. All knowledge and freedom were one. But she had delayed so long in finding that seed. Could she do something with this Thanatopsis Club? Or should she make her house so charming that it would be an influence? She'd make Kennicott like poetry. That was it, for a beginning! She conceived so clear a picture of their bending over large fair pages by the fire (in a non-existent fireplace) that the spectral presences slipped away. Doors no longer moved; curtains were not creeping shadows but lovely dark masses in the dusk; and when Bea came home Carol was singing at the piano which she had not touched for many days. Their supper was the feast of two girls. Carol was in the dining-room, in a frock of black satin edged with gold, and Bea, in blue gingham and an apron, dined in the kitchen; but the door was open between, and Carol was inquiring, "Did you see any ducks in Dahl's window?" and Bea chanting, "No, ma'am. Say, ve have a svell time, dis afternoon. Tina she have coffee and knackebrod, and her fella vos dere, and ve yoost laughed and laughed, and her fella say he vos president and he going to make me queen of Finland, and Ay stick a fedder in may hair and say Ay bane going to go to var--oh, ve vos so foolish and ve LAUGH so!" When Carol sat at the piano again she did not think of her husband but of the book-drugged hermit, Guy Pollock. She wished that Pollock would come calling. "If a girl really kissed him, he'd creep out of his den and be human. If Will were as literate as Guy, or Guy were as executive as Will, I think I could endure even Gopher Prairie. It's so hard to mother Will. I could be maternal with Guy. Is that what I want, something to mother, a man or a baby or a town? I WILL have a baby. Some day. But to have him isolated here all his receptive years---- "And so to bed. "Have I found my real level in Bea and kitchen-gossip? "Oh, I do miss you, Will. But it will be pleasant to turn over in bed as often as I want to, without worrying about waking you up. "Am I really this settled thing called a 'married woman'? I feel so unmarried tonight. So free. To think that there was once a Mrs. Kennicott who let herself worry over a town called Gopher Prairie when there was a whole world outside it! "Of course Will is going to like poetry." III A black February day. Clouds hewn of ponderous timber weighing down on the earth; an irresolute dropping of snow specks upon the trampled wastes. Gloom but no veiling of angularity. The lines of roofs and sidewalks sharp and inescapable. The second day of Kennicott's absence. She fled from the creepy house for a walk. It was thirty below zero; too cold to exhilarate her. In the spaces between houses the wind caught her. It stung, it gnawed at nose and ears and aching cheeks, and she hastened from shelter to shelter, catching her breath in the lee of a barn, grateful for the protection of a billboard covered with ragged posters showing layer under layer of paste-smeared green and streaky red. The grove of oaks at the end of the street suggested Indians, hunting, snow-shoes, and she struggled past the earth-banked cottages to the open country, to a farm and a low hill corrugated with hard snow. In her loose nutria coat, seal toque, virginal cheeks unmarked by lines of village jealousies, she was as out of place on this dreary hillside as a scarlet tanager on an ice-floe. She looked down on Gopher Prairie. The snow, stretching without break from streets to devouring prairie beyond, wiped out the town's pretense of being a shelter. The houses were black specks on a white sheet. Her heart shivered with that still loneliness as her body shivered with the wind. She ran back into the huddle of streets, all the while protesting that she wanted a city's yellow glare of shop-windows and restaurants, or the primitive forest with hooded furs and a rifle, or a barnyard warm and steamy, noisy with hens and cattle, certainly not these dun houses, these yards choked with winter ash-piles, these roads of dirty snow and clotted frozen mud. The zest of winter was gone. Three months more, till May, the cold might drag on, with the snow ever filthier, the weakened body less resistent. She wondered why the good citizens insisted on adding the chill of prejudice, why they did not make the houses of their spirits more warm and frivolous, like the wise chatterers of Stockholm and Moscow. She circled the outskirts of the town and viewed the slum of "Swede Hollow." Wherever as many as three houses are gathered there will be a slum of at least one house. In Gopher Prairie, the Sam Clarks boasted, "you don't get any of this poverty that you find in cities--always plenty of work--no need of charity--man got to be blame shiftless if he don't get ahead." But now that the summer mask of leaves and grass was gone, Carol discovered misery and dead hope. In a shack of thin boards covered with tar-paper she saw the washerwoman, Mrs. Steinhof, working in gray steam. Outside, her six-year-old boy chopped wood. He had a torn jacket, muffler of a blue like skimmed milk. His hands were covered with red mittens through which protruded his chapped raw knuckles. He halted to blow on them, to cry disinterestedly. A family of recently arrived Finns were camped in an abandoned stable. A man of eighty was picking up lumps of coal along the railroad. She did not know what to do about it. She felt that these independent citizens, who had been taught that they belonged to a democracy, would resent her trying to play Lady Bountiful. She lost her loneliness in the activity of the village industries--the railroad-yards with a freight-train switching, the wheat-elevator, oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks on the snow, the creamery with the sleds of farmers and piles of milk-cans, an unexplained stone hut labeled "Danger--Powder Stored Here." The jolly tombstone-yard, where a utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as he hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's small planing-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and the burr of circular saws. Most important, the Gopher Prairie Flour and Milling Company, Lyman Cass president. Its windows were blanketed with flour-dust, but it was the most stirring spot in town. Workmen were wheeling barrels of flour into a box-car; a farmer sitting on sacks of wheat in a bobsled argued with the wheat-buyer; machinery within the mill boomed and whined, water gurgled in the ice-freed mill-race. The clatter was a relief to Carol after months of smug houses. She wished that she could work in the mill; that she did not belong to the caste of professional-man's-wife. She started for home, through the small slum. Before a tar-paper shack, at a gateless gate, a man in rough brown dogskin coat and black plush cap with lappets was watching her. His square face was confident, his foxy mustache was picaresque. He stood erect, his hands in his side-pockets, his pipe puffing slowly. He was forty-five or -six, perhaps. "How do, Mrs. Kennicott," he drawled. She recalled him--the town handyman, who had repaired their furnace at the beginning of winter. "Oh, how do you do," she fluttered. "My name 's Bjornstam. 'The Red Swede' they call me. Remember? Always thought I'd kind of like to say howdy to you again." "Ye--yes----I've been exploring the outskirts of town." "Yump. Fine mess. No sewage, no street cleaning, and the Lutheran minister and the priest represent the arts and sciences. Well, thunder, we submerged tenth down here in Swede Hollow are no worse off than you folks. Thank God, we don't have to go and purr at Juanity Haydock at the Jolly Old Seventeen." The Carol who regarded herself as completely adaptable was uncomfortable at being chosen as comrade by a pipe-reeking odd-job man. Probably he was one of her husband's patients. But she must keep her dignity. "Yes, even the Jolly Seventeen isn't always so exciting. It's very cold again today, isn't it. Well----" Bjornstam was not respectfully valedictory. He showed no signs of pulling a forelock. His eyebrows moved as though they had a life of their own. With a subgrin he went on: "Maybe I hadn't ought to talk about Mrs. Haydock and her Solemcholy Seventeen in that fresh way. I suppose I'd be tickled to death if I was invited to sit in with that gang. I'm what they call a pariah, I guess. I'm the town badman, Mrs. Kennicott: town atheist, and I suppose I must be an anarchist, too. Everybody who doesn't love the bankers and the Grand Old Republican Party is an anarchist." Carol had unconsciously slipped from her attitude of departure into an attitude of listening, her face full toward him, her muff lowered. She fumbled: "Yes, I suppose so." Her own grudges came in a flood. "I don't see why you shouldn't criticize the Jolly Seventeen if you want to. They aren't sacred." "Oh yes, they are! The dollar-sign has chased the crucifix clean off the map. But then, I've got no kick. I do what I please, and I suppose I ought to let them do the same." "What do you mean by saying you're a pariah?" "I'm poor, and yet I don't decently envy the rich. I'm an old bach. I make enough money for a stake, and then I sit around by myself, and shake hands with myself, and have a smoke, and read history, and I don't contribute to the wealth of Brother Elder or Daddy Cass." "You----I fancy you read a good deal." "Yep. In a hit-or-a-miss way. I'll tell you: I'm a lone wolf. I trade horses, and saw wood, and work in lumber-camps--I'm a first-rate swamper. Always wished I could go to college. Though I s'pose I'd find it pretty slow, and they'd probably kick me out." "You really are a curious person, Mr.----" "Bjornstam. Miles Bjornstam. Half Yank and half Swede. Usually known as 'that damn lazy big-mouthed calamity-howler that ain't satisfied with the way we run things.' No, I ain't curious--whatever you mean by that! I'm just a bookworm. Probably too much reading for the amount of digestion I've got. Probably half-baked. I'm going to get in 'half-baked' first, and beat you to it, because it's dead sure to be handed to a radical that wears jeans!" They grinned together. She demanded: "You say that the Jolly Seventeen is stupid. What makes you think so?" "Oh, trust us borers into the foundation to know about your leisure class. Fact, Mrs. Kennicott, I'll say that far as I can make out, the only people in this man's town that do have any brains--I don't mean ledger-keeping brains or duck-hunting brains or baby-spanking brains, but real imaginative brains--are you and me and Guy Pollock and the foreman at the flour-mill. He's a socialist, the foreman. (Don't tell Lym Cass that! Lym would fire a socialist quicker than he would a horse-thief!)" "Indeed no, I sha'n't tell him." "This foreman and I have some great set-to's. He's a regular old-line party-member. Too dogmatic. Expects to reform everything from deforestration to nosebleed by saying phrases like 'surplus value.' Like reading the prayer-book. But same time, he's a Plato J. Aristotle compared with people like Ezry Stowbody or Professor Mott or Julius Flickerbaugh." "It's interesting to hear about him." He dug his toe into a drift, like a schoolboy. "Rats. You mean I talk too much. Well, I do, when I get hold of somebody like you. You probably want to run along and keep your nose from freezing." "Yes, I must go, I suppose. But tell me: Why did you leave Miss Sherwin, of the high school, out of your list of the town intelligentsia?" "I guess maybe she does belong in it. From all I can hear she's in everything and behind everything that looks like a reform--lot more than most folks realize. She lets Mrs. Reverend Warren, the president of this-here Thanatopsis Club, think she's running the works, but Miss Sherwin is the secret boss, and nags all the easy-going dames into doing something. But way I figure it out----You see, I'm not interested in these dinky reforms. Miss Sherwin's trying to repair the holes in this barnacle-covered ship of a town by keeping busy bailing out the water. And Pollock tries to repair it by reading poetry to the crew! Me, I want to yank it up on the ways, and fire the poor bum of a shoemaker that built it so it sails crooked, and have it rebuilt right, from the keel up." "Yes--that--that would be better. But I must run home. My poor nose is nearly frozen." "Say, you better come in and get warm, and see what an old bach's shack is like." She looked doubtfully at him, at the low shanty, the yard that was littered with cord-wood, moldy planks, a hoopless wash-tub. She was disquieted, but Bjornstam did not give her the opportunity to be delicate. He flung out his hand in a welcoming gesture which assumed that she was her own counselor, that she was not a Respectable Married Woman but fully a human being. With a shaky, "Well, just a moment, to warm my nose," she glanced down the street to make sure that she was not spied on, and bolted toward the shanty. She remained for one hour, and never had she known a more considerate host than the Red Swede. He had but one room: bare pine floor, small work-bench, wall bunk with amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-stippled coffee-pot on the shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-ball stove, backwoods chairs--one constructed from half a barrel, one from a tilted plank--and a row of books incredibly assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise on "The Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry and Cattle." There was but one picture--a magazine color-plate of a steep-roofed village in the Harz Mountains which suggested kobolds and maidens with golden hair. Bjornstam did not fuss over her. He suggested, "Might throw open your coat and put your feet up on the box in front of the stove." He tossed his dogskin coat into the bunk, lowered himself into the barrel chair, and droned on: "Yeh, I'm probably a yahoo, but by gum I do keep my independence by doing odd jobs, and that's more 'n these polite cusses like the clerks in the banks do. When I'm rude to some slob, it may be partly because I don't know better (and God knows I'm not no authority on trick forks and what pants you wear with a Prince Albert), but mostly it's because I mean something. I'm about the only man in Johnson County that remembers the joker in the Declaration of Independence about Americans being supposed to have the right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' "I meet old Ezra Stowbody on the street. He looks at me like he wants me to remember he's a highmuckamuck and worth two hundred thousand dollars, and he says, 'Uh, Bjornquist----' "'Bjornstam's my name, Ezra,' I says. HE knows my name, all rightee. "'Well, whatever your name is,' he says, 'I understand you have a gasoline saw. I want you to come around and saw up four cords of maple for me,' he says. "'So you like my looks, eh?' I says, kind of innocent. "'What difference does that make? Want you to saw that wood before Saturday,' he says, real sharp. Common workman going and getting fresh with a fifth of a million dollars all walking around in a hand-me-down fur coat! "'Here's the difference it makes,' I says, just to devil him. 'How do you know I like YOUR looks?' Maybe he didn't look sore! 'Nope,' I says, thinking it all over, 'I don't like your application for a loan. Take it to another bank, only there ain't any,' I says, and I walks off on him. "Sure. Probably I was surly--and foolish. But I figured there had to be ONE man in town independent enough to sass the banker!" He hitched out of his chair, made coffee, gave Carol a cup, and talked on, half defiant and half apologetic, half wistful for friendliness and half amused by her surprise at the discovery that there was a proletarian philosophy. At the door, she hinted: "Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when people thought you were affected?" "Huh? Kick 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all over silver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals thought about my flying?" It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of Bjornstam's scorn which carried her through town. She faced Juanita Haydock, cocked her head at Maud Dyer's brief nod, and came home to Bea radiant. She telephoned Vida Sherwin to "run over this evening." She lustily played Tschaikowsky--the virile chords an echo of the red laughing philosopher of the tar-paper shack. (When she hinted to Vida, "Isn't there a man here who amuses himself by being irreverent to the village gods--Bjornstam, some such a name?" the reform-leader said "Bjornstam? Oh yes. Fixes things. He's awfully impertinent.") IV Kennicott had returned at midnight. At breakfast he said four several times that he had missed her every moment. On her way to market Sam Clark hailed her, "The top o' the mornin' to yez! Going to stop and pass the time of day mit Sam'l? Warmer, eh? What'd the doc's thermometer say it was? Say, you folks better come round and visit with us, one of these evenings. Don't be so dog-gone proud, staying by yourselves." Champ Perry the pioneer, wheat-buyer at the elevator, stopped her in the post-office, held her hand in his withered paws, peered at her with faded eyes, and chuckled, "You are so fresh and blooming, my dear. Mother was saying t'other day that a sight of you was better 'n a dose of medicine." In the Bon Ton Store she found Guy Pollock tentatively buying a modest gray scarf. "We haven't seen you for so long," she said. "Wouldn't you like to come in and play cribbage, some evening?" As though he meant it, Pollock begged, "May I, really?" While she was purchasing two yards of malines the vocal Raymie Wutherspoon tiptoed up to her, his long sallow face bobbing, and he besought, "You've just got to come back to my department and see a pair of patent leather slippers I set aside for you." In a manner of more than sacerdotal reverence he unlaced her boots, tucked her skirt about her ankles, slid on the slippers. She took them. "You're a good salesman," she said. "I'm not a salesman at all! I just like elegant things. All this is so inartistic." He indicated with a forlornly waving hand the shelves of shoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood perforated in rosettes, the display of shoe-trees and tin boxes of blacking, the lithograph of a smirking young woman with cherry cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry of advertising, "My tootsies never got hep to what pedal perfection was till I got a pair of clever classy Cleopatra Shoes." "But sometimes," Raymie sighed, "there is a pair of dainty little shoes like these, and I set them aside for some one who will appreciate. When I saw these I said right away, 'Wouldn't it be nice if they fitted Mrs. Kennicott,' and I meant to speak to you first chance I had. I haven't forgotten our jolly talks at Mrs. Gurrey's!" That evening Guy Pollock came in and, though Kennicott instantly impressed him into a cribbage game, Carol was happy again. V She did not, in recovering something of her buoyancy, forget her determination to begin the liberalizing of Gopher Prairie by the easy and agreeable propaganda of teaching Kennicott to enjoy reading poetry in the lamplight. The campaign was delayed. Twice he suggested that they call on neighbors; once he was in the country. The fourth evening he yawned pleasantly, stretched, and inquired, "Well, what'll we do tonight? Shall we go to the movies?" "I know exactly what we're going to do. Now don't ask questions! Come and sit down by the table. There, are you comfy? Lean back and forget you're a practical man, and listen to me." It may be that she had been influenced by the managerial Vida Sherwin; certainly she sounded as though she was selling culture. But she dropped it when she sat on the couch, her chin in her hands, a volume of Yeats on her knees, and read aloud. Instantly she was released from the homely comfort of a prairie town. She was in the world of lonely things--the flutter of twilight linnets, the aching call of gulls along a shore to which the netted foam crept out of darkness, the island of Aengus and the elder gods and the eternal glories that never were, tall kings and women girdled with crusted gold, the woful incessant chanting and the---- "Heh-cha-cha!" coughed Dr. Kennicott. She stopped. She remembered that he was the sort of person who chewed tobacco. She glared, while he uneasily petitioned, "That's great stuff. Study it in college? I like poetry fine--James Whitcomb Riley and some of Longfellow--this 'Hiawatha.' Gosh, I wish I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. But I guess I'm too old a dog to learn new tricks." With pity for his bewilderment, and a certain desire to giggle, she consoled him, "Then let's try some Tennyson. You've read him?" "Tennyson? You bet. Read him in school. There's that: And let there be no (what is it?) of farewell When I put out to sea, But let the---- Well, I don't remember all of it but----Oh, sure! And there's that 'I met a little country boy who----' I don't remember exactly how it goes, but the chorus ends up, 'We are seven.'" "Yes. Well----Shall we try 'The Idylls of the King?' They're so full of color." "Go to it. Shoot." But he hastened to shelter himself behind a cigar. She was not transported to Camelot. She read with an eye cocked on him, and when she saw how much he was suffering she ran to him, kissed his forehead, cried, "You poor forced tube-rose that wants to be a decent turnip!" "Look here now, that ain't----" "Anyway, I sha'n't torture you any longer." She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great deal of emphasis: There's a REGIMENT a-COMING down the GRAND Trunk ROAD. He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured. But when he complimented her, "That was fine. I don't know but what you can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody," she banged the book and suggested that they were not too late for the nine o'clock show at the movies. That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divine unhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the lilies of Avalon and the sunsets of Cockaigne in tin cans at Ole Jenson's Grocery. But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered herself laughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor of an actor who stuffed spaghetti down a woman's evening frock. For a second she loathed her laughter; mourned for the day when on her hill by the Mississippi she had walked the battlements with queens. But the celebrated cinema jester's conceit of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her into unwilling tittering, and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fled through darkness. VI She went to the Jolly Seventeen's afternoon bridge. She had learned the elements of the game from the Sam Clarks. She played quietly and reasonably badly. She had no opinions on anything more polemic than woolen union-suits, a topic on which Mrs. Howland discoursed for five minutes. She smiled frequently, and was the complete canary-bird in her manner of thanking the hostess, Mrs. Dave Dyer. Her only anxious period was during the conference on husbands. The young matrons discussed the intimacies of domesticity with a frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol. Juanita Haydock communicated Harry's method of shaving, and his interest in deer-shooting. Mrs. Gougerling reported fully, and with some irritation, her husband's inappreciation of liver and bacon. Maud Dyer chronicled Dave's digestive disorders; quoted a recent bedtime controversy with him in regard to Christian Science, socks and the sewing of buttons upon vests; announced that she "simply wasn't going to stand his always pawing girls when he went and got crazy-jealous if a man just danced with her"; and rather more than sketched Dave's varieties of kisses. So meekly did Carol give attention, so obviously was she at last desirous of being one of them, that they looked on her fondly, and encouraged her to give such details of her honeymoon as might be of interest. She was embarrassed rather than resentful. She deliberately misunderstood. She talked of Kennicott's overshoes and medical ideals till they were thoroughly bored. They regarded her as agreeable but green. Till the end she labored to satisfy the inquisition. She bubbled at Juanita, the president of the club, that she wanted to entertain them. "Only," she said, "I don't know that I can give you any refreshments as nice as Mrs. Dyer's salad, or that simply delicious angel's-food we had at your house, dear." "Fine! We need a hostess for the seventeenth of March. Wouldn't it be awfully original if you made it a St. Patrick's Day bridge! I'll be tickled to death to help you with it. I'm glad you've learned to play bridge. At first I didn't hardly know if you were going to like Gopher Prairie. Isn't it dandy that you've settled down to being homey with us! Maybe we aren't as highbrow as the Cities, but we do have the daisiest times and--oh, we go swimming in summer, and dances and--oh, lots of good times. If folks will just take us as we are, I think we're a pretty good bunch!" "I'm sure of it. Thank you so much for the idea about having a St. Patrick's Day bridge." "Oh, that's nothing. I always think the Jolly Seventeen are so good at original ideas. If you knew these other towns Wakamin and Joralemon and all, you'd find out and realize that G. P. is the liveliest, smartest town in the state. Did you know that Percy Bresnahan, the famous auto manufacturer, came from here and----Yes, I think that a St. Patrick's Day party would be awfully cunning and original, and yet not too queer or freaky or anything."

Chapter 10

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-10

Carol sits alone in her house having no clue what to do. She knows there's a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen women's club, but she can't bring herself to go and be phony around them. Instead, she wishes that someone would come see her. Carol makes tea for herself and a visitor, since she has faith someone will call on her. But no one does, and the tea goes cold. Carol is bitterly disappointed. Carol asks Bea about her day off when she gets back. She envies Bea for being so satisfied with everything around her and decides that she's going to try to create change in her own home before she tries it on Gopher Prairie. She decides she's going to get her husband Will to like poetry. The next day, Carol goes for a walk around Gopher Prairie and wanders by a working-class slum called "Swede Hollow." She feels more connected to reality when she's around these poor people. Carol runs into Miles Bjornstam, the town handyman. Miles speaks to her plainly and criticizes the phoniness of the town. Carol is uncomfortable but also exhilarated to have someone to talk to about this subject. He invites her into his shack, which strikes Carol as improper, but she says yes, anyway. Carol looks around Miles's shack and sees how poor he is compared to her husband Will. But Miles is not self-conscious at all in front of her; he truly doesn't care what people think, and Carol admires him for it. After Carol gets home that day, her husband Will returns from his country trip. The next time Carol heads into the town, everyone acts like they're really happy to see her. It turns out that just a few days' absence is enough to make them want her back. Carol sticks by her resolution to make her husband Will interested in poetry. She sits down with him one night and reads some to him... but it's no use. Will isn't the poetic type, and it's clear that he's suffering just for her sake. In the end, Will and Carol just decide to go to a movie, where Carol finds herself laughing just as much as Will at a stupid comedy. The next time she goes to a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen, Carol avoids saying anything controversial, and she volunteers to have the club's next meeting at her house.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/11.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_10_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 11

chapter 11

{"name": "Chapter 11", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-11", "summary": "One day, a woman from the town's Thanatopsis Club barges into Carol's house and says Carol should go to the club's next meeting, where they'll discuss English poetry. Carol didn't realize this group was so literary, and she answers that she'd be delighted to go. Unfortunately, Carol quickly learns that the discussion of the poets is totally superficial. All they do is talk about the poets' lives and accomplishments without ever actually looking at their work. Carol tries to correct this, but what she says is over the heads of her listeners. Still, Carol tries hard to fit in, despite her dissatisfaction. The next day, Carol decides to check out the building for City Hall. She also visits the town library and asks the librarian there to give a talk sometime for the Thanatopsis Club, since she's the only woman in the town who might actually know about books. The woman says that the Thanatopsis Club has never been very keen on her. Carol decides to confide her dreams for Gopher Prairie to Miss Villets. But Miss Villets thinks that if the town is going to be improved, it'll have to be done through the churches. Carol doesn't like this idea, because she thinks that churches are stuck in the past. Unfortunately, Carol gets stuck contributing to plans that the town has already set in motion. Carol asks another woman named Mrs. Cass if they could find ways to rebuild the town's major buildings. Mrs. Cass rejects the idea by saying that taxes are too high as it is, and the town shouldn't be allowed to spend one more cent. Carol finally decides to approach a millionaire in the town, Luke Dawson, and ask him to give all his money to making Gopher Prairie more beautiful. Dawson basically laughs her out of his house. Plus, he thinks the town is fine just the way it is. After failing, Carol heads back to hang out with Miles Bjornstam to vent her frustrations about the town. He actually agrees with Mr. Dawson because he doesn't want some millionaire stepping in to help the town--he wants the town to help itself. At her next Thanatopsis meeting, Carol suggests that the club should try to help the poor people of the town by creating an employment bureau. She doesn't want to offer charity, but a chance to help the poor help themselves. The women are only interested in charity, though, since they figure there's no point in helping the poor if it doesn't make them feel good about themselves. Plus, the women don't really believe there's any true poverty in the town. The women of the club are more interested in getting more Bible study into the town. Carol thinks they've already got enough Bible study, but the women are offended at the idea that anyone can ever have enough Bible study. After this meeting, Carol more or less gives up on ever trying to change her town.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XI I SHE had often been invited to the weekly meetings of the Thanatopsis, the women's study club, but she had put it off. The Thanatopsis was, Vida Sherwin promised, "such a cozy group, and yet it puts you in touch with all the intellectual thoughts that are going on everywhere." Early in March Mrs. Westlake, wife of the veteran physician, marched into Carol's living-room like an amiable old pussy and suggested, "My dear, you really must come to the Thanatopsis this afternoon. Mrs. Dawson is going to be leader and the poor soul is frightened to death. She wanted me to get you to come. She says she's sure you will brighten up the meeting with your knowledge of books and writings. (English poetry is our topic today.) So shoo! Put on your coat!" "English poetry? Really? I'd love to go. I didn't realize you were reading poetry." "Oh, we're not so slow!" Mrs. Luke Dawson, wife of the richest man in town, gaped at them piteously when they appeared. Her expensive frock of beaver-colored satin with rows, plasters, and pendants of solemn brown beads was intended for a woman twice her size. She stood wringing her hands in front of nineteen folding chairs, in her front parlor with its faded photograph of Minnehaha Falls in 1890, its "colored enlargement" of Mr. Dawson, its bulbous lamp painted with sepia cows and mountains and standing on a mortuary marble column. She creaked, "O Mrs. Kennicott, I'm in such a fix. I'm supposed to lead the discussion, and I wondered would you come and help?" "What poet do you take up today?" demanded Carol, in her library tone of "What book do you wish to take out?" "Why, the English ones." "Not all of them?" "W-why yes. We're learning all of European Literature this year. The club gets such a nice magazine, Culture Hints, and we follow its programs. Last year our subject was Men and Women of the Bible, and next year we'll probably take up Furnishings and China. My, it does make a body hustle to keep up with all these new culture subjects, but it is improving. So will you help us with the discussion today?" On her way over Carol had decided to use the Thanatopsis as the tool with which to liberalize the town. She had immediately conceived enormous enthusiasm; she had chanted, "These are the real people. When the housewives, who bear the burdens, are interested in poetry, it means something. I'll work with them--for them--anything!" Her enthusiasm had become watery even before thirteen women resolutely removed their overshoes, sat down meatily, ate peppermints, dusted their fingers, folded their hands, composed their lower thoughts, and invited the naked muse of poetry to deliver her most improving message. They had greeted Carol affectionately, and she tried to be a daughter to them. But she felt insecure. Her chair was out in the open, exposed to their gaze, and it was a hard-slatted, quivery, slippery church-parlor chair, likely to collapse publicly and without warning. It was impossible to sit on it without folding the hands and listening piously. She wanted to kick the chair and run. It would make a magnificent clatter. She saw that Vida Sherwin was watching her. She pinched her wrist, as though she were a noisy child in church, and when she was decent and cramped again, she listened. Mrs. Dawson opened the meeting by sighing, "I'm sure I'm glad to see you all here today, and I understand that the ladies have prepared a number of very interesting papers, this is such an interesting subject, the poets, they have been an inspiration for higher thought, in fact wasn't it Reverend Benlick who said that some of the poets have been as much an inspiration as a good many of the ministers, and so we shall be glad to hear----" The poor lady smiled neuralgically, panted with fright, scrabbled about the small oak table to find her eye-glasses, and continued, "We will first have the pleasure of hearing Mrs. Jenson on the subject 'Shakespeare and Milton.'" Mrs. Ole Jenson said that Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died 1616. He lived in London, England, and in Stratford-on-Avon, which many American tourists loved to visit, a lovely town with many curios and old houses well worth examination. Many people believed that Shakespeare was the greatest play-wright who ever lived, also a fine poet. Not much was known about his life, but after all that did not really make so much difference, because they loved to read his numerous plays, several of the best known of which she would now criticize. Perhaps the best known of his plays was "The Merchant of Venice," having a beautiful love story and a fine appreciation of a woman's brains, which a woman's club, even those who did not care to commit themselves on the question of suffrage, ought to appreciate. (Laughter.) Mrs. Jenson was sure that she, for one, would love to be like Portia. The play was about a Jew named Shylock, and he didn't want his daughter to marry a Venice gentleman named Antonio---- Mrs. Leonard Warren, a slender, gray, nervous woman, president of the Thanatopsis and wife of the Congregational pastor, reported the birth and death dates of Byron, Scott, Moore, Burns; and wound up: "Burns was quite a poor boy and he did not enjoy the advantages we enjoy today, except for the advantages of the fine old Scotch kirk where he heard the Word of God preached more fearlessly than even in the finest big brick churches in the big and so-called advanced cities of today, but he did not have our educational advantages and Latin and the other treasures of the mind so richly strewn before the, alas, too ofttimes inattentive feet of our youth who do not always sufficiently appreciate the privileges freely granted to every American boy rich or poor. Burns had to work hard and was sometimes led by evil companionship into low habits. But it is morally instructive to know that he was a good student and educated himself, in striking contrast to the loose ways and so-called aristocratic society-life of Lord Byron, on which I have just spoken. And certainly though the lords and earls of his day may have looked down upon Burns as a humble person, many of us have greatly enjoyed his pieces about the mouse and other rustic subjects, with their message of humble beauty--I am so sorry I have not got the time to quote some of them." Mrs. George Edwin Mott gave ten minutes to Tennyson and Browning. Mrs. Nat Hicks, a wry-faced, curiously sweet woman, so awed by her betters that Carol wanted to kiss her, completed the day's grim task by a paper on "Other Poets." The other poets worthy of consideration were Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Gray, Mrs. Hemans, and Kipling. Miss Ella Stowbody obliged with a recital of "The Recessional" and extracts from "Lalla Rookh." By request, she gave "An Old Sweetheart of Mine" as encore. Gopher Prairie had finished the poets. It was ready for the next week's labor: English Fiction and Essays. Mrs. Dawson besought, "Now we will have a discussion of the papers, and I am sure we shall all enjoy hearing from one who we hope to have as a new member, Mrs. Kennicott, who with her splendid literary training and all should be able to give us many pointers and--many helpful pointers." Carol had warned herself not to be so "beastly supercilious." She had insisted that in the belated quest of these work-stained women was an aspiration which ought to stir her tears. "But they're so self-satisfied. They think they're doing Burns a favor. They don't believe they have a 'belated quest.' They're sure that they have culture salted and hung up." It was out of this stupor of doubt that Mrs. Dawson's summons roused her. She was in a panic. How could she speak without hurting them? Mrs. Champ Perry leaned over to stroke her hand and whisper, "You look tired, dearie. Don't you talk unless you want to." Affection flooded Carol; she was on her feet, searching for words and courtesies: "The only thing in the way of suggestion----I know you are following a definite program, but I do wish that now you've had such a splendid introduction, instead of going on with some other subject next year you could return and take up the poets more in detail. Especially actual quotations--even though their lives are so interesting and, as Mrs. Warren said, so morally instructive. And perhaps there are several poets not mentioned today whom it might be worth while considering--Keats, for instance, and Matthew Arnold and Rossetti and Swinburne. Swinburne would be such a--well, that is, such a contrast to life as we all enjoy it in our beautiful Middle-west----" She saw that Mrs. Leonard Warren was not with her. She captured her by innocently continuing: "Unless perhaps Swinburne tends to be, uh, more outspoken than you, than we really like. What do you think, Mrs. Warren?" The pastor's wife decided, "Why, you've caught my very thoughts, Mrs. Kennicott. Of course I have never READ Swinburne, but years ago, when he was in vogue, I remember Mr. Warren saying that Swinburne (or was it Oscar Wilde? but anyway:) he said that though many so-called intellectual people posed and pretended to find beauty in Swinburne, there can never be genuine beauty without the message from the heart. But at the same time I do think you have an excellent idea, and though we have talked about Furnishings and China as the probable subject for next year, I believe that it would be nice if the program committee would try to work in another day entirely devoted to English poetry! In fact, Madame Chairman, I so move you." When Mrs. Dawson's coffee and angel's-food had helped them to recover from the depression caused by thoughts of Shakespeare's death they all told Carol that it was a pleasure to have her with them. The membership committee retired to the sitting-room for three minutes and elected her a member. And she stopped being patronizing. She wanted to be one of them. They were so loyal and kind. It was they who would carry out her aspiration. Her campaign against village sloth was actually begun! On what specific reform should she first loose her army? During the gossip after the meeting Mrs. George Edwin Mott remarked that the city hall seemed inadequate for the splendid modern Gopher Prairie. Mrs. Nat Hicks timidly wished that the young people could have free dances there--the lodge dances were so exclusive. The city hall. That was it! Carol hurried home. She had not realized that Gopher Prairie was a city. From Kennicott she discovered that it was legally organized with a mayor and city-council and wards. She was delighted by the simplicity of voting one's self a metropolis. Why not? She was a proud and patriotic citizen, all evening. II She examined the city hall, next morning. She had remembered it only as a bleak inconspicuousness. She found it a liver-colored frame coop half a block from Main Street. The front was an unrelieved wall of clapboards and dirty windows. It had an unobstructed view of a vacant lot and Nat Hicks's tailor shop. It was larger than the carpenter shop beside it, but not so well built. No one was about. She walked into the corridor. On one side was the municipal court, like a country school; on the other, the room of the volunteer fire company, with a Ford hose-cart and the ornamental helmets used in parades, at the end of the hall, a filthy two-cell jail, now empty but smelling of ammonia and ancient sweat. The whole second story was a large unfinished room littered with piles of folding chairs, a lime-crusted mortar-mixing box, and the skeletons of Fourth of July floats covered with decomposing plaster shields and faded red, white, and blue bunting. At the end was an abortive stage. The room was large enough for the community dances which Mrs. Nat Hicks advocated. But Carol was after something bigger than dances. In the afternoon she scampered to the public library. The library was open three afternoons and four evenings a week. It was housed in an old dwelling, sufficient but unattractive. Carol caught herself picturing pleasanter reading-rooms, chairs for children, an art collection, a librarian young enough to experiment. She berated herself, "Stop this fever of reforming everything! I WILL be satisfied with the library! The city hall is enough for a beginning. And it's really an excellent library. It's--it isn't so bad. . . . Is it possible that I am to find dishonesties and stupidity in every human activity I encounter? In schools and business and government and everything? Is there never any contentment, never any rest?" She shook her head as though she were shaking off water, and hastened into the library, a young, light, amiable presence, modest in unbuttoned fur coat, blue suit, fresh organdy collar, and tan boots roughened from scuffling snow. Miss Villets stared at her, and Carol purred, "I was so sorry not to see you at the Thanatopsis yesterday. Vida said you might come." "Oh. You went to the Thanatopsis. Did you enjoy it?" "So much. Such good papers on the poets." Carol lied resolutely. "But I did think they should have had you give one of the papers on poetry!" "Well----Of course I'm not one of the bunch that seem to have the time to take and run the club, and if they prefer to have papers on literature by other ladies who have no literary training--after all, why should I complain? What am I but a city employee!" "You're not! You're the one person that does--that does--oh, you do so much. Tell me, is there, uh----Who are the people who control the club?" Miss Villets emphatically stamped a date in the front of "Frank on the Lower Mississippi" for a small flaxen boy, glowered at him as though she were stamping a warning on his brain, and sighed: "I wouldn't put myself forward or criticize any one for the world, and Vida is one of my best friends, and such a splendid teacher, and there is no one in town more advanced and interested in all movements, but I must say that no matter who the president or the committees are, Vida Sherwin seems to be behind them all the time, and though she is always telling me about what she is pleased to call my 'fine work in the library,' I notice that I'm not often called on for papers, though Mrs. Lyman Cass once volunteered and told me that she thought my paper on 'The Cathedrals of England' was the most interesting paper we had, the year we took up English and French travel and architecture. But----And of course Mrs. Mott and Mrs. Warren are very important in the club, as you might expect of the wives of the superintendent of schools and the Congregational pastor, and indeed they are both very cultured, but----No, you may regard me as entirely unimportant. I'm sure what I say doesn't matter a bit!" "You're much too modest, and I'm going to tell Vida so, and, uh, I wonder if you can give me just a teeny bit of your time and show me where the magazine files are kept?" She had won. She was profusely escorted to a room like a grandmother's attic, where she discovered periodicals devoted to house-decoration and town-planning, with a six-year file of the National Geographic. Miss Villets blessedly left her alone. Humming, fluttering pages with delighted fingers, Carol sat cross-legged on the floor, the magazines in heaps about her. She found pictures of New England streets: the dignity of Falmouth, the charm of Concord, Stockbridge and Farmington and Hillhouse Avenue. The fairy-book suburb of Forest Hills on Long Island. Devonshire cottages and Essex manors and a Yorkshire High Street and Port Sunlight. The Arab village of Djeddah--an intricately chased jewel-box. A town in California which had changed itself from the barren brick fronts and slatternly frame sheds of a Main Street to a way which led the eye down a vista of arcades and gardens. Assured that she was not quite mad in her belief that a small American town might be lovely, as well as useful in buying wheat and selling plows, she sat brooding, her thin fingers playing a tattoo on her cheeks. She saw in Gopher Prairie a Georgian city hall: warm brick walls with white shutters, a fanlight, a wide hall and curving stair. She saw it the common home and inspiration not only of the town but of the country about. It should contain the court-room (she couldn't get herself to put in a jail), public library, a collection of excellent prints, rest-room and model kitchen for farmwives, theater, lecture room, free community ballroom, farm-bureau, gymnasium. Forming about it and influenced by it, as mediaeval villages gathered about the castle, she saw a new Georgian town as graceful and beloved as Annapolis or that bowery Alexandria to which Washington rode. All this the Thanatopsis Club was to accomplish with no difficulty whatever, since its several husbands were the controllers of business and politics. She was proud of herself for this practical view. She had taken only half an hour to change a wire-fenced potato-plot into a walled rose-garden. She hurried out to apprize Mrs. Leonard Warren, as president of the Thanatopsis, of the miracle which had been worked. III At a quarter to three Carol had left home; at half-past four she had created the Georgian town; at a quarter to five she was in the dignified poverty of the Congregational parsonage, her enthusiasm pattering upon Mrs. Leonard Warren like summer rain upon an old gray roof; at two minutes to five a town of demure courtyards and welcoming dormer windows had been erected, and at two minutes past five the entire town was as flat as Babylon. Erect in a black William and Mary chair against gray and speckly-brown volumes of sermons and Biblical commentaries and Palestine geographies upon long pine shelves, her neat black shoes firm on a rag-rug, herself as correct and low-toned as her background, Mrs. Warren listened without comment till Carol was quite through, then answered delicately: "Yes, I think you draw a very nice picture of what might easily come to pass--some day. I have no doubt that such villages will be found on the prairie--some day. But if I might make just the least little criticism: it seems to me that you are wrong in supposing either that the city hall would be the proper start, or that the Thanatopsis would be the right instrument. After all, it's the churches, isn't it, that are the real heart of the community. As you may possibly know, my husband is prominent in Congregational circles all through the state for his advocacy of church-union. He hopes to see all the evangelical denominations joined in one strong body, opposing Catholicism and Christian Science, and properly guiding all movements that make for morality and prohibition. Here, the combined churches could afford a splendid club-house, maybe a stucco and half-timber building with gargoyles and all sorts of pleasing decorations on it, which, it seems to me, would be lots better to impress the ordinary class of people than just a plain old-fashioned colonial house, such as you describe. And that would be the proper center for all educational and pleasurable activities, instead of letting them fall into the hands of the politicians." "I don't suppose it will take more than thirty or forty years for the churches to get together?" Carol said innocently. "Hardly that long even; things are moving so rapidly. So it would be a mistake to make any other plans." Carol did not recover her zeal till two days after, when she tried Mrs. George Edwin Mott, wife of the superintendent of schools. Mrs. Mott commented, "Personally, I am terribly busy with dressmaking and having the seamstress in the house and all, but it would be splendid to have the other members of the Thanatopsis take up the question. Except for one thing: First and foremost, we must have a new schoolbuilding. Mr. Mott says they are terribly cramped." Carol went to view the old building. The grades and the high school were combined in a damp yellow-brick structure with the narrow windows of an antiquated jail--a hulk which expressed hatred and compulsory training. She conceded Mrs. Mott's demand so violently that for two days she dropped her own campaign. Then she built the school and city hall together, as the center of the reborn town. She ventured to the lead-colored dwelling of Mrs. Dave Dyer. Behind the mask of winter-stripped vines and a wide porch only a foot above the ground, the cottage was so impersonal that Carol could never visualize it. Nor could she remember anything that was inside it. But Mrs. Dyer was personal enough. With Carol, Mrs. Howland, Mrs. McGanum, and Vida Sherwin she was a link between the Jolly Seventeen and the serious Thanatopsis (in contrast to Juanita Haydock, who unnecessarily boasted of being a "lowbrow" and publicly stated that she would "see herself in jail before she'd write any darned old club papers"). Mrs. Dyer was superfeminine in the kimono in which she received Carol. Her skin was fine, pale, soft, suggesting a weak voluptuousness. At afternoon-coffees she had been rude but now she addressed Carol as "dear," and insisted on being called Maud. Carol did not quite know why she was uncomfortable in this talcum-powder atmosphere, but she hastened to get into the fresh air of her plans. Maud Dyer granted that the city hall wasn't "so very nice," yet, as Dave said, there was no use doing anything about it till they received an appropriation from the state and combined a new city hall with a national guard armory. Dave had given verdict, "What these mouthy youngsters that hang around the pool-room need is universal military training. Make men of 'em." Mrs. Dyer removed the new schoolbuilding from the city hall: "Oh, so Mrs. Mott has got you going on her school craze! She's been dinging at that till everybody's sick and tired. What she really wants is a big office for her dear bald-headed Gawge to sit around and look important in. Of course I admire Mrs. Mott, and I'm very fond of her, she's so brainy, even if she does try to butt in and run the Thanatopsis, but I must say we're sick of her nagging. The old building was good enough for us when we were kids! I hate these would-be women politicians, don't you?" IV The first week of March had given promise of spring and stirred Carol with a thousand desires for lakes and fields and roads. The snow was gone except for filthy woolly patches under trees, the thermometer leaped in a day from wind-bitten chill to itchy warmth. As soon as Carol was convinced that even in this imprisoned North, spring could exist again, the snow came down as abruptly as a paper storm in a theater; the northwest gale flung it up in a half blizzard; and with her hope of a glorified town went hope of summer meadows. But a week later, though the snow was everywhere in slushy heaps, the promise was unmistakable. By the invisible hints in air and sky and earth which had aroused her every year through ten thousand generations she knew that spring was coming. It was not a scorching, hard, dusty day like the treacherous intruder of a week before, but soaked with languor, softened with a milky light. Rivulets were hurrying in each alley; a calling robin appeared by magic on the crab-apple tree in the Howlands' yard. Everybody chuckled, "Looks like winter is going," and "This 'll bring the frost out of the roads--have the autos out pretty soon now--wonder what kind of bass-fishing we'll get this summer--ought to be good crops this year." Each evening Kennicott repeated, "We better not take off our Heavy Underwear or the storm windows too soon--might be 'nother spell of cold--got to be careful 'bout catching cold--wonder if the coal will last through?" The expanding forces of life within her choked the desire for reforming. She trotted through the house, planning the spring cleaning with Bea. When she attended her second meeting of the Thanatopsis she said nothing about remaking the town. She listened respectably to statistics on Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Scott, Hardy, Lamb, De Quincey, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, who, it seemed, constituted the writers of English Fiction and Essays. Not till she inspected the rest-room did she again become a fanatic. She had often glanced at the store-building which had been turned into a refuge in which farmwives could wait while their husbands transacted business. She had heard Vida Sherwin and Mrs. Warren caress the virtue of the Thanatopsis in establishing the rest-room and in sharing with the city council the expense of maintaining it. But she had never entered it till this March day. She went in impulsively; nodded at the matron, a plump worthy widow named Nodelquist, and at a couple of farm-women who were meekly rocking. The rest-room resembled a second-hand store. It was furnished with discarded patent rockers, lopsided reed chairs, a scratched pine table, a gritty straw mat, old steel engravings of milkmaids being morally amorous under willow-trees, faded chromos of roses and fish, and a kerosene stove for warming lunches. The front window was darkened by torn net curtains and by a mound of geraniums and rubber-plants. While she was listening to Mrs. Nodelquist's account of how many thousands of farmers' wives used the rest-room every year, and how much they "appreciated the kindness of the ladies in providing them with this lovely place, and all free," she thought, "Kindness nothing! The kind-ladies' husbands get the farmers' trade. This is mere commercial accommodation. And it's horrible. It ought to be the most charming room in town, to comfort women sick of prairie kitchens. Certainly it ought to have a clear window, so that they can see the metropolitan life go by. Some day I'm going to make a better rest-room--a club-room. Why! I've already planned that as part of my Georgian town hall!" So it chanced that she was plotting against the peace of the Thanatopsis at her third meeting (which covered Scandinavian, Russian, and Polish Literature, with remarks by Mrs. Leonard Warren on the sinful paganism of the Russian so-called church). Even before the entrance of the coffee and hot rolls Carol seized on Mrs. Champ Perry, the kind and ample-bosomed pioneer woman who gave historic dignity to the modern matrons of the Thanatopsis. She poured out her plans. Mrs. Perry nodded and stroked Carol's hand, but at the end she sighed: "I wish I could agree with you, dearie. I'm sure you're one of the Lord's anointed (even if we don't see you at the Baptist Church as often as we'd like to)! But I'm afraid you're too tender-hearted. When Champ and I came here we teamed-it with an ox-cart from Sauk Centre to Gopher Prairie, and there was nothing here then but a stockade and a few soldiers and some log cabins. When we wanted salt pork and gunpowder, we sent out a man on horseback, and probably he was shot dead by the Injuns before he got back. We ladies--of course we were all farmers at first--we didn't expect any rest-room in those days. My, we'd have thought the one they have now was simply elegant! My house was roofed with hay and it leaked something terrible when it rained--only dry place was under a shelf. "And when the town grew up we thought the new city hall was real fine. And I don't see any need for dance-halls. Dancing isn't what it was, anyway. We used to dance modest, and we had just as much fun as all these young folks do now with their terrible Turkey Trots and hugging and all. But if they must neglect the Lord's injunction that young girls ought to be modest, then I guess they manage pretty well at the K. P. Hall and the Oddfellows', even if some of tie lodges don't always welcome a lot of these foreigners and hired help to all their dances. And I certainly don't see any need of a farm-bureau or this domestic science demonstration you talk about. In my day the boys learned to farm by honest sweating, and every gal could cook, or her ma learned her how across her knee! Besides, ain't there a county agent at Wakamin? He comes here once a fortnight, maybe. That's enough monkeying with this scientific farming--Champ says there's nothing to it anyway. "And as for a lecture hall--haven't we got the churches? Good deal better to listen to a good old-fashioned sermon than a lot of geography and books and things that nobody needs to know--more 'n enough heathen learning right here in the Thanatopsis. And as for trying to make a whole town in this Colonial architecture you talk about----I do love nice things; to this day I run ribbons into my petticoats, even if Champ Perry does laugh at me, the old villain! But just the same I don't believe any of us old-timers would like to see the town that we worked so hard to build being tore down to make a place that wouldn't look like nothing but some Dutch story-book and not a bit like the place we loved. And don't you think it's sweet now? All the trees and lawns? And such comfy houses, and hot-water heat and electric lights and telephones and cement walks and everything? Why, I thought everybody from the Twin Cities always said it was such a beautiful town!" Carol forswore herself; declared that Gopher Prairie had the color of Algiers and the gaiety of Mardi Gras. Yet the next afternoon she was pouncing on Mrs. Lyman Cass, the hook-nosed consort of the owner of the flour-mill. Mrs. Cass's parlor belonged to the crammed-Victorian school, as Mrs. Luke Dawson's belonged to the bare-Victorian. It was furnished on two principles: First, everything must resemble something else. A rocker had a back like a lyre, a near-leather seat imitating tufted cloth, and arms like Scotch Presbyterian lions; with knobs, scrolls, shields, and spear-points on unexpected portions of the chair. The second principle of the crammed-Victorian school was that every inch of the interior must be filled with useless objects. The walls of Mrs. Cass's parlor were plastered with "hand-painted" pictures, "buckeye" pictures, of birch-trees, news-boys, puppies, and church-steeples on Christmas Eve; with a plaque depicting the Exposition Building in Minneapolis, burnt-wood portraits of Indian chiefs of no tribe in particular, a pansy-decked poetic motto, a Yard of Roses, and the banners of the educational institutions attended by the Casses' two sons--Chicopee Falls Business College and McGillicuddy University. One small square table contained a card-receiver of painted china with a rim of wrought and gilded lead, a Family Bible, Grant's Memoirs, the latest novel by Mrs. Gene Stratton Porter, a wooden model of a Swiss chalet which was also a bank for dimes, a polished abalone shell holding one black-headed pin and one empty spool, a velvet pin-cushion in a gilded metal slipper with "Souvenir of Troy, N. Y." stamped on the toe, and an unexplained red glass dish which had warts. Mrs. Cass's first remark was, "I must show you all my pretty things and art objects." She piped, after Carol's appeal: "I see. You think the New England villages and Colonial houses are so much more cunning than these Middlewestern towns. I'm glad you feel that way. You'll be interested to know I was born in Vermont." "And don't you think we ought to try to make Gopher Prai----" "My gracious no! We can't afford it. Taxes are much too high as it is. We ought to retrench, and not let the city council spend another cent. Uh----Don't you think that was a grand paper Mrs. Westlake read about Tolstoy? I was so glad she pointed out how all his silly socialistic ideas failed." What Mrs. Cass said was what Kennicott said, that evening. Not in twenty years would the council propose or Gopher Prairie vote the funds for a new city hall. V Carol had avoided exposing her plans to Vida Sherwin. She was shy of the big-sister manner; Vida would either laugh at her or snatch the idea and change it to suit herself. But there was no other hope. When Vida came in to tea Carol sketched her Utopia. Vida was soothing but decisive: "My dear, you're all off. I would like to see it: a real gardeny place to shut out the gales. But it can't be done. What could the clubwomen accomplish?" "Their husbands are the most important men in town. They ARE the town!" "But the town as a separate unit is not the husband of the Thanatopsis. If you knew the trouble we had in getting the city council to spend the money and cover the pumping-station with vines! Whatever you may think of Gopher Prairie women, they're twice as progressive as the men." "But can't the men see the ugliness?" "They don't think it's ugly. And how can you prove it? Matter of taste. Why should they like what a Boston architect likes?" "What they like is to sell prunes!" "Well, why not? Anyway, the point is that you have to work from the inside, with what we have, rather than from the outside, with foreign ideas. The shell ought not to be forced on the spirit. It can't be! The bright shell has to grow out of the spirit, and express it. That means waiting. If we keep after the city council for another ten years they MAY vote the bonds for a new school." "I refuse to believe that if they saw it the big men would be too tight-fisted to spend a few dollars each for a building--think!--dancing and lectures and plays, all done co-operatively!" "You mention the word 'co-operative' to the merchants and they'll lynch you! The one thing they fear more than mail-order houses is that farmers' co-operative movements may get started." "The secret trails that lead to scared pocket-books! Always, in everything! And I don't have any of the fine melodrama of fiction: the dictagraphs and speeches by torchlight. I'm merely blocked by stupidity. Oh, I know I'm a fool. I dream of Venice, and I live in Archangel and scold because the Northern seas aren't tender-colored. But at least they sha'n't keep me from loving Venice, and sometime I'll run away----All right. No more." She flung out her hands in a gesture of renunciation. VI Early May; wheat springing up in blades like grass; corn and potatoes being planted; the land humming. For two days there had been steady rain. Even in town the roads were a furrowed welter of mud, hideous to view and difficult to cross. Main Street was a black swamp from curb to curb; on residence streets the grass parking beside the walks oozed gray water. It was prickly hot, yet the town was barren under the bleak sky. Softened neither by snow nor by waving boughs the houses squatted and scowled, revealed in their unkempt harshness. As she dragged homeward Carol looked with distaste at her clay-loaded rubbers, the smeared hem of her skirt. She passed Lyman Cass's pinnacled, dark-red, hulking house. She waded a streaky yellow pool. This morass was not her home, she insisted. Her home, and her beautiful town, existed in her mind. They had already been created. The task was done. What she really had been questing was some one to share them with her. Vida would not; Kennicott could not. Some one to share her refuge. Suddenly she was thinking of Guy Pollock. She dismissed him. He was too cautious. She needed a spirit as young and unreasonable as her own. And she would never find it. Youth would never come singing. She was beaten. Yet that same evening she had an idea which solved the rebuilding of Gopher Prairie. Within ten minutes she was jerking the old-fashioned bell-pull of Luke Dawson. Mrs. Dawson opened the door and peered doubtfully about the edge of it. Carol kissed her cheek, and frisked into the lugubrious sitting-room. "Well, well, you're a sight for sore eyes!" chuckled Mr. Dawson, dropping his newspaper, pushing his spectacles back on his forehead. "You seem so excited," sighed Mrs. Dawson. "I am! Mr. Dawson, aren't you a millionaire?" He cocked his head, and purred, "Well, I guess if I cashed in on all my securities and farm-holdings and my interests in iron on the Mesaba and in Northern timber and cut-over lands, I could push two million dollars pretty close, and I've made every cent of it by hard work and having the sense to not go out and spend every----" "I think I want most of it from you!" The Dawsons glanced at each other in appreciation of the jest; and he chirped, "You're worse than Reverend Benlick! He don't hardly ever strike me for more than ten dollars--at a time!" "I'm not joking. I mean it! Your children in the Cities are grown-up and well-to-do. You don't want to die and leave your name unknown. Why not do a big, original thing? Why not rebuild the whole town? Get a great architect, and have him plan a town that would be suitable to the prairie. Perhaps he'd create some entirely new form of architecture. Then tear down all these shambling buildings----" Mr. Dawson had decided that she really did mean it. He wailed, "Why, that would cost at least three or four million dollars!" "But you alone, just one man, have two of those millions!" "Me? Spend all my hard-earned cash on building houses for a lot of shiftless beggars that never had the sense to save their money? Not that I've ever been mean. Mama could always have a hired girl to do the work--when we could find one. But her and I have worked our fingers to the bone and--spend it on a lot of these rascals----?" "Please! Don't be angry! I just mean--I mean----Oh, not spend all of it, of course, but if you led off the list, and the others came in, and if they heard you talk about a more attractive town----" "Why now, child, you've got a lot of notions. Besides what's the matter with the town? Looks good to me. I've had people that have traveled all over the world tell me time and again that Gopher Prairie is the prettiest place in the Middlewest. Good enough for anybody. Certainly good enough for Mama and me. Besides! Mama and me are planning to go out to Pasadena and buy a bungalow and live there." VII She had met Miles Bjornstam on the street. For the second of welcome encounter this workman with the bandit mustache and the muddy overalls seemed nearer than any one else to the credulous youth which she was seeking to fight beside her, and she told him, as a cheerful anecdote, a little of her story. He grunted, "I never thought I'd be agreeing with Old Man Dawson, the penny-pinching old land-thief--and a fine briber he is, too. But you got the wrong slant. You aren't one of the people--yet. You want to do something for the town. I don't! I want the town to do something for itself. We don't want old Dawson's money--not if it's a gift, with a string. We'll take it away from him, because it belongs to us. You got to get more iron and cussedness into you. Come join us cheerful bums, and some day--when we educate ourselves and quit being bums--we'll take things and run 'em straight." He had changed from her friend to a cynical man in overalls. She could not relish the autocracy of "cheerful bums." She forgot him as she tramped the outskirts of town. She had replaced the city hall project by an entirely new and highly exhilarating thought of how little was done for these unpicturesque poor. VIII The spring of the plains is not a reluctant virgin but brazen and soon away. The mud roads of a few days ago are powdery dust and the puddles beside them have hardened into lozenges of black sleek earth like cracked patent leather. Carol was panting as she crept to the meeting of the Thanatopsis program committee which was to decide the subject for next fall and winter. Madam Chairman (Miss Ella Stowbody in an oyster-colored blouse) asked if there was any new business. Carol rose. She suggested that the Thanatopsis ought to help the poor of the town. She was ever so correct and modern. She did not, she said, want charity for them, but a chance of self-help; an employment bureau, direction in washing babies and making pleasing stews, possibly a municipal fund for home-building. "What do you think of my plans, Mrs. Warren?" she concluded. Speaking judiciously, as one related to the church by marriage, Mrs. Warren gave verdict: "I'm sure we're all heartily in accord with Mrs. Kennicott in feeling that wherever genuine poverty is encountered, it is not only noblesse oblige but a joy to fulfil our duty to the less fortunate ones. But I must say it seems to me we should lose the whole point of the thing by not regarding it as charity. Why, that's the chief adornment of the true Christian and the church! The Bible has laid it down for our guidance. 'Faith, Hope, and CHARITY,' it says, and, 'The poor ye have with ye always,' which indicates that there never can be anything to these so-called scientific schemes for abolishing charity, never! And isn't it better so? I should hate to think of a world in which we were deprived of all the pleasure of giving. Besides, if these shiftless folks realize they're getting charity, and not something to which they have a right, they're so much more grateful." "Besides," snorted Miss Ella Stowbody, "they've been fooling you, Mrs. Kennicott. There isn't any real poverty here. Take that Mrs. Steinhof you speak of: I send her our washing whenever there's too much for our hired girl--I must have sent her ten dollars' worth the past year alone! I'm sure Papa would never approve of a city home-building fund. Papa says these folks are fakers. Especially all these tenant farmers that pretend they have so much trouble getting seed and machinery. Papa says they simply won't pay their debts. He says he's sure he hates to foreclose mortgages, but it's the only way to make them respect the law." "And then think of all the clothes we give these people!" said Mrs. Jackson Elder. Carol intruded again. "Oh yes. The clothes. I was going to speak of that. Don't you think that when we give clothes to the poor, if we do give them old ones, we ought to mend them first and make them as presentable as we can? Next Christmas when the Thanatopsis makes its distribution, wouldn't it be jolly if we got together and sewed on the clothes, and trimmed hats, and made them----" "Heavens and earth, they have more time than we have! They ought to be mighty good and grateful to get anything, no matter what shape it's in. I know I'm not going to sit and sew for that lazy Mrs. Vopni, with all I've got to do!" snapped Ella Stowbody. They were glaring at Carol. She reflected that Mrs. Vopni, whose husband had been killed by a train, had ten children. But Mrs. Mary Ellen Wilks was smiling. Mrs. Wilks was the proprietor of Ye Art Shoppe and Magazine and Book Store, and the reader of the small Christian Science church. She made it all clear: "If this class of people had an understanding of Science and that we are the children of God and nothing can harm us, they wouldn't be in error and poverty." Mrs. Jackson Elder confirmed, "Besides, it strikes me the club is already doing enough, with tree-planting and the anti-fly campaign and the responsibility for the rest-room--to say nothing of the fact that we've talked of trying to get the railroad to put in a park at the station!" "I think so too!" said Madam Chairman. She glanced uneasily at Miss Sherwin. "But what do you think, Vida?" Vida smiled tactfully at each of the committee, and announced, "Well, I don't believe we'd better start anything more right now. But it's been a privilege to hear Carol's dear generous ideas, hasn't it! Oh! There is one thing we must decide on at once. We must get together and oppose any move on the part of the Minneapolis clubs to elect another State Federation president from the Twin Cities. And this Mrs. Edgar Potbury they're putting forward--I know there are people who think she's a bright interesting speaker, but I regard her as very shallow. What do you say to my writing to the Lake Ojibawasha Club, telling them that if their district will support Mrs. Warren for second vice-president, we'll support their Mrs. Hagelton (and such a dear, lovely, cultivated woman, too) for president." "Yes! We ought to show up those Minneapolis folks!" Ella Stowbody said acidly. "And oh, by the way, we must oppose this movement of Mrs. Potbury's to have the state clubs come out definitely in favor of woman suffrage. Women haven't any place in politics. They would lose all their daintiness and charm if they became involved in these horried plots and log-rolling and all this awful political stuff about scandal and personalities and so on." All--save one--nodded. They interrupted the formal business-meeting to discuss Mrs. Edgar Potbury's husband, Mrs. Potbury's income, Mrs. Potbury's sedan, Mrs. Potbury's residence, Mrs. Potbury's oratorical style, Mrs. Potbury's mandarin evening coat, Mrs. Potbury's coiffure, and Mrs. Potbury's altogether reprehensible influence on the State Federation of Women's Clubs. Before the program committee adjourned they took three minutes to decide which of the subjects suggested by the magazine Culture Hints, Furnishings and China, or The Bible as Literature, would be better for the coming year. There was one annoying incident. Mrs. Dr. Kennicott interfered and showed off again. She commented, "Don't you think that we already get enough of the Bible in our churches and Sunday Schools?" Mrs. Leonard Warren, somewhat out of order but much more out of temper, cried, "Well upon my word! I didn't suppose there was any one who felt that we could get enough of the Bible! I guess if the Grand Old Book has withstood the attacks of infidels for these two thousand years it is worth our SLIGHT consideration!" "Oh, I didn't mean----" Carol begged. Inasmuch as she did mean, it was hard to be extremely lucid. "But I wish, instead of limiting ourselves either to the Bible, or to anecdotes about the Brothers Adam's wigs, which Culture Hints seems to regard as the significant point about furniture, we could study some of the really stirring ideas that are springing up today--whether it's chemistry or anthropology or labor problems--the things that are going to mean so terribly much." Everybody cleared her polite throat. Madam Chairman inquired, "Is there any other discussion? Will some one make a motion to adopt the suggestion of Vida Sherwin--to take up Furnishings and China?" It was adopted, unanimously. "Checkmate!" murmured Carol, as she held up her hand. Had she actually believed that she could plant a seed of liberalism in the blank wall of mediocrity? How had she fallen into the folly of trying to plant anything whatever in a wall so smooth and sun-glazed, and so satisfying to the happy sleepers within?

Chapter 11

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-11

One day, a woman from the town's Thanatopsis Club barges into Carol's house and says Carol should go to the club's next meeting, where they'll discuss English poetry. Carol didn't realize this group was so literary, and she answers that she'd be delighted to go. Unfortunately, Carol quickly learns that the discussion of the poets is totally superficial. All they do is talk about the poets' lives and accomplishments without ever actually looking at their work. Carol tries to correct this, but what she says is over the heads of her listeners. Still, Carol tries hard to fit in, despite her dissatisfaction. The next day, Carol decides to check out the building for City Hall. She also visits the town library and asks the librarian there to give a talk sometime for the Thanatopsis Club, since she's the only woman in the town who might actually know about books. The woman says that the Thanatopsis Club has never been very keen on her. Carol decides to confide her dreams for Gopher Prairie to Miss Villets. But Miss Villets thinks that if the town is going to be improved, it'll have to be done through the churches. Carol doesn't like this idea, because she thinks that churches are stuck in the past. Unfortunately, Carol gets stuck contributing to plans that the town has already set in motion. Carol asks another woman named Mrs. Cass if they could find ways to rebuild the town's major buildings. Mrs. Cass rejects the idea by saying that taxes are too high as it is, and the town shouldn't be allowed to spend one more cent. Carol finally decides to approach a millionaire in the town, Luke Dawson, and ask him to give all his money to making Gopher Prairie more beautiful. Dawson basically laughs her out of his house. Plus, he thinks the town is fine just the way it is. After failing, Carol heads back to hang out with Miles Bjornstam to vent her frustrations about the town. He actually agrees with Mr. Dawson because he doesn't want some millionaire stepping in to help the town--he wants the town to help itself. At her next Thanatopsis meeting, Carol suggests that the club should try to help the poor people of the town by creating an employment bureau. She doesn't want to offer charity, but a chance to help the poor help themselves. The women are only interested in charity, though, since they figure there's no point in helping the poor if it doesn't make them feel good about themselves. Plus, the women don't really believe there's any true poverty in the town. The women of the club are more interested in getting more Bible study into the town. Carol thinks they've already got enough Bible study, but the women are offended at the idea that anyone can ever have enough Bible study. After this meeting, Carol more or less gives up on ever trying to change her town.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/12.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_11_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 12

chapter 12

{"name": "Chapter 12", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-12", "summary": "Carol starts going for long walks in nature alone to calm her mind and to feel better about her place in the world. This is the only time she feels she gets to act like a kid. While she's walking, Carol sees Miles Bjornstam. The guy invites her to join him and a buddy named Pete for a hunk of bacon. It sounds like Miles is just about to leave town to do some horse-trading for the summer. When Carol finally walks away from Miles, she feels lonely. When the summer heat rolls in, the whole town of Gopher Prairie becomes uncomfortable. The families of Gopher Prairie eventually go to their summer cottages. Carol visits a couple known as the \"Champ Perrys\" who used to be very rich but who lost quite a lot of money and now live in a cramped apartment. All she hears from them is the same conservative dogma she's always heard from Gopher Prairie. Carol had visited them hoping for inspiration because Champ Perry's ancestors had been pioneers--but she's sad to find out that Champ is just like everyone else. The next time she goes out, Carol runs into Miles, who is fresh back from horse-trading. She instantly feels more admiration for him than for anyone else she knows.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XII ONE week of authentic spring, one rare sweet week of May, one tranquil moment between the blast of winter and the charge of summer. Daily Carol walked from town into flashing country hysteric with new life. One enchanted hour when she returned to youth and a belief in the possibility of beauty. She had walked northward toward the upper shore of Plover Lake, taking to the railroad track, whose directness and dryness make it the natural highway for pedestrians on the plains. She stepped from tie to tie, in long strides. At each road-crossing she had to crawl over a cattle-guard of sharpened timbers. She walked the rails, balancing with arms extended, cautious heel before toe. As she lost balance her body bent over, her arms revolved wildly, and when she toppled she laughed aloud. The thick grass beside the track, coarse and prickly with many burnings, hid canary-yellow buttercups and the mauve petals and woolly sage-green coats of the pasque flowers. The branches of the kinnikinic brush were red and smooth as lacquer on a saki bowl. She ran down the gravelly embankment, smiled at children gathering flowers in a little basket, thrust a handful of the soft pasque flowers into the bosom of her white blouse. Fields of springing wheat drew her from the straight propriety of the railroad and she crawled through the rusty barbed-wire fence. She followed a furrow between low wheat blades and a field of rye which showed silver lights as it flowed before the wind. She found a pasture by the lake. So sprinkled was the pasture with rag-baby blossoms and the cottony herb of Indian tobacco that it spread out like a rare old Persian carpet of cream and rose and delicate green. Under her feet the rough grass made a pleasant crunching. Sweet winds blew from the sunny lake beside her, and small waves sputtered on the meadowy shore. She leaped a tiny creek bowered in pussy-willow buds. She was nearing a frivolous grove of birch and poplar and wild plum trees. The poplar foliage had the downiness of a Corot arbor; the green and silver trunks were as candid as the birches, as slender and lustrous as the limbs of a Pierrot. The cloudy white blossoms of the plum trees filled the grove with a springtime mistiness which gave an illusion of distance. She ran into the wood, crying out for joy of freedom regained after winter. Choke-cherry blossoms lured her from the outer sun-warmed spaces to depths of green stillness, where a submarine light came through the young leaves. She walked pensively along an abandoned road. She found a moccasin-flower beside a lichen-covered log. At the end of the road she saw the open acres--dipping rolling fields bright with wheat. "I believe! The woodland gods still live! And out there, the great land. It's beautiful as the mountains. What do I care for Thanatopsises?" She came out on the prairie, spacious under an arch of boldly cut clouds. Small pools glittered. Above a marsh red-winged blackbirds chased a crow in a swift melodrama of the air. On a hill was silhouetted a man following a drag. His horse bent its neck and plodded, content. A path took her to the Corinth road, leading back to town. Dandelions glowed in patches amidst the wild grass by the way. A stream golloped through a concrete culvert beneath the road. She trudged in healthy weariness. A man in a bumping Ford rattled up beside her, hailed, "Give you a lift, Mrs. Kennicott?" "Thank you. It's awfully good of you, but I'm enjoying the walk." "Great day, by golly. I seen some wheat that must of been five inches high. Well, so long." She hadn't the dimmest notion who he was, but his greeting warmed her. This countryman gave her a companionship which she had never (whether by her fault or theirs or neither) been able to find in the matrons and commercial lords of the town. Half a mile from town, in a hollow between hazelnut bushes and a brook, she discovered a gipsy encampment: a covered wagon, a tent, a bunch of pegged-out horses. A broad-shouldered man was squatted on his heels, holding a frying-pan over a camp-fire. He looked toward her. He was Miles Bjornstam. "Well, well, what you doing out here?" he roared. "Come have a hunk o' bacon. Pete! Hey, Pete!" A tousled person came from behind the covered wagon. "Pete, here's the one honest-to-God lady in my bum town. Come on, crawl in and set a couple minutes, Mrs. Kennicott. I'm hiking off for all summer." The Red Swede staggered up, rubbed his cramped knees, lumbered to the wire fence, held the strands apart for her. She unconsciously smiled at him as she went through. Her skirt caught on a barb; he carefully freed it. Beside this man in blue flannel shirt, baggy khaki trousers, uneven suspenders, and vile felt hat, she was small and exquisite. The surly Pete set out an upturned bucket for her. She lounged on it, her elbows on her knees. "Where are you going?" she asked. "Just starting off for the summer, horse-trading." Bjornstam chuckled. His red mustache caught the sun. "Regular hoboes and public benefactors we are. Take a hike like this every once in a while. Sharks on horses. Buy 'em from farmers and sell 'em to others. We're honest--frequently. Great time. Camp along the road. I was wishing I had a chance to say good-by to you before I ducked out but----Say, you better come along with us." "I'd like to." "While you're playing mumblety-peg with Mrs. Lym Cass, Pete and me will be rambling across Dakota, through the Bad Lands, into the butte country, and when fall comes, we'll be crossing over a pass of the Big Horn Mountains, maybe, and camp in a snow-storm, quarter of a mile right straight up above a lake. Then in the morning we'll lie snug in our blankets and look up through the pines at an eagle. How'd it strike you? Heh? Eagle soaring and soaring all day--big wide sky----" "Don't! Or I will go with you, and I'm afraid there might be some slight scandal. Perhaps some day I'll do it. Good-by." Her hand disappeared in his blackened leather glove. From the turn in the road she waved at him. She walked on more soberly now, and she was lonely. But the wheat and grass were sleek velvet under the sunset; the prairie clouds were tawny gold; and she swung happily into Main Street. II Through the first days of June she drove with Kennicott on his calls. She identified him with the virile land; she admired him as she saw with what respect the farmers obeyed him. She was out in the early chill, after a hasty cup of coffee, reaching open country as the fresh sun came up in that unspoiled world. Meadow larks called from the tops of thin split fence-posts. The wild roses smelled clean. As they returned in late afternoon the low sun was a solemnity of radial bands, like a heavenly fan of beaten gold; the limitless circle of the grain was a green sea rimmed with fog, and the willow wind-breaks were palmy isles. Before July the close heat blanketed them. The tortured earth cracked. Farmers panted through corn-fields behind cultivators and the sweating flanks of horses. While she waited for Kennicott in the car, before a farmhouse, the seat burned her fingers and her head ached with the glare on fenders and hood. A black thunder-shower was followed by a dust storm which turned the sky yellow with the hint of a coming tornado. Impalpable black dust far-borne from Dakota covered the inner sills of the closed windows. The July heat was ever more stifling. They crawled along Main Street by day; they found it hard to sleep at night. They brought mattresses down to the living-room, and thrashed and turned by the open window. Ten times a night they talked of going out to soak themselves with the hose and wade through the dew, but they were too listless to take the trouble. On cool evenings, when they tried to go walking, the gnats appeared in swarms which peppered their faces and caught in their throats. She wanted the Northern pines, the Eastern sea, but Kennicott declared that it would be "kind of hard to get away, just NOW." The Health and Improvement Committee of the Thanatopsis asked her to take part in the anti-fly campaign, and she toiled about town persuading householders to use the fly-traps furnished by the club, or giving out money prizes to fly-swatting children. She was loyal enough but not ardent, and without ever quite intending to, she began to neglect the task as heat sucked at her strength. Kennicott and she motored North and spent a week with his mother--that is, Carol spent it with his mother, while he fished for bass. The great event was their purchase of a summer cottage, down on Lake Minniemashie. Perhaps the most amiable feature of life in Gopher Prairie was the summer cottages. They were merely two-room shanties, with a seepage of broken-down chairs, peeling veneered tables, chromos pasted on wooden walls, and inefficient kerosene stoves. They were so thin-walled and so close together that you could--and did--hear a baby being spanked in the fifth cottage off. But they were set among elms and lindens on a bluff which looked across the lake to fields of ripened wheat sloping up to green woods. Here the matrons forgot social jealousies, and sat gossiping in gingham; or, in old bathing-suits, surrounded by hysterical children, they paddled for hours. Carol joined them; she ducked shrieking small boys, and helped babies construct sand-basins for unfortunate minnows. She liked Juanita Haydock and Maud Dyer when she helped them make picnic-supper for the men, who came motoring out from town each evening. She was easier and more natural with them. In the debate as to whether there should be veal loaf or poached egg on hash, she had no chance to be heretical and oversensitive. They danced sometimes, in the evening; they had a minstrel show, with Kennicott surprisingly good as end-man; always they were encircled by children wise in the lore of woodchucks and gophers and rafts and willow whistles. If they could have continued this normal barbaric life Carol would have been the most enthusiastic citizen of Gopher Prairie. She was relieved to be assured that she did not want bookish conversation alone; that she did not expect the town to become a Bohemia. She was content now. She did not criticize. But in September, when the year was at its richest, custom dictated that it was time to return to town; to remove the children from the waste occupation of learning the earth, and send them back to lessons about the number of potatoes which (in a delightful world untroubled by commission-houses or shortages in freight-cars) William sold to John. The women who had cheerfully gone bathing all summer looked doubtful when Carol begged, "Let's keep up an outdoor life this winter, let's slide and skate." Their hearts shut again till spring, and the nine months of cliques and radiators and dainty refreshments began all over. III Carol had started a salon. Since Kennicott, Vida Sherwin, and Guy Pollock were her only lions, and since Kennicott would have preferred Sam Clark to all the poets and radicals in the entire world, her private and self-defensive clique did not get beyond one evening dinner for Vida and Guy, on her first wedding anniversary; and that dinner did not get beyond a controversy regarding Raymie Wutherspoon's yearnings. Guy Pollock was the gentlest person she had found here. He spoke of her new jade and cream frock naturally, not jocosely; he held her chair for her as they sat down to dinner; and he did not, like Kennicott, interrupt her to shout, "Oh say, speaking of that, I heard a good story today." But Guy was incurably hermit. He sat late and talked hard, and did not come again. Then she met Champ Perry in the post-office--and decided that in the history of the pioneers was the panacea for Gopher Prairie, for all of America. We have lost their sturdiness, she told herself. We must restore the last of the veterans to power and follow them on the backward path to the integrity of Lincoln, to the gaiety of settlers dancing in a saw-mill. She read in the records of the Minnesota Territorial Pioneers that only sixty years ago, not so far back as the birth of her own father, four cabins had composed Gopher Prairie. The log stockade which Mrs. Champ Perry was to find when she trekked in was built afterward by the soldiers as a defense against the Sioux. The four cabins were inhabited by Maine Yankees who had come up the Mississippi to St. Paul and driven north over virgin prairie into virgin woods. They ground their own corn; the men-folks shot ducks and pigeons and prairie chickens; the new breakings yielded the turnip-like rutabagas, which they ate raw and boiled and baked and raw again. For treat they had wild plums and crab-apples and tiny wild strawberries. Grasshoppers came darkening the sky, and in an hour ate the farmwife's garden and the farmer's coat. Precious horses painfully brought from Illinois, were drowned in bogs or stampeded by the fear of blizzards. Snow blew through the chinks of new-made cabins, and Eastern children, with flowery muslin dresses, shivered all winter and in summer were red and black with mosquito bites. Indians were everywhere; they camped in dooryards, stalked into kitchens to demand doughnuts, came with rifles across their backs into schoolhouses and begged to see the pictures in the geographies. Packs of timber-wolves treed the children; and the settlers found dens of rattle-snakes, killed fifty, a hundred, in a day. Yet it was a buoyant life. Carol read enviously in the admirable Minnesota chronicles called "Old Rail Fence Corners" the reminiscence of Mrs. Mahlon Black, who settled in Stillwater in 1848: "There was nothing to parade over in those days. We took it as it came and had happy lives. . . . We would all gather together and in about two minutes would be having a good time--playing cards or dancing. . . . We used to waltz and dance contra dances. None of these new jigs and not wear any clothes to speak of. We covered our hides in those days; no tight skirts like now. You could take three or four steps inside our skirts and then not reach the edge. One of the boys would fiddle a while and then some one would spell him and he could get a dance. Sometimes they would dance and fiddle too." She reflected that if she could not have ballrooms of gray and rose and crystal, she wanted to be swinging across a puncheon-floor with a dancing fiddler. This smug in-between town, which had exchanged "Money Musk" for phonographs grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic old nor the sophisticated new. Couldn't she somehow, some yet unimagined how, turn it back to simplicity? She herself knew two of the pioneers: the Perrys. Champ Perry was the buyer at the grain-elevator. He weighed wagons of wheat on a rough platform-scale, in the cracks of which the kernels sprouted every spring. Between times he napped in the dusty peace of his office. She called on the Perrys at their rooms above Howland & Gould's grocery. When they were already old they had lost the money, which they had invested in an elevator. They had given up their beloved yellow brick house and moved into these rooms over a store, which were the Gopher Prairie equivalent of a flat. A broad stairway led from the street to the upper hall, along which were the doors of a lawyer's office, a dentist's, a photographer's "studio," the lodge-rooms of the Affiliated Order of Spartans and, at the back, the Perrys' apartment. They received her (their first caller in a month) with aged fluttering tenderness. Mrs. Perry confided, "My, it's a shame we got to entertain you in such a cramped place. And there ain't any water except that ole iron sink outside in the hall, but still, as I say to Champ, beggars can't be choosers. 'Sides, the brick house was too big for me to sweep, and it was way out, and it's nice to be living down here among folks. Yes, we're glad to be here. But----Some day, maybe we can have a house of our own again. We're saving up----Oh, dear, if we could have our own home! But these rooms are real nice, ain't they!" As old people will, the world over, they had moved as much as possible of their familiar furniture into this small space. Carol had none of the superiority she felt toward Mrs. Lyman Cass's plutocratic parlor. She was at home here. She noted with tenderness all the makeshifts: the darned chair-arms, the patent rocker covered with sleazy cretonne, the pasted strips of paper mending the birch-bark napkin-rings labeled "Papa" and "Mama." She hinted of her new enthusiasm. To find one of the "young folks" who took them seriously, heartened the Perrys, and she easily drew from them the principles by which Gopher Prairie should be born again--should again become amusing to live in. This was their philosophy complete . . . in the era of aeroplanes and syndicalism: The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the divinely ordained standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and ethics. "We don't need all this new-fangled science, or this terrible Higher Criticism that's ruining our young men in colleges. What we need is to get back to the true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have it preached to us." The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is the agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs. All socialists ought to be hanged. "Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good morals in his novels, and folks say he's made prett' near a million dollars out of 'em." People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred are wicked. Europeans are still wickeder. It doesn't hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybody who touches wine is headed straight for hell. Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be. Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody. The farmers want too much for their wheat. The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the salaries they pay. There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world if everybody worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our first farm. IV Carol's hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding, and the nodding dwindled to a desire to escape, and she went home with a headache. Next day she saw Miles Bjornstam on the street. "Just back from Montana. Great summer. Pumped my lungs chuck-full of Rocky Mountain air. Now for another whirl at sassing the bosses of Gopher Prairie." She smiled at him, and the Perrys faded, the pioneers faded, till they were but daguerreotypes in a black walnut cupboard.

Chapter 12

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-12

Carol starts going for long walks in nature alone to calm her mind and to feel better about her place in the world. This is the only time she feels she gets to act like a kid. While she's walking, Carol sees Miles Bjornstam. The guy invites her to join him and a buddy named Pete for a hunk of bacon. It sounds like Miles is just about to leave town to do some horse-trading for the summer. When Carol finally walks away from Miles, she feels lonely. When the summer heat rolls in, the whole town of Gopher Prairie becomes uncomfortable. The families of Gopher Prairie eventually go to their summer cottages. Carol visits a couple known as the "Champ Perrys" who used to be very rich but who lost quite a lot of money and now live in a cramped apartment. All she hears from them is the same conservative dogma she's always heard from Gopher Prairie. Carol had visited them hoping for inspiration because Champ Perry's ancestors had been pioneers--but she's sad to find out that Champ is just like everyone else. The next time she goes out, Carol runs into Miles, who is fresh back from horse-trading. She instantly feels more admiration for him than for anyone else she knows.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/13.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_12_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 13

chapter 13

{"name": "Chapter 13", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-13", "summary": "Carol keeps calling on the Champ Perrys out of loyalty more than anything else. But the next time she calls on them, they aren't at home. She sees a light under one of the other doors in their building, and she knocks on it, only to find Guy Pollock, her husband's lawyer friend, on the other side. Carol sits down with Guy, and they soon get to talking about Gopher Prairie. Carol realizes that Guy is a kindred spirit who thinks that there's much more to life than Gopher Prairie has to offer. Unfortunately, Guy is too scared to rock the boat or move anywhere else. The way he puts it, there is a \"Village Virus\" that's gotten into his system and made him spineless. The more Carol and Guy walk, the more Carol feels a romantic attraction to him. But she also feels repulsed by his submission to Gopher Prairie, because it's the exact kind of thing she's trying to avoid. Guy starts tiptoeing around the idea that he wants to be romantically involved with Carol, but then he admits he's too much of a coward to do so. He gets to talking about how even Carol's husband Will is in unfriendly competition with the other doctors in town, but Carol is unwilling to believe he's so petty. Guy crosses his room and caresses Carol's hand , but then he retreats. It's getting late, and Carol wants to leave before her meeting with Guy becomes any more inappropriate. But he convinces her to stay by inviting some neighbors over to keep everything on the up and up.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XIII SHE tried, more from loyalty than from desire, to call upon the Perrys on a November evening when Kennicott was away. They were not at home. Like a child who has no one to play with she loitered through the dark hall. She saw a light under an office door. She knocked. To the person who opened she murmured, "Do you happen to know where the Perrys are?" She realized that it was Guy Pollock. "I'm awfully sorry, Mrs. Kennicott, but I don't know. Won't you come in and wait for them?" "W-why----" she observed, as she reflected that in Gopher Prairie it is not decent to call on a man; as she decided that no, really, she wouldn't go in; and as she went in. "I didn't know your office was up here." "Yes, office, town-house, and chateau in Picardy. But you can't see the chateau and town-house (next to the Duke of Sutherland's). They're beyond that inner door. They are a cot and a wash-stand and my other suit and the blue crepe tie you said you liked." "You remember my saying that?" "Of course. I always shall. Please try this chair." She glanced about the rusty office--gaunt stove, shelves of tan law-books, desk-chair filled with newspapers so long sat upon that they were in holes and smudged to grayness. There were only two things which suggested Guy Pollock. On the green felt of the table-desk, between legal blanks and a clotted inkwell, was a cloissone vase. On a swing shelf was a row of books unfamiliar to Gopher Prairie: Mosher editions of the poets, black and red German novels, a Charles Lamb in crushed levant. Guy did not sit down. He quartered the office, a grayhound on the scent; a grayhound with glasses tilted forward on his thin nose, and a silky indecisive brown mustache. He had a golf jacket of jersey, worn through at the creases in the sleeves. She noted that he did not apologize for it, as Kennicott would have done. He made conversation: "I didn't know you were a bosom friend of the Perrys. Champ is the salt of the earth but somehow I can't imagine him joining you in symbolic dancing, or making improvements on the Diesel engine." "No. He's a dear soul, bless him, but he belongs in the National Museum, along with General Grant's sword, and I'm----Oh, I suppose I'm seeking for a gospel that will evangelize Gopher Prairie." "Really? Evangelize it to what?" "To anything that's definite. Seriousness or frivolousness or both. I wouldn't care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it's merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?" "Is anything the matter with it? Isn't there perhaps something the matter with you and me? (May I join you in the honor of having something the matter?)" "(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it's the town." "Because they enjoy skating more than biology?" "But I'm not only more interested in biology than the Jolly Seventeen, but also in skating! I'll skate with them, or slide, or throw snowballs, just as gladly as talk with you." ("Oh no!") ("Yes!) But they want to stay home and embroider." "Perhaps. I'm not defending the town. It's merely----I'm a confirmed doubter of myself. (Probably I'm conceited about my lack of conceit!) Anyway, Gopher Prairie isn't particularly bad. It's like all villages in all countries. Most places that have lost the smell of earth but not yet acquired the smell of patchouli--or of factory-smoke--are just as suspicious and righteous. I wonder if the small town isn't, with some lovely exceptions, a social appendix? Some day these dull market-towns may be as obsolete as monasteries. I can imagine the farmer and his local store-manager going by monorail, at the end of the day, into a city more charming than any William Morris Utopia--music, a university, clubs for loafers like me. (Lord, how I'd like to have a real club!)" She asked impulsively, "You, why do you stay here?" "I have the Village Virus." "It sounds dangerous." "It is. More dangerous than the cancer that will certainly get me at fifty unless I stop this smoking. The Village Virus is the germ which--it's extraordinarily like the hook-worm--it infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. You'll find it epidemic among lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-bred merchants--all these people who have had a glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned to their swamp. I'm a perfect example. But I sha'n't pester you with my dolors." "You won't. And do sit down, so I can see you." He dropped into the shrieking desk-chair. He looked squarely at her; she was conscious of the pupils of his eyes; of the fact that he was a man, and lonely. They were embarrassed. They elaborately glanced away, and were relieved as he went on: "The diagnosis of my Village Virus is simple enough. I was born in an Ohio town about the same size as Gopher Prairie, and much less friendly. It'd had more generations in which to form an oligarchy of respectability. Here, a stranger is taken in if he is correct, if he likes hunting and motoring and God and our Senator. There, we didn't take in even our own till we had contemptuously got used to them. It was a red-brick Ohio town, and the trees made it damp, and it smelled of rotten apples. The country wasn't like our lakes and prairie. There were small stuffy corn-fields and brick-yards and greasy oil-wells. "I went to a denominational college and learned that since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it. From college I went to New York, to the Columbia Law School. And for four years I lived. Oh, I won't rhapsodize about New York. It was dirty and noisy and breathless and ghastly expensive. But compared with the moldy academy in which I had been smothered----! I went to symphonies twice a week. I saw Irving and Terry and Duse and Bernhardt, from the top gallery. I walked in Gramercy Park. And I read, oh, everything. "Through a cousin I learned that Julius Flickerbaugh was sick and needed a partner. I came here. Julius got well. He didn't like my way of loafing five hours and then doing my work (really not so badly) in one. We parted. "When I first came here I swore I'd 'keep up my interests.' Very lofty! I read Browning, and went to Minneapolis for the theaters. I thought I was 'keeping up.' But I guess the Village Virus had me already. I was reading four copies of cheap fiction-magazines to one poem. I'd put off the Minneapolis trips till I simply had to go there on a lot of legal matters. "A few years ago I was talking to a patent lawyer from Chicago, and I realized that----I'd always felt so superior to people like Julius Flickerbaugh, but I saw that I was as provincial and behind-the-times as Julius. (Worse! Julius plows through the Literary Digest and the Outlook faithfully, while I'm turning over pages of a book by Charles Flandrau that I already know by heart.) "I decided to leave here. Stern resolution. Grasp the world. Then I found that the Village Virus had me, absolute: I didn't want to face new streets and younger men--real competition. It was too easy to go on making out conveyances and arguing ditching cases. So----That's all of the biography of a living dead man, except the diverting last chapter, the lies about my having been 'a tower of strength and legal wisdom' which some day a preacher will spin over my lean dry body." He looked down at his table-desk, fingering the starry enameled vase. She could not comment. She pictured herself running across the room to pat his hair. She saw that his lips were firm, under his soft faded mustache. She sat still and maundered, "I know. The Village Virus. Perhaps it will get me. Some day I'm going----Oh, no matter. At least, I am making you talk! Usually you have to be polite to my garrulousness, but now I'm sitting at your feet." "It would be rather nice to have you literally sitting at my feet, by a fire." "Would you have a fireplace for me?" "Naturally! Please don't snub me now! Let the old man rave. How old are you, Carol?" "Twenty-six, Guy." "Twenty-six! I was just leaving New York, at twenty-six. I heard Patti sing, at twenty-six. And now I'm forty-seven. I feel like a child, yet I'm old enough to be your father. So it's decently paternal to imagine you curled at my feet. . . . Of course I hope it isn't, but we'll reflect the morals of Gopher Prairie by officially announcing that it is! . . . These standards that you and I live up to! There's one thing that's the matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling-class (there is a ruling-class, despite all our professions of democracy). And the penalty we tribal rulers pay is that our subjects watch us every minute. We can't get wholesomely drunk and relax. We have to be so correct about sex morals, and inconspicuous clothes, and doing our commercial trickery only in the traditional ways, that none of us can live up to it, and we become horribly hypocritical. Unavoidably. The widow-robbing deacon of fiction can't help being hypocritical. The widows themselves demand it! They admire his unctuousness. And look at me. Suppose I did dare to make love to--some exquisite married woman. I wouldn't admit it to myself. I giggle with the most revolting salaciousness over La Vie Parisienne, when I get hold of one in Chicago, yet I shouldn't even try to hold your hand. I'm broken. It's the historical Anglo-Saxon way of making life miserable. . . . Oh, my dear, I haven't talked to anybody about myself and all our selves for years." "Guy! Can't we do something with the town? Really?" "No, we can't!" He disposed of it like a judge ruling out an improper objection; returned to matters less uncomfortably energetic: "Curious. Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes. Here in Gopher Prairie we've cleared the fields, and become soft, so we make ourselves unhappy artificially, at great expense and exertion: Methodists disliking Episcopalians, the man with the Hudson laughing at the man with the flivver. The worst is the commercial hatred--the grocer feeling that any man who doesn't deal with him is robbing him. What hurts me is that it applies to lawyers and doctors (and decidedly to their wives!) as much as to grocers. The doctors--you know about that--how your husband and Westlake and Gould dislike one another." "No! I won't admit it!" He grinned. "Oh, maybe once or twice, when Will has positively known of a case where Doctor--where one of the others has continued to call on patients longer than necessary, he has laughed about it, but----" He still grinned. "No, REALLY! And when you say the wives of the doctors share these jealousies----Mrs. McGanum and I haven't any particular crush on each other; she's so stolid. But her mother, Mrs. Westlake--nobody could be sweeter." "Yes, I'm sure she's very bland. But I wouldn't tell her my heart's secrets if I were you, my dear. I insist that there's only one professional-man's wife in this town who doesn't plot, and that is you, you blessed, credulous outsider!" "I won't be cajoled! I won't believe that medicine, the priesthood of healing, can be turned into a penny-picking business." "See here: Hasn't Kennicott ever hinted to you that you'd better be nice to some old woman because she tells her friends which doctor to call in? But I oughtn't to----" She remembered certain remarks which Kennicott had offered regarding the Widow Bogart. She flinched, looked at Guy beseechingly. He sprang up, strode to her with a nervous step, smoothed her hand. She wondered if she ought to be offended by his caress. Then she wondered if he liked her hat, the new Oriental turban of rose and silver brocade. He dropped her hand. His elbow brushed her shoulder. He flitted over to the desk-chair, his thin back stooped. He picked up the cloisonne vase. Across it he peered at her with such loneliness that she was startled. But his eyes faded into impersonality as he talked of the jealousies of Gopher Prairie. He stopped himself with a sharp, "Good Lord, Carol, you're not a jury. You are within your legal rights in refusing to be subjected to this summing-up. I'm a tedious old fool analyzing the obvious, while you're the spirit of rebellion. Tell me your side. What is Gopher Prairie to you?" "A bore!" "Can I help?" "How could you?" "I don't know. Perhaps by listening. I haven't done that tonight. But normally----Can't I be the confidant of the old French plays, the tiring-maid with the mirror and the loyal ears?" "Oh, what is there to confide? The people are savorless and proud of it. And even if I liked you tremendously, I couldn't talk to you without twenty old hexes watching, whispering." "But you will come talk to me, once in a while?" "I'm not sure that I shall. I'm trying to develop my own large capacity for dullness and contentment. I've failed at every positive thing I've tried. I'd better 'settle down,' as they call it, and be satisfied to be--nothing." "Don't be cynical. It hurts me, in you. It's like blood on the wing of a humming-bird." "I'm not a humming-bird. I'm a hawk; a tiny leashed hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy hens. But I am grateful to you for confirming me in the faith. And I'm going home!" "Please stay and have some coffee with me." "I'd like to. But they've succeeded in terrorizing me. I'm afraid of what people might say." "I'm not afraid of that. I'm only afraid of what you might say!" He stalked to her; took her unresponsive hand. "Carol! You have been happy here tonight? (Yes. I'm begging!)" She squeezed his hand quickly, then snatched hers away. She had but little of the curiosity of the flirt, and none of the intrigante's joy in furtiveness. If she was the naive girl, Guy Pollock was the clumsy boy. He raced about the office; he rammed his fists into his pockets. He stammered, "I--I--I----Oh, the devil! Why do I awaken from smooth dustiness to this jagged rawness? I'll make I'm going to trot down the hall and bring in the Dillons, and we'll all have coffee or something." "The Dillons?" "Yes. Really quite a decent young pair--Harvey Dillon and his wife. He's a dentist, just come to town. They live in a room behind his office, same as I do here. They don't know much of anybody----" "I've heard of them. And I've never thought to call. I'm horribly ashamed. Do bring them----" She stopped, for no very clear reason, but his expression said, her faltering admitted, that they wished they had never mentioned the Dillons. With spurious enthusiasm he said, "Splendid! I will." From the door he glanced at her, curled in the peeled leather chair. He slipped out, came back with Dr. and Mrs. Dillon. The four of them drank rather bad coffee which Pollock made on a kerosene burner. They laughed, and spoke of Minneapolis, and were tremendously tactful; and Carol started for home, through the November wind.

Chapter 13

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-13

Carol keeps calling on the Champ Perrys out of loyalty more than anything else. But the next time she calls on them, they aren't at home. She sees a light under one of the other doors in their building, and she knocks on it, only to find Guy Pollock, her husband's lawyer friend, on the other side. Carol sits down with Guy, and they soon get to talking about Gopher Prairie. Carol realizes that Guy is a kindred spirit who thinks that there's much more to life than Gopher Prairie has to offer. Unfortunately, Guy is too scared to rock the boat or move anywhere else. The way he puts it, there is a "Village Virus" that's gotten into his system and made him spineless. The more Carol and Guy walk, the more Carol feels a romantic attraction to him. But she also feels repulsed by his submission to Gopher Prairie, because it's the exact kind of thing she's trying to avoid. Guy starts tiptoeing around the idea that he wants to be romantically involved with Carol, but then he admits he's too much of a coward to do so. He gets to talking about how even Carol's husband Will is in unfriendly competition with the other doctors in town, but Carol is unwilling to believe he's so petty. Guy crosses his room and caresses Carol's hand , but then he retreats. It's getting late, and Carol wants to leave before her meeting with Guy becomes any more inappropriate. But he convinces her to stay by inviting some neighbors over to keep everything on the up and up.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/14.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_13_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 14

chapter 14

{"name": "Chapter 14", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-14", "summary": "As she walks home from Guy Pollock's, Carol wonders if she's capable of cheating on her husband Will. All kinds of thoughts fly through her head until she reaches home, where Will asks what's kept her out so late. She tells him she's been at Guy Pollock's and has to reassure him by saying that the neighbors were over, too. She doesn't bother to tell him about the long time she spent with Guy before these neighbors came over. Carol decides to fish for Will's opinions on the other doctors in Gopher Prairie to see if Guy was right about his competitiveness. She's sad to see that Will does have a grudge against the other doctors. Will realizes what Carol is implying and gets angry with her for being so willing to think poorly of him. He goes to sleep angry, and Carol feels that the love in their marriage is gone. Carol uses the argument as an opportunity to bring up the fact that she wants a set allowance from Will. He argues that his income goes up and down depending on business, so he can't arrange for a set amount. So Carol wants a percentage, and yadda yadda, it goes on like that. Will eventually agrees to let Carol establish a budget so that she can run their household like a business. Carol is tender with Will for a moment, but then they start arguing again. Will says that Carol just likes to be dissatisfied because she thinks her dissatisfaction makes her superior to people who just enjoy life. Carol admits that there might be something to this. Will also thinks that Carol doesn't have enough sympathy for the people of Gopher Prairie. Will mentions that Carol isn't the only person in the world who's dissatisfied. He just isn't selfish enough to go broadcasting his own dissatisfaction all over town.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XIV SHE was marching home. "No. I couldn't fall in love with him. I like him, very much. But he's too much of a recluse. Could I kiss him? No! No! Guy Pollock at twenty-six I could have kissed him then, maybe, even if I were married to some one else, and probably I'd have been glib in persuading myself that 'it wasn't really wrong.' "The amazing thing is that I'm not more amazed at myself. I, the virtuous young matron. Am I to be trusted? If the Prince Charming came---- "A Gopher Prairie housewife, married a year, and yearning for a 'Prince Charming' like a bachfisch of sixteen! They say that marriage is a magic change. But I'm not changed. But---- "No! I wouldn't want to fall in love, even if the Prince did come. I wouldn't want to hurt Will. I am fond of Will. I am! He doesn't stir me, not any longer. But I depend on him. He is home and children. "I wonder when we will begin to have children? I do want them. "I wonder whether I remembered to tell Bea to have hominy tomorrow, instead of oatmeal? She will have gone to bed by now. Perhaps I'll be up early enough---- "Ever so fond of Will. I wouldn't hurt him, even if I had to lose the mad love. If the Prince came I'd look once at him, and run. Darn fast! Oh, Carol, you are not heroic nor fine. You are the immutable vulgar young female. "But I'm not the faithless wife who enjoys confiding that she's 'misunderstood.' Oh, I'm not, I'm not! "Am I? "At least I didn't whisper to Guy about Will's faults and his blindness to my remarkable soul. I didn't! Matter of fact, Will probably understands me perfectly! If only--if he would just back me up in rousing the town. "How many, how incredibly many wives there must be who tingle over the first Guy Pollock who smiles at them. No! I will not be one of that herd of yearners! The coy virgin brides. Yet probably if the Prince were young and dared to face life---- "I'm not half as well oriented as that Mrs. Dillon. So obviously adoring her dentist! And seeing Guy only as an eccentric fogy. "They weren't silk, Mrs. Dillon's stockings. They were lisle. Her legs are nice and slim. But no nicer than mine. I hate cotton tops on silk stockings. . . . Are my ankles getting fat? I will NOT have fat ankles! "No. I am fond of Will. His work--one farmer he pulls through diphtheria is worth all my yammering for a castle in Spain. A castle with baths. "This hat is so tight. I must stretch it. Guy liked it. "There's the house. I'm awfully chilly. Time to get out the fur coat. I wonder if I'll ever have a beaver coat? Nutria is NOT the same thing! Beaver-glossy. Like to run my fingers over it. Guy's mustache like beaver. How utterly absurd! "I am, I AM fond of Will, and----Can't I ever find another word than 'fond'? "He's home. He'll think I was out late. "Why can't he ever remember to pull down the shades? Cy Bogart and all the beastly boys peeping in. But the poor dear, he's absent-minded about minute--minush--whatever the word is. He has so much worry and work, while I do nothing but jabber to Bea. "I MUSTN'T forget the hominy----" She was flying into the hall. Kennicott looked up from the Journal of the American Medical Society. "Hello! What time did you get back?" she cried. "About nine. You been gadding. Here it is past eleven!" Good-natured yet not quite approving. "Did it feel neglected?" "Well, you didn't remember to close the lower draft in the furnace." "Oh, I'm so sorry. But I don't often forget things like that, do I?" She dropped into his lap and (after he had jerked back his head to save his eye-glasses, and removed the glasses, and settled her in a position less cramping to his legs, and casually cleared his throat) he kissed her amiably, and remarked: "Nope, I must say you're fairly good about things like that. I wasn't kicking. I just meant I wouldn't want the fire to go out on us. Leave that draft open and the fire might burn up and go out on us. And the nights are beginning to get pretty cold again. Pretty cold on my drive. I put the side-curtains up, it was so chilly. But the generator is working all right now." "Yes. It is chilly. But I feel fine after my walk." "Go walking?" "I went up to see the Perrys." By a definite act of will she added the truth: "They weren't in. And I saw Guy Pollock. Dropped into his office." "Why, you haven't been sitting and chinning with him till eleven o'clock?" "Of course there were some other people there and----Will! What do you think of Dr. Westlake?" "Westlake? Why?" "I noticed him on the street today." "Was he limping? If the poor fish would have his teeth X-rayed, I'll bet nine and a half cents he'd find an abscess there. 'Rheumatism' he calls it. Rheumatism, hell! He's behind the times. Wonder he doesn't bleed himself! Wellllllll----" A profound and serious yawn. "I hate to break up the party, but it's getting late, and a doctor never knows when he'll get routed out before morning." (She remembered that he had given this explanation, in these words, not less than thirty times in the year.) "I guess we better be trotting up to bed. I've wound the clock and looked at the furnace. Did you lock the front door when you came in?" They trailed up-stairs, after he had turned out the lights and twice tested the front door to make sure it was fast. While they talked they were preparing for bed. Carol still sought to maintain privacy by undressing behind the screen of the closet door. Kennicott was not so reticent. Tonight, as every night, she was irritated by having to push the old plush chair out of the way before she could open the closet door. Every time she opened the door she shoved the chair. Ten times an hour. But Kennicott liked to have the chair in the room, and there was no place for it except in front of the closet. She pushed it, felt angry, hid her anger. Kennicott was yawning, more portentously. The room smelled stale. She shrugged and became chatty: "You were speaking of Dr. Westlake. Tell me--you've never summed him up: Is he really a good doctor?" "Oh yes, he's a wise old coot." ("There! You see there is no medical rivalry. Not in my house!" she said triumphantly to Guy Pollock.) She hung her silk petticoat on a closet hook, and went on, "Dr. Westlake is so gentle and scholarly----" "Well, I don't know as I'd say he was such a whale of a scholar. I've always had a suspicion he did a good deal of four-flushing about that. He likes to have people think he keeps up his French and Greek and Lord knows what all; and he's always got an old Dago book lying around the sitting-room, but I've got a hunch he reads detective stories 'bout like the rest of us. And I don't know where he'd ever learn so dog-gone many languages anyway! He kind of lets people assume he went to Harvard or Berlin or Oxford or somewhere, but I looked him up in the medical register, and he graduated from a hick college in Pennsylvania, 'way back in 1861!" "But this is the important thing: Is he an honest doctor?" "How do you mean 'honest'? Depends on what you mean." "Suppose you were sick. Would you call him in? Would you let me call him in?" "Not if I were well enough to cuss and bite, I wouldn't! No, SIR! I wouldn't have the old fake in the house. Makes me tired, his everlasting palavering and soft-soaping. He's all right for an ordinary bellyache or holding some fool woman's hand, but I wouldn't call him in for an honest-to-God illness, not much I wouldn't, NO-sir! You know I don't do much back-biting, but same time----I'll tell you, Carrrie: I've never got over being sore at Westlake for the way he treated Mrs. Jonderquist. Nothing the matter with her, what she really needed was a rest, but Westlake kept calling on her and calling on her for weeks, almost every day, and he sent her a good big fat bill, too, you can bet! I never did forgive him for that. Nice decent hard-working people like the Jonderquists!" In her batiste nightgown she was standing at the bureau engaged in the invariable rites of wishing that she had a real dressing-table with a triple mirror, of bending toward the streaky glass and raising her chin to inspect a pin-head mole on her throat, and finally of brushing her hair. In rhythm to the strokes she went on: "But, Will, there isn't any of what you might call financial rivalry between you and the partners--Westlake and McGanum--is there?" He flipped into bed with a solemn back-somersault and a ludicrous kick of his heels as he tucked his legs under the blankets. He snorted, "Lord no! I never begrudge any man a nickel he can get away from me--fairly." "But is Westlake fair? Isn't he sly?" "Sly is the word. He's a fox, that boy!" She saw Guy Pollock's grin in the mirror. She flushed. Kennicott, with his arms behind his head, was yawning: "Yump. He's smooth, too smooth. But I bet I make prett' near as much as Westlake and McGanum both together, though I've never wanted to grab more than my just share. If anybody wants to go to the partners instead of to me, that's his business. Though I must say it makes me tired when Westlake gets hold of the Dawsons. Here Luke Dawson had been coming to me for every toeache and headache and a lot of little things that just wasted my time, and then when his grandchild was here last summer and had summer-complaint, I suppose, or something like that, probably--you know, the time you and I drove up to Lac-qui-Meurt--why, Westlake got hold of Ma Dawson, and scared her to death, and made her think the kid had appendicitis, and, by golly, if he and McGanum didn't operate, and holler their heads off about the terrible adhesions they found, and what a regular Charley and Will Mayo they were for classy surgery. They let on that if they'd waited two hours more the kid would have developed peritonitis, and God knows what all; and then they collected a nice fat hundred and fifty dollars. And probably they'd have charged three hundred, if they hadn't been afraid of me! I'm no hog, but I certainly do hate to give old Luke ten dollars' worth of advice for a dollar and a half, and then see a hundred and fifty go glimmering. And if I can't do a better 'pendectomy than either Westlake or McGanum, I'll eat my hat!" As she crept into bed she was dazzled by Guy's blazing grin. She experimented: "But Westlake is cleverer than his son-in-law, don't you think?" "Yes, Westlake may be old-fashioned and all that, but he's got a certain amount of intuition, while McGanum goes into everything bull-headed, and butts his way through like a damn yahoo, and tries to argue his patients into having whatever he diagnoses them as having! About the best thing Mac can do is to stick to baby-snatching. He's just about on a par with this bone-pounding chiropractor female, Mrs. Mattie Gooch." "Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. McGanum, though--they're nice. They've been awfully cordial to me." "Well, no reason why they shouldn't be, is there? Oh, they're nice enough--though you can bet your bottom dollar they're both plugging for their husbands all the time, trying to get the business. And I don't know as I call it so damn cordial in Mrs. McGanum when I holler at her on the street and she nods back like she had a sore neck. Still, she's all right. It's Ma Westlake that makes the mischief, pussyfooting around all the time. But I wouldn't trust any Westlake out of the whole lot, and while Mrs. McGanum SEEMS square enough, you don't never want to forget that she's Westlake's daughter. You bet!" "What about Dr. Gould? Don't you think he's worse than either Westlake or McGanum? He's so cheap--drinking, and playing pool, and always smoking cigars in such a cocky way----" "That's all right now! Terry Gould is a good deal of a tin-horn sport, but he knows a lot about medicine, and don't you forget it for one second!" She stared down Guy's grin, and asked more cheerfully, "Is he honest, too?" "Ooooooooooo! Gosh I'm sleepy!" He burrowed beneath the bedclothes in a luxurious stretch, and came up like a diver, shaking his head, as he complained, "How's that? Who? Terry Gould honest? Don't start me laughing--I'm too nice and sleepy! I didn't say he was honest. I said he had savvy enough to find the index in 'Gray's Anatomy,' which is more than McGanum can do! But I didn't say anything about his being honest. He isn't. Terry is crooked as a dog's hind leg. He's done me more than one dirty trick. He told Mrs. Glorbach, seventeen miles out, that I wasn't up-to-date in obstetrics. Fat lot of good it did him! She came right in and told me! And Terry's lazy. He'd let a pneumonia patient choke rather than interrupt a poker game." "Oh no. I can't believe----" "Well now, I'm telling you!" "Does he play much poker? Dr. Dillon told me that Dr. Gould wanted him to play----" "Dillon told you what? Where'd you meet Dillon? He's just come to town." "He and his wife were at Mr. Pollock's tonight." "Say, uh, what'd you think of them? Didn't Dillon strike you as pretty light-waisted?" "Why no. He seemed intelligent. I'm sure he's much more wide-awake than our dentist." "Well now, the old man is a good dentist. He knows his business. And Dillon----I wouldn't cuddle up to the Dillons too close, if I were you. All right for Pollock, and that's none of our business, but we----I think I'd just give the Dillons the glad hand and pass 'em up." "But why? He isn't a rival." "That's--all--right!" Kennicott was aggressively awake now. "He'll work right in with Westlake and McGanum. Matter of fact, I suspect they were largely responsible for his locating here. They'll be sending him patients, and he'll send all that he can get hold of to them. I don't trust anybody that's too much hand-in-glove with Westlake. You give Dillon a shot at some fellow that's just bought a farm here and drifts into town to get his teeth looked at, and after Dillon gets through with him, you'll see him edging around to Westlake and McGanum, every time!" Carol reached for her blouse, which hung on a chair by the bed. She draped it about her shoulders, and sat up studying Kennicott, her chin in her hands. In the gray light from the small electric bulb down the hall she could see that he was frowning. "Will, this is--I must get this straight. Some one said to me the other day that in towns like this, even more than in cities, all the doctors hate each other, because of the money----" "Who said that?" "It doesn't matter." "I'll bet a hat it was your Vida Sherwin. She's a brainy woman, but she'd be a damn sight brainier if she kept her mouth shut and didn't let so much of her brains ooze out that way." "Will! O Will! That's horrible! Aside from the vulgarity----Some ways, Vida is my best friend. Even if she HAD said it. Which, as a matter of fact, she didn't." He reared up his thick shoulders, in absurd pink and green flannelette pajamas. He sat straight, and irritatingly snapped his fingers, and growled: "Well, if she didn't say it, let's forget her. Doesn't make any difference who said it, anyway. The point is that you believe it. God! To think you don't understand me any better than that! Money!" ("This is the first real quarrel we've ever had," she was agonizing.) He thrust out his long arm and snatched his wrinkly vest from a chair. He took out a cigar, a match. He tossed the vest on the floor. He lighted the cigar and puffed savagely. He broke up the match and snapped the fragments at the foot-board. She suddenly saw the foot-board of the bed as the foot-stone of the grave of love. The room was drab-colored and ill-ventilated--Kennicott did not "believe in opening the windows so darn wide that you heat all outdoors." The stale air seemed never to change. In the light from the hall they were two lumps of bedclothes with shoulders and tousled heads attached. She begged, "I didn't mean to wake you up, dear. And please don't smoke. You've been smoking so much. Please go back to sleep. I'm sorry." "Being sorry 's all right, but I'm going to tell you one or two things. This falling for anybody's say-so about medical jealousy and competition is simply part and parcel of your usual willingness to think the worst you possibly can of us poor dubs in Gopher Prairie. Trouble with women like you is, you always want to ARGUE. Can't take things the way they are. Got to argue. Well, I'm not going to argue about this in any way, shape, manner, or form. Trouble with you is, you don't make any effort to appreciate us. You're so damned superior, and think the city is such a hell of a lot finer place, and you want us to do what YOU want, all the time----" "That's not true! It's I who make the effort. It's they--it's you--who stand back and criticize. I have to come over to the town's opinion; I have to devote myself to their interests. They can't even SEE my interests, to say nothing of adopting them. I get ever so excited about their old Lake Minniemashie and the cottages, but they simply guffaw (in that lovely friendly way you advertise so much) if I speak of wanting to see Taormina also." "Sure, Tormina, whatever that is--some nice expensive millionaire colony, I suppose. Sure; that's the idea; champagne taste and beer income; and make sure that we never will have more than a beer income, too!" "Are you by any chance implying that I am not economical?" "Well, I hadn't intended to, but since you bring it up yourself, I don't mind saying the grocery bills are about twice what they ought to be." "Yes, they probably are. I'm not economical. I can't be. Thanks to you!" "Where d' you get that 'thanks to you'?" "Please don't be quite so colloquial--or shall I say VULGAR?" "I'll be as damn colloquial as I want to. How do you get that 'thanks to you'? Here about a year ago you jump me for not remembering to give you money. Well, I'm reasonable. I didn't blame you, and I SAID I was to blame. But have I ever forgotten it since--practically?" "No. You haven't--practically! But that isn't it. I ought to have an allowance. I will, too! I must have an agreement for a regular stated amount, every month." "Fine idea! Of course a doctor gets a regular stated amount! Sure! A thousand one month--and lucky if he makes a hundred the next." "Very well then, a percentage. Or something else. No matter how much you vary, you can make a rough average for----" "But what's the idea? What are you trying to get at? Mean to say I'm unreasonable? Think I'm so unreliable and tightwad that you've got to tie me down with a contract? By God, that hurts! I thought I'd been pretty generous and decent, and I took a lot of pleasure--thinks I, 'she'll be tickled when I hand her over this twenty'--or fifty, or whatever it was; and now seems you been wanting to make it a kind of alimony. Me, like a poor fool, thinking I was liberal all the while, and you----" "Please stop pitying yourself! You're having a beautiful time feeling injured. I admit all you say. Certainly. You've given me money both freely and amiably. Quite as if I were your mistress!" "Carrie!" "I mean it! What was a magnificent spectacle of generosity to you was humiliation to me. You GAVE me money--gave it to your mistress, if she was complaisant, and then you----" "Carrie!" "(Don't interrupt me!)--then you felt you'd discharged all obligation. Well, hereafter I'll refuse your money, as a gift. Either I'm your partner, in charge of the household department of our business, with a regular budget for it, or else I'm nothing. If I'm to be a mistress, I shall choose my lovers. Oh, I hate it--I hate it--this smirking and hoping for money--and then not even spending it on jewels as a mistress has a right to, but spending it on double-boilers and socks for you! Yes indeed! You're generous! You give me a dollar, right out--the only proviso is that I must spend it on a tie for you! And you give it when and as you wish. How can I be anything but uneconomical?" "Oh well, of course, looking at it that way----" "I can't shop around, can't buy in large quantities, have to stick to stores where I have a charge account, good deal of the time, can't plan because I don't know how much money I can depend on. That's what I pay for your charming sentimentalities about giving so generously. You make me----" "Wait! Wait! You know you're exaggerating. You never thought about that mistress stuff till just this minute! Matter of fact, you never have 'smirked and hoped for money.' But all the same, you may be right. You ought to run the household as a business. I'll figure out a definite plan tomorrow, and hereafter you'll be on a regular amount or percentage, with your own checking account." "Oh, that IS decent of you!" She turned toward him, trying to be affectionate. But his eyes were pink and unlovely in the flare of the match with which he lighted his dead and malodorous cigar. His head drooped, and a ridge of flesh scattered with pale small bristles bulged out under his chin. She sat in abeyance till he croaked: "No. 'Tisn't especially decent. It's just fair. And God knows I want to be fair. But I expect others to be fair, too. And you're so high and mighty about people. Take Sam Clark; best soul that ever lived, honest and loyal and a damn good fellow----" ("Yes, and a good shot at ducks, don't forget that!") ("Well, and he is a good shot, too!) Sam drops around in the evening to sit and visit, and by golly just because he takes a dry smoke and rolls his cigar around in his mouth, and maybe spits a few times, you look at him as if he was a hog. Oh, you didn't know I was onto you, and I certainly hope Sam hasn't noticed it, but I never miss it." "I have felt that way. Spitting--ugh! But I'm sorry you caught my thoughts. I tried to be nice; I tried to hide them." "Maybe I catch a whole lot more than you think I do!" "Yes, perhaps you do." "And d' you know why Sam doesn't light his cigar when he's here?" "Why?" "He's so darn afraid you'll be offended if he smokes. You scare him. Every time he speaks of the weather you jump him because he ain't talking about poetry or Gertie--Goethe?--or some other highbrow junk. You've got him so leery he scarcely dares to come here." "Oh, I AM sorry. (Though I'm sure it's you who are exaggerating now.") "Well now, I don't know as I am! And I can tell you one thing: if you keep on you'll manage to drive away every friend I've got." "That would be horrible of me. You KNOW I don't mean to Will, what is it about me that frightens Sam--if I do frighten him." "Oh, you do, all right! 'Stead of putting his legs up on another chair, and unbuttoning his vest, and telling a good story or maybe kidding me about something, he sits on the edge of his chair and tries to make conversation about politics, and he doesn't even cuss, and Sam's never real comfortable unless he can cuss a little!" "In other words, he isn't comfortable unless he can behave like a peasant in a mud hut!" "Now that'll be about enough of that! You want to know how you scare him? First you deliberately fire some question at him that you know darn well he can't answer--any fool could see you were experimenting with him--and then you shock him by talking of mistresses or something, like you were doing just now----" "Of course the pure Samuel never speaks of such erring ladies in his private conversations!" "Not when there's ladies around! You can bet your life on that!" "So the impurity lies in failing to pretend that----" "Now we won't go into all that--eugenics or whatever damn fad you choose to call it. As I say, first you shock him, and then you become so darn flighty that nobody can follow you. Either you want to dance, or you bang the piano, or else you get moody as the devil and don't want to talk or anything else. If you must be temperamental, why can't you be that way by yourself?" "My dear man, there's nothing I'd like better than to be by myself occasionally! To have a room of my own! I suppose you expect me to sit here and dream delicately and satisfy my 'temperamentality' while you wander in from the bathroom with lather all over your face, and shout, 'Seen my brown pants?'" "Huh!" He did not sound impressed. He made no answer. He turned out of bed, his feet making one solid thud on the floor. He marched from the room, a grotesque figure in baggy union-pajamas. She heard him drawing a drink of water at the bathroom tap. She was furious at the contemptuousness of his exit. She snuggled down in bed, and looked away from him as he returned. He ignored her. As he flumped into bed he yawned, and casually stated: "Well, you'll have plenty of privacy when we build a new house. "When?" "Oh, I'll build it all right, don't you fret! But of course I don't expect any credit for it." Now it was she who grunted "Huh!" and ignored him, and felt independent and masterful as she shot up out of bed, turned her back on him, fished a lone and petrified chocolate out of her glove-box in the top right-hand drawer of the bureau, gnawed at it, found that it had cocoanut filling, said "Damn!" wished that she had not said it, so that she might be superior to his colloquialism, and hurled the chocolate into the wastebasket, where it made an evil and mocking clatter among the debris of torn linen collars and toothpaste box. Then, in great dignity and self-dramatization, she returned to bed. All this time he had been talking on, embroidering his assertion that he "didn't expect any credit." She was reflecting that he was a rustic, that she hated him, that she had been insane to marry him, that she had married him only because she was tired of work, that she must get her long gloves cleaned, that she would never do anything more for him, and that she mustn't forget his hominy for breakfast. She was roused to attention by his storming: "I'm a fool to think about a new house. By the time I get it built you'll probably have succeeded in your plan to get me completely in Dutch with every friend and every patient I've got." She sat up with a bounce. She said coldly, "Thank you very much for revealing your real opinion of me. If that's the way you feel, if I'm such a hindrance to you, I can't stay under this roof another minute. And I am perfectly well able to earn my own living. I will go at once, and you may get a divorce at your pleasure! What you want is a nice sweet cow of a woman who will enjoy having your dear friends talk about the weather and spit on the floor!" "Tut! Don't be a fool!" "You will very soon find out whether I'm a fool or not! I mean it! Do you think I'd stay here one second after I found out that I was injuring you? At least I have enough sense of justice not to do that." "Please stop flying off at tangents, Carrie. This----" "Tangents? TANGENTS! Let me tell you----" "----isn't a theater-play; it's a serious effort to have us get together on fundamentals. We've both been cranky, and said a lot of things we didn't mean. I wish we were a couple o' bloomin' poets and just talked about roses and moonshine, but we're human. All right. Let's cut out jabbing at each other. Let's admit we both do fool things. See here: You KNOW you feel superior to folks. You're not as bad as I say, but you're not as good as you say--not by a long shot! What's the reason you're so superior? Why can't you take folks as they are?" Her preparations for stalking out of the Doll's House were not yet visible. She mused: "I think perhaps it's my childhood." She halted. When she went on her voice had an artificial sound, her words the bookish quality of emotional meditation. "My father was the tenderest man in the world, but he did feel superior to ordinary people. Well, he was! And the Minnesota Valley----I used to sit there on the cliffs above Mankato for hours at a time, my chin in my hand, looking way down the valley, wanting to write poems. The shiny tilted roofs below me, and the river, and beyond it the level fields in the mist, and the rim of palisades across----It held my thoughts in. I LIVED, in the valley. But the prairie--all my thoughts go flying off into the big space. Do you think it might be that?" "Um, well, maybe, but----Carrie, you always talk so much about getting all you can out of life, and not letting the years slip by, and here you deliberately go and deprive yourself of a lot of real good home pleasure by not enjoying people unless they wear frock coats and trot out----" ("Morning clothes. Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean t' interrupt you.") "----to a lot of tea-parties. Take Jack Elder. You think Jack hasn't got any ideas about anything but manufacturing and the tariff on lumber. But do you know that Jack is nutty about music? He'll put a grand-opera record on the phonograph and sit and listen to it and close his eyes----Or you take Lym Cass. Ever realize what a well-informed man he is?" "But IS he? Gopher Prairie calls anybody 'well-informed' who's been through the State Capitol and heard about Gladstone." "Now I'm telling you! Lym reads a lot--solid stuff--history. Or take Mart Mahoney, the garageman. He's got a lot of Perry prints of famous pictures in his office. Or old Bingham Playfair, that died here 'bout a year ago--lived seven miles out. He was a captain in the Civil War, and knew General Sherman, and they say he was a miner in Nevada right alongside of Mark Twain. You'll find these characters in all these small towns, and a pile of savvy in every single one of them, if you just dig for it." "I know. And I do love them. Especially people like Champ Perry. But I can't be so very enthusiastic over the smug cits like Jack Elder." "Then I'm a smug cit, too, whatever that is." "No, you're a scientist. Oh, I will try and get the music out of Mr. Elder. Only, why can't he let it COME out, instead of being ashamed of it, and always talking about hunting dogs? But I will try. Is it all right now?" "Sure. But there's one other thing. You might give me some attention, too!" "That's unjust! You have everything I am!" "No, I haven't. You think you respect me--you always hand out some spiel about my being so 'useful.' But you never think of me as having ambitions, just as much as you have----" "Perhaps not. I think of you as being perfectly satisfied." "Well, I'm not, not by a long shot! I don't want to be a plug general practitioner all my life, like Westlake, and die in harness because I can't get out of it, and have 'em say, 'He was a good fellow, but he couldn't save a cent.' Not that I care a whoop what they say, after I've kicked in and can't hear 'em, but I want to put enough money away so you and I can be independent some day, and not have to work unless I feel like it, and I want to have a good house--by golly, I'll have as good a house as anybody in THIS town!--and if we want to travel and see your Tormina or whatever it is, why we can do it, with enough money in our jeans so we won't have to take anything off anybody, or fret about our old age. You never worry about what might happen if we got sick and didn't have a good fat wad salted away, do you!" "I don't suppose I do." "Well then, I have to do it for you. And if you think for one moment I want to be stuck in this burg all my life, and not have a chance to travel and see the different points of interest and all that, then you simply don't get me. I want to have a squint at the world, much's you do. Only, I'm practical about it. First place, I'm going to make the money--I'm investing in good safe farmlands. Do you understand why now?" "Yes." "Will you try and see if you can't think of me as something more than just a dollar-chasing roughneck?" "Oh, my dear, I haven't been just! I AM difficile. And I won't call on the Dillons! And if Dr. Dillon is working for Westlake and McGanum, I hate him!"

Chapter 14

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-14

As she walks home from Guy Pollock's, Carol wonders if she's capable of cheating on her husband Will. All kinds of thoughts fly through her head until she reaches home, where Will asks what's kept her out so late. She tells him she's been at Guy Pollock's and has to reassure him by saying that the neighbors were over, too. She doesn't bother to tell him about the long time she spent with Guy before these neighbors came over. Carol decides to fish for Will's opinions on the other doctors in Gopher Prairie to see if Guy was right about his competitiveness. She's sad to see that Will does have a grudge against the other doctors. Will realizes what Carol is implying and gets angry with her for being so willing to think poorly of him. He goes to sleep angry, and Carol feels that the love in their marriage is gone. Carol uses the argument as an opportunity to bring up the fact that she wants a set allowance from Will. He argues that his income goes up and down depending on business, so he can't arrange for a set amount. So Carol wants a percentage, and yadda yadda, it goes on like that. Will eventually agrees to let Carol establish a budget so that she can run their household like a business. Carol is tender with Will for a moment, but then they start arguing again. Will says that Carol just likes to be dissatisfied because she thinks her dissatisfaction makes her superior to people who just enjoy life. Carol admits that there might be something to this. Will also thinks that Carol doesn't have enough sympathy for the people of Gopher Prairie. Will mentions that Carol isn't the only person in the world who's dissatisfied. He just isn't selfish enough to go broadcasting his own dissatisfaction all over town.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/15.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_14_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 15

chapter 15

{"name": "Chapter 15", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-15", "summary": "We learn that Carol suddenly falls back in love with Will when December rolls around. We can assume that this chapter will tell us why that happens. One night, Carol wakes up to hear Will talking to a German farmer whose wife is sick. Turns out that Will needs to leave, and Carol finds herself admiring him as a hero. She falls back asleep and finds Will dropping into bed beside her just as she wakes up. On a different day, a cart pulls into the Kennicotts' yard carrying a guy with a wounded leg. Carol is excited when Will asks her to fetch some hot water and blankets. The next time Carol sees Guy Pollock at the store, he seems to think there's still something between them, but Carol isn't feeling it anymore. Carol brings Will some sweets at his office and then tells him she's going to redecorate his waiting room. He thinks it's good the way it is, but once she's done with it, he admits that there's a big improvement. One day, Mrs. Bogart drops by and says she doesn't like the way Carol's maid Bea has been fraternizing with the grocery delivery people. Carol basically tells her to mind her own beeswax. Another day, Will invites Carol to come along with him on one of his house calls in the country. When Carol and Will get to the person's house, Carol realizes that she's going to have to help Will while he performs an arm amputation right on the person's kitchen table. She has to deliver the anesthetic and nearly faints in the process. When the Kennicotts head home the next day, they get caught in a snowstorm and have to take shelter in a barn. Will takes this opportunity to tell Carol that the two of them were lucky not to blow themselves up the night before, since he had used flammable ether as an anesthetic instead of chloroform.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XV THAT December she was in love with her husband. She romanticized herself not as a great reformer but as the wife of a country physician. The realities of the doctor's household were colored by her pride. Late at night, a step on the wooden porch, heard through her confusion of sleep; the storm-door opened; fumbling over the inner door-panels; the buzz of the electric bell. Kennicott muttering "Gol darn it," but patiently creeping out of bed, remembering to draw the covers up to keep her warm, feeling for slippers and bathrobe, clumping down-stairs. From below, half-heard in her drowsiness, a colloquy in the pidgin-German of the farmers who have forgotten the Old Country language without learning the new: "Hello, Barney, wass willst du?" "Morgen, doctor. Die Frau ist ja awful sick. All night she been having an awful pain in de belly." "How long she been this way? Wie lang, eh?" "I dunno, maybe two days." "Why didn't you come for me yesterday, instead of waking me up out of a sound sleep? Here it is two o'clock! So spat--warum, eh?" "Nun aber, I know it, but she got soch a lot vorse last evening. I t'ought maybe all de time it go avay, but it got a lot vorse." "Any fever?" "Vell ja, I t'ink she got fever." "Which side is the pain on?" "Huh?" "Das Schmertz--die Weh--which side is it on? Here?" "So. Right here it is." "Any rigidity there?" "Huh?" "Is it rigid--stiff--I mean, does the belly feel hard to the fingers?" "I dunno. She ain't said yet." "What she been eating?" "Vell, I t'ink about vot ve alwis eat, maybe corn beef and cabbage and sausage, und so weiter. Doc, sie weint immer, all the time she holler like hell. I vish you come." "Well, all right, but you call me earlier, next time. Look here, Barney, you better install a 'phone--telephone haben. Some of you Dutchmen will be dying one of these days before you can fetch the doctor." The door closing. Barney's wagon--the wheels silent in the snow, but the wagon-body rattling. Kennicott clicking the receiver-hook to rouse the night telephone-operator, giving a number, waiting, cursing mildly, waiting again, and at last growling, "Hello, Gus, this is the doctor. Say, uh, send me up a team. Guess snow's too thick for a machine. Going eight miles south. All right. Huh? The hell I will! Don't you go back to sleep. Huh? Well, that's all right now, you didn't wait so very darn long. All right, Gus; shoot her along. By!" His step on the stairs; his quiet moving about the frigid room while he dressed; his abstracted and meaningless cough. She was supposed to be asleep; she was too exquisitely drowsy to break the charm by speaking. On a slip of paper laid on the bureau--she could hear the pencil grinding against the marble slab--he wrote his destination. He went out, hungry, chilly, unprotesting; and she, before she fell asleep again, loved him for his sturdiness, and saw the drama of his riding by night to the frightened household on the distant farm; pictured children standing at a window, waiting for him. He suddenly had in her eyes the heroism of a wireless operator on a ship in a collision; of an explorer, fever-clawed, deserted by his bearers, but going on--jungle--going---- At six, when the light faltered in as through ground glass and bleakly identified the chairs as gray rectangles, she heard his step on the porch; heard him at the furnace: the rattle of shaking the grate, the slow grinding removal of ashes, the shovel thrust into the coal-bin, the abrupt clatter of the coal as it flew into the fire-box, the fussy regulation of drafts--the daily sounds of a Gopher Prairie life, now first appealing to her as something brave and enduring, many-colored and free. She visioned the fire-box: flames turned to lemon and metallic gold as the coal-dust sifted over them; thin twisty flutters of purple, ghost flames which gave no light, slipping up between the dark banked coals. It was luxurious in bed, and the house would be warm for her when she rose, she reflected. What a worthless cat she was! What were her aspirations beside his capability? She awoke again as he dropped into bed. "Seems just a few minutes ago that you started out!" "I've been away four hours. I've operated a woman for appendicitis, in a Dutch kitchen. Came awful close to losing her, too, but I pulled her through all right. Close squeak. Barney says he shot ten rabbits last Sunday." He was instantly asleep--one hour of rest before he had to be up and ready for the farmers who came in early. She marveled that in what was to her but a night-blurred moment, he should have been in a distant place, have taken charge of a strange house, have slashed a woman, saved a life. What wonder he detested the lazy Westlake and McGanum! How could the easy Guy Pollock understand this skill and endurance? Then Kennicott was grumbling, "Seven-fifteen! Aren't you ever going to get up for breakfast?" and he was not a hero-scientist but a rather irritable and commonplace man who needed a shave. They had coffee, griddle-cakes, and sausages, and talked about Mrs. McGanum's atrocious alligator-hide belt. Night witchery and morning disillusion were alike forgotten in the march of realities and days. II Familiar to the doctor's wife was the man with an injured leg, driven in from the country on a Sunday afternoon and brought to the house. He sat in a rocker in the back of a lumber-wagon, his face pale from the anguish of the jolting. His leg was thrust out before him, resting on a starch-box and covered with a leather-bound horse-blanket. His drab courageous wife drove the wagon, and she helped Kennicott support him as he hobbled up the steps, into the house. "Fellow cut his leg with an ax--pretty bad gash--Halvor Nelson, nine miles out," Kennicott observed. Carol fluttered at the back of the room, childishly excited when she was sent to fetch towels and a basin of water. Kennicott lifted the farmer into a chair and chuckled, "There we are, Halvor! We'll have you out fixing fences and drinking aquavit in a month." The farmwife sat on the couch, expressionless, bulky in a man's dogskin coat and unplumbed layers of jackets. The flowery silk handkerchief which she had worn over her head now hung about her seamed neck. Her white wool gloves lay in her lap. Kennicott drew from the injured leg the thick red "German sock," the innumerous other socks of gray and white wool, then the spiral bandage. The leg was of an unwholesome dead white, with the black hairs feeble and thin and flattened, and the scar a puckered line of crimson. Surely, Carol shuddered, this was not human flesh, the rosy shining tissue of the amorous poets. Kennicott examined the scar, smiled at Halvor and his wife, chanted, "Fine, b' gosh! Couldn't be better!" The Nelsons looked deprecating. The farmer nodded a cue to his wife and she mourned: "Vell, how much ve going to owe you, doctor?" "I guess it'll be----Let's see: one drive out and two calls. I guess it'll be about eleven dollars in all, Lena." "I dunno ve can pay you yoost a little w'ile, doctor." Kennicott lumbered over to her, patted her shoulder, roared, "Why, Lord love you, sister, I won't worry if I never get it! You pay me next fall, when you get your crop. . . . Carrie! Suppose you or Bea could shake up a cup of coffee and some cold lamb for the Nelsons? They got a long cold drive ahead." III He had been gone since morning; her eyes ached with reading; Vida Sherwin could not come to tea. She wandered through the house, empty as the bleary street without. The problem of "Will the doctor be home in time for supper, or shall I sit down without him?" was important in the household. Six was the rigid, the canonical supper-hour, but at half-past six he had not come. Much speculation with Bea: Had the obstetrical case taken longer than he had expected? Had he been called somewhere else? Was the snow much heavier out in the country, so that he should have taken a buggy, or even a cutter, instead of the car? Here in town it had melted a lot, but still---- A honking, a shout, the motor engine raced before it was shut off. She hurried to the window. The car was a monster at rest after furious adventures. The headlights blazed on the clots of ice in the road so that the tiniest lumps gave mountainous shadows, and the taillight cast a circle of ruby on the snow behind. Kennicott was opening the door, crying, "Here we are, old girl! Got stuck couple times, but we made it, by golly, we made it, and here we be! Come on! Food! Eatin's!" She rushed to him, patted his fur coat, the long hairs smooth but chilly to her fingers. She joyously summoned Bea, "All right! He's here! We'll sit right down!" IV There were, to inform the doctor's wife of his successes no clapping audiences nor book-reviews nor honorary degrees. But there was a letter written by a German farmer recently moved from Minnesota to Saskatchewan: Dear sor, as you haf bin treading mee for a fue Weaks dis Somer and seen wat is rong wit mee so in Regarding to dat i wont to tank you. the Doctor heir say wat shot bee rong wit mee and day give mee som Madsin but it diten halp mee like wat you dit. Now day glaim dat i Woten Neet aney Madsin ad all wat you tink? Well i haven ben tacking aney ting for about one & 1/2 Mont but i dont get better so i like to heir Wat you tink about it i feel like dis Disconfebil feeling around the Stomac after eating and dat Pain around Heard and down the arm and about 3 to 3 1/2 Hour after Eating i feel weeak like and dissy and a dull Hadig. Now you gust lett mee know Wat you tink about mee, i do Wat you say. V She encountered Guy Pollock at the drug store. He looked at her as though he had a right to; he spoke softly. "I haven't see you, the last few days." "No. I've been out in the country with Will several times. He's so----Do you know that people like you and me can never understand people like him? We're a pair of hypercritical loafers, you and I, while he quietly goes and does things." She nodded and smiled and was very busy about purchasing boric acid. He stared after her, and slipped away. When she found that he was gone she was slightly disconcerted. VI She could--at times--agree with Kennicott that the shaving-and-corsets familiarity of married life was not dreary vulgarity but a wholesome frankness; that artificial reticences might merely be irritating. She was not much disturbed when for hours he sat about the living-room in his honest socks. But she would not listen to his theory that "all this romance stuff is simply moonshine--elegant when you're courting, but no use busting yourself keeping it up all your life." She thought of surprises, games, to vary the days. She knitted an astounding purple scarf, which she hid under his supper plate. (When he discovered it he looked embarrassed, and gasped, "Is today an anniversary or something? Gosh, I'd forgotten it!") Once she filled a thermos bottle with hot coffee a corn-flakes box with cookies just baked by Bea, and bustled to his office at three in the afternoon. She hid her bundles in the hall and peeped in. The office was shabby. Kennicott had inherited it from a medical predecessor, and changed it only by adding a white enameled operating-table, a sterilizer, a Roentgen-ray apparatus, and a small portable typewriter. It was a suite of two rooms: a waiting-room with straight chairs, shaky pine table, and those coverless and unknown magazines which are found only in the offices of dentists and doctors. The room beyond, looking on Main Street, was business-office, consulting-room, operating-room, and, in an alcove, bacteriological and chemical laboratory. The wooden floors of both rooms were bare; the furniture was brown and scaly. Waiting for the doctor were two women, as still as though they were paralyzed, and a man in a railroad brakeman's uniform, holding his bandaged right hand with his tanned left. They stared at Carol. She sat modestly in a stiff chair, feeling frivolous and out of place. Kennicott appeared at the inner door, ushering out a bleached man with a trickle of wan beard, and consoling him, "All right, Dad. Be careful about the sugar, and mind the diet I gave you. Gut the prescription filled, and come in and see me next week. Say, uh, better, uh, better not drink too much beer. All right, Dad." His voice was artificially hearty. He looked absently at Carol. He was a medical machine now, not a domestic machine. "What is it, Carrie?" he droned. "No hurry. Just wanted to say hello." "Well----" Self-pity because he did not divine that this was a surprise party rendered her sad and interesting to herself, and she had the pleasure of the martyrs in saying bravely to him, "It's nothing special. If you're busy long I'll trot home." While she waited she ceased to pity and began to mock herself. For the first time she observed the waiting-room. Oh yes, the doctor's family had to have obi panels and a wide couch and an electric percolator, but any hole was good enough for sick tired common people who were nothing but the one means and excuse for the doctor's existing! No. She couldn't blame Kennicott. He was satisfied by the shabby chairs. He put up with them as his patients did. It was her neglected province--she who had been going about talking of rebuilding the whole town! When the patients were gone she brought in her bundles. "What's those?" wondered Kennicott. "Turn your back! Look out of the window!" He obeyed--not very much bored. When she cried "Now!" a feast of cookies and small hard candies and hot coffee was spread on the roll-top desk in the inner room. His broad face lightened. "That's a new one on me! Never was more surprised in my life! And, by golly, I believe I am hungry. Say, this is fine." When the first exhilaration of the surprise had declined she demanded, "Will! I'm going to refurnish your waiting-room!" "What's the matter with it? It's all right." "It is not! It's hideous. We can afford to give your patients a better place. And it would be good business." She felt tremendously politic. "Rats! I don't worry about the business. You look here now: As I told you----Just because I like to tuck a few dollars away, I'll be switched if I'll stand for your thinking I'm nothing but a dollar-chasing----" "Stop it! Quick! I'm not hurting your feelings! I'm not criticizing! I'm the adoring least one of thy harem. I just mean----" Two days later, with pictures, wicker chairs, a rug, she had made the waiting-room habitable; and Kennicott admitted, "Does look a lot better. Never thought much about it. Guess I need being bullied." She was convinced that she was gloriously content in her career as doctor's-wife. VII She tried to free herself from the speculation and disillusionment which had been twitching at her; sought to dismiss all the opinionation of an insurgent era. She wanted to shine upon the veal-faced bristly-bearded Lyman Cass as much as upon Miles Bjornstam or Guy Pollock. She gave a reception for the Thanatopsis Club. But her real acquiring of merit was in calling upon that Mrs. Bogart whose gossipy good opinion was so valuable to a doctor. Though the Bogart house was next door she had entered it but three times. Now she put on her new moleskin cap, which made her face small and innocent, she rubbed off the traces of a lip-stick--and fled across the alley before her admirable resolution should sneak away. The age of houses, like the age of men, has small relation to their years. The dull-green cottage of the good Widow Bogart was twenty years old, but it had the antiquity of Cheops, and the smell of mummy-dust. Its neatness rebuked the street. The two stones by the path were painted yellow; the outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice that it was not concealed at all; the last iron dog remaining in Gopher Prairie stood among whitewashed conch-shells upon the lawn. The hallway was dismayingly scrubbed; the kitchen was an exercise in mathematics, with problems worked out in equidistant chairs. The parlor was kept for visitors. Carol suggested, "Let's sit in the kitchen. Please don't trouble to light the parlor stove." "No trouble at all! My gracious, and you coming so seldom and all, and the kitchen is a perfect sight, I try to keep it clean, but Cy will track mud all over it, I've spoken to him about it a hundred times if I've spoken once, no, you sit right there, dearie, and I'll make a fire, no trouble at all, practically no trouble at all." Mrs. Bogart groaned, rubbed her joints, and repeatedly dusted her hands while she made the fire, and when Carol tried to help she lamented, "Oh, it doesn't matter; guess I ain't good for much but toil and workin' anyway; seems as though that's what a lot of folks think." The parlor was distinguished by an expanse of rag carpet from which, as they entered, Mrs. Bogart hastily picked one sad dead fly. In the center of the carpet was a rug depicting a red Newfoundland dog, reclining in a green and yellow daisy field and labeled "Our Friend." The parlor organ, tall and thin, was adorned with a mirror partly circular, partly square, and partly diamond-shaped, and with brackets holding a pot of geraniums, a mouth-organ, and a copy of "The Oldtime Hymnal." On the center table was a Sears-Roebuck mail-order catalogue, a silver frame with photographs of the Baptist Church and of an elderly clergyman, and an aluminum tray containing a rattlesnake's rattle and a broken spectacle-lens. Mrs. Bogart spoke of the eloquence of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel, the coldness of cold days, the price of poplar wood, Dave Dyer's new hair-cut, and Cy Bogart's essential piety. "As I said to his Sunday School teacher, Cy may be a little wild, but that's because he's got so much better brains than a lot of these boys, and this farmer that claims he caught Cy stealing 'beggies, is a liar, and I ought to have the law on him." Mrs. Bogart went thoroughly into the rumor that the girl waiter at Billy's Lunch was not all she might be--or, rather, was quite all she might be. "My lands, what can you expect when everybody knows what her mother was? And if these traveling salesmen would let her alone she would be all right, though I certainly don't believe she ought to be allowed to think she can pull the wool over our eyes. The sooner she's sent to the school for incorrigible girls down at Sauk Centre, the better for all and----Won't you just have a cup of coffee, Carol dearie, I'm sure you won't mind old Aunty Bogart calling you by your first name when you think how long I've known Will, and I was such a friend of his dear lovely mother when she lived here and--was that fur cap expensive? But----Don't you think it's awful, the way folks talk in this town?" Mrs. Bogart hitched her chair nearer. Her large face, with its disturbing collection of moles and lone black hairs, wrinkled cunningly. She showed her decayed teeth in a reproving smile, and in the confidential voice of one who scents stale bedroom scandal she breathed: "I just don't see how folks can talk and act like they do. You don't know the things that go on under cover. This town--why it's only the religious training I've given Cy that's kept him so innocent of--things. Just the other day----I never pay no attention to stories, but I heard it mighty good and straight that Harry Haydock is carrying on with a girl that clerks in a store down in Minneapolis, and poor Juanita not knowing anything about it--though maybe it's the judgment of God, because before she married Harry she acted up with more than one boy----Well, I don't like to say it, and maybe I ain't up-to-date, like Cy says, but I always believed a lady shouldn't even give names to all sorts of dreadful things, but just the same I know there was at least one case where Juanita and a boy--well, they were just dreadful. And--and----Then there's that Ole Jenson the grocer, that thinks he's so plaguey smart, and I know he made up to a farmer's wife and----And this awful man Bjornstam that does chores, and Nat Hicks and----" There was, it seemed, no person in town who was not living a life of shame except Mrs. Bogart, and naturally she resented it. She knew. She had always happened to be there. Once, she whispered, she was going by when an indiscreet window-shade had been left up a couple of inches. Once she had noticed a man and woman holding hands, and right at a Methodist sociable! "Another thing----Heaven knows I never want to start trouble, but I can't help what I see from my back steps, and I notice your hired girl Bea carrying on with the grocery boys and all----" "Mrs. Bogart! I'd trust Bea as I would myself!" "Oh, dearie, you don't understand me! I'm sure she's a good girl. I mean she's green, and I hope that none of these horrid young men that there are around town will get her into trouble! It's their parents' fault, letting them run wild and hear evil things. If I had my way there wouldn't be none of them, not boys nor girls neither, allowed to know anything about--about things till they was married. It's terrible the bald way that some folks talk. It just shows and gives away what awful thoughts they got inside them, and there's nothing can cure them except coming right to God and kneeling down like I do at prayer-meeting every Wednesday evening, and saying, 'O God, I would be a miserable sinner except for thy grace.' "I'd make every last one of these brats go to Sunday School and learn to think about nice things 'stead of about cigarettes and goings-on--and these dances they have at the lodges are the worst thing that ever happened to this town, lot of young men squeezing girls and finding out----Oh, it's dreadful. I've told the mayor he ought to put a stop to them and----There was one boy in this town, I don't want to be suspicious or uncharitable but----" It was half an hour before Carol escaped. She stopped on her own porch and thought viciously: "If that woman is on the side of the angels, then I have no choice; I must be on the side of the devil. But--isn't she like me? She too wants to 'reform the town'! She too criticizes everybody! She too thinks the men are vulgar and limited! AM I LIKE HER? This is ghastly!" That evening she did not merely consent to play cribbage with Kennicott; she urged him to play; and she worked up a hectic interest in land-deals and Sam Clark. VIII In courtship days Kennicott had shown her a photograph of Nels Erdstrom's baby and log cabin, but she had never seen the Erdstroms. They had become merely "patients of the doctor." Kennicott telephoned her on a mid-December afternoon, "Want to throw your coat on and drive out to Erdstrom's with me? Fairly warm. Nels got the jaundice." "Oh yes!" She hastened to put on woolen stockings, high boots, sweater, muffler, cap, mittens. The snow was too thick and the ruts frozen too hard for the motor. They drove out in a clumsy high carriage. Tucked over them was a blue woolen cover, prickly to her wrists, and outside of it a buffalo robe, humble and moth-eaten now, used ever since the bison herds had streaked the prairie a few miles to the west. The scattered houses between which they passed in town were small and desolate in contrast to the expanse of huge snowy yards and wide street. They crossed the railroad tracks, and instantly were in the farm country. The big piebald horses snorted clouds of steam, and started to trot. The carriage squeaked in rhythm. Kennicott drove with clucks of "There boy, take it easy!" He was thinking. He paid no attention to Carol. Yet it was he who commented, "Pretty nice, over there," as they approached an oak-grove where shifty winter sunlight quivered in the hollow between two snow-drifts. They drove from the natural prairie to a cleared district which twenty years ago had been forest. The country seemed to stretch unchanging to the North Pole: low hill, brush-scraggly bottom, reedy creek, muskrat mound, fields with frozen brown clods thrust up through the snow. Her ears and nose were pinched; her breath frosted her collar; her fingers ached. "Getting colder," she said. "Yup." That was all their conversation for three miles. Yet she was happy. They reached Nels Erdstrom's at four, and with a throb she recognized the courageous venture which had lured her to Gopher Prairie: the cleared fields, furrows among stumps, a log cabin chinked with mud and roofed with dry hay. But Nels had prospered. He used the log cabin as a barn; and a new house reared up, a proud, unwise, Gopher Prairie house, the more naked and ungraceful in its glossy white paint and pink trimmings. Every tree had been cut down. The house was so unsheltered, so battered by the wind, so bleakly thrust out into the harsh clearing, that Carol shivered. But they were welcomed warmly enough in the kitchen, with its crisp new plaster, its black and nickel range, its cream separator in a corner. Mrs. Erdstrom begged her to sit in the parlor, where there was a phonograph and an oak and leather davenport, the prairie farmer's proofs of social progress, but she dropped down by the kitchen stove and insisted, "Please don't mind me." When Mrs. Erdstrom had followed the doctor out of the room Carol glanced in a friendly way at the grained pine cupboard, the framed Lutheran Konfirmations Attest, the traces of fried eggs and sausages on the dining table against the wall, and a jewel among calendars, presenting not only a lithographic young woman with cherry lips, and a Swedish advertisement of Axel Egge's grocery, but also a thermometer and a match-holder. She saw that a boy of four or five was staring at her from the hall, a boy in gingham shirt and faded corduroy trousers, but large-eyed, firm-mouthed, wide-browed. He vanished, then peeped in again, biting his knuckles, turning his shoulder toward her in shyness. Didn't she remember--what was it?--Kennicott sitting beside her at Fort Snelling, urging, "See how scared that baby is. Needs some woman like you." Magic had fluttered about her then--magic of sunset and cool air and the curiosity of lovers. She held out her hands as much to that sanctity as to the boy. He edged into the room, doubtfully sucking his thumb. "Hello," she said. "What's your name?" "Hee, hee, hee!" "You're quite right. I agree with you. Silly people like me always ask children their names." "Hee, hee, hee!" "Come here and I'll tell you the story of--well, I don't know what it will be about, but it will have a slim heroine and a Prince Charming." He stood stoically while she spun nonsense. His giggling ceased. She was winning him. Then the telephone bell--two long rings, one short. Mrs. Erdstrom galloped into the room, shrieked into the transmitter, "Vell? Yes, yes, dis is Erdstrom's place! Heh? Oh, you vant de doctor?" Kennicott appeared, growled into the telephone: "Well, what do you want? Oh, hello Dave; what do you want? Which Morgenroth's? Adolph's? All right. Amputation? Yuh, I see. Say, Dave, get Gus to harness up and take my surgical kit down there--and have him take some chloroform. I'll go straight down from here. May not get home tonight. You can get me at Adolph's. Huh? No, Carrie can give the anesthetic, I guess. G'-by. Huh? No; tell me about that tomorrow--too damn many people always listening in on this farmers' line." He turned to Carol. "Adolph Morgenroth, farmer ten miles southwest of town, got his arm crushed-fixing his cow-shed and a post caved in on him--smashed him up pretty bad--may have to amputate, Dave Dyer says. Afraid we'll have to go right from here. Darn sorry to drag you clear down there with me----" "Please do. Don't mind me a bit." "Think you could give the anesthetic? Usually have my driver do it." "If you'll tell me how." "All right. Say, did you hear me putting one over on these goats that are always rubbering in on party-wires? I hope they heard me! Well. . . . Now, Bessie, don't you worry about Nels. He's getting along all right. Tomorrow you or one of the neighbors drive in and get this prescription filled at Dyer's. Give him a teaspoonful every four hours. Good-by. Hel-lo! Here's the little fellow! My Lord, Bessie, it ain't possible this is the fellow that used to be so sickly? Why, say, he's a great big strapping Svenska now--going to be bigger 'n his daddy!" Kennicott's bluffness made the child squirm with a delight which Carol could not evoke. It was a humble wife who followed the busy doctor out to the carriage, and her ambition was not to play Rachmaninoff better, nor to build town halls, but to chuckle at babies. The sunset was merely a flush of rose on a dome of silver, with oak twigs and thin poplar branches against it, but a silo on the horizon changed from a red tank to a tower of violet misted over with gray. The purple road vanished, and without lights, in the darkness of a world destroyed, they swayed on--toward nothing. It was a bumpy cold way to the Morgenroth farm, and she was asleep when they arrived. Here was no glaring new house with a proud phonograph, but a low whitewashed kitchen smelling of cream and cabbage. Adolph Morgenroth was lying on a couch in the rarely used dining-room. His heavy work-scarred wife was shaking her hands in anxiety. Carol felt that Kennicott would do something magnificent and startling. But he was casual. He greeted the man, "Well, well, Adolph, have to fix you up, eh?" Quietly, to the wife, "Hat die drug store my schwartze bag hier geschickt? So--schon. Wie viel Uhr ist 's? Sieben? Nun, lassen uns ein wenig supper zuerst haben. Got any of that good beer left--giebt 's noch Bier?" He had supped in four minutes. His coat off, his sleeves rolled up, he was scrubbing his hands in a tin basin in the sink, using the bar of yellow kitchen soap. Carol had not dared to look into the farther room while she labored over the supper of beer, rye bread, moist cornbeef and cabbage, set on the kitchen table. The man in there was groaning. In her one glance she had seen that his blue flannel shirt was open at a corded tobacco-brown neck, the hollows of which were sprinkled with thin black and gray hairs. He was covered with a sheet, like a corpse, and outside the sheet was his right arm, wrapped in towels stained with blood. But Kennicott strode into the other room gaily, and she followed him. With surprising delicacy in his large fingers he unwrapped the towels and revealed an arm which, below the elbow, was a mass of blood and raw flesh. The man bellowed. The room grew thick about her; she was very seasick; she fled to a chair in the kitchen. Through the haze of nausea she heard Kennicott grumbling, "Afraid it will have to come off, Adolph. What did you do? Fall on a reaper blade? We'll fix it right up. Carrie! CAROL!" She couldn't--she couldn't get up. Then she was up, her knees like water, her stomach revolving a thousand times a second, her eyes filmed, her ears full of roaring. She couldn't reach the dining-room. She was going to faint. Then she was in the dining-room, leaning against the wall, trying to smile, flushing hot and cold along her chest and sides, while Kennicott mumbled, "Say, help Mrs. Morgenroth and me carry him in on the kitchen table. No, first go out and shove those two tables together, and put a blanket on them and a clean sheet." It was salvation to push the heavy tables, to scrub them, to be exact in placing the sheet. Her head cleared; she was able to look calmly in at her husband and the farmwife while they undressed the wailing man, got him into a clean nightgown, and washed his arm. Kennicott came to lay out his instruments. She realized that, with no hospital facilities, yet with no worry about it, her husband--HER HUSBAND--was going to perform a surgical operation, that miraculous boldness of which one read in stories about famous surgeons. She helped them to move Adolph into the kitchen. The man was in such a funk that he would not use his legs. He was heavy, and smelled of sweat and the stable. But she put her arm about his waist, her sleek head by his chest; she tugged at him; she clicked her tongue in imitation of Kennicott's cheerful noises. When Adolph was on the table Kennicott laid a hemispheric steel and cotton frame on his face; suggested to Carol, "Now you sit here at his head and keep the ether dripping--about this fast, see? I'll watch his breathing. Look who's here! Real anesthetist! Ochsner hasn't got a better one! Class, eh? . . . Now, now, Adolph, take it easy. This won't hurt you a bit. Put you all nice and asleep and it won't hurt a bit. Schweig' mal! Bald schlaft man grat wie ein Kind. So! So! Bald geht's besser!" As she let the ether drip, nervously trying to keep the rhythm that Kennicott had indicated, Carol stared at her husband with the abandon of hero-worship. He shook his head. "Bad light--bad light. Here, Mrs. Morgenroth, you stand right here and hold this lamp. Hier, und dieses--dieses lamp halten--so!" By that streaky glimmer he worked, swiftly, at ease. The room was still. Carol tried to look at him, yet not look at the seeping blood, the crimson slash, the vicious scalpel. The ether fumes were sweet, choking. Her head seemed to be floating away from her body. Her arm was feeble. It was not the blood but the grating of the surgical saw on the living bone that broke her, and she knew that she had been fighting off nausea, that she was beaten. She was lost in dizziness. She heard Kennicott's voice-- "Sick? Trot outdoors couple minutes. Adolph will stay under now." She was fumbling at a door-knob which whirled in insulting circles; she was on the stoop, gasping, forcing air into her chest, her head clearing. As she returned she caught the scene as a whole: the cavernous kitchen, two milk-cans a leaden patch by the wall, hams dangling from a beam, bats of light at the stove door, and in the center, illuminated by a small glass lamp held by a frightened stout woman, Dr. Kennicott bending over a body which was humped under a sheet--the surgeon, his bare arms daubed with blood, his hands, in pale-yellow rubber gloves, loosening the tourniquet, his face without emotion save when he threw up his head and clucked at the farmwife, "Hold that light steady just a second more--noch blos esn wenig." "He speaks a vulgar, common, incorrect German of life and death and birth and the soil. I read the French and German of sentimental lovers and Christmas garlands. And I thought that it was I who had the culture!" she worshiped as she returned to her place. After a time he snapped, "That's enough. Don't give him any more ether." He was concentrated on tying an artery. His gruffness seemed heroic to her. As he shaped the flap of flesh she murmured, "Oh, you ARE wonderful!" He was surprised. "Why, this is a cinch. Now if it had been like last week----Get me some more water. Now last week I had a case with an ooze in the peritoneal cavity, and by golly if it wasn't a stomach ulcer that I hadn't suspected and----There. Say, I certainly am sleepy. Let's turn in here. Too late to drive home. And tastes to me like a storm coming." IX They slept on a feather bed with their fur coats over them; in the morning they broke ice in the pitcher--the vast flowered and gilt pitcher. Kennicott's storm had not come. When they set out it was hazy and growing warmer. After a mile she saw that he was studying a dark cloud in the north. He urged the horses to the run. But she forgot his unusual haste in wonder at the tragic landscape. The pale snow, the prickles of old stubble, and the clumps of ragged brush faded into a gray obscurity. Under the hillocks were cold shadows. The willows about a farmhouse were agitated by the rising wind, and the patches of bare wood where the bark had peeled away were white as the flesh of a leper. The snowy slews were of a harsh flatness. The whole land was cruel, and a climbing cloud of slate-edged blackness dominated the sky. "Guess we're about in for a blizzard," speculated Kennicott "We can make Ben McGonegal's, anyway." "Blizzard? Really? Why----But still we used to think they were fun when I was a girl. Daddy had to stay home from court, and we'd stand at the window and watch the snow." "Not much fun on the prairie. Get lost. Freeze to death. Take no chances." He chirruped at the horses. They were flying now, the carriage rocking on the hard ruts. The whole air suddenly crystallized into large damp flakes. The horses and the buffalo robe were covered with snow; her face was wet; the thin butt of the whip held a white ridge. The air became colder. The snowflakes were harder; they shot in level lines, clawing at her face. She could not see a hundred feet ahead. Kennicott was stern. He bent forward, the reins firm in his coonskin gauntlets. She was certain that he would get through. He always got through things. Save for his presence, the world and all normal living disappeared. They were lost in the boiling snow. He leaned close to bawl, "Letting the horses have their heads. They'll get us home." With a terrifying bump they were off the road, slanting with two wheels in the ditch, but instantly they were jerked back as the horses fled on. She gasped. She tried to, and did not, feel brave as she pulled the woolen robe up about her chin. They were passing something like a dark wall on the right. "I know that barn!" he yelped. He pulled at the reins. Peeping from the covers she saw his teeth pinch his lower lip, saw him scowl as he slackened and sawed and jerked sharply again at the racing horses. They stopped. "Farmhouse there. Put robe around you and come on," he cried. It was like diving into icy water to climb out of the carriage, but on the ground she smiled at him, her face little and childish and pink above the buffalo robe over her shoulders. In a swirl of flakes which scratched at their eyes like a maniac darkness, he unbuckled the harness. He turned and plodded back, a ponderous furry figure, holding the horses' bridles, Carol's hand dragging at his sleeve. They came to the cloudy bulk of a barn whose outer wall was directly upon the road. Feeling along it, he found a gate, led them into a yard, into the barn. The interior was warm. It stunned them with its languid quiet. He carefully drove the horses into stalls. Her toes were coals of pain. "Let's run for the house," she said. "Can't. Not yet. Might never find it. Might get lost ten feet away from it. Sit over in this stall, near the horses. We'll rush for the house when the blizzard lifts." "I'm so stiff! I can't walk!" He carried her into the stall, stripped off her overshoes and boots, stopping to blow on his purple fingers as he fumbled at her laces. He rubbed her feet, and covered her with the buffalo robe and horse-blankets from the pile on the feed-box. She was drowsy, hemmed in by the storm. She sighed: "You're so strong and yet so skilful and not afraid of blood or storm or----" "Used to it. Only thing that's bothered me was the chance the ether fumes might explode, last night." "I don't understand." "Why, Dave, the darn fool, sent me ether, instead of chloroform like I told him, and you know ether fumes are mighty inflammable, especially with that lamp right by the table. But I had to operate, of course--wound chuck-full of barnyard filth that way." "You knew all the time that----Both you and I might have been blown up? You knew it while you were operating?" "Sure. Didn't you? Why, what's the matter?"

Chapter 15

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-15

We learn that Carol suddenly falls back in love with Will when December rolls around. We can assume that this chapter will tell us why that happens. One night, Carol wakes up to hear Will talking to a German farmer whose wife is sick. Turns out that Will needs to leave, and Carol finds herself admiring him as a hero. She falls back asleep and finds Will dropping into bed beside her just as she wakes up. On a different day, a cart pulls into the Kennicotts' yard carrying a guy with a wounded leg. Carol is excited when Will asks her to fetch some hot water and blankets. The next time Carol sees Guy Pollock at the store, he seems to think there's still something between them, but Carol isn't feeling it anymore. Carol brings Will some sweets at his office and then tells him she's going to redecorate his waiting room. He thinks it's good the way it is, but once she's done with it, he admits that there's a big improvement. One day, Mrs. Bogart drops by and says she doesn't like the way Carol's maid Bea has been fraternizing with the grocery delivery people. Carol basically tells her to mind her own beeswax. Another day, Will invites Carol to come along with him on one of his house calls in the country. When Carol and Will get to the person's house, Carol realizes that she's going to have to help Will while he performs an arm amputation right on the person's kitchen table. She has to deliver the anesthetic and nearly faints in the process. When the Kennicotts head home the next day, they get caught in a snowstorm and have to take shelter in a barn. Will takes this opportunity to tell Carol that the two of them were lucky not to blow themselves up the night before, since he had used flammable ether as an anesthetic instead of chloroform.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/16.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_15_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 16

chapter 16

{"name": "Chapter 16", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-16", "summary": "When Christmas comes, Carol finds herself crying and missing her father, even though he's been dead for more than a decade. She realizes that her Christmases with Will will never be like the ones she grew up with. Carol makes a new effort to appreciate the things Will loves in life, including his motorcar and his land speculation. But Will isn't very good at giving Carol the facts she'd need to appreciate them. Carol eventually gives up and retreats into her boring, lonely life. She keeps arguing with Will about making Gopher Prairie a more fulfilling place to live in. He argues that everyone likes it except her. Carol approaches Guy Pollock again for help living in Gopher Prairie. It turns out that there's not much he can do for her, since he has learned to accept the way things are. One day, while Will is out, Carol invites Miles Bjornstam to have dinner in her kitchen with her maid Bea. Carol eats in a different room because that's what's considered proper. Miles and Bea really hit it off, and Carol is envious of their connection.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XVI KENNICOTT was heavily pleased by her Christmas presents, and he gave her a diamond bar-pin. But she could not persuade herself that he was much interested in the rites of the morning, in the tree she had decorated, the three stockings she had hung, the ribbons and gilt seals and hidden messages. He said only: "Nice way to fix things, all right. What do you say we go down to Jack Elder's and have a game of five hundred this afternoon?" She remembered her father's Christmas fantasies: the sacred old rag doll at the top of the tree, the score of cheap presents, the punch and carols, the roast chestnuts by the fire, and the gravity with which the judge opened the children's scrawly notes and took cognizance of demands for sled-rides, for opinions upon the existence of Santa Claus. She remembered him reading out a long indictment of himself for being a sentimentalist, against the peace and dignity of the State of Minnesota. She remembered his thin legs twinkling before their sled---- She muttered unsteadily, "Must run up and put on my shoes--slippers so cold." In the not very romantic solitude of the locked bathroom she sat on the slippery edge of the tub and wept. II Kennicott had five hobbies: medicine, land-investment, Carol, motoring, and hunting. It is not certain in what order he preferred them. Solid though his enthusiasms were in the matter of medicine--his admiration of this city surgeon, his condemnation of that for tricky ways of persuading country practitioners to bring in surgical patients, his indignation about fee-splitting, his pride in a new X-ray apparatus--none of these beatified him as did motoring. He nursed his two-year-old Buick even in winter, when it was stored in the stable-garage behind the house. He filled the grease-cups, varnished a fender, removed from beneath the back seat the debris of gloves, copper washers, crumpled maps, dust, and greasy rags. Winter noons he wandered out and stared owlishly at the car. He became excited over a fabulous "trip we might take next summer." He galloped to the station, brought home railway maps, and traced motor-routes from Gopher Prairie to Winnipeg or Des Moines or Grand Marais, thinking aloud and expecting her to be effusive about such academic questions as "Now I wonder if we could stop at Baraboo and break the jump from La Crosse to Chicago?" To him motoring was a faith not to be questioned, a high-church cult, with electric sparks for candles, and piston-rings possessing the sanctity of altar-vessels. His liturgy was composed of intoned and metrical road-comments: "They say there's a pretty good hike from Duluth to International Falls." Hunting was equally a devotion, full of metaphysical concepts veiled from Carol. All winter he read sporting-catalogues, and thought about remarkable past shots: "'Member that time when I got two ducks on a long chance, just at sunset?" At least once a month he drew his favorite repeating shotgun, his "pump gun," from its wrapper of greased canton flannel; he oiled the trigger, and spent silent ecstatic moments aiming at the ceiling. Sunday mornings Carol heard him trudging up to the attic and there, an hour later, she found him turning over boots, wooden duck-decoys, lunch-boxes, or reflectively squinting at old shells, rubbing their brass caps with his sleeve and shaking his head as he thought about their uselessness. He kept the loading-tools he had used as a boy: a capper for shot-gun shells, a mold for lead bullets. When once, in a housewifely frenzy for getting rid of things, she raged, "Why don't you give these away?" he solemnly defended them, "Well, you can't tell; they might come in handy some day." She flushed. She wondered if he was thinking of the child they would have when, as he put it, they were "sure they could afford one." Mysteriously aching, nebulously sad, she slipped away, half-convinced but only half-convinced that it was horrible and unnatural, this postponement of release of mother-affection, this sacrifice to her opinionation and to his cautious desire for prosperity. "But it would be worse if he were like Sam Clark--insisted on having children," she considered; then, "If Will were the Prince, wouldn't I DEMAND his child?" Kennicott's land-deals were both financial advancement and favorite game. Driving through the country, he noticed which farms had good crops; he heard the news about the restless farmer who was "thinking about selling out here and pulling his freight for Alberta." He asked the veterinarian about the value of different breeds of stock; he inquired of Lyman Cass whether or not Einar Gyseldson really had had a yield of forty bushels of wheat to the acre. He was always consulting Julius Flickerbaugh, who handled more real estate than law, and more law than justice. He studied township maps, and read notices of auctions. Thus he was able to buy a quarter-section of land for one hundred and fifty dollars an acre, and to sell it in a year or two, after installing a cement floor in the barn and running water in the house, for one hundred and eighty or even two hundred. He spoke of these details to Sam Clark . . . rather often. In all his games, cars and guns and land, he expected Carol to take an interest. But he did not give her the facts which might have created interest. He talked only of the obvious and tedious aspects; never of his aspirations in finance, nor of the mechanical principles of motors. This month of romance she was eager to understand his hobbies. She shivered in the garage while he spent half an hour in deciding whether to put alcohol or patent non-freezing liquid into the radiator, or to drain out the water entirely. "Or no, then I wouldn't want to take her out if it turned warm--still, of course, I could fill the radiator again--wouldn't take so awful long--just take a few pails of water--still, if it turned cold on me again before I drained it----Course there's some people that put in kerosene, but they say it rots the hose-connections and----Where did I put that lug-wrench?" It was at this point that she gave up being a motorist and retired to the house. In their new intimacy he was more communicative about his practise; he informed her, with the invariable warning not to tell, that Mrs. Sunderquist had another baby coming, that the "hired girl at Howland's was in trouble." But when she asked technical questions he did not know how to answer; when she inquired, "Exactly what is the method of taking out the tonsils?" he yawned, "Tonsilectomy? Why you just----If there's pus, you operate. Just take 'em out. Seen the newspaper? What the devil did Bea do with it?" She did not try again. III They had gone to the "movies." The movies were almost as vital to Kennicott and the other solid citizens of Gopher Prairie as land-speculation and guns and automobiles. The feature film portrayed a brave young Yankee who conquered a South American republic. He turned the natives from their barbarous habits of singing and laughing to the vigorous sanity, the Pep and Punch and Go, of the North; he taught them to work in factories, to wear Klassy Kollege Klothes, and to shout, "Oh, you baby doll, watch me gather in the mazuma." He changed nature itself. A mountain which had borne nothing but lilies and cedars and loafing clouds was by his Hustle so inspirited that it broke out in long wooden sheds, and piles of iron ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore to be converted into steamers to carry iron ore. The intellectual tension induced by the master film was relieved by a livelier, more lyric and less philosophical drama: Mack Schnarken and the Bathing Suit Babes in a comedy of manners entitled "Right on the Coco." Mr. Schnarken was at various high moments a cook, a life-guard, a burlesque actor, and a sculptor. There was a hotel hallway up which policemen charged, only to be stunned by plaster busts hurled upon them from the innumerous doors. If the plot lacked lucidity, the dual motif of legs and pie was clear and sure. Bathing and modeling were equally sound occasions for legs; the wedding-scene was but an approach to the thunderous climax when Mr. Schnarken slipped a piece of custard pie into the clergyman's rear pocket. The audience in the Rosebud Movie Palace squealed and wiped their eyes; they scrambled under the seats for overshoes, mittens, and mufflers, while the screen announced that next week Mr. Schnarken might be seen in a new, riproaring, extra-special superfeature of the Clean Comedy Corporation entitled, "Under Mollie's Bed." "I'm glad," said Carol to Kennicott as they stooped before the northwest gale which was torturing the barren street, "that this is a moral country. We don't allow any of these beastly frank novels." "Yump. Vice Society and Postal Department won't stand for them. The American people don't like filth." "Yes. It's fine. I'm glad we have such dainty romances as 'Right on the Coco' instead." "Say what in heck do you think you're trying to do? Kid me?" He was silent. She awaited his anger. She meditated upon his gutter patois, the Boeotian dialect characteristic of Gopher Prairie. He laughed puzzlingly. When they came into the glow of the house he laughed again. He condescended: "I've got to hand it to you. You're consistent, all right. I'd of thought that after getting this look-in at a lot of good decent farmers, you'd get over this high-art stuff, but you hang right on." "Well----" To herself: "He takes advantage of my trying to be good." "Tell you, Carrie: There's just three classes of people: folks that haven't got any ideas at all; and cranks that kick about everything; and Regular Guys, the fellows with sticktuitiveness, that boost and get the world's work done." "Then I'm probably a crank." She smiled negligently. "No. I won't admit it. You do like to talk, but at a show-down you'd prefer Sam Clark to any damn long-haired artist." "Oh--well----" "Oh well!" mockingly. "My, we're just going to change everything, aren't we! Going to tell fellows that have been making movies for ten years how to direct 'em; and tell architects how to build towns; and make the magazines publish nothing but a lot of highbrow stories about old maids, and about wives that don't know what they want. Oh, we're a terror! . . . Come on now, Carrie; come out of it; wake up! You've got a fine nerve, kicking about a movie because it shows a few legs! Why, you're always touting these Greek dancers, or whatever they are, that don't even wear a shimmy!" "But, dear, the trouble with that film--it wasn't that it got in so many legs, but that it giggled coyly and promised to show more of them, and then didn't keep the promise. It was Peeping Tom's idea of humor." "I don't get you. Look here now----" She lay awake, while he rumbled with sleep "I must go on. My 'crank ideas;' he calls them. I thought that adoring him, watching him operate, would be enough. It isn't. Not after the first thrill. "I don't want to hurt him. But I must go on. "It isn't enough, to stand by while he fills an automobile radiator and chucks me bits of information. "If I stood by and admired him long enough, I would be content. I would become a 'nice little woman.' The Village Virus. Already----I'm not reading anything. I haven't touched the piano for a week. I'm letting the days drown in worship of 'a good deal, ten plunks more per acre.' I won't! I won't succumb! "How? I've failed at everything: the Thanatopsis, parties, pioneers, city hall, Guy and Vida. But----It doesn't MATTER! I'm not trying to 'reform the town' now. I'm not trying to organize Browning Clubs, and sit in clean white kids yearning up at lecturers with ribbony eyeglasses. I am trying to save my soul. "Will Kennicott, asleep there, trusting me, thinking he holds me. And I'm leaving him. All of me left him when he laughed at me. It wasn't enough for him that I admired him; I must change myself and grow like him. He takes advantage. No more. It's finished. I will go on." IV Her violin lay on top of the upright piano. She picked it up. Since she had last touched it the dried strings had snapped, and upon it lay a gold and crimson cigar-band. V She longed to see Guy Pollock, for the confirming of the brethren in the faith. But Kennicott's dominance was heavy upon her. She could not determine whether she was checked by fear or him, or by inertia--by dislike of the emotional labor of the "scenes" which would be involved in asserting independence. She was like the revolutionist at fifty: not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades. The second evening after the movies she impulsively summoned Vida Sherwin and Guy to the house for pop-corn and cider. In the living-room Vida and Kennicott debated "the value of manual training in grades below the eighth," while Carol sat beside Guy at the dining table, buttering pop-corn. She was quickened by the speculation in his eyes. She murmured: "Guy, do you want to help me?" "My dear! How?" "I don't know!" He waited. "I think I want you to help me find out what has made the darkness of the women. Gray darkness and shadowy trees. We're all in it, ten million women, young married women with good prosperous husbands, and business women in linen collars, and grandmothers that gad out to teas, and wives of under-paid miners, and farmwives who really like to make butter and go to church. What is it we want--and need? Will Kennicott there would say that we need lots of children and hard work. But it isn't that. There's the same discontent in women with eight children and one more coming--always one more coming! And you find it in stenographers and wives who scrub, just as much as in girl college-graduates who wonder how they can escape their kind parents. What do we want?" "Essentially, I think, you are like myself, Carol; you want to go back to an age of tranquillity and charming manners. You want to enthrone good taste again." "Just good taste? Fastidious people? Oh--no! I believe all of us want the same things--we're all together, the industrial workers and the women and the farmers and the negro race and the Asiatic colonies, and even a few of the Respectables. It's all the same revolt, in all the classes that have waited and taken advice. I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing the politicians and priests and cautious reformers (and the husbands!) coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just give us a bit more time and we'll produce it; trust us; we're wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia NOW--and we're going to try our hands at it. All we want is--everything for all of us! For every housewife and every longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want everything. We shatn't get it. So we shatn't ever be content----" She wondered why he was wincing. He broke in: "See here, my dear, I certainly hope you don't class yourself with a lot of trouble-making labor-leaders! Democracy is all right theoretically, and I'll admit there are industrial injustices, but I'd rather have them than see the world reduced to a dead level of mediocrity. I refuse to believe that you have anything in common with a lot of laboring men rowing for bigger wages so that they can buy wretched flivvers and hideous player-pianos and----" At this second, in Buenos Ayres, a newspaper editor broke his routine of being bored by exchanges to assert, "Any injustice is better than seeing the world reduced to a gray level of scientific dullness." At this second a clerk standing at the bar of a New York saloon stopped milling his secret fear of his nagging office-manager long enough to growl at the chauffeur beside him, "Aw, you socialists make me sick! I'm an individualist. I ain't going to be nagged by no bureaus and take orders off labor-leaders. And mean to say a hobo's as good as you and me?" At this second Carol realized that for all Guy's love of dead elegances his timidity was as depressing to her as the bulkiness of Sam Clark. She realized that he was not a mystery, as she had excitedly believed; not a romantic messenger from the World Outside on whom she could count for escape. He belonged to Gopher Prairie, absolutely. She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street. He was completing his protest, "You don't want to be mixed up in all this orgy of meaningless discontent?" She soothed him. "No, I don't. I'm not heroic. I'm scared by all the fighting that's going on in the world. I want nobility and adventure, but perhaps I want still more to curl on the hearth with some one I love." "Would you----" He did not finish it. He picked up a handful of pop-corn, let it run through his fingers, looked at her wistfully. With the loneliness of one who has put away a possible love Carol saw that he was a stranger. She saw that he had never been anything but a frame on which she had hung shining garments. If she had let him diffidently make love to her, it was not because she cared, but because she did not care, because it did not matter. She smiled at him with the exasperating tactfulness of a woman checking a flirtation; a smile like an airy pat on the arm. She sighed, "You're a dear to let me tell you my imaginary troubles." She bounced up, and trilled, "Shall we take the pop-corn in to them now?" Guy looked after her desolately. While she teased Vida and Kennicott she was repeating, "I must go on." VI Miles Bjornstam, the pariah "Red Swede," had brought his circular saw and portable gasoline engine to the house, to cut the cords of poplar for the kitchen range. Kennicott had given the order; Carol knew nothing of it till she heard the ringing of the saw, and glanced out to see Bjornstam, in black leather jacket and enormous ragged purple mittens, pressing sticks against the whirling blade, and flinging the stove-lengths to one side. The red irritable motor kept up a red irritable "tip-tip-tip-tip-tip-tip." The whine of the saw rose till it simulated the shriek of a fire-alarm whistle at night, but always at the end it gave a lively metallic clang, and in the stillness she heard the flump of the cut stick falling on the pile. She threw a motor robe over her, ran out. Bjornstam welcomed her, "Well, well, well! Here's old Miles, fresh as ever. Well say, that's all right; he ain't even begun to be cheeky yet; next summer he's going to take you out on his horse-trading trip, clear into Idaho." "Yes, and I may go!" "How's tricks? Crazy about the town yet?" "No, but I probably shall be, some day." "Don't let 'em get you. Kick 'em in the face!" He shouted at her while he worked. The pile of stove-wood grew astonishingly. The pale bark of the poplar sticks was mottled with lichens of sage-green and dusty gray; the newly sawed ends were fresh-colored, with the agreeable roughness of a woolen muffler. To the sterile winter air the wood gave a scent of March sap. Kennicott telephoned that he was going into the country. Bjornstam had not finished his work at noon, and she invited him to have dinner with Bea in the kitchen. She wished that she were independent enough to dine with these her guests. She considered their friendliness, she sneered at "social distinctions," she raged at her own taboos--and she continued to regard them as retainers and herself as a lady. She sat in the dining-room and listened through the door to Bjornstam's booming and Bea's giggles. She was the more absurd to herself in that, after the rite of dining alone, she could go out to the kitchen, lean against the sink, and talk to them. They were attracted to each other; a Swedish Othello and Desdemona, more useful and amiable than their prototypes. Bjornstam told his scapes: selling horses in a Montana mining-camp, breaking a log-jam, being impertinent to a "two-fisted" millionaire lumberman. Bea gurgled "Oh my!" and kept his coffee cup filled. He took a long time to finish the wood. He had frequently to go into the kitchen to get warm. Carol heard him confiding to Bea, "You're a darn nice Swede girl. I guess if I had a woman like you I wouldn't be such a sorehead. Gosh, your kitchen is clean; makes an old bach feel sloppy. Say, that's nice hair you got. Huh? Me fresh? Saaaay, girl, if I ever do get fresh, you'll know it. Why, I could pick you up with one finger, and hold you in the air long enough to read Robert J. Ingersoll clean through. Ingersoll? Oh, he's a religious writer. Sure. You'd like him fine." When he drove off he waved to Bea; and Carol, lonely at the window above, was envious of their pastoral. "And I----But I will go on."

Chapter 16

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-16

When Christmas comes, Carol finds herself crying and missing her father, even though he's been dead for more than a decade. She realizes that her Christmases with Will will never be like the ones she grew up with. Carol makes a new effort to appreciate the things Will loves in life, including his motorcar and his land speculation. But Will isn't very good at giving Carol the facts she'd need to appreciate them. Carol eventually gives up and retreats into her boring, lonely life. She keeps arguing with Will about making Gopher Prairie a more fulfilling place to live in. He argues that everyone likes it except her. Carol approaches Guy Pollock again for help living in Gopher Prairie. It turns out that there's not much he can do for her, since he has learned to accept the way things are. One day, while Will is out, Carol invites Miles Bjornstam to have dinner in her kitchen with her maid Bea. Carol eats in a different room because that's what's considered proper. Miles and Bea really hit it off, and Carol is envious of their connection.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/17.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_16_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 17

chapter 17

{"name": "Chapter 17", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-17", "summary": "Carol rides with twenty other people in a large sled to some lakeside cottages. She tries her best to feel merry. All of the talk at the party is superficial and repetitive, but Carol does her best to enjoy herself. She tells the folks at the party that Gopher Prairie should get together a dramatic association that can put on plays. People are really into the idea, although we're not sure how well they'll follow through on it. Carol later convinces Will to take her to Minneapolis so she can study how plays are put on in the big city. When they get there, though, she's ashamed of how hickish she and Will must look to the city folk. Will wants to get out of the plays as soon as the two of them sit down. Carol convinces him to stay for several more, but she can feel how badly he wants to leave. She tries to fantasize and put herself in the plays, but Will's comments keep pulling her back out.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XVII I THEY were driving down the lake to the cottages that moonlit January night, twenty of them in the bob-sled. They sang "Toy Land" and "Seeing Nelly Home"; they leaped from the low back of the sled to race over the slippery snow ruts; and when they were tired they climbed on the runners for a lift. The moon-tipped flakes kicked up by the horses settled over the revelers and dripped down their necks, but they laughed, yelped, beat their leather mittens against their chests. The harness rattled, the sleigh-bells were frantic, Jack Elder's setter sprang beside the horses, barking. For a time Carol raced with them. The cold air gave fictive power. She felt that she could run on all night, leap twenty feet at a stride. But the excess of energy tired her, and she was glad to snuggle under the comforters which covered the hay in the sled-box. In the midst of the babel she found enchanted quietude. Along the road the shadows from oak-branches were inked on the snow like bars of music. Then the sled came out on the surface of Lake Minniemashie. Across the thick ice was a veritable road, a short-cut for farmers. On the glaring expanse of the lake-levels of hard crust, flashes of green ice blown clear, chains of drifts ribbed like the sea-beach--the moonlight was overwhelming. It stormed on the snow, it turned the woods ashore into crystals of fire. The night was tropical and voluptuous. In that drugged magic there was no difference between heavy heat and insinuating cold. Carol was dream-strayed. The turbulent voices, even Guy Pollock being connotative beside her, were nothing. She repeated: Deep on the convent-roof the snows Are sparkling to the moon. The words and the light blurred into one vast indefinite happiness, and she believed that some great thing was coming to her. She withdrew from the clamor into a worship of incomprehensible gods. The night expanded, she was conscious of the universe, and all mysteries stooped down to her. She was jarred out of her ecstasy as the bob-sled bumped up the steep road to the bluff where stood the cottages. They dismounted at Jack Elder's shack. The interior walls of unpainted boards, which had been grateful in August, were forbidding in the chill. In fur coats and mufflers tied over caps they were a strange company, bears and walruses talking. Jack Elder lighted the shavings waiting in the belly of a cast-iron stove which was like an enlarged bean-pot. They piled their wraps high on a rocker, and cheered the rocker as it solemnly tipped over backward. Mrs. Elder and Mrs. Sam Clark made coffee in an enormous blackened tin pot; Vida Sherwin and Mrs. McGanum unpacked doughnuts and gingerbread; Mrs. Dave Dyer warmed up "hot dogs"--frankfurters in rolls; Dr. Terry Gould, after announcing, "Ladies and gents, prepare to be shocked; shock line forms on the right," produced a bottle of bourbon whisky. The others danced, muttering "Ouch!" as their frosted feet struck the pine planks. Carol had lost her dream. Harry Haydock lifted her by the waist and swung her. She laughed. The gravity of the people who stood apart and talked made her the more impatient for frolic. Kennicott, Sam Clark, Jackson Elder, young Dr. McGanum, and James Madison Howland, teetering on their toes near the stove, conversed with the sedate pomposity of the commercialist. In details the men were unlike, yet they said the same things in the same hearty monotonous voices. You had to look at them to see which was speaking. "Well, we made pretty good time coming up," from one--any one. "Yump, we hit it up after we struck the good going on the lake." "Seems kind of slow though, after driving an auto." "Yump, it does, at that. Say, how'd you make out with that Sphinx tire you got?" "Seems to hold out fine. Still, I don't know's I like it any better than the Roadeater Cord." "Yump, nothing better than a Roadeater. Especially the cord. The cord's lots better than the fabric." "Yump, you said something----Roadeater's a good tire." "Say, how'd you come out with Pete Garsheim on his payments?" "He's paying up pretty good. That's a nice piece of land he's got." "Yump, that's a dandy farm." "Yump, Pete's got a good place there." They glided from these serious topics into the jocose insults which are the wit of Main Street. Sam Clark was particularly apt at them. "What's this wild-eyed sale of summer caps you think you're trying to pull off?" he clamored at Harry Haydock. "Did you steal 'em, or are you just overcharging us, as usual? . . . Oh say, speaking about caps, d'I ever tell you the good one I've got on Will? The doc thinks he's a pretty good driver, fact, he thinks he's almost got human intelligence, but one time he had his machine out in the rain, and the poor fish, he hadn't put on chains, and thinks I----" Carol had heard the story rather often. She fled back to the dancers, and at Dave Dyer's masterstroke of dropping an icicle down Mrs. McGanum's back she applauded hysterically. They sat on the floor, devouring the food. The men giggled amiably as they passed the whisky bottle, and laughed, "There's a real sport!" when Juanita Haydock took a sip. Carol tried to follow; she believed that she desired to be drunk and riotous; but the whisky choked her and as she saw Kennicott frown she handed the bottle on repentantly. Somewhat too late she remembered that she had given up domesticity and repentance. "Let's play charades!" said Raymie Wutherspoon. "Oh yes, do let us," said Ella Stowbody. "That's the caper," sanctioned Harry Haydock. They interpreted the word "making" as May and King. The crown was a red flannel mitten cocked on Sam Clark's broad pink bald head. They forgot they were respectable. They made-believe. Carol was stimulated to cry: "Let's form a dramatic club and give a play! Shall we? It's been so much fun tonight!" They looked affable. "Sure," observed Sam Clark loyally. "Oh, do let us! I think it would be lovely to present 'Romeo and Juliet'!" yearned Ella Stowbody. "Be a whale of a lot of fun," Dr. Terry Gould granted. "But if we did," Carol cautioned, "it would be awfully silly to have amateur theatricals. We ought to paint our own scenery and everything, and really do something fine. There'd be a lot of hard work. Would you--would we all be punctual at rehearsals, do you suppose?" "You bet!" "Sure." "That's the idea." "Fellow ought to be prompt at rehearsals," they all agreed. "Then let's meet next week and form the Gopher Prairie Dramatic Association!" Carol sang. She drove home loving these friends who raced through moonlit snow, had Bohemian parties, and were about to create beauty in the theater. Everything was solved. She would be an authentic part of the town, yet escape the coma of the Village Virus. . . . She would be free of Kennicott again, without hurting him, without his knowing. She had triumphed. The moon was small and high now, and unheeding. II Though they had all been certain that they longed for the privilege of attending committee meetings and rehearsals, the dramatic association as definitely formed consisted only of Kennicott, Carol, Guy Pollock, Vida Sherwin, Ella Stowbody, the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, Raymie Wutherspoon, Dr. Terry Gould, and four new candidates: flirtatious Rita Simons, Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon and Myrtle Cass, an uncomely but intense girl of nineteen. Of these fifteen only seven came to the first meeting. The rest telephoned their unparalleled regrets and engagements and illnesses, and announced that they would be present at all other meetings through eternity. Carol was made president and director. She had added the Dillons. Despite Kennicott's apprehension the dentist and his wife had not been taken up by the Westlakes but had remained as definitely outside really smart society as Willis Woodford, who was teller, bookkeeper, and janitor in Stowbody's bank. Carol had noted Mrs. Dillon dragging past the house during a bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, looking in with pathetic lips at the splendor of the accepted. She impulsively invited the Dillons to the dramatic association meeting, and when Kennicott was brusque to them she was unusually cordial, and felt virtuous. That self-approval balanced her disappointment at the smallness of the meeting, and her embarrassment during Raymie Wutherspoon's repetitions of "The stage needs uplifting," and "I believe that there are great lessons in some plays." Ella Stowbody, who was a professional, having studied elocution in Milwaukee, disapproved of Carol's enthusiasm for recent plays. Miss Stowbody expressed the fundamental principle of the American drama: the only way to be artistic is to present Shakespeare. As no one listened to her she sat back and looked like Lady Macbeth. III The Little Theaters, which were to give piquancy to American drama three or four years later, were only in embryo. But of this fast coming revolt Carol had premonitions. She knew from some lost magazine article that in Dublin were innovators called The Irish Players. She knew confusedly that a man named Gordon Craig had painted scenery--or had he written plays? She felt that in the turbulence of the drama she was discovering a history more important than the commonplace chronicles which dealt with senators and their pompous puerilities. She had a sensation of familiarity; a dream of sitting in a Brussels cafe and going afterward to a tiny gay theater under a cathedral wall. The advertisement in the Minneapolis paper leaped from the page to her eyes: The Cosmos School of Music, Oratory, and Dramatic Art announces a program of four one-act plays by Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats, and Lord Dunsany. She had to be there! She begged Kennicott to "run down to the Cities" with her. "Well, I don't know. Be fun to take in a show, but why the deuce do you want to see those darn foreign plays, given by a lot of amateurs? Why don't you wait for a regular play, later on? There's going to be some corkers coming: 'Lottie of Two-Gun Rancho,' and 'Cops and Crooks'--real Broadway stuff, with the New York casts. What's this junk you want to see? Hm. 'How He Lied to Her Husband.' That doesn't listen so bad. Sounds racy. And, uh, well, I could go to the motor show, I suppose. I'd like to see this new Hup roadster. Well----" She never knew which attraction made him decide. She had four days of delightful worry--over the hole in her one good silk petticoat, the loss of a string of beads from her chiffon and brown velvet frock, the catsup stain on her best georgette crepe blouse. She wailed, "I haven't a single solitary thing that's fit to be seen in," and enjoyed herself very much indeed. Kennicott went about casually letting people know that he was "going to run down to the Cities and see some shows." As the train plodded through the gray prairie, on a windless day with the smoke from the engine clinging to the fields in giant cotton-rolls, in a low and writhing wall which shut off the snowy fields, she did not look out of the window. She closed her eyes and hummed, and did not know that she was humming. She was the young poet attacking fame and Paris. In the Minneapolis station the crowd of lumberjacks, farmers, and Swedish families with innumerous children and grandparents and paper parcels, their foggy crowding and their clamor confused her. She felt rustic in this once familiar city, after a year and a half of Gopher Prairie. She was certain that Kennicott was taking the wrong trolley-car. By dusk, the liquor warehouses, Hebraic clothing-shops, and lodging-houses on lower Hennepin Avenue were smoky, hideous, ill-tempered. She was battered by the noise and shuttling of the rush-hour traffic. When a clerk in an overcoat too closely fitted at the waist stared at her, she moved nearer to Kennicott's arm. The clerk was flippant and urban. He was a superior person, used to this tumult. Was he laughing at her? For a moment she wanted the secure quiet of Gopher Prairie. In the hotel-lobby she was self-conscious. She was not used to hotels; she remembered with jealousy how often Juanita Haydock talked of the famous hotels in Chicago. She could not face the traveling salesmen, baronial in large leather chairs. She wanted people to believe that her husband and she were accustomed to luxury and chill elegance; she was faintly angry at him for the vulgar way in which, after signing the register "Dr. W. P. Kennicott & wife," he bellowed at the clerk, "Got a nice room with bath for us, old man?" She gazed about haughtily, but as she discovered that no one was interested in her she felt foolish, and ashamed of her irritation. She asserted, "This silly lobby is too florid," and simultaneously she admired it: the onyx columns with gilt capitals, the crown-embroidered velvet curtains at the restaurant door, the silk-roped alcove where pretty girls perpetually waited for mysterious men, the two-pound boxes of candy and the variety of magazines at the news-stand. The hidden orchestra was lively. She saw a man who looked like a European diplomat, in a loose top-coat and a Homburg hat. A woman with a broadtail coat, a heavy lace veil, pearl earrings, and a close black hat entered the restaurant. "Heavens! That's the first really smart woman I've seen in a year!" Carol exulted. She felt metropolitan. But as she followed Kennicott to the elevator the coat-check girl, a confident young woman, with cheeks powdered like lime, and a blouse low and thin and furiously crimson, inspected her, and under that supercilious glance Carol was shy again. She unconsciously waited for the bellboy to precede her into the elevator. When he snorted "Go ahead!" she was mortified. He thought she was a hayseed, she worried. The moment she was in their room, with the bellboy safely out of the way, she looked critically at Kennicott. For the first time in months she really saw him. His clothes were too heavy and provincial. His decent gray suit, made by Nat Hicks of Gopher Prairie, might have been of sheet iron; it had no distinction of cut, no easy grace like the diplomat's Burberry. His black shoes were blunt and not well polished. His scarf was a stupid brown. He needed a shave. But she forgot her doubt as she realized the ingenuities of the room. She ran about, turning on the taps of the bathtub, which gushed instead of dribbling like the taps at home, snatching the new wash-rag out of its envelope of oiled paper, trying the rose-shaded light between the twin beds, pulling out the drawers of the kidney-shaped walnut desk to examine the engraved stationery, planning to write on it to every one she knew, admiring the claret-colored velvet armchair and the blue rug, testing the ice-water tap, and squealing happily when the water really did come out cold. She flung her arms about Kennicott, kissed him. "Like it, old lady?" "It's adorable. It's so amusing. I love you for bringing me. You really are a dear!" He looked blankly indulgent, and yawned, and condescended, "That's a pretty slick arrangement on the radiator, so you can adjust it at any temperature you want. Must take a big furnace to run this place. Gosh, I hope Bea remembers to turn off the drafts tonight." Under the glass cover of the dressing-table was a menu with the most enchanting dishes: breast of guinea hen De Vitresse, pommes de terre a la Russe, meringue Chantilly, gateaux Bruxelles. "Oh, let's----I'm going to have a hot bath, and put on my new hat with the wool flowers, and let's go down and eat for hours, and we'll have a cocktail!" she chanted. While Kennicott labored over ordering it was annoying to see him permit the waiter to be impertinent, but as the cocktail elevated her to a bridge among colored stars, as the oysters came in--not canned oysters in the Gopher Prairie fashion, but on the half-shell--she cried, "If you only knew how wonderful it is not to have had to plan this dinner, and order it at the butcher's and fuss and think about it, and then watch Bea cook it! I feel so free. And to have new kinds of food, and different patterns of dishes and linen, and not worry about whether the pudding is being spoiled! Oh, this is a great moment for me!" IV They had all the experiences of provincials in a metropolis. After breakfast Carol bustled to a hair-dresser's, bought gloves and a blouse, and importantly met Kennicott in front of an optician's, in accordance with plans laid down, revised, and verified. They admired the diamonds and furs and frosty silverware and mahogany chairs and polished morocco sewing-boxes in shop-windows, and were abashed by the throngs in the department-stores, and were bullied by a clerk into buying too many shirts for Kennicott, and gaped at the "clever novelty perfumes--just in from New York." Carol got three books on the theater, and spent an exultant hour in warning herself that she could not afford this rajah-silk frock, in thinking how envious it would make Juanita Haydock, in closing her eyes, and buying it. Kennicott went from shop to shop, earnestly hunting down a felt-covered device to keep the windshield of his car clear of rain. They dined extravagantly at their hotel at night, and next morning sneaked round the corner to economize at a Childs' Restaurant. They were tired by three in the afternoon, and dozed at the motion-pictures and said they wished they were back in Gopher Prairie--and by eleven in the evening they were again so lively that they went to a Chinese restaurant that was frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on pay-days. They sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Fooyung, and listened to a brassy automatic piano, and were altogether cosmopolitan. On the street they met people from home--the McGanums. They laughed, shook hands repeatedly, and exclaimed, "Well, this is quite a coincidence!" They asked when the McGanums had come down, and begged for news of the town they had left two days before. Whatever the McGanums were at home, here they stood out as so superior to all the undistinguishable strangers absurdly hurrying past that the Kennicotts held them as long as they could. The McGanums said good-by as though they were going to Tibet instead of to the station to catch No. 7 north. They explored Minneapolis. Kennicott was conversational and technical regarding gluten and cockle-cylinders and No. I Hard, when they were shown through the gray stone hulks and new cement elevators of the largest flour-mills in the world. They looked across Loring Park and the Parade to the towers of St. Mark's and the Procathedral, and the red roofs of houses climbing Kenwood Hill. They drove about the chain of garden-circled lakes, and viewed the houses of the millers and lumbermen and real estate peers--the potentates of the expanding city. They surveyed the small eccentric bungalows with pergolas, the houses of pebbledash and tapestry brick with sleeping-porches above sun-parlors, and one vast incredible chateau fronting the Lake of the Isles. They tramped through a shining-new section of apartment-houses; not the tall bleak apartments of Eastern cities but low structures of cheerful yellow brick, in which each flat had its glass-enclosed porch with swinging couch and scarlet cushions and Russian brass bowls. Between a waste of tracks and a raw gouged hill they found poverty in staggering shanties. They saw miles of the city which they had never known in their days of absorption in college. They were distinguished explorers, and they remarked, in great mutual esteem, "I bet Harry Haydock's never seen the City like this! Why, he'd never have sense enough to study the machinery in the mills, or go through all these outlying districts. Wonder folks in Gopher Prairie wouldn't use their legs and explore, the way we do!" They had two meals with Carol's sister, and were bored, and felt that intimacy which beatifies married people when they suddenly admit that they equally dislike a relative of either of them. So it was with affection but also with weariness that they approached the evening on which Carol was to see the plays at the dramatic school. Kennicott suggested not going. "So darn tired from all this walking; don't know but what we better turn in early and get rested up." It was only from duty that Carol dragged him and herself out of the warm hotel, into a stinking trolley, up the brownstone steps of the converted residence which lugubriously housed the dramatic school. V They were in a long whitewashed hall with a clumsy draw-curtain across the front. The folding chairs were filled with people who looked washed and ironed: parents of the pupils, girl students, dutiful teachers. "Strikes me it's going to be punk. If the first play isn't good, let's beat it," said Kennicott hopefully. "All right," she yawned. With hazy eyes she tried to read the lists of characters, which were hidden among lifeless advertisements of pianos, music-dealers, restaurants, candy. She regarded the Schnitzler play with no vast interest. The actors moved and spoke stiffly. Just as its cynicism was beginning to rouse her village-dulled frivolity, it was over. "Don't think a whale of a lot of that. How about taking a sneak?" petitioned Kennicott. "Oh, let's try the next one, 'How He Lied to Her Husband.'" The Shaw conceit amused her, and perplexed Kennicott: "Strikes me it's darn fresh. Thought it would be racy. Don't know as I think much of a play where a husband actually claims he wants a fellow to make love to his wife. No husband ever did that! Shall we shake a leg?" "I want to see this Yeats thing, 'Land of Heart's Desire.' I used to love it in college." She was awake now, and urgent. "I know you didn't care so much for Yeats when I read him aloud to you, but you just see if you don't adore him on the stage." Most of the cast were as unwieldy as oak chairs marching, and the setting was an arty arrangement of batik scarfs and heavy tables, but Maire Bruin was slim as Carol, and larger-eyed, and her voice was a morning bell. In her, Carol lived, and on her lifting voice was transported from this sleepy small-town husband and all the rows of polite parents to the stilly loft of a thatched cottage where in a green dimness, beside a window caressed by linden branches, she bent over a chronicle of twilight women and the ancient gods. "Well--gosh--nice kid played that girl--good-looker," said Kennicott. "Want to stay for the last piece? Heh?" She shivered. She did not answer. The curtain was again drawn aside. On the stage they saw nothing but long green curtains and a leather chair. Two young men in brown robes like furniture-covers were gesturing vacuously and droning cryptic sentences full of repetitions. It was Carol's first hearing of Dunsany. She sympathized with the restless Kennicott as he felt in his pocket for a cigar and unhappily put it back. Without understanding when or how, without a tangible change in the stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was conscious of another time and place. Stately and aloof among vainglorious tiring-maids, a queen in robes that murmured on the marble floor, she trod the gallery of a crumbling palace. In the courtyard, elephants trumpeted, and swart men with beards dyed crimson stood with blood-stained hands folded upon their hilts, guarding the caravan from El Sharnak, the camels with Tyrian stuffs of topaz and cinnabar. Beyond the turrets of the outer wall the jungle glared and shrieked, and the sun was furious above drenched orchids. A youth came striding through the steel-bossed doors, the sword-bitten doors that were higher than ten tall men. He was in flexible mail, and under the rim of his planished morion were amorous curls. His hand was out to her; before she touched it she could feel its warmth---- "Gosh all hemlock! What the dickens is all this stuff about, Carrie?" She was no Syrian queen. She was Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. She fell with a jolt into a whitewashed hall and sat looking at two scared girls and a young man in wrinkled tights. Kennicott fondly rambled as they left the hall: "What the deuce did that last spiel mean? Couldn't make head or tail of it. If that's highbrow drama, give me a cow-puncher movie, every time! Thank God, that's over, and we can get to bed. Wonder if we wouldn't make time by walking over to Nicollet to take a car? One thing I will say for that dump: they had it warm enough. Must have a big hot-air furnace, I guess. Wonder how much coal it takes to run 'em through the winter?" In the car he affectionately patted her knee, and he was for a second the striding youth in armor; then he was Doc Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, and she was recaptured by Main Street. Never, not all her life, would she behold jungles and the tombs of kings. There were strange things in the world, they really existed; but she would never see them. She would recreate them in plays! She would make the dramatic association understand her aspiration. They would, surely they would---- She looked doubtfully at the impenetrable reality of yawning trolley conductor and sleepy passengers and placards advertising soap and underwear.

Chapter 17

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-17

Carol rides with twenty other people in a large sled to some lakeside cottages. She tries her best to feel merry. All of the talk at the party is superficial and repetitive, but Carol does her best to enjoy herself. She tells the folks at the party that Gopher Prairie should get together a dramatic association that can put on plays. People are really into the idea, although we're not sure how well they'll follow through on it. Carol later convinces Will to take her to Minneapolis so she can study how plays are put on in the big city. When they get there, though, she's ashamed of how hickish she and Will must look to the city folk. Will wants to get out of the plays as soon as the two of them sit down. Carol convinces him to stay for several more, but she can feel how badly he wants to leave. She tries to fantasize and put herself in the plays, but Will's comments keep pulling her back out.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/18.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_17_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 18

chapter 18

{"name": "Chapter 18", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-18", "summary": "Back in Gopher Prairie, Carol calls the first meeting of the dramatic club and asks for any suggestions for the play they should put on. She already has a high-minded play to recommend, but she's shocked to find out that every person is adamant about doing the play they want to do. When Carol finally recommends her choice, it gets shot down almost immediately. The group ends up choosing a lame play called \"The Girl from Kankakee.\" Carol thinks it might be okay but then hates it from the moment she first sees the script. It doesn't take long for Carol to get on everyone's nerves with her constant nitpicking and perfectionism. Everyone talks and laughs about her behind her back, and pretty soon people stop showing up for every rehearsal. Carol attends the only professional play that comes to Gopher Prairie that year, but she's disappointed to see how amateurish it is. In the meantime, Miles Bjornstam starts courting Carol's maid, Bea Sorenson. He tells Carol he hopes that she'll put on a good show, because if she doesn't, no one ever will. The play ends up being a total disaster on its opening night. Carol can see how awful it is, but everyone in the audience and the cast thinks it's great. This puts Carol in a terrible dilemma. Should she tell them how horrible it is, or should she let them go on thinking it's great? Three years go by in a flash for Carol, as she settles back into a mindless and ambitionless life in Gopher Prairie. The only thing that interests her is the baby that Bea Sorenson ends up having with Miles Bjornstam after they're married.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XVIII I SHE hurried to the first meeting of the play-reading committee. Her jungle romance had faded, but she retained a religious fervor, a surge of half-formed thought about the creation of beauty by suggestion. A Dunsany play would be too difficult for the Gopher Prairie association. She would let them compromise on Shaw--on "Androcles and the Lion," which had just been published. The committee was composed of Carol, Vida Sherwin, Guy Pollock, Raymie Wutherspoon, and Juanita Haydock. They were exalted by the picture of themselves as being simultaneously business-like and artistic. They were entertained by Vida in the parlor of Mrs. Elisha Gurrey's boarding-house, with its steel engraving of Grant at Appomattox, its basket of stereoscopic views, and its mysterious stains on the gritty carpet. Vida was an advocate of culture-buying and efficiency-systems. She hinted that they ought to have (as at the committee-meetings of the Thanatopsis) a "regular order of business," and "the reading of the minutes," but as there were no minutes to read, and as no one knew exactly what was the regular order of the business of being literary, they had to give up efficiency. Carol, as chairman, said politely, "Have you any ideas about what play we'd better give first?" She waited for them to look abashed and vacant, so that she might suggest "Androcles." Guy Pollock answered with disconcerting readiness, "I'll tell you: since we're going to try to do something artistic, and not simply fool around, I believe we ought to give something classic. How about 'The School for Scandal'?" "Why----Don't you think that has been done a good deal?" "Yes, perhaps it has." Carol was ready to say, "How about Bernard Shaw?" when he treacherously went on, "How would it be then to give a Greek drama--say 'Oedipus Tyrannus'?" "Why, I don't believe----" Vida Sherwin intruded, "I'm sure that would be too hard for us. Now I've brought something that I think would be awfully jolly." She held out, and Carol incredulously took, a thin gray pamphlet entitled "McGinerty's Mother-in-law." It was the sort of farce which is advertised in "school entertainment" catalogues as: Riproaring knock-out, 5 m. 3 f., time 2 hrs., interior set, popular with churches and all high-class occasions. Carol glanced from the scabrous object to Vida, and realized that she was not joking. "But this is--this is--why, it's just a----Why, Vida, I thought you appreciated--well--appreciated art." Vida snorted, "Oh. Art. Oh yes. I do like art. It's very nice. But after all, what does it matter what kind of play we give as long as we get the association started? The thing that matters is something that none of you have spoken of, that is: what are we going to do with the money, if we make any? I think it would be awfully nice if we presented the high school with a full set of Stoddard's travel-lectures!" Carol moaned, "Oh, but Vida dear, do forgive me but this farce----Now what I'd like us to give is something distinguished. Say Shaw's 'Androcles.' Have any of you read it?" "Yes. Good play," said Guy Pollock. Then Raymie Wutherspoon astoundingly spoke up: "So have I. I read through all the plays in the public library, so's to be ready for this meeting. And----But I don't believe you grasp the irreligious ideas in this 'Androcles,' Mrs. Kennicott. I guess the feminine mind is too innocent to understand all these immoral writers. I'm sure I don't want to criticize Bernard Shaw; I understand he is very popular with the highbrows in Minneapolis; but just the same----As far as I can make out, he's downright improper! The things he SAYS----Well, it would be a very risky thing for our young folks to see. It seems to me that a play that doesn't leave a nice taste in the mouth and that hasn't any message is nothing but--nothing but----Well, whatever it may be, it isn't art. So----Now I've found a play that is clean, and there's some awfully funny scenes in it, too. I laughed out loud, reading it. It's called 'His Mother's Heart,' and it's about a young man in college who gets in with a lot of free-thinkers and boozers and everything, but in the end his mother's influence----" Juanita Haydock broke in with a derisive, "Oh rats, Raymie! Can the mother's influence! I say let's give something with some class to it. I bet we could get the rights to 'The Girl from Kankakee,' and that's a real show. It ran for eleven months in New York!" "That would be lots of fun, if it wouldn't cost too much," reflected Vida. Carol's was the only vote cast against "The Girl from Kankakee." II She disliked "The Girl from Kankakee" even more than she had expected. It narrated the success of a farm-lassie in clearing her brother of a charge of forgery. She became secretary to a New York millionaire and social counselor to his wife; and after a well-conceived speech on the discomfort of having money, she married his son. There was also a humorous office-boy. Carol discerned that both Juanita Haydock and Ella Stowbody wanted the lead. She let Juanita have it. Juanita kissed her and in the exuberant manner of a new star presented to the executive committee her theory, "What we want in a play is humor and pep. There's where American playwrights put it all over these darn old European glooms." As selected by Carol and confirmed by the committee, the persons of the play were: John Grimm, a millionaire . . . . Guy Pollock His wife. . . . . . . . . Miss Vida Sherwin His son . . . . . . . . . Dr. Harvey Dillon His business rival. . . . . . . Raymond T. Wutherspoon Friend of Mrs. Grimm . . . . . . Miss Ella Stowbody The girl from Kankakee . . . . . Mrs. Harold C. Haydock Her brother. . . . . . . . Dr. Terence Gould Her mother . . . . . . . . Mrs. David Dyer Stenographer . . . . . . . . Miss Rita Simons Office-boy . . . . . . . . Miss Myrtle Cass Maid in the Grimms' home . . . . Mrs. W. P. Kennicott Direction of Mrs. Kennicott Among the minor lamentations was Maud Dyer's "Well of course I suppose I look old enough to be Juanita's mother, even if Juanita is eight months older than I am, but I don't know as I care to have everybody noticing it and----" Carol pleaded, "Oh, my DEAR! You two look exactly the same age. I chose you because you have such a darling complexion, and you know with powder and a white wig, anybody looks twice her age, and I want the mother to be sweet, no matter who else is." Ella Stowbody, the professional, perceiving that it was because of a conspiracy of jealousy that she had been given a small part, alternated between lofty amusement and Christian patience. Carol hinted that the play would be improved by cutting, but as every actor except Vida and Guy and herself wailed at the loss of a single line, she was defeated. She told herself that, after all, a great deal could be done with direction and settings. Sam Clark had boastfully written about the dramatic association to his schoolmate, Percy Bresnahan, president of the Velvet Motor Company of Boston. Bresnahan sent a check for a hundred dollars; Sam added twenty-five and brought the fund to Carol, fondly crying, "There! That'll give you a start for putting the thing across swell!" She rented the second floor of the city hall for two months. All through the spring the association thrilled to its own talent in that dismal room. They cleared out the bunting, ballot-boxes, handbills, legless chairs. They attacked the stage. It was a simple-minded stage. It was raised above the floor, and it did have a movable curtain, painted with the advertisement of a druggist dead these ten years, but otherwise it might not have been recognized as a stage. There were two dressing-rooms, one for men, one for women, on either side. The dressing-room doors were also the stage-entrances, opening from the house, and many a citizen of Gopher Prairie had for his first glimpse of romance the bare shoulders of the leading woman. There were three sets of scenery: a woodland, a Poor Interior, and a Rich Interior, the last also useful for railway stations, offices, and as a background for the Swedish Quartette from Chicago. There were three gradations of lighting: full on, half on, and entirely off. This was the only theater in Gopher Prairie. It was known as the "op'ra house." Once, strolling companies had used it for performances of "The Two Orphans," and "Nellie the Beautiful Cloak Model," and "Othello" with specialties between acts, but now the motion-pictures had ousted the gipsy drama. Carol intended to be furiously modern in constructing the office-set, the drawing-room for Mr. Grimm, and the Humble Home near Kankakee. It was the first time that any one in Gopher Prairie had been so revolutionary as to use enclosed scenes with continuous side-walls. The rooms in the op'ra house sets had separate wing-pieces for sides, which simplified dramaturgy, as the villain could always get out of the hero's way by walking out through the wall. The inhabitants of the Humble Home were supposed to be amiable and intelligent. Carol planned for them a simple set with warm color. She could see the beginning of the play: all dark save the high settles and the solid wooden table between them, which were to be illuminated by a ray from offstage. The high light was a polished copper pot filled with primroses. Less clearly she sketched the Grimm drawing-room as a series of cool high white arches. As to how she was to produce these effects she had no notion. She discovered that, despite the enthusiastic young writers, the drama was not half so native and close to the soil as motor cars and telephones. She discovered that simple arts require sophisticated training. She discovered that to produce one perfect stage-picture would be as difficult as to turn all of Gopher Prairie into a Georgian garden. She read all she could find regarding staging, she bought paint and light wood; she borrowed furniture and drapes unscrupulously; she made Kennicott turn carpenter. She collided with the problem of lighting. Against the protest of Kennicott and Vida she mortgaged the association by sending to Minneapolis for a baby spotlight, a strip light, a dimming device, and blue and amber bulbs; and with the gloating rapture of a born painter first turned loose among colors, she spent absorbed evenings in grouping, dimming-painting with lights. Only Kennicott, Guy, and Vida helped her. They speculated as to how flats could be lashed together to form a wall; they hung crocus-yellow curtains at the windows; they blacked the sheet-iron stove; they put on aprons and swept. The rest of the association dropped into the theater every evening, and were literary and superior. They had borrowed Carol's manuals of play-production and had become extremely stagey in vocabulary. Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons, and Raymie Wutherspoon sat on a sawhorse, watching Carol try to get the right position for a picture on the wall in the first scene. "I don't want to hand myself anything but I believe I'll give a swell performance in this first act," confided Juanita. "I wish Carol wasn't so bossy though. She doesn't understand clothes. I want to wear, oh, a dandy dress I have--all scarlet--and I said to her, 'When I enter wouldn't it knock their eyes out if I just stood there at the door in this straight scarlet thing?' But she wouldn't let me." Young Rita agreed, "She's so much taken up with her old details and carpentering and everything that she can't see the picture as a whole. Now I thought it would be lovely if we had an office-scene like the one in 'Little, But Oh My!' Because I SAW that, in Duluth. But she simply wouldn't listen at all." Juanita sighed, "I wanted to give one speech like Ethel Barrymore would, if she was in a play like this. (Harry and I heard her one time in Minneapolis--we had dandy seats, in the orchestra--I just know I could imitate her.) Carol didn't pay any attention to my suggestion. I don't want to criticize but I guess Ethel knows more about acting than Carol does!" "Say, do you think Carol has the right dope about using a strip light behind the fireplace in the second act? I told her I thought we ought to use a bunch," offered Raymie. "And I suggested it would be lovely if we used a cyclorama outside the window in the first act, and what do you think she said? 'Yes, and it would be lovely to have Eleanora Duse play the lead,' she said, 'and aside from the fact that it's evening in the first act, you're a great technician,' she said. I must say I think she was pretty sarcastic. I've been reading up, and I know I could build a cyclorama, if she didn't want to run everything." "Yes, and another thing, I think the entrance in the first act ought to be L. U. E., not L. 3 E.," from Juanita. "And why does she just use plain white tormenters?" "What's a tormenter?" blurted Rita Simons. The savants stared at her ignorance. III Carol did not resent their criticisms, she didn't very much resent their sudden knowledge, so long as they let her make pictures. It was at rehearsals that the quarrrels broke. No one understood that rehearsals were as real engagements as bridge-games or sociables at the Episcopal Church. They gaily came in half an hour late, or they vociferously came in ten minutes early, and they were so hurt that they whispered about resigning when Carol protested. They telephoned, "I don't think I'd better come out; afraid the dampness might start my toothache," or "Guess can't make it tonight; Dave wants me to sit in on a poker game." When, after a month of labor, as many as nine-elevenths of the cast were often present at a rehearsal; when most of them had learned their parts and some of them spoke like human beings, Carol had a new shock in the realization that Guy Pollock and herself were very bad actors, and that Raymie Wutherspoon was a surprisingly good one. For all her visions she could not control her voice, and she was bored by the fiftieth repetition of her few lines as maid. Guy pulled his soft mustache, looked self-conscious, and turned Mr. Grimm into a limp dummy. But Raymie, as the villain, had no repressions. The tilt of his head was full of character; his drawl was admirably vicious. There was an evening when Carol hoped she was going to make a play; a rehearsal during which Guy stopped looking abashed. From that evening the play declined. They were weary. "We know our parts well enough now; what's the use of getting sick of them?" they complained. They began to skylark; to play with the sacred lights; to giggle when Carol was trying to make the sentimental Myrtle Cass into a humorous office-boy; to act everything but "The Girl from Kankakee." After loafing through his proper part Dr. Terry Gould had great applause for his burlesque of "Hamlet." Even Raymie lost his simple faith, and tried to show that he could do a vaudeville shuffle. Carol turned on the company. "See here, I want this nonsense to stop. We've simply got to get down to work." Juanita Haydock led the mutiny: "Look here, Carol, don't be so bossy. After all, we're doing this play principally for the fun of it, and if we have fun out of a lot of monkey-shines, why then----" "Ye-es," feebly. "You said one time that folks in G. P. didn't get enough fun out of life. And now we are having a circus, you want us to stop!" Carol answered slowly: "I wonder if I can explain what I mean? It's the difference between looking at the comic page and looking at Manet. I want fun out of this, of course. Only----I don't think it would be less fun, but more, to produce as perfect a play as we can." She was curiously exalted; her voice was strained; she stared not at the company but at the grotesques scrawled on the backs of wing-pieces by forgotten stage-hands. "I wonder if you can understand the 'fun' of making a beautiful thing, the pride and satisfaction of it, and the holiness!" The company glanced doubtfully at one another. In Gopher Prairie it is not good form to be holy except at a church, between ten-thirty and twelve on Sunday. "But if we want to do it, we've got to work; we must have self-discipline." They were at once amused and embarrassed. They did not want to affront this mad woman. They backed off and tried to rehearse. Carol did not hear Juanita, in front, protesting to Maud Dyer, "If she calls it fun and holiness to sweat over her darned old play--well, I don't!" IV Carol attended the only professional play which came to Gopher Prairie that spring. It was a "tent show, presenting snappy new dramas under canvas." The hard-working actors doubled in brass, and took tickets; and between acts sang about the moon in June, and sold Dr. Wintergreen's Surefire Tonic for Ills of the Heart, Lungs, Kidneys, and Bowels. They presented "Sunbonnet Nell: A Dramatic Comedy of the Ozarks," with J. Witherbee Boothby wringing the soul by his resonant "Yuh ain't done right by mah little gal, Mr. City Man, but yer a-goin' to find that back in these-yere hills there's honest folks and good shots!" The audience, on planks beneath the patched tent, admired Mr. Boothby's beard and long rifle; stamped their feet in the dust at the spectacle of his heroism; shouted when the comedian aped the City Lady's use of a lorgnon by looking through a doughnut stuck on a fork; wept visibly over Mr. Boothby's Little Gal Nell, who was also Mr. Boothby's legal wife Pearl, and when the curtain went down, listened respectfully to Mr. Boothby's lecture on Dr. Wintergreen's Tonic as a cure for tape-worms, which he illustrated by horrible pallid objects curled in bottles of yellowing alcohol. Carol shook her head. "Juanita is right. I'm a fool. Holiness of the drama! Bernard Shaw! The only trouble with 'The Girl from Kankakee' is that it's too subtle for Gopher Prairie!" She sought faith in spacious banal phrases, taken from books: "the instinctive nobility of simple souls," "need only the opportunity, to appreciate fine things," and "sturdy exponents of democracy." But these optimisms did not sound so loud as the laughter of the audience at the funny-man's line, "Yes, by heckelum, I'm a smart fella." She wanted to give up the play, the dramatic association, the town. As she came out of the tent and walked with Kennicott down the dusty spring street, she peered at this straggling wooden village and felt that she could not possibly stay here through all of tomorrow. It was Miles Bjornstam who gave her strength--he and the fact that every seat for "The Girl from Kankakee" had been sold. Bjornstam was "keeping company" with Bea. Every night he was sitting on the back steps. Once when Carol appeared he grumbled, "Hope you're going to give this burg one good show. If you don't, reckon nobody ever will." V It was the great night; it was the night of the play. The two dressing-rooms were swirling with actors, panting, twitchy pale. Del Snafflin the barber, who was as much a professional as Ella, having once gone on in a mob scene at a stock-company performance in Minneapolis, was making them up, and showing his scorn for amateurs with, "Stand still! For the love o' Mike, how do you expect me to get your eyelids dark if you keep a-wigglin'?" The actors were beseeching, "Hey, Del, put some red in my nostrils--you put some in Rita's--gee, you didn't hardly do anything to my face." They were enormously theatric. They examined Del's makeup box, they sniffed the scent of grease-paint, every minute they ran out to peep through the hole in the curtain, they came back to inspect their wigs and costumes, they read on the whitewashed walls of the dressing-rooms the pencil inscriptions: "The Flora Flanders Comedy Company," and "This is a bum theater," and felt that they were companions of these vanished troupers. Carol, smart in maid's uniform, coaxed the temporary stage-hands to finish setting the first act, wailed at Kennicott, the electrician, "Now for heaven's sake remember the change in cue for the ambers in Act Two," slipped out to ask Dave Dyer, the ticket-taker, if he could get some more chairs, warned the frightened Myrtle Cass to be sure to upset the waste-basket when John Grimm called, "Here you, Reddy." Del Snafflin's orchestra of piano, violin, and cornet began to tune up and every one behind the magic line of the proscenic arch was frightened into paralysis. Carol wavered to the hole in the curtain. There were so many people out there, staring so hard---- In the second row she saw Miles Bjornstam, not with Bea but alone. He really wanted to see the play! It was a good omen. Who could tell? Perhaps this evening would convert Gopher Prairie to conscious beauty. She darted into the women's dressing-room, roused Maud Dyer from her fainting panic, pushed her to the wings, and ordered the curtain up. It rose doubtfully, it staggered and trembled, but it did get up without catching--this time. Then she realized that Kennicott had forgotten to turn off the houselights. Some one out front was giggling. She galloped round to the left wing, herself pulled the switch, looked so ferociously at Kennicott that he quaked, and fled back. Mrs. Dyer was creeping out on the half-darkened stage. The play was begun. And with that instant Carol realized that it was a bad play abominably acted. Encouraging them with lying smiles, she watched her work go to pieces. The settings seemed flimsy, the lighting commonplace. She watched Guy Pollock stammer and twist his mustache when he should have been a bullying magnate; Vida Sherwin, as Grimm's timid wife, chatter at the audience as though they were her class in high-school English; Juanita, in the leading role, defy Mr. Grimm as though she were repeating a list of things she had to buy at the grocery this morning; Ella Stowbody remark "I'd like a cup of tea" as though she were reciting "Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight"; and Dr. Gould, making love to Rita Simons, squeak, "My--my--you--are--a--won'erful--girl." Myrtle Cass, as the office-boy, was so much pleased by the applause of her relatives, then so much agitated by the remarks of Cy Bogart, in the back row, in reference to her wearing trousers, that she could hardly be got off the stage. Only Raymie was so unsociable as to devote himself entirely to acting. That she was right in her opinion of the play Carol was certain when Miles Bjornstam went out after the first act, and did not come back. VI Between the second and third acts she called the company together, and supplicated, "I want to know something, before we have a chance to separate. Whether we're doing well or badly tonight, it is a beginning. But will we take it as merely a beginning? How many of you will pledge yourselves to start in with me, right away, tomorrow, and plan for another play, to be given in September?" They stared at her; they nodded at Juanita's protest: "I think one's enough for a while. It's going elegant tonight, but another play----Seems to me it'll be time enough to talk about that next fall. Carol! I hope you don't mean to hint and suggest we're not doing fine tonight? I'm sure the applause shows the audience think it's just dandy!" Then Carol knew how completely she had failed. As the audience seeped out she heard B. J. Gougerling the banker say to Howland the grocer, "Well, I think the folks did splendid; just as good as professionals. But I don't care much for these plays. What I like is a good movie, with auto accidents and hold-ups, and some git to it, and not all this talky-talk." Then Carol knew how certain she was to fail again. She wearily did not blame them, company nor audience. Herself she blamed for trying to carve intaglios in good wholesome jack-pine. "It's the worst defeat of all. I'm beaten. By Main Street. 'I must go on.' But I can't!" She was not vastly encouraged by the Gopher Prairie Dauntless: . . . would be impossible to distinguish among the actors when all gave such fine account of themselves in difficult roles of this well-known New York stage play. Guy Pollock as the old millionaire could not have been bettered for his fine impersonation of the gruff old millionaire; Mrs. Harry Haydock as the young lady from the West who so easily showed the New York four-flushers where they got off was a vision of loveliness and with fine stage presence. Miss Vida Sherwin the ever popular teacher in our high school pleased as Mrs. Grimm, Dr. Gould was well suited in the role of young lover--girls you better look out, remember the doc is a bachelor. The local Four Hundred also report that he is a great hand at shaking the light fantastic tootsies in the dance. As the stenographer Rita Simons was pretty as a picture, and Miss Ella Stowbody's long and intensive study of the drama and kindred arts in Eastern schools was seen in the fine finish of her part. . . . to no one is greater credit to be given than to Mrs. Will Kennicott on whose capable shoulders fell the burden of directing. "So kindly," Carol mused, "so well meant, so neighborly--and so confoundedly untrue. Is it really my failure, or theirs?" She sought to be sensible; she elaborately explained to herself that it was hysterical to condemn Gopher Prairie because it did not foam over the drama. Its justification was in its service as a market-town for farmers. How bravely and generously it did its work, forwarding the bread of the world, feeding and healing the farmers! Then, on the corner below her husband's office, she heard a farmer holding forth: "Sure. Course I was beaten. The shipper and the grocers here wouldn't pay us a decent price for our potatoes, even though folks in the cities were howling for 'em. So we says, well, we'll get a truck and ship 'em right down to Minneapolis. But the commission merchants there were in cahoots with the local shipper here; they said they wouldn't pay us a cent more than he would, not even if they was nearer to the market. Well, we found we could get higher prices in Chicago, but when we tried to get freight cars to ship there, the railroads wouldn't let us have 'em--even though they had cars standing empty right here in the yards. There you got it--good market, and these towns keeping us from it. Gus, that's the way these towns work all the time. They pay what they want to for our wheat, but we pay what they want us to for their clothes. Stowbody and Dawson foreclose every mortgage they can, and put in tenant farmers. The Dauntless lies to us about the Nonpartisan League, the lawyers sting us, the machinery-dealers hate to carry us over bad years, and then their daughters put on swell dresses and look at us as if we were a bunch of hoboes. Man, I'd like to burn this town!" Kennicott observed, "There's that old crank Wes Brannigan shooting off his mouth again. Gosh, but he loves to hear himself talk! They ought to run that fellow out of town!" VII She felt old and detached through high-school commencement week, which is the fete of youth in Gopher Prairie; through baccalaureate sermon, senior Parade, junior entertainment, commencement address by an Iowa clergyman who asserted that he believed in the virtue of virtuousness, and the procession of Decoration Day, when the few Civil War veterans followed Champ Perry, in his rusty forage-cap, along the spring-powdered road to the cemetery. She met Guy; she found that she had nothing to say to him. Her head ached in an aimless way. When Kennicott rejoiced, "We'll have a great time this summer; move down to the lake early and wear old clothes and act natural," she smiled, but her smile creaked. In the prairie heat she trudged along unchanging ways, talked about nothing to tepid people, and reflected that she might never escape from them. She was startled to find that she was using the word "escape." Then, for three years which passed like one curt paragraph, she ceased to find anything interesting save the Bjornstams and her baby.

Chapter 18

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-18

Back in Gopher Prairie, Carol calls the first meeting of the dramatic club and asks for any suggestions for the play they should put on. She already has a high-minded play to recommend, but she's shocked to find out that every person is adamant about doing the play they want to do. When Carol finally recommends her choice, it gets shot down almost immediately. The group ends up choosing a lame play called "The Girl from Kankakee." Carol thinks it might be okay but then hates it from the moment she first sees the script. It doesn't take long for Carol to get on everyone's nerves with her constant nitpicking and perfectionism. Everyone talks and laughs about her behind her back, and pretty soon people stop showing up for every rehearsal. Carol attends the only professional play that comes to Gopher Prairie that year, but she's disappointed to see how amateurish it is. In the meantime, Miles Bjornstam starts courting Carol's maid, Bea Sorenson. He tells Carol he hopes that she'll put on a good show, because if she doesn't, no one ever will. The play ends up being a total disaster on its opening night. Carol can see how awful it is, but everyone in the audience and the cast thinks it's great. This puts Carol in a terrible dilemma. Should she tell them how horrible it is, or should she let them go on thinking it's great? Three years go by in a flash for Carol, as she settles back into a mindless and ambitionless life in Gopher Prairie. The only thing that interests her is the baby that Bea Sorenson ends up having with Miles Bjornstam after they're married.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/19.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_18_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 19

chapter 19

{"name": "Chapter 19", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-19", "summary": "After he marries Bea Sorenson and settles down, Miles Bjornstam stops talking about his radical political views and tries harder to fit in. The change is depressing for Carol, who always liked the way Miles stirred the pot. Very few people attend Miles and Bea's wedding, because they all think they're above these working-class nobodies. The whole thing is depressing for Carol. Carol gets elected to the library board only to find out once again that she's not capable of making any real change in Gopher Prairie. Meanwhile, Will makes a land deal that gets him a lot of money. He suggests to Carol that the time is right for them to have a baby. Carol still doesn't want to have one. A travelling show comes through Gopher Prairie and boasts about giving community courses in interesting subjects. But Carol finds that it's all too dumbed-down for her liking. The show makes everyone in Gopher Prairie feel like they've become much more educated. Two weeks later, World War I breaks out in Europe. A little later on, Carol realizes that she's pregnant.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XIX I IN three years of exile from herself Carol had certain experiences chronicled as important by the Dauntless, or discussed by the Jolly Seventeen, but the event unchronicled, undiscussed, and supremely controlling, was her slow admission of longing to find her own people. II Bea and Miles Bjornstam were married in June, a month after "The Girl from Kankakee." Miles had turned respectable. He had renounced his criticisms of state and society; he had given up roving as horse-trader, and wearing red mackinaws in lumber-camps; he had gone to work as engineer in Jackson Elder's planing-mill; he was to be seen upon the streets endeavoring to be neighborly with suspicious men whom he had taunted for years. Carol was the patroness and manager of the wedding. Juanita Haydock mocked, "You're a chump to let a good hired girl like Bea go. Besides! How do you know it's a good thing, her marrying a sassy bum like this awful Red Swede person? Get wise! Chase the man off with a mop, and hold onto your Svenska while the holding's good. Huh? Me go to their Scandahoofian wedding? Not a chance!" The other matrons echoed Juanita. Carol was dismayed by the casualness of their cruelty, but she persisted. Miles had exclaimed to her, "Jack Elder says maybe he'll come to the wedding! Gee, it would be nice to have Bea meet the Boss as a reg'lar married lady. Some day I'll be so well off that Bea can play with Mrs. Elder--and you! Watch us!" There was an uneasy knot of only nine guests at the service in the unpainted Lutheran Church--Carol, Kennicott, Guy Pollock, and the Champ Perrys, all brought by Carol; Bea's frightened rustic parents, her cousin Tina, and Pete, Miles's ex-partner in horse-trading, a surly, hairy man who had bought a black suit and come twelve hundred miles from Spokane for the event. Miles continuously glanced back at the church door. Jackson Elder did not appear. The door did not once open after the awkward entrance of the first guests. Miles's hand closed on Bea's arm. He had, with Carol's help, made his shanty over into a cottage with white curtains and a canary and a chintz chair. Carol coaxed the powerful matrons to call on Bea. They half scoffed, half promised to go. Bea's successor was the oldish, broad, silent Oscarina, who was suspicious of her frivolous mistress for a month, so that Juanita Haydock was able to crow, "There, smarty, I told you you'd run into the Domestic Problem!" But Oscarina adopted Carol as a daughter, and with her as faithful to the kitchen as Bea had been, there was nothing changed in Carol's life. III She was unexpectedly appointed to the town library-board by Ole Jenson, the new mayor. The other members were Dr. Westlake, Lyman Cass, Julius Flickerbaugh the attorney, Guy Pollock, and Martin Mahoney, former livery-stable keeper and now owner of a garage. She was delighted. She went to the first meeting rather condescendingly, regarding herself as the only one besides Guy who knew anything about books or library methods. She was planning to revolutionize the whole system. Her condescension was ruined and her humility wholesomely increased when she found the board, in the shabby room on the second floor of the house which had been converted into the library, not discussing the weather and longing to play checkers, but talking about books. She discovered that amiable old Dr. Westlake read everything in verse and "light fiction"; that Lyman Cass, the veal-faced, bristly-bearded owner of the mill, had tramped through Gibbon, Hume, Grote, Prescott, and the other thick historians; that he could repeat pages from them--and did. When Dr. Westlake whispered to her, "Yes, Lym is a very well-informed man, but he's modest about it," she felt uninformed and immodest, and scolded at herself that she had missed the human potentialities in this vast Gopher Prairie. When Dr. Westlake quoted the "Paradiso," "Don Quixote," "Wilhelm Meister," and the Koran, she reflected that no one she knew, not even her father, had read all four. She came diffidently to the second meeting of the board. She did not plan to revolutionize anything. She hoped that the wise elders might be so tolerant as to listen to her suggestions about changing the shelving of the juveniles. Yet after four sessions of the library-board she was where she had been before the first session. She had found that for all their pride in being reading men, Westlake and Cass and even Guy had no conception of making the library familiar to the whole town. They used it, they passed resolutions about it, and they left it as dead as Moses. Only the Henty books and the Elsie books and the latest optimisms by moral female novelists and virile clergymen were in general demand, and the board themselves were interested only in old, stilted volumes. They had no tenderness for the noisiness of youth discovering great literature. If she was egotistic about her tiny learning, they were at least as much so regarding theirs. And for all their talk of the need of additional library-tax none of them was willing to risk censure by battling for it, though they now had so small a fund that, after paying for rent, heat, light, and Miss Villets's salary, they had only a hundred dollars a year for the purchase of books. The Incident of the Seventeen Cents killed her none too enduring interest. She had come to the board-meeting singing with a plan. She had made a list of thirty European novels of the past ten years, with twenty important books on psychology, education, and economics which the library lacked. She had made Kennicott promise to give fifteen dollars. If each of the board would contribute the same, they could have the books. Lym Cass looked alarmed, scratched himself, and protested, "I think it would be a bad precedent for the board-members to contribute money--uh--not that I mind, but it wouldn't be fair--establish precedent. Gracious! They don't pay us a cent for our services! Certainly can't expect us to pay for the privilege of serving!" Only Guy looked sympathetic, and he stroked the pine table and said nothing. The rest of the meeting they gave to a bellicose investigation of the fact that there was seventeen cents less than there should be in the Fund. Miss Villets was summoned; she spent half an hour in explosively defending herself; the seventeen cents were gnawed over, penny by penny; and Carol, glancing at the carefully inscribed list which had been so lovely and exciting an hour before, was silent, and sorry for Miss Villets, and sorrier for herself. She was reasonably regular in attendance till her two years were up and Vida Sherwin was appointed to the board in her place, but she did not try to be revolutionary. In the plodding course of her life there was nothing changed, and nothing new. IV Kennicott made an excellent land-deal, but as he told her none of the details, she was not greatly exalted or agitated. What did agitate her was his announcement, half whispered and half blurted, half tender and half coldly medical, that they "ought to have a baby, now they could afford it." They had so long agreed that "perhaps it would be just as well not to have any children for a while yet," that childlessness had come to be natural. Now, she feared and longed and did not know; she hesitatingly assented, and wished that she had not assented. As there appeared no change in their drowsy relations, she forgot all about it, and life was planless. V Idling on the porch of their summer cottage at the lake, on afternoons when Kennicott was in town, when the water was glazed and the whole air languid, she pictured a hundred escapes: Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm, with limousines, golden shops, a cathedral spire. A reed hut on fantastic piles above the mud of a jungle river. A suite in Paris, immense high grave rooms, with lambrequins and a balcony. The Enchanted Mesa. An ancient stone mill in Maryland, at the turn of the road, between rocky brook and abrupt hills. An upland moor of sheep and flitting cool sunlight. A clanging dock where steel cranes unloaded steamers from Buenos Ayres and Tsing-tao. A Munich concert-hall, and a famous 'cellist playing--playing to her. One scene had a persistent witchery: She stood on a terrace overlooking a boulevard by the warm sea. She was certain, though she had no reason for it, that the place was Mentone. Along the drive below her swept barouches, with a mechanical tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, and great cars with polished black hoods and engines quiet as the sigh of an old man. In them were women erect, slender, enameled, and expressionless as marionettes, their small hands upon parasols, their unchanging eyes always forward, ignoring the men beside them, tall men with gray hair and distinguished faces. Beyond the drive were painted sea and painted sands, and blue and yellow pavilions. Nothing moved except the gliding carriages, and the people were small and wooden, spots in a picture drenched with gold and hard bright blues. There was no sound of sea or winds; no softness of whispers nor of falling petals; nothing but yellow and cobalt and staring light, and the never-changing tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot---- She startled. She whimpered. It was the rapid ticking of the clock which had hypnotized her into hearing the steady hoofs. No aching color of the sea and pride of supercilious people, but the reality of a round-bellied nickel alarm-clock on a shelf against a fuzzy unplaned pine wall, with a stiff gray wash-rag hanging above it and a kerosene-stove standing below. A thousand dreams governed by the fiction she had read, drawn from the pictures she had envied, absorbed her drowsy lake afternoons, but always in the midst of them Kennicott came out from town, drew on khaki trousers which were plastered with dry fish-scales, asked, "Enjoying yourself?" and did not listen to her answer. And nothing was changed, and there was no reason to believe that there ever would be change. VI Trains! At the lake cottage she missed the passing of the trains. She realized that in town she had depended upon them for assurance that there remained a world beyond. The railroad was more than a means of transportation to Gopher Prairie. It was a new god; a monster of steel limbs, oak ribs, flesh of gravel, and a stupendous hunger for freight; a deity created by man that he might keep himself respectful to Property, as elsewhere he had elevated and served as tribal gods the mines, cotton-mills, motor-factories, colleges, army. The East remembered generations when there had been no railroad, and had no awe of it; but here the railroads had been before time was. The towns had been staked out on barren prairie as convenient points for future train-halts; and back in 1860 and 1870 there had been much profit, much opportunity to found aristocratic families, in the possession of advance knowledge as to where the towns would arise. If a town was in disfavor, the railroad could ignore it, cut it off from commerce, slay it. To Gopher Prairie the tracks were eternal verities, and boards of railroad directors an omnipotence. The smallest boy or the most secluded grandam could tell you whether No. 32 had a hot-box last Tuesday, whether No. 7 was going to put on an extra day-coach; and the name of the president of the road was familiar to every breakfast table. Even in this new era of motors the citizens went down to the station to see the trains go through. It was their romance; their only mystery besides mass at the Catholic Church; and from the trains came lords of the outer world--traveling salesmen with piping on their waistcoats, and visiting cousins from Milwaukee. Gopher Prairie had once been a "division-point." The roundhouse and repair-shops were gone, but two conductors still retained residence, and they were persons of distinction, men who traveled and talked to strangers, who wore uniforms with brass buttons, and knew all about these crooked games of con-men. They were a special caste, neither above nor below the Haydocks, but apart, artists and adventurers. The night telegraph-operator at the railroad station was the most melodramatic figure in town: awake at three in the morning, alone in a room hectic with clatter of the telegraph key. All night he "talked" to operators twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away. It was always to be expected that he would be held up by robbers. He never was, but round him was a suggestion of masked faces at the window, revolvers, cords binding him to a chair, his struggle to crawl to the key before he fainted. During blizzards everything about the railroad was melodramatic. There were days when the town was completely shut off, when they had no mail, no express, no fresh meat, no newspapers. At last the rotary snow-plow came through, bucking the drifts, sending up a geyser, and the way to the Outside was open again. The brakemen, in mufflers and fur caps, running along the tops of ice-coated freight-cars; the engineers scratching frost from the cab windows and looking out, inscrutable, self-contained, pilots of the prairie sea--they were heroism, they were to Carol the daring of the quest in a world of groceries and sermons. To the small boys the railroad was a familiar playground. They climbed the iron ladders on the sides of the box-cars; built fires behind piles of old ties; waved to favorite brakemen. But to Carol it was magic. She was motoring with Kennicott, the car lumping through darkness, the lights showing mud-puddles and ragged weeds by the road. A train coming! A rapid chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck. It was hurling past--the Pacific Flyer, an arrow of golden flame. Light from the fire-box splashed the under side of the trailing smoke. Instantly the vision was gone; Carol was back in the long darkness; and Kennicott was giving his version of that fire and wonder: "No. 19. Must be 'bout ten minutes late." In town, she listened from bed to the express whistling in the cut a mile north. Uuuuuuu!--faint, nervous, distrait, horn of the free night riders journeying to the tall towns where were laughter and banners and the sound of bells--Uuuuu! Uuuuu!--the world going by--Uuuuuuu!--fainter, more wistful, gone. Down here there were no trains. The stillness was very great. The prairie encircled the lake, lay round her, raw, dusty, thick. Only the train could cut it. Some day she would take a train; and that would be a great taking. VII She turned to the Chautauqua as she had turned to the dramatic association, to the library-board. Besides the permanent Mother Chautauqua, in New York, there are, all over these States, commercial Chautauqua companies which send out to every smallest town troupes of lecturers and "entertainers" to give a week of culture under canvas. Living in Minneapolis, Carol had never encountered the ambulant Chautauqua, and the announcement of its coming to Gopher Prairie gave her hope that others might be doing the vague things which she had attempted. She pictured a condensed university course brought to the people. Mornings when she came in from the lake with Kennicott she saw placards in every shop-window, and strung on a cord across Main Street, a line of pennants alternately worded "The Boland Chautauqua COMING!" and "A solid week of inspiration and enjoyment!" But she was disappointed when she saw the program. It did not seem to be a tabloid university; it did not seem to be any kind of a university; it seemed to be a combination of vaudeville performance Y. M. C. A. lecture, and the graduation exercises of an elocution class. She took her doubt to Kennicott. He insisted, "Well, maybe it won't be so awful darn intellectual, the way you and I might like it, but it's a whole lot better than nothing." Vida Sherwin added, "They have some splendid speakers. If the people don't carry off so much actual information, they do get a lot of new ideas, and that's what counts." During the Chautauqua Carol attended three evening meetings, two afternoon meetings, and one in the morning. She was impressed by the audience: the sallow women in skirts and blouses, eager to be made to think, the men in vests and shirt-sleeves, eager to be allowed to laugh, and the wriggling children, eager to sneak away. She liked the plain benches, the portable stage under its red marquee, the great tent over all, shadowy above strings of incandescent bulbs at night and by day casting an amber radiance on the patient crowd. The scent of dust and trampled grass and sun-baked wood gave her an illusion of Syrian caravans; she forgot the speakers while she listened to noises outside the tent: two farmers talking hoarsely, a wagon creaking down Main Street, the crow of a rooster. She was content. But it was the contentment of the lost hunter stopping to rest. For from the Chautauqua itself she got nothing but wind and chaff and heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless and primitive sound like the cries of beasts on a farm. These were the several instructors in the condensed university's seven-day course: Nine lecturers, four of them ex-ministers, and one an ex-congressman, all of them delivering "inspirational addresses." The only facts or opinions which Carol derived from them were: Lincoln was a celebrated president of the United States, but in his youth extremely poor. James J. Hill was the best-known railroad-man of the West, and in his youth extremely poor. Honesty and courtesy in business are preferable to boorishness and exposed trickery, but this is not to be taken personally, since all persons in Gopher Prairie are known to be honest and courteous. London is a large city. A distinguished statesman once taught Sunday School. Four "entertainers" who told Jewish stories, Irish stories, German stories, Chinese stories, and Tennessee mountaineer stories, most of which Carol had heard. A "lady elocutionist" who recited Kipling and imitated children. A lecturer with motion-pictures of an Andean exploration; excellent pictures and a halting narrative. Three brass-bands, a company of six opera-singers, a Hawaiian sextette, and four youths who played saxophones and guitars disguised as wash-boards. The most applauded pieces were those, such as the "Lucia" inevitability, which the audience had heard most often. The local superintendent, who remained through the week while the other enlighteners went to other Chautauquas for their daily performances. The superintendent was a bookish, underfed man who worked hard at rousing artificial enthusiasm, at trying to make the audience cheer by dividing them into competitive squads and telling them that they were intelligent and made splendid communal noises. He gave most of the morning lectures, droning with equal unhappy facility about poetry, the Holy Land, and the injustice to employers in any system of profit-sharing. The final item was a man who neither lectured, inspired, nor entertained; a plain little man with his hands in his pockets. All the other speakers had confessed, "I cannot keep from telling the citizens of your beautiful city that none of the talent on this circuit have found a more charming spot or more enterprising and hospitable people." But the little man suggested that the architecture of Gopher Prairie was haphazard, and that it was sottish to let the lake-front be monopolized by the cinder-heaped wall of the railroad embankment. Afterward the audience grumbled, "Maybe that guy's got the right dope, but what's the use of looking on the dark side of things all the time? New ideas are first-rate, but not all this criticism. Enough trouble in life without looking for it!" Thus the Chautauqua, as Carol saw it. After it, the town felt proud and educated. VIII Two weeks later the Great War smote Europe. For a month Gopher Prairie had the delight of shuddering, then, as the war settled down to a business of trench-fighting, they forgot. When Carol talked about the Balkans, and the possibility of a German revolution, Kennicott yawned, "Oh yes, it's a great old scrap, but it's none of our business. Folks out here are too busy growing corn to monkey with any fool war that those foreigners want to get themselves into." It was Miles Bjornstam who said, "I can't figure it out. I'm opposed to wars, but still, seems like Germany has got to be licked because them Junkers stands in the way of progress." She was calling on Miles and Bea, early in autumn. They had received her with cries, with dusting of chairs, and a running to fetch water for coffee. Miles stood and beamed at her. He fell often and joyously into his old irreverence about the lords of Gopher Prairie, but always--with a certain difficulty--he added something decorous and appreciative. "Lots of people have come to see you, haven't they?" Carol hinted. "Why, Bea's cousin Tina comes in right along, and the foreman at the mill, and----Oh, we have good times. Say, take a look at that Bea! Wouldn't you think she was a canary-bird, to listen to her, and to see that Scandahoofian tow-head of hers? But say, know what she is? She's a mother hen! Way she fusses over me--way she makes old Miles wear a necktie! Hate to spoil her by letting her hear it, but she's one pretty darn nice--nice----Hell! What do we care if none of the dirty snobs come and call? We've got each other." Carol worried about their struggle, but she forgot it in the stress of sickness and fear. For that autumn she knew that a baby was coming, that at last life promised to be interesting in the peril of the great change.

Chapter 19

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-19

After he marries Bea Sorenson and settles down, Miles Bjornstam stops talking about his radical political views and tries harder to fit in. The change is depressing for Carol, who always liked the way Miles stirred the pot. Very few people attend Miles and Bea's wedding, because they all think they're above these working-class nobodies. The whole thing is depressing for Carol. Carol gets elected to the library board only to find out once again that she's not capable of making any real change in Gopher Prairie. Meanwhile, Will makes a land deal that gets him a lot of money. He suggests to Carol that the time is right for them to have a baby. Carol still doesn't want to have one. A travelling show comes through Gopher Prairie and boasts about giving community courses in interesting subjects. But Carol finds that it's all too dumbed-down for her liking. The show makes everyone in Gopher Prairie feel like they've become much more educated. Two weeks later, World War I breaks out in Europe. A little later on, Carol realizes that she's pregnant.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/20.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_19_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 20

chapter 20

{"name": "Chapter 20", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-20", "summary": "Carol hates the experience of being pregnant in Gopher Prairie, because all the women seem to treat the pregnancy as their business. They all make comments about how Carol will have to give up her weird ideas in order to be a good mom. When the baby is first born, Carol doesn't like him at all, but after a while, she becomes completely devoted to him. After the baby is born, Will's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie move to Gopher Prairie to be closer to them. These people are about as meddling as any relatives could possibly be, and they constantly criticize Carol's behavior and ideas. Carol tries to act rudely to keep the in-laws away, but she can't do a good enough job.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XX I THE baby was coming. Each morning she was nauseated, chilly, bedraggled, and certain that she would never again be attractive; each twilight she was afraid. She did not feel exalted, but unkempt and furious. The period of daily sickness crawled into an endless time of boredom. It became difficult for her to move about, and she raged that she, who had been slim and light-footed, should have to lean on a stick, and be heartily commented upon by street gossips. She was encircled by greasy eyes. Every matron hinted, "Now that you're going to be a mother, dearie, you'll get over all these ideas of yours and settle down." She felt that willy-nilly she was being initiated into the assembly of housekeepers; with the baby for hostage, she would never escape; presently she would be drinking coffee and rocking and talking about diapers. "I could stand fighting them. I'm used to that. But this being taken in, being taken as a matter of course, I can't stand it--and I must stand it!" She alternately detested herself for not appreciating the kindly women, and detested them for their advice: lugubrious hints as to how much she would suffer in labor, details of baby-hygiene based on long experience and total misunderstanding, superstitious cautions about the things she must eat and read and look at in prenatal care for the baby's soul, and always a pest of simpering baby-talk. Mrs. Champ Perry bustled in to lend "Ben Hur," as a preventive of future infant immorality. The Widow Bogart appeared trailing pinkish exclamations, "And how is our lovely 'ittle muzzy today! My, ain't it just like they always say: being in a Family Way does make the girlie so lovely, just like a Madonna. Tell me--" Her whisper was tinged with salaciousness--"does oo feel the dear itsy one stirring, the pledge of love? I remember with Cy, of course he was so big----" "I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogart. My complexion is rotten, and my hair is coming out, and I look like a potato-bag, and I think my arches are falling, and he isn't a pledge of love, and I'm afraid he WILL look like us, and I don't believe in mother-devotion, and the whole business is a confounded nuisance of a biological process," remarked Carol. Then the baby was born, without unusual difficulty: a boy with straight back and strong legs. The first day she hated him for the tides of pain and hopeless fear he had caused; she resented his raw ugliness. After that she loved him with all the devotion and instinct at which she had scoffed. She marveled at the perfection of the miniature hands as noisily as did Kennicott, she was overwhelmed by the trust with which the baby turned to her; passion for him grew with each unpoetic irritating thing she had to do for him. He was named Hugh, for her father. Hugh developed into a thin healthy child with a large head and straight delicate hair of a faint brown. He was thoughtful and casual--a Kennicott. For two years nothing else existed. She did not, as the cynical matrons had prophesied, "give up worrying about the world and other folks' babies soon as she got one of her own to fight for." The barbarity of that willingness to sacrifice other children so that one child might have too much was impossible to her. But she would sacrifice herself. She understood consecration--she who answered Kennicott's hints about having Hugh christened: "I refuse to insult my baby and myself by asking an ignorant young man in a frock coat to sanction him, to permit me to have him! I refuse to subject him to any devil-chasing rites! If I didn't give my baby--MY BABY--enough sanctification in those nine hours of hell, then he can't get any more out of the Reverend Mr. Zitterel!" "Well, Baptists hardly ever christen kids. I was kind of thinking more about Reverend Warren," said Kennicott. Hugh was her reason for living, promise of accomplishment in the future, shrine of adoration--and a diverting toy. "I thought I'd be a dilettante mother, but I'm as dismayingly natural as Mrs. Bogart," she boasted. For two--years Carol was a part of the town; as much one of Our Young Mothers as Mrs. McGanum. Her opinionation seemed dead; she had no apparent desire for escape; her brooding centered on Hugh. While she wondered at the pearl texture of his ear she exulted, "I feel like an old woman, with a skin like sandpaper, beside him, and I'm glad of it! He is perfect. He shall have everything. He sha'n't always stay here in Gopher Prairie. . . . I wonder which is really the best, Harvard or Yale or Oxford?" II The people who hemmed her in had been brilliantly reinforced by Mr. and Mrs. Whittier N. Smail--Kennicott's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie. The true Main Streetite defines a relative as a person to whose house you go uninvited, to stay as long as you like. If you hear that Lym Cass on his journey East has spent all his time "visiting" in Oyster Center, it does not mean that he prefers that village to the rest of New England, but that he has relatives there. It does not mean that he has written to the relatives these many years, nor that they have ever given signs of a desire to look upon him. But "you wouldn't expect a man to go and spend good money at a hotel in Boston, when his own third cousins live right in the same state, would you?" When the Smails sold their creamery in North Dakota they visited Mr. Smail's sister, Kennicott's mother, at Lac-qui-Meurt, then plodded on to Gopher Prairie to stay with their nephew. They appeared unannounced, before the baby was born, took their welcome for granted, and immediately began to complain of the fact that their room faced north. Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie assumed that it was their privilege as relatives to laugh at Carol, and their duty as Christians to let her know how absurd her "notions" were. They objected to the food, to Oscarina's lack of friendliness, to the wind, the rain, and the immodesty of Carol's maternity gowns. They were strong and enduring; for an hour at a time they could go on heaving questions about her father's income, about her theology, and about the reason why she had not put on her rubbers when she had gone across the street. For fussy discussion they had a rich, full genius, and their example developed in Kennicott a tendency to the same form of affectionate flaying. If Carol was so indiscreet as to murmur that she had a small headache, instantly the two Smails and Kennicott were at it. Every five minutes, every time she sat down or rose or spoke to Oscarina, they twanged, "Is your head better now? Where does it hurt? Don't you keep hartshorn in the house? Didn't you walk too far today? Have you tried hartshorn? Don't you keep some in the house so it will be handy? Does it feel better now? How does it feel? Do your eyes hurt, too? What time do you usually get to bed? As late as THAT? Well! How does it feel now?" In her presence Uncle Whittier snorted at Kennicott, "Carol get these headaches often? Huh? Be better for her if she didn't go gadding around to all these bridge-whist parties, and took some care of herself once in a while!" They kept it up, commenting, questioning, commenting, questioning, till her determination broke and she bleated, "For heaven's SAKE, don't dis-CUSS it! My head 's all RIGHT!" She listened to the Smails and Kennicott trying to determine by dialectics whether the copy of the Dauntless, which Aunt Bessie wanted to send to her sister in Alberta, ought to have two or four cents postage on it. Carol would have taken it to the drug store and weighed it, but then she was a dreamer, while they were practical people (as they frequently admitted). So they sought to evolve the postal rate from their inner consciousnesses, which, combined with entire frankness in thinking aloud, was their method of settling all problems. The Smails did not "believe in all this nonsense" about privacy and reticence. When Carol left a letter from her sister on the table, she was astounded to hear from Uncle Whittier, "I see your sister says her husband is doing fine. You ought to go see her oftener. I asked Will and he says you don't go see her very often. My! You ought to go see her oftener!" If Carol was writing a letter to a classmate, or planning the week's menus, she could be certain that Aunt Bessie would pop in and titter, "Now don't let me disturb you, I just wanted to see where you were, don't stop, I'm not going to stay only a second. I just wondered if you could possibly have thought that I didn't eat the onions this noon because I didn't think they were properly cooked, but that wasn't the reason at all, it wasn't because I didn't think they were well cooked, I'm sure that everything in your house is always very dainty and nice, though I do think that Oscarina is careless about some things, she doesn't appreciate the big wages you pay her, and she is so cranky, all these Swedes are so cranky, I don't really see why you have a Swede, but----But that wasn't it, I didn't eat them not because I didn't think they weren't cooked proper, it was just--I find that onions don't agree with me, it's very strange, ever since I had an attack of biliousness one time, I have found that onions, either fried onions or raw ones, and Whittier does love raw onions with vinegar and sugar on them----" It was pure affection. Carol was discovering that the one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love. She supposed that she was being gracefully dull and standardized in the Smails' presence, but they scented the heretic, and with forward-stooping delight they sat and tried to drag out her ludicrous concepts for their amusement. They were like the Sunday-afternoon mob starting at monkeys in the Zoo, poking fingers and making faces and giggling at the resentment of the more dignified race. With a loose-lipped, superior, village smile Uncle Whittier hinted, "What's this I hear about your thinking Gopher Prairie ought to be all tore down and rebuilt, Carrie? I don't know where folks get these new-fangled ideas. Lots of farmers in Dakota getting 'em these days. About co-operation. Think they can run stores better 'n storekeepers! Huh!" "Whit and I didn't need no co-operation as long as we was farming!" triumphed Aunt Bessie. "Carrie, tell your old auntie now: don't you ever go to church on Sunday? You do go sometimes? But you ought to go every Sunday! When you're as old as I am, you'll learn that no matter how smart folks think they are, God knows a whole lot more than they do, and then you'll realize and be glad to go and listen to your pastor!" In the manner of one who has just beheld a two-headed calf they repeated that they had "never HEARD such funny ideas!" They were staggered to learn that a real tangible person, living in Minnesota, and married to their own flesh-and-blood relation, could apparently believe that divorce may not always be immoral; that illegitimate children do not bear any special and guaranteed form of curse; that there are ethical authorities outside of the Hebrew Bible; that men have drunk wine yet not died in the gutter; that the capitalistic system of distribution and the Baptist wedding-ceremony were not known in the Garden of Eden; that mushrooms are as edible as corn-beef hash; that the word "dude" is no longer frequently used; that there are Ministers of the Gospel who accept evolution; that some persons of apparent intelligence and business ability do not always vote the Republican ticket straight; that it is not a universal custom to wear scratchy flannels next the skin in winter; that a violin is not inherently more immoral than a chapel organ; that some poets do not have long hair; and that Jews are not always pedlers or pants-makers. "Where does she get all them the'ries?" marveled Uncle Whittier Smail; while Aunt Bessie inquired, "Do you suppose there's many folks got notions like hers? My! If there are," and her tone settled the fact that there were not, "I just don't know what the world's coming to!" Patiently--more or less--Carol awaited the exquisite day when they would announce departure. After three weeks Uncle Whittier remarked, "We kinda like Gopher Prairie. Guess maybe we'll stay here. We'd been wondering what we'd do, now we've sold the creamery and my farms. So I had a talk with Ole Jenson about his grocery, and I guess I'll buy him out and storekeep for a while." He did. Carol rebelled. Kennicott soothed her: "Oh, we won't see much of them. They'll have their own house." She resolved to be so chilly that they would stay away. But she had no talent for conscious insolence. They found a house, but Carol was never safe from their appearance with a hearty, "Thought we'd drop in this evening and keep you from being lonely. Why, you ain't had them curtains washed yet!" Invariably, whenever she was touched by the realization that it was they who were lonely, they wrecked her pitying affection by comments--questions--comments--advice. They immediately became friendly with all of their own race, with the Luke Dawsons, the Deacon Piersons, and Mrs. Bogart; and brought them along in the evening. Aunt Bessie was a bridge over whom the older women, bearing gifts of counsel and the ignorance of experience, poured into Carol's island of reserve. Aunt Bessie urged the good Widow Bogart, "Drop in and see Carrie real often. Young folks today don't understand housekeeping like we do." Mrs. Bogart showed herself perfectly willing to be an associate relative. Carol was thinking up protective insults when Kennicott's mother came down to stay with Brother Whittier for two months. Carol was fond of Mrs. Kennicott. She could not carry out her insults. She felt trapped. She had been kidnaped by the town. She was Aunt Bessie's niece, and she was to be a mother. She was expected, she almost expected herself, to sit forever talking of babies, cooks, embroidery stitches, the price of potatoes, and the tastes of husbands in the matter of spinach. She found a refuge in the Jolly Seventeen. She suddenly understood that they could be depended upon to laugh with her at Mrs. Bogart, and she now saw Juanita Haydock's gossip not as vulgarity but as gaiety and remarkable analysis. Her life had changed, even before Hugh appeared. She looked forward to the next bridge of the Jolly Seventeen, and the security of whispering with her dear friends Maud Dyer and Juanita and Mrs. McGanum. She was part of the town. Its philosophy and its feuds dominated her. III She was no longer irritated by the cooing of the matrons, nor by their opinion that diet didn't matter so long as the Little Ones had plenty of lace and moist kisses, but she concluded that in the care of babies as in politics, intelligence was superior to quotations about pansies. She liked best to talk about Hugh to Kennicott, Vida, and the Bjornstams. She was happily domestic when Kennicott sat by her on the floor, to watch baby make faces. She was delighted when Miles, speaking as one man to another, admonished Hugh, "I wouldn't stand them skirts if I was you. Come on. Join the union and strike. Make 'em give you pants." As a parent, Kennicott was moved to establish the first child-welfare week held in Gopher Prairie. Carol helped him weigh babies and examine their throats, and she wrote out the diets for mute German and Scandinavian mothers. The aristocracy of Gopher Prairie, even the wives of the rival doctors, took part, and for several days there was community spirit and much uplift. But this reign of love was overthrown when the prize for Best Baby was awarded not to decent parents but to Bea and Miles Bjornstam! The good matrons glared at Olaf Bjornstam, with his blue eyes, his honey-colored hair, and magnificent back, and they remarked, "Well, Mrs. Kennicott, maybe that Swede brat is as healthy as your husband says he is, but let me tell you I hate to think of the future that awaits any boy with a hired girl for a mother and an awful irreligious socialist for a pa!" She raged, but so violent was the current of their respectability, so persistent was Aunt Bessie in running to her with their blabber, that she was embarrassed when she took Hugh to play with Olaf. She hated herself for it, but she hoped that no one saw her go into the Bjornstam shanty. She hated herself and the town's indifferent cruelty when she saw Bea's radiant devotion to both babies alike; when she saw Miles staring at them wistfully. He had saved money, had quit Elder's planing-mill and started a dairy on a vacant lot near his shack. He was proud of his three cows and sixty chickens, and got up nights to nurse them. "I'll be a big farmer before you can bat an eye! I tell you that young fellow Olaf is going to go East to college along with the Haydock kids. Uh----Lots of folks dropping in to chin with Bea and me now. Say! Ma Bogart come in one day! She was----I liked the old lady fine. And the mill foreman comes in right along. Oh, we got lots of friends. You bet!" IV Though the town seemed to Carol to change no more than the surrounding fields, there was a constant shifting, these three years. The citizen of the prairie drifts always westward. It may be because he is the heir of ancient migrations--and it may be because he finds within his own spirit so little adventure that he is driven to seek it by changing his horizon. The towns remain unvaried, yet the individual faces alter like classes in college. The Gopher Prairie jeweler sells out, for no discernible reason, and moves on to Alberta or the state of Washington, to open a shop precisely like his former one, in a town precisely like the one he has left. There is, except among professional men and the wealthy, small permanence either of residence or occupation. A man becomes farmer, grocer, town policeman, garageman, restaurant-owner, postmaster, insurance-agent, and farmer all over again, and the community more or less patiently suffers from his lack of knowledge in each of his experiments. Ole Jenson the grocer and Dahl the butcher moved on to South Dakota and Idaho. Luke and Mrs. Dawson picked up ten thousand acres of prairie soil, in the magic portable form of a small check book, and went to Pasadena, to a bungalow and sunshine and cafeterias. Chet Dashaway sold his furniture and undertaking business and wandered to Los Angeles, where, the Dauntless reported, "Our good friend Chester has accepted a fine position with a real-estate firm, and his wife has in the charming social circles of the Queen City of the Southwestland that same popularity which she enjoyed in our own society sets." Rita Simons was married to Terry Gould, and rivaled Juanita Haydock as the gayest of the Young Married Set. But Juanita also acquired merit. Harry's father died, Harry became senior partner in the Bon Ton Store, and Juanita was more acidulous and shrewd and cackling than ever. She bought an evening frock, and exposed her collar-bone to the wonder of the Jolly Seventeen, and talked of moving to Minneapolis. To defend her position against the new Mrs. Terry Gould she sought to attach Carol to her faction by giggling that "SOME folks might call Rita innocent, but I've got a hunch that she isn't half as ignorant of things as brides are supposed to be--and of course Terry isn't one-two-three as a doctor alongside of your husband." Carol herself would gladly have followed Mr. Ole Jenson, and migrated even to another Main Street; flight from familiar tedium to new tedium would have for a time the outer look and promise of adventure. She hinted to Kennicott of the probable medical advantages of Montana and Oregon. She knew that he was satisfied with Gopher Prairie, but it gave her vicarious hope to think of going, to ask for railroad folders at the station, to trace the maps with a restless forefinger. Yet to the casual eye she was not discontented, she was not an abnormal and distressing traitor to the faith of Main Street. The settled citizen believes that the rebel is constantly in a stew of complaining and, hearing of a Carol Kennicott, he gasps, "What an awful person! She must be a Holy Terror to live with! Glad MY folks are satisfied with things way they are!" Actually, it was not so much as five minutes a day that Carol devoted to lonely desires. It is probable that the agitated citizen has within his circle at least one inarticulate rebel with aspirations as wayward as Carol's. The presence of the baby had made her take Gopher Prairie and the brown house seriously, as natural places of residence. She pleased Kennicott by being friendly with the complacent maturity of Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Elder, and when she had often enough been in conference upon the Elders' new Cadillac car, or the job which the oldest Clark boy had taken in the office of the flour-mill, these topics became important, things to follow up day by day. With nine-tenths of her emotion concentrated upon Hugh, she did not criticize shops, streets, acquaintances . . . this year or two. She hurried to Uncle Whittier's store for a package of corn-flakes, she abstractedly listened to Uncle Whittier's denunciation of Martin Mahoney for asserting that the wind last Tuesday had been south and not southwest, she came back along streets that held no surprises nor the startling faces of strangers. Thinking of Hugh's teething all the way, she did not reflect that this store, these drab blocks, made up all her background. She did her work, and she triumphed over winning from the Clarks at five hundred. The most considerable event of the two years after the birth of Hugh occurred when Vida Sherwin resigned from the high school and was married. Carol was her attendant, and as the wedding was at the Episcopal Church, all the women wore new kid slippers and long white kid gloves, and looked refined. For years Carol had been little sister to Vida, and had never in the least known to what degree Vida loved her and hated her and in curious strained ways was bound to her.

Chapter 20

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-20

Carol hates the experience of being pregnant in Gopher Prairie, because all the women seem to treat the pregnancy as their business. They all make comments about how Carol will have to give up her weird ideas in order to be a good mom. When the baby is first born, Carol doesn't like him at all, but after a while, she becomes completely devoted to him. After the baby is born, Will's Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie move to Gopher Prairie to be closer to them. These people are about as meddling as any relatives could possibly be, and they constantly criticize Carol's behavior and ideas. Carol tries to act rudely to keep the in-laws away, but she can't do a good enough job.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/21.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_20_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 21

chapter 21

{"name": "Chapter 21", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-21", "summary": "The novel takes a moment away from Carol Kennicott to tell us about the inner life of Vida Sherwin. It turns out that Vida had a bit of a thing going with Will Kennicott that never panned out, but Vida was still a little crushed when she found out Will had married Carol. Carol never knew that Vida would have some secret reason to dislike her. It doesn't make Vida's life any easier when she realizes that Carol thinks she's above everyone in Gopher Prairie. Still, she tries her best to like Carol and to be like a big sister to her. Eventually, Vida starts hanging out with Raymie Wutherspoon, and they strike up a deep friendship. Then, when both of them are nearing the age of forty, they get married. It's clear to everyone in the town that Vida and Raymie are much happier once they're married.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXI I GRAY steel that seems unmoving because it spins so fast in the balanced fly-wheel, gray snow in an avenue of elms, gray dawn with the sun behind it--this was the gray of Vida Sherwin's life at thirty-six. She was small and active and sallow; her yellow hair was faded, and looked dry; her blue silk blouses and modest lace collars and high black shoes and sailor hats were as literal and uncharming as a schoolroom desk; but her eyes determined her appearance, revealed her as a personage and a force, indicated her faith in the goodness and purpose of everything. They were blue, and they were never still; they expressed amusement, pity, enthusiasm. If she had been seen in sleep, with the wrinkles beside her eyes stilled and the creased lids hiding the radiant irises, she would have lost her potency. She was born in a hill-smothered Wisconsin village where her father was a prosy minister; she labored through a sanctimonious college; she taught for two years in an iron-range town of blurry-faced Tatars and Montenegrins, and wastes of ore, and when she came to Gopher Prairie, its trees and the shining spaciousness of the wheat prairie made her certain that she was in paradise. She admitted to her fellow-teachers that the schoolbuilding was slightly damp, but she insisted that the rooms were "arranged so conveniently--and then that bust of President McKinley at the head of the stairs, it's a lovely art-work, and isn't it an inspiration to have the brave, honest, martyr president to think about!" She taught French, English, and history, and the Sophomore Latin class, which dealt in matters of a metaphysical nature called Indirect Discourse and the Ablative Absolute. Each year she was reconvinced that the pupils were beginning to learn more quickly. She spent four winters in building up the Debating Society, and when the debate really was lively one Friday afternoon, and the speakers of pieces did not forget their lines, she felt rewarded. She lived an engrossed useful life, and seemed as cool and simple as an apple. But secretly she was creeping among fears, longing, and guilt. She knew what it was, but she dared not name it. She hated even the sound of the word "sex." When she dreamed of being a woman of the harem, with great white warm limbs, she awoke to shudder, defenseless in the dusk of her room. She prayed to Jesus, always to the Son of God, offering him the terrible power of her adoration, addressing him as the eternal lover, growing passionate, exalted, large, as she contemplated his splendor. Thus she mounted to endurance and surcease. By day, rattling about in many activities, she was able to ridicule her blazing nights of darkness. With spurious cheerfulness she announced everywhere, "I guess I'm a born spinster," and "No one will ever marry a plain schoolma'am like me," and "You men, great big noisy bothersome creatures, we women wouldn't have you round the place, dirtying up nice clean rooms, if it wasn't that you have to be petted and guided. We just ought to say 'Scat!' to all of you!" But when a man held her close at a dance, even when "Professor" George Edwin Mott patted her hand paternally as they considered the naughtinesses of Cy Bogart, she quivered, and reflected how superior she was to have kept her virginity. In the autumn of 1911, a year before Dr. Will Kennicott was married, Vida was his partner at a five-hundred tournament. She was thirty-four then; Kennicott about thirty-six. To her he was a superb, boyish, diverting creature; all the heroic qualities in a manly magnificent body. They had been helping the hostess to serve the Waldorf salad and coffee and gingerbread. They were in the kitchen, side by side on a bench, while the others ponderously supped in the room beyond. Kennicott was masculine and experimental. He stroked Vida's hand, he put his arm carelessly about her shoulder. "Don't!" she said sharply. "You're a cunning thing," he offered, patting the back of her shoulder in an exploratory manner. While she strained away, she longed to move nearer to him. He bent over, looked at her knowingly. She glanced down at his left hand as it touched her knee. She sprang up, started noisily and needlessly to wash the dishes. He helped her. He was too lazy to adventure further--and too used to women in his profession. She was grateful for the impersonality of his talk. It enabled her to gain control. She knew that she had skirted wild thoughts. A month after, on a sleighing-party, under the buffalo robes in the bob-sled, he whispered, "You pretend to be a grown-up schoolteacher, but you're nothing but a kiddie." His arm was about her. She resisted. "Don't you like the poor lonely bachelor?" he yammered in a fatuous way. "No, I don't! You don't care for me in the least. You're just practising on me." "You're so mean! I'm terribly fond of you." "I'm not of you. And I'm not going to let myself be fond of you, either." He persistently drew her toward him. She clutched his arm. Then she threw off the robe, climbed out of the sled, raced after it with Harry Haydock. At the dance which followed the sleigh-ride Kennicott was devoted to the watery prettiness of Maud Dyer, and Vida was noisily interested in getting up a Virginia Reel. Without seeming to watch Kennicott, she knew that he did not once look at her. That was all of her first love-affair. He gave no sign of remembering that he was "terribly fond." She waited for him; she reveled in longing, and in a sense of guilt because she longed. She told herself that she did not want part of him; unless he gave her all his devotion she would never let him touch her; and when she found that she was probably lying, she burned with scorn. She fought it out in prayer. She knelt in a pink flannel nightgown, her thin hair down her back, her forehead as full of horror as a mask of tragedy, while she identified her love for the Son of God with her love for a mortal, and wondered if any other woman had ever been so sacrilegious. She wanted to be a nun and observe perpetual adoration. She bought a rosary, but she had been so bitterly reared as a Protestant that she could not bring herself to use it. Yet none of her intimates in the school and in the boarding-house knew of her abyss of passion. They said she was "so optimistic." When she heard that Kennicott was to marry a girl, pretty, young, and imposingly from the Cities, Vida despaired. She congratulated Kennicott; carelessly ascertained from him the hour of marriage. At that hour, sitting in her room, Vida pictured the wedding in St. Paul. Full of an ecstasy which horrified her, she followed Kennicott and the girl who had stolen her place, followed them to the train, through the evening, the night. She was relieved when she had worked out a belief that she wasn't really shameful, that there was a mystical relation between herself and Carol, so that she was vicariously yet veritably with Kennicott, and had the right to be. She saw Carol during the first five minutes in Gopher Prairie. She stared at the passing motor, at Kennicott and the girl beside him. In that fog world of transference of emotion Vida had no normal jealousy but a conviction that, since through Carol she had received Kennicott's love, then Carol was a part of her, an astral self, a heightened and more beloved self. She was glad of the girl's charm, of the smooth black hair, the airy head and young shoulders. But she was suddenly angry. Carol glanced at her for a quarter-second, but looked past her, at an old roadside barn. If she had made the great sacrifice, at least she expected gratitude and recognition, Vida raged, while her conscious schoolroom mind fussily begged her to control this insanity. During her first call half of her wanted to welcome a fellow reader of books; the other half itched to find out whether Carol knew anything about Kennicott's former interest in herself. She discovered that Carol was not aware that he had ever touched another woman's hand. Carol was an amusing, naive, curiously learned child. While Vida was most actively describing the glories of the Thanatopsis, and complimenting this librarian on her training as a worker, she was fancying that this girl was the child born of herself and Kennicott; and out of that symbolizing she had a comfort she had not known for months. When she came home, after supper with the Kennicotts and Guy Pollock, she had a sudden and rather pleasant backsliding from devotion. She bustled into her room, she slammed her hat on the bed, and chattered, "I don't CARE! I'm a lot like her--except a few years older. I'm light and quick, too, and I can talk just as well as she can, and I'm sure----Men are such fools. I'd be ten times as sweet to make love to as that dreamy baby. And I AM as good-looking!" But as she sat on the bed and stared at her thin thighs, defiance oozed away. She mourned: "No. I'm not. Dear God, how we fool ourselves! I pretend I'm 'spiritual.' I pretend my legs are graceful. They aren't. They're skinny. Old-maidish. I hate it! I hate that impertinent young woman! A selfish cat, taking his love for granted. . . . No, she's adorable. . . . I don't think she ought to be so friendly with Guy Pollock." For a year Vida loved Carol, longed to and did not pry into the details of her relations with Kennicott, enjoyed her spirit of play as expressed in childish tea-parties, and, with the mystic bond between them forgotten, was healthily vexed by Carol's assumption that she was a sociological messiah come to save Gopher Prairie. This last facet of Vida's thought was the one which, after a year, was most often turned to the light. In a testy way she brooded, "These people that want to change everything all of a sudden without doing any work, make me tired! Here I have to go and work for four years, picking out the pupils for debates, and drilling them, and nagging at them to get them to look up references, and begging them to choose their own subjects--four years, to get up a couple of good debates! And she comes rushing in, and expects in one year to change the whole town into a lollypop paradise with everybody stopping everything else to grow tulips and drink tea. And it's a comfy homey old town, too!" She had such an outburst after each of Carol's campaigns--for better Thanatopsis programs, for Shavian plays, for more human schools--but she never betrayed herself, and always she was penitent. Vida was, and always would be, a reformer, a liberal. She believed that details could excitingly be altered, but that things-in-general were comely and kind and immutable. Carol was, without understanding or accepting it, a revolutionist, a radical, and therefore possessed of "constructive ideas," which only the destroyer can have, since the reformer believes that all the essential constructing has already been done. After years of intimacy it was this unexpressed opposition more than the fancied loss of Kennicott's love which held Vida irritably fascinated. But the birth of Hugh revived the transcendental emotion. She was indignant that Carol should not be utterly fulfilled in having borne Kennicott's child. She admitted that Carol seemed to have affection and immaculate care for the baby, but she began to identify herself now with Kennicott, and in this phase to feel that she had endured quite too much from Carol's instability. She recalled certain other women who had come from the Outside and had not appreciated Gopher Prairie. She remembered the rector's wife who had been chilly to callers and who was rumored throughout the town to have said, "Re-ah-ly I cawn't endure this bucolic heartiness in the responses." The woman was positively known to have worn handkerchiefs in her bodice as padding--oh, the town had simply roared at her. Of course the rector and she were got rid of in a few months. Then there was the mysterious woman with the dyed hair and penciled eyebrows, who wore tight English dresses, like basques, who smelled of stale musk, who flirted with the men and got them to advance money for her expenses in a lawsuit, who laughed at Vida's reading at a school-entertainment, and went off owing a hotel-bill and the three hundred dollars she had borrowed. Vida insisted that she loved Carol, but with some satisfaction she compared her to these traducers of the town. II Vida had enjoyed Raymie Wutherspoon's singing in the Episcopal choir; she had thoroughly reviewed the weather with him at Methodist sociables and in the Bon Ton. But she did not really know him till she moved to Mrs. Gurrey's boarding-house. It was five years after her affair with Kennicott. She was thirty-nine, Raymie perhaps a year younger. She said to him, and sincerely, "My! You can do anything, with your brains and tact and that heavenly voice. You were so good in 'The Girl from Kankakee.' You made me feel terribly stupid. If you'd gone on the stage, I believe you'd be just as good as anybody in Minneapolis. But still, I'm not sorry you stuck to business. It's such a constructive career." "Do you really think so?" yearned Raymie, across the apple-sauce. It was the first time that either of them had found a dependable intellectual companionship. They looked down on Willis Woodford the bank-clerk, and his anxious babycentric wife, the silent Lyman Casses, the slangy traveling man, and the rest of Mrs. Gurrey's unenlightened guests. They sat opposite, and they sat late. They were exhilarated to find that they agreed in confession of faith: "People like Sam Clark and Harry Haydock aren't earnest about music and pictures and eloquent sermons and really refined movies, but then, on the other hand, people like Carol Kennicott put too much stress on all this art. Folks ought to appreciate lovely things, but just the same, they got to be practical and--they got to look at things in a practical way." Smiling, passing each other the pressed-glass pickle-dish, seeing Mrs. Gurrey's linty supper-cloth irradiated by the light of intimacy, Vida and Raymie talked about Carol's rose-colored turban, Carol's sweetness, Carol's new low shoes, Carol's erroneous theory that there was no need of strict discipline in school, Carol's amiability in the Bon Ton, Carol's flow of wild ideas, which, honestly, just simply made you nervous trying to keep track of them. About the lovely display of gents' shirts in the Bon Ton window as dressed by Raymie, about Raymie's offertory last Sunday, the fact that there weren't any of these new solos as nice as "Jerusalem the Golden," and the way Raymie stood up to Juanita Haydock when she came into the store and tried to run things and he as much as told her that she was so anxious to have folks think she was smart and bright that she said things she didn't mean, and anyway, Raymie was running the shoe-department, and if Juanita, or Harry either, didn't like the way he ran things, they could go get another man. About Vida's new jabot which made her look thirty-two (Vida's estimate) or twenty-two (Raymie's estimate), Vida's plan to have the high-school Debating Society give a playlet, and the difficulty of keeping the younger boys well behaved on the playground when a big lubber like Cy Bogart acted up so. About the picture post-card which Mrs. Dawson had sent to Mrs. Cass from Pasadena, showing roses growing right outdoors in February, the change in time on No. 4, the reckless way Dr. Gould always drove his auto, the reckless way almost all these people drove their autos, the fallacy of supposing that these socialists could carry on a government for as much as six months if they ever did have a chance to try out their theories, and the crazy way in which Carol jumped from subject to subject. Vida had once beheld Raymie as a thin man with spectacles, mournful drawn-out face, and colorless stiff hair. Now she noted that his jaw was square, that his long hands moved quickly and were bleached in a refined manner, and that his trusting eyes indicated that he had "led a clean life." She began to call him "Ray," and to bounce in defense of his unselfishness and thoughtfulness every time Juanita Haydock or Rita Gould giggled about him at the Jolly Seventeen. On a Sunday afternoon of late autumn they walked down to Lake Minniemashie. Ray said that he would like to see the ocean; it must be a grand sight; it must be much grander than a lake, even a great big lake. Vida had seen it, she stated modestly; she had seen it on a summer trip to Cape Cod. "Have you been clear to Cape Cod? Massachusetts? I knew you'd traveled, but I never realized you'd been that far!" Made taller and younger by his interest she poured out, "Oh my yes. It was a wonderful trip. So many points of interest through Massachusetts--historical. There's Lexington where we turned back the redcoats, and Longfellow's home at Cambridge, and Cape Cod--just everything--fishermen and whale-ships and sand-dunes and everything." She wished that she had a little cane to carry. He broke off a willow branch. "My, you're strong!" she said. "No, not very. I wish there was a Y. M. C. A. here, so I could take up regular exercise. I used to think I could do pretty good acrobatics, if I had a chance." "I'm sure you could. You're unusually lithe, for a large man." "Oh no, not so very. But I wish we had a Y. M. It would be dandy to have lectures and everything, and I'd like to take a class in improving the memory--I believe a fellow ought to go on educating himself and improving his mind even if he is in business, don't you, Vida--I guess I'm kind of fresh to call you 'Vida'!" "I've been calling you 'Ray' for weeks!" He wondered why she sounded tart. He helped her down the bank to the edge of the lake but dropped her hand abruptly, and as they sat on a willow log and he brushed her sleeve, he delicately moved over and murmured, "Oh, excuse me--accident." She stared at the mud-browned chilly water, the floating gray reeds. "You look so thoughtful," he said. She threw out her hands. "I am! Will you kindly tell me what's the use of--anything! Oh, don't mind me. I'm a moody old hen. Tell me about your plan for getting a partnership in the Bon Ton. I do think you're right: Harry Haydock and that mean old Simons ought to give you one." He hymned the old unhappy wars in which he had been Achilles and the mellifluous Nestor, yet gone his righteous ways unheeded by the cruel kings. . . . "Why, if I've told 'em once, I've told 'em a dozen times to get in a side-line of light-weight pants for gents' summer wear, and of course here they go and let a cheap kike like Rifkin beat them to it and grab the trade right off 'em, and then Harry said--you know how Harry is, maybe he don't mean to be grouchy, but he's such a sore-head----" He gave her a hand to rise. "If you don't MIND. I think a fellow is awful if a lady goes on a walk with him and she can't trust him and he tries to flirt with her and all." "I'm sure you're highly trustworthy!" she snapped, and she sprang up without his aid. Then, smiling excessively, "Uh--don't you think Carol sometimes fails to appreciate Dr. Will's ability?" III Ray habitually asked her about his window-trimming, the display of the new shoes, the best music for the entertainment at the Eastern Star, and (though he was recognized as a professional authority on what the town called "gents' furnishings") about his own clothes. She persuaded him not to wear the small bow ties which made him look like an elongated Sunday School scholar. Once she burst out: "Ray, I could shake you! Do you know you're too apologetic? You always appreciate other people too much. You fuss over Carol Kennicott when she has some crazy theory that we all ought to turn anarchists or live on figs and nuts or something. And you listen when Harry Haydock tries to show off and talk about turnovers and credits and things you know lots better than he does. Look folks in the eye! Glare at 'em! Talk deep! You're the smartest man in town, if you only knew it. You ARE!" He could not believe it. He kept coming back to her for confirmation. He practised glaring and talking deep, but he circuitously hinted to Vida that when he had tried to look Harry Haydock in the eye, Harry had inquired, "What's the matter with you, Raymie? Got a pain?" But afterward Harry had asked about Kantbeatum socks in a manner which, Ray felt, was somehow different from his former condescension. They were sitting on the squat yellow satin settee in the boarding-house parlor. As Ray reannounced that he simply wouldn't stand it many more years if Harry didn't give him a partnership, his gesticulating hand touched Vida's shoulders. "Oh, excuse me!" he pleaded. "It's all right. Well, I think I must be running up to my room. Headache," she said briefly. IV Ray and she had stopped in at Dyer's for a hot chocolate on their way home from the movies, that March evening. Vida speculated, "Do you know that I may not be here next year?" "What do you mean?" With her fragile narrow nails she smoothed the glass slab which formed the top of the round table at which they sat. She peeped through the glass at the perfume-boxes of black and gold and citron in the hollow table. She looked about at shelves of red rubber water-bottles, pale yellow sponges, wash-rags with blue borders, hair-brushes of polished cherry backs. She shook her head like a nervous medium coming out of a trance, stared at him unhappily, demanded: "Why should I stay here? And I must make up my mind. Now. Time to renew our teaching-contracts for next year. I think I'll go teach in some other town. Everybody here is tired of me. I might as well go. Before folks come out and SAY they're tired of me. I have to decide tonight. I might as well----Oh, no matter. Come. Let's skip. It's late." She sprang up, ignoring his wail of "Vida! Wait! Sit down! Gosh! I'm flabbergasted! Gee! Vida!" She marched out. While he was paying his check she got ahead. He ran after her, blubbering, "Vida! Wait!" In the shade of the lilacs in front of the Gougerling house he came up with her, stayed her flight by a hand on her shoulder. "Oh, don't! Don't! What does it matter?" she begged. She was sobbing, her soft wrinkly lids soaked with tears. "Who cares for my affection or help? I might as well drift on, forgotten. O Ray, please don't hold me. Let me go. I'll just decide not to renew my contract here, and--and drift--way off----" His hand was steady on her shoulder. She dropped her head, rubbed the back of his hand with her cheek. They were married in June. V They took the Ole Jenson house. "It's small," said Vida, "but it's got the dearest vegetable garden, and I love having time to get near to Nature for once." Though she became Vida Wutherspoon technically, and though she certainly had no ideals about the independence of keeping her name, she continued to be known as Vida Sherwin. She had resigned from the school, but she kept up one class in English. She bustled about on every committee of the Thanatopsis; she was always popping into the rest-room to make Mrs. Nodelquist sweep the floor; she was appointed to the library-board to succeed Carol; she taught the Senior Girls' Class in the Episcopal Sunday School, and tried to revive the King's Daughters. She exploded into self-confidence and happiness; her draining thoughts were by marriage turned into energy. She became daily and visibly more plump, and though she chattered as eagerly, she was less obviously admiring of marital bliss, less sentimental about babies, sharper in demanding that the entire town share her reforms--the purchase of a park, the compulsory cleaning of back-yards. She penned Harry Haydock at his desk in the Bon Ton; she interrupted his joking; she told him that it was Ray who had built up the shoe-department and men's department; she demanded that he be made a partner. Before Harry could answer she threatened that Ray and she would start a rival shop. "I'll clerk behind the counter myself, and a Certain Party is all ready to put up the money." She rather wondered who the Certain Party was. Ray was made a one-sixth partner. He became a glorified floor-walker, greeting the men with new poise, no longer coyly subservient to pretty women. When he was not affectionately coercing people into buying things they did not need, he stood at the back of the store, glowing, abstracted, feeling masculine as he recalled the tempestuous surprises of love revealed by Vida. The only remnant of Vida's identification of herself with Carol was a jealousy when she saw Kennicott and Ray together, and reflected that some people might suppose that Kennicott was his superior. She was sure that Carol thought so, and she wanted to shriek, "You needn't try to gloat! I wouldn't have your pokey old husband. He hasn't one single bit of Ray's spiritual nobility."

Chapter 21

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-21

The novel takes a moment away from Carol Kennicott to tell us about the inner life of Vida Sherwin. It turns out that Vida had a bit of a thing going with Will Kennicott that never panned out, but Vida was still a little crushed when she found out Will had married Carol. Carol never knew that Vida would have some secret reason to dislike her. It doesn't make Vida's life any easier when she realizes that Carol thinks she's above everyone in Gopher Prairie. Still, she tries her best to like Carol and to be like a big sister to her. Eventually, Vida starts hanging out with Raymie Wutherspoon, and they strike up a deep friendship. Then, when both of them are nearing the age of forty, they get married. It's clear to everyone in the town that Vida and Raymie are much happier once they're married.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/22.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_21_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 22

chapter 22

{"name": "Chapter 22", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-22", "summary": "Carol sees the happiness that Vida Sherwin has after getting married and wishes she could be happy in the same way. Her new solution to dealing with her situation is to read more and to find out what kinds of ideas women in her situation are starting to have all over the U.S. The more she reads, the more Carol develops grand theories of how towns like Gopher Prairie work behind the scenes. She hates the fact that the town takes all of the interesting things about people who move there and grind them all into dullness. Carol takes her new ideas about why Gopher Prairie stinks and tells them to Vida. Vida is more satisfied with her life than she's ever been, though, and she dismisses Carol as a Negative Nelly. Vida also tells Carol that the town will be building a new school--no thanks to Carol's involvement. Carol realizes that even if something does happen to make the town better, she won't be involved, because people don't like her.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXII I THE greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the long-shoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman. It was this which puzzled Carol in regard to the married Vida. Carol herself had the baby, a larger house to care for, all the telephone calls for Kennicott when he was away; and she read everything, while Vida was satisfied with newspaper headlines. But after detached brown years in boarding-houses, Vida was hungry for housework, for the most pottering detail of it. She had no maid, nor wanted one. She cooked, baked, swept, washed supper-cloths, with the triumph of a chemist in a new laboratory. To her the hearth was veritably the altar. When she went shopping she hugged the cans of soup, and she bought a mop or a side of bacon as though she were preparing for a reception. She knelt beside a bean sprout and crooned, "I raised this with my own hands--I brought this new life into the world." "I love her for being so happy," Carol brooded. "I ought to be that way. I worship the baby, but the housework----Oh, I suppose I'm fortunate; so much better off than farm-women on a new clearing, or people in a slum." It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others. In Carol's own twenty-four hours a day she got up, dressed the baby, had breakfast, talked to Oscarina about the day's shopping, put the baby on the porch to play, went to the butcher's to choose between steak and pork chops, bathed the baby, nailed up a shelf, had dinner, put the baby to bed for a nap, paid the iceman, read for an hour, took the baby out for a walk, called on Vida, had supper, put the baby to bed, darned socks, listened to Kennicott's yawning comment on what a fool Dr. McGanum was to try to use that cheap X-ray outfit of his on an epithelioma, repaired a frock, drowsily heard Kennicott stoke the furnace, tried to read a page of Thorstein Veblen--and the day was gone. Except when Hugh was vigorously naughty, or whiney, or laughing, or saying "I like my chair" with thrilling maturity, she was always enfeebled by loneliness. She no longer felt superior about that misfortune. She would gladly have been converted to Vida's satisfaction in Gopher Prairie and mopping the floor. II Carol drove through an astonishing number of books from the public library and from city shops. Kennicott was at first uncomfortable over her disconcerting habit of buying them. A book was a book, and if you had several thousand of them right here in the library, free, why the dickens should you spend your good money? After worrying about it for two or three years, he decided that this was one of the Funny Ideas which she had caught as a librarian and from which she would never entirely recover. The authors whom she read were most of them frightfully annoyed by the Vida Sherwins. They were young American sociologists, young English realists, Russian horrorists; Anatole France, Rolland, Nexo, Wells, Shaw, Key, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Mencken, and all the other subversive philosophers and artists whom women were consulting everywhere, in batik-curtained studios in New York, in Kansas farmhouses, San Francisco drawing-rooms, Alabama schools for negroes. From them she got the same confused desire which the million other women felt; the same determination to be class-conscious without discovering the class of which she was to be conscious. Certainly her reading precipitated her observations of Main Street, of Gopher Prairie and of the several adjacent Gopher Prairies which she had seen on drives with Kennicott. In her fluid thought certain convictions appeared, jaggedly, a fragment of an impression at a time, while she was going to sleep, or manicuring her nails, or waiting for Kennicott. These convictions she presented to Vida Sherwin--Vida Wutherspoon--beside a radiator, over a bowl of not very good walnuts and pecans from Uncle Whittier's grocery, on an evening when both Kennicott and Raymie had gone out of town with the other officers of the Ancient and Affiliated Order of Spartans, to inaugurate a new chapter at Wakamin. Vida had come to the house for the night. She helped in putting Hugh to bed, sputtering the while about his soft skin. Then they talked till midnight. What Carol said that evening, what she was passionately thinking, was also emerging in the minds of women in ten thousand Gopher Prairies. Her formulations were not pat solutions but visions of a tragic futility. She did not utter them so compactly that they can be given in her words; they were roughened with "Well, you see" and "if you get what I mean" and "I don't know that I'm making myself clear." But they were definite enough, and indignant enough. III In reading popular stories and seeing plays, asserted Carol, she had found only two traditions of the American small town. The first tradition, repeated in scores of magazines every month, is that the American village remains the one sure abode of friendship, honesty, and clean sweet marriageable girls. Therefore all men who succeed in painting in Paris or in finance in New York at last become weary of smart women, return to their native towns, assert that cities are vicious, marry their childhood sweethearts and, presumably, joyously abide in those towns until death. The other tradition is that the significant features of all villages are whiskers, iron dogs upon lawns, gold bricks, checkers, jars of gilded cat-tails, and shrewd comic old men who are known as "hicks" and who ejaculate "Waal I swan." This altogether admirable tradition rules the vaudeville stage, facetious illustrators, and syndicated newspaper humor, but out of actual life it passed forty years ago. Carol's small town thinks not in hoss-swapping but in cheap motor cars, telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa, kodaks, phonographs, leather-upholstered Morris chairs, bridge-prizes, oil-stocks, motion-pictures, land-deals, unread sets of Mark Twain, and a chaste version of national politics. With such a small-town life a Kennicott or a Champ Perry is content, but there are also hundreds of thousands, particularly women and young men, who are not at all content. The more intelligent young people (and the fortunate widows!) flee to the cities with agility and, despite the fictional tradition, resolutely stay there, seldom returning even for holidays. The most protesting patriots of the towns leave them in old age, if they can afford it, and go to live in California or in the cities. The reason, Carol insisted, is not a whiskered rusticity. It is nothing so amusing! It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God. A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world. IV She had inquired as to the effect of this dominating dullness upon foreigners. She remembered the feeble exotic quality to be found in the first-generation Scandinavians; she recalled the Norwegian Fair at the Lutheran Church, to which Bea had taken her. There, in the bondestue, the replica of a Norse farm kitchen, pale women in scarlet jackets embroidered with gold thread and colored beads, in black skirts with a line of blue, green-striped aprons, and ridged caps very pretty to set off a fresh face, had served rommegrod og lefse--sweet cakes and sour milk pudding spiced with cinnamon. For the first time in Gopher Prairie Carol had found novelty. She had reveled in the mild foreignness of it. But she saw these Scandinavian women zealously exchanging their spiced puddings and red jackets for fried pork chops and congealed white blouses, trading the ancient Christmas hymns of the fjords for "She's My Jazzland Cutie," being Americanized into uniformity, and in less than a generation losing in the grayness whatever pleasant new customs they might have added to the life of the town. Their sons finished the process. In ready-made clothes and ready-made high-school phrases they sank into propriety, and the sound American customs had absorbed without one trace of pollution another alien invasion. And along with these foreigners, she felt herself being ironed into glossy mediocrity, and she rebelled, in fear. The respectability of the Gopher Prairies, said Carol, is reinforced by vows of poverty and chastity in the matter of knowledge. Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which it is so easy to come by. To be "intellectual" or "artistic" or, in their own word, to be "highbrow," is to be priggish and of dubious virtue. Large experiments in politics and in co-operative distribution, ventures requiring knowledge, courage, and imagination, do originate in the West and Middlewest, but they are not of the towns, they are of the farmers. If these heresies are supported by the townsmen it is only by occasional teachers doctors, lawyers, the labor unions, and workmen like Miles Bjornstam, who are punished by being mocked as "cranks," as "half-baked parlor socialists." The editor and the rector preach at them. The cloud of serene ignorance submerges them in unhappiness and futility. V Here Vida observed, "Yes--well----Do you know, I've always thought that Ray would have made a wonderful rector. He has what I call an essentially religious soul. My! He'd have read the service beautifully! I suppose it's too late now, but as I tell him, he can also serve the world by selling shoes and----I wonder if we oughtn't to have family-prayers?" VI Doubtless all small towns, in all countries, in all ages, Carol admitted, have a tendency to be not only dull but mean, bitter, infested with curiosity. In France or Tibet quite as much as in Wyoming or Indiana these timidities are inherent in isolation. But a village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to dominate the earth, to drain the hills and sea of color, to set Dante at boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress the high gods in Klassy Kollege Klothes. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicate to the sayings of Confucius. Such a society functions admirably in the large production of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience of safety razors. And such a society, such a nation, is determined by the Gopher Prairies. The greatest manufacturer is but a busier Sam Clark, and all the rotund senators and presidents are village lawyers and bankers grown nine feet tall. Though a Gopher Prairie regards itself as a part of the Great World, compares itself to Rome and Vienna, it will not acquire the scientific spirit, the international mind, which would make it great. It picks at information which will visibly procure money or social distinction. Its conception of a community ideal is not the grand manner, the noble aspiration, the fine aristocratic pride, but cheap labor for the kitchen and rapid increase in the price of land. It plays at cards on greasy oil-cloth in a shanty, and does not know that prophets are walking and talking on the terrace. If all the provincials were as kindly as Champ Perry and Sam Clark there would be no reason for desiring the town to seek great traditions. It is the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, the Jackson Elders, small busy men crushingly powerful in their common purpose, viewing themselves as men of the world but keeping themselves men of the cash-register and the comic film, who make the town a sterile oligarchy. VII She had sought to be definite in analyzing the surface ugliness of the Gopher Prairies. She asserted that it is a matter of universal similarity; of flimsiness of construction, so that the towns resemble frontier camps; of neglect of natural advantages, so that the hills are covered with brush, the lakes shut off by railroads, and the creeks lined with dumping-grounds; of depressing sobriety of color; rectangularity of buildings; and excessive breadth and straightness of the gashed streets, so that there is no escape from gales and from sight of the grim sweep of land, nor any windings to coax the loiterer along, while the breadth which would be majestic in an avenue of palaces makes the low shabby shops creeping down the typical Main Street the more mean by comparison. The universal similarity--that is the physical expression of the philosophy of dull safety. Nine-tenths of the American towns are so alike that it is the completest boredom to wander from one to another. Always, west of Pittsburg, and often, east of it, there is the same lumber yard, the same railroad station, the same Ford garage, the same creamery, the same box-like houses and two-story shops. The new, more conscious houses are alike in their very attempts at diversity: the same bungalows, the same square houses of stucco or tapestry brick. The shops show the same standardized, nationally advertised wares; the newspapers of sections three thousand miles apart have the same "syndicated features"; the boy in Arkansas displays just such a flamboyant ready-made suit as is found on just such a boy in Delaware, both of them iterate the same slang phrases from the same sporting-pages, and if one of them is in college and the other is a barber, no one may surmise which is which. If Kennicott were snatched from Gopher Prairie and instantly conveyed to a town leagues away, he would not realize it. He would go down apparently the same Main Street (almost certainly it would be called Main Street); in the same drug store he would see the same young man serving the same ice-cream soda to the same young woman with the same magazines and phonograph records under her arm. Not till he had climbed to his office and found another sign on the door, another Dr. Kennicott inside, would he understand that something curious had presumably happened. Finally, behind all her comments, Carol saw the fact that the prairie towns no more exist to serve the farmers who are their reason of existence than do the great capitals; they exist to fatten on the farmers, to provide for the townsmen large motors and social preferment; and, unlike the capitals, they do not give to the district in return for usury a stately and permanent center, but only this ragged camp. It is a "parasitic Greek civilization"--minus the civilization. "There we are then," said Carol. "The remedy? Is there any? Criticism, perhaps, for the beginning of the beginning. Oh, there's nothing that attacks the Tribal God Mediocrity that doesn't help a little . . . and probably there's nothing that helps very much. Perhaps some day the farmers will build and own their market-towns. (Think of the club they could have!) But I'm afraid I haven't any 'reform program.' Not any more! The trouble is spiritual, and no League or Party can enact a preference for gardens rather than dumping-grounds. . . . There's my confession. WELL?" "In other words, all you want is perfection?" "Yes! Why not?" "How you hate this place! How can you expect to do anything with it if you haven't any sympathy?" "But I have! And affection. Or else I wouldn't fume so. I've learned that Gopher Prairie isn't just an eruption on the prairie, as I thought first, but as large as New York. In New York I wouldn't know more than forty or fifty people, and I know that many here. Go on! Say what you're thinking." "Well, my dear, if I DID take all your notions seriously, it would be pretty discouraging. Imagine how a person would feel, after working hard for years and helping to build up a nice town, to have you airily flit in and simply say 'Rotten!' Think that's fair?" "Why not? It must be just as discouraging for the Gopher Prairieite to see Venice and make comparisons." "It would not! I imagine gondolas are kind of nice to ride in, but we've got better bath-rooms! But----My dear, you're not the only person in this town who has done some thinking for herself, although (pardon my rudeness) I'm afraid you think so. I'll admit we lack some things. Maybe our theater isn't as good as shows in Paris. All right! I don't want to see any foreign culture suddenly forced on us--whether it's street-planning or table-manners or crazy communistic ideas." Vida sketched what she termed "practical things that will make a happier and prettier town, but that do belong to our life, that actually are being done." Of the Thanatopsis Club she spoke; of the rest-room, the fight against mosquitos, the campaign for more gardens and shade-trees and sewers--matters not fantastic and nebulous and distant, but immediate and sure. Carol's answer was fantastic and nebulous enough: "Yes. . . . Yes. . . . I know. They're good. But if I could put through all those reforms at once, I'd still want startling, exotic things. Life is comfortable and clean enough here already. And so secure. What it needs is to be less secure, more eager. The civic improvements which I'd like the Thanatopsis to advocate are Strindberg plays, and classic dancers--exquisite legs beneath tulle--and (I can see him so clearly!) a thick, black-bearded, cynical Frenchman who would sit about and drink and sing opera and tell bawdy stories and laugh at our proprieties and quote Rabelais and not be ashamed to kiss my hand!" "Huh! Not sure about the rest of it but I guess that's what you and all the other discontented young women really want: some stranger kissing your hand!" At Carol's gasp, the old squirrel-like Vida darted out and cried, "Oh, my dear, don't take that too seriously. I just meant----" "I know. You just meant it. Go on. Be good for my soul. Isn't it funny: here we all are--me trying to be good for Gopher Prairie's soul, and Gopher Prairie trying to be good for my soul. What are my other sins?" "Oh, there's plenty of them. Possibly some day we shall have your fat cynical Frenchman (horrible, sneering, tobacco-stained object, ruining his brains and his digestion with vile liquor!) but, thank heaven, for a while we'll manage to keep busy with our lawns and pavements! You see, these things really are coming! The Thanatopsis is getting somewhere. And you----" Her tone italicized the words--"to my great disappointment, are doing less, not more, than the people you laugh at! Sam Clark, on the school-board, is working for better school ventilation. Ella Stowbody (whose elocuting you always think is so absurd) has persuaded the railroad to share the expense of a parked space at the station, to do away with that vacant lot. "You sneer so easily. I'm sorry, but I do think there's something essentially cheap in your attitude. Especially about religion. "If you must know, you're not a sound reformer at all. You're an impossibilist. And you give up too easily. You gave up on the new city hall, the anti-fly campaign, club papers, the library-board, the dramatic association--just because we didn't graduate into Ibsen the very first thing. You want perfection all at once. Do you know what the finest thing you've done is--aside from bringing Hugh into the world? It was the help you gave Dr. Will during baby-welfare week. You didn't demand that each baby be a philosopher and artist before you weighed him, as you do with the rest of us. "And now I'm afraid perhaps I'll hurt you. We're going to have a new schoolbuilding in this town--in just a few years--and we'll have it without one bit of help or interest from you! "Professor Mott and I and some others have been dinging away at the moneyed men for years. We didn't call on you because you would never stand the pound-pound-pounding year after year without one bit of encouragement. And we've won! I've got the promise of everybody who counts that just as soon as war-conditions permit, they'll vote the bonds for the schoolhouse. And we'll have a wonderful building--lovely brown brick, with big windows, and agricultural and manual-training departments. When we get it, that'll be my answer to all your theories!" "I'm glad. And I'm ashamed I haven't had any part in getting it. But----Please don't think I'm unsympathetic if I ask one question: Will the teachers in the hygienic new building go on informing the children that Persia is a yellow spot on the map, and 'Caesar' the title of a book of grammatical puzzles?" VIII Vida was indignant; Carol was apologetic; they talked for another hour, the eternal Mary and Martha--an immoralist Mary and a reformist Martha. It was Vida who conquered. The fact that she had been left out of the campaign for the new schoolbuilding disconcerted Carol. She laid her dreams of perfection aside. When Vida asked her to take charge of a group of Camp Fire Girls, she obeyed, and had definite pleasure out of the Indian dances and ritual and costumes. She went more regularly to the Thanatopsis. With Vida as lieutenant and unofficial commander she campaigned for a village nurse to attend poor families, raised the fund herself, saw to it that the nurse was young and strong and amiable and intelligent. Yet all the while she beheld the burly cynical Frenchman and the diaphanous dancers as clearly as the child sees its air-born playmates; she relished the Camp Fire Girls not because, in Vida's words, "this Scout training will help so much to make them Good Wives," but because she hoped that the Sioux dances would bring subversive color into their dinginess. She helped Ella Stowbody to set out plants in the tiny triangular park at the railroad station; she squatted in the dirt, with a small curved trowel and the most decorous of gardening gauntlets; she talked to Ella about the public-spiritedness of fuchsias and cannas; and she felt that she was scrubbing a temple deserted by the gods and empty even of incense and the sound of chanting. Passengers looking from trains saw her as a village woman of fading prettiness, incorruptible virtue, and no abnormalities; the baggageman heard her say, "Oh yes, I do think it will be a good example for the children"; and all the while she saw herself running garlanded through the streets of Babylon. Planting led her to botanizing. She never got much farther than recognizing the tiger lily and the wild rose, but she rediscovered Hugh. "What does the buttercup say, mummy?" he cried, his hand full of straggly grasses, his cheek gilded with pollen. She knelt to embrace him; she affirmed that he made life more than full; she was altogether reconciled . . . for an hour. But she awoke at night to hovering death. She crept away from the hump of bedding that was Kennicott; tiptoed into the bathroom and, by the mirror in the door of the medicine-cabinet, examined her pallid face. Wasn't she growing visibly older in ratio as Vida grew plumper and younger? Wasn't her nose sharper? Wasn't her neck granulated? She stared and choked. She was only thirty. But the five years since her marriage--had they not gone by as hastily and stupidly as though she had been under ether; would time not slink past till death? She pounded her fist on the cool enameled rim of the bathtub and raged mutely against the indifferent gods: "I don't care! I won't endure it! They lie so--Vida and Will and Aunt Bessie--they tell me I ought to be satisfied with Hugh and a good home and planting seven nasturtiums in a station garden! I am I! When I die the world will be annihilated, as far as I'm concerned. I am I! I'm not content to leave the sea and the ivory towers to others. I want them for me! Damn Vida! Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe that a display of potatoes at Howland & Gould's is enough beauty and strangeness?"

Chapter 22

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-22

Carol sees the happiness that Vida Sherwin has after getting married and wishes she could be happy in the same way. Her new solution to dealing with her situation is to read more and to find out what kinds of ideas women in her situation are starting to have all over the U.S. The more she reads, the more Carol develops grand theories of how towns like Gopher Prairie work behind the scenes. She hates the fact that the town takes all of the interesting things about people who move there and grind them all into dullness. Carol takes her new ideas about why Gopher Prairie stinks and tells them to Vida. Vida is more satisfied with her life than she's ever been, though, and she dismisses Carol as a Negative Nelly. Vida also tells Carol that the town will be building a new school--no thanks to Carol's involvement. Carol realizes that even if something does happen to make the town better, she won't be involved, because people don't like her.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/23.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_22_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 23

chapter 23

{"name": "Chapter 23", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-23", "summary": "We're at the point where America has decided to enter World War I. Vida sends her new husband Raymie off to a training camp so he can do his part for his country. Mrs. Bogart's son Cy wants to join the army so he can kill some Germans, but Mrs. Bogart won't let him, since he's still only a teenager. Meanwhile, Carol keeps hearing about how the war is going to bring about a basic change in human psychology and wipe the slate clean. She hopes this is the case, even though it'll take a lot of death to accomplish it. The town gets excited when it finds out that its most famous son, Percy Bresnahan, will be coming to visit. Percy is the president of a car company in Boston, and everyone is proud of how rich and powerful he has become. Bresnahan pays a special visit to the Kennicott house and flirts a little with Carol. Carol is cold with him, but part of her likes the attention. Bresnahan goes on a picnic with Will and Carol the next day, and people from the town are eager to know Bresnahan's inside gossip about the war. He hates the German Empire, but he still thinks it's better than the alternative, which is all the communists and socialists agitating in the German streets. Carol later hears a story about how Miles Bjornstam tried to smack-talk Bresnahan for being a greedy capitalist. But apparently Bresnahan verbally humiliated Miles and got everyone in the town gloating over the victory. Worst of all, Carol is crushed to realize that she thinks of Bresnahan as a real man and feels attracted to him, even though he stands for everything she dislikes in the world.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXIII I WHEN America entered the Great European War, Vida sent Raymie off to an officers' training-camp--less than a year after her wedding. Raymie was diligent and rather strong. He came out a first lieutenant of infantry, and was one of the earliest sent abroad. Carol grew definitely afraid of Vida as Vida transferred the passion which had been released in marriage to the cause of the war; as she lost all tolerance. When Carol was touched by the desire for heroism in Raymie and tried tactfully to express it, Vida made her feel like an impertinent child. By enlistment and draft, the sons of Lyman Cass, Nat Hicks, Sam Clark joined the army. But most of the soldiers were the sons of German and Swedish farmers unknown to Carol. Dr. Terry Gould and Dr. McGanum became captains in the medical corps, and were stationed at camps in Iowa and Georgia. They were the only officers, besides Raymie, from the Gopher Prairie district. Kennicott wanted to go with them, but the several doctors of the town forgot medical rivalry and, meeting in council, decided that he would do better to wait and keep the town well till he should be needed. Kennicott was forty-two now; the only youngish doctor left in a radius of eighteen miles. Old Dr. Westlake, who loved comfort like a cat, protestingly rolled out at night for country calls, and hunted through his collar-box for his G. A. R. button. Carol did not quite know what she thought about Kennicott's going. Certainly she was no Spartan wife. She knew that he wanted to go; she knew that this longing was always in him, behind his unchanged trudging and remarks about the weather. She felt for him an admiring affection--and she was sorry that she had nothing more than affection. Cy Bogart was the spectacular warrior of the town. Cy was no longer the weedy boy who had sat in the loft speculating about Carol's egotism and the mysteries of generation. He was nineteen now, tall, broad, busy, the "town sport," famous for his ability to drink beer, to shake dice, to tell undesirable stories, and, from his post in front of Dyer's drug store, to embarrass the girls by "jollying" them as they passed. His face was at once peach-bloomed and pimply. Cy was to be heard publishing it abroad that if he couldn't get the Widow Bogart's permission to enlist, he'd run away and enlist without it. He shouted that he "hated every dirty Hun; by gosh, if he could just poke a bayonet into one big fat Heinie and learn him some decency and democracy, he'd die happy." Cy got much reputation by whipping a farmboy named Adolph Pochbauer for being a "damn hyphenated German." . . . This was the younger Pochbauer, who was killed in the Argonne, while he was trying to bring the body of his Yankee captain back to the lines. At this time Cy Bogart was still dwelling in Gopher Prairie and planning to go to war. II Everywhere Carol heard that the war was going to bring a basic change in psychology, to purify and uplift everything from marital relations to national politics, and she tried to exult in it. Only she did not find it. She saw the women who made bandages for the Red Cross giving up bridge, and laughing at having to do without sugar, but over the surgical-dressings they did not speak of God and the souls of men, but of Miles Bjornstam's impudence, of Terry Gould's scandalous carryings-on with a farmer's daughter four years ago, of cooking cabbage, and of altering blouses. Their references to the war touched atrocities only. She herself was punctual, and efficient at making dressings, but she could not, like Mrs. Lyman Cass and Mrs. Bogart, fill the dressings with hate for enemies. When she protested to Vida, "The young do the work while these old ones sit around and interrupt us and gag with hate because they're too feeble to do anything but hate," then Vida turned on her: "If you can't be reverent, at least don't be so pert and opinionated, now when men and women are dying. Some of us--we have given up so much, and we're glad to. At least we expect that you others sha'n't try to be witty at our expense." There was weeping. Carol did desire to see the Prussian autocracy defeated; she did persuade herself that there were no autocracies save that of Prussia; she did thrill to motion-pictures of troops embarking in New York; and she was uncomfortable when she met Miles Bjornstam on the street and he croaked: "How's tricks? Things going fine with me; got two new cows. Well, have you become a patriot? Eh? Sure, they'll bring democracy--the democracy of death. Yes, sure, in every war since the Garden of Eden the workmen have gone out to fight each other for perfectly good reasons--handed to them by their bosses. Now me, I'm wise. I'm so wise that I know I don't know anything about the war." It was not a thought of the war that remained with her after Miles's declamation but a perception that she and Vida and all of the good-intentioners who wanted to "do something for the common people" were insignificant, because the "common people" were able to do things for themselves, and highly likely to, as soon as they learned the fact. The conception of millions of workmen like Miles taking control frightened her, and she scuttled rapidly away from the thought of a time when she might no longer retain the position of Lady Bountiful to the Bjornstams and Beas and Oscarinas whom she loved--and patronized. III It was in June, two months after America's entrance into the war, that the momentous event happened--the visit of the great Percy Bresnahan, the millionaire president of the Velvet Motor Car Company of Boston, the one native son who was always to be mentioned to strangers. For two weeks there were rumors. Sam Clark cried to Kennicott, "Say, I hear Perce Bresnahan is coming! By golly it'll be great to see the old scout, eh?" Finally the Dauntless printed, on the front page with a No. 1 head, a letter from Bresnahan to Jackson Elder: DEAR JACK: Well, Jack, I find I can make it. I'm to go to Washington as a dollar a year man for the government, in the aviation motor section, and tell them how much I don't know about carburetors. But before I start in being a hero I want to shoot out and catch me a big black bass and cuss out you and Sam Clark and Harry Haydock and Will Kennicott and the rest of you pirates. I'll land in G. P. on June 7, on No. 7 from Mpls. Shake a day-day. Tell Bert Tybee to save me a glass of beer. Sincerely yours, Perce. All members of the social, financial, scientific, literary, and sporting sets were at No. 7 to meet Bresnahan; Mrs. Lyman Cass was beside Del Snafflin the barber, and Juanita Haydock almost cordial to Miss Villets the librarian. Carol saw Bresnahan laughing down at them from the train vestibule--big, immaculate, overjawed, with the eye of an executive. In the voice of the professional Good Fellow he bellowed, "Howdy, folks!" As she was introduced to him (not he to her) Bresnahan looked into her eyes, and his hand-shake was warm, unhurried. He declined the offers of motors; he walked off, his arm about the shoulder of Nat Hicks the sporting tailor, with the elegant Harry Haydock carrying one of his enormous pale leather bags, Del Snafflin the other, Jack Elder bearing an overcoat, and Julius Flickerbaugh the fishing-tackle. Carol noted that though Bresnahan wore spats and a stick, no small boy jeered. She decided, "I must have Will get a double-breasted blue coat and a wing collar and a dotted bow-tie like his." That evening, when Kennicott was trimming the grass along the walk with sheep-shears, Bresnahan rolled up, alone. He was now in corduroy trousers, khaki shirt open at the throat, a white boating hat, and marvelous canvas-and-leather shoes "On the job there, old Will! Say, my Lord, this is living, to come back and get into a regular man-sized pair of pants. They can talk all they want to about the city, but my idea of a good time is to loaf around and see you boys and catch a gamey bass!" He hustled up the walk and blared at Carol, "Where's that little fellow? I hear you've got one fine big he-boy that you're holding out on me!" "He's gone to bed," rather briefly. "I know. And rules are rules, these days. Kids get routed through the shop like a motor. But look here, sister; I'm one great hand at busting rules. Come on now, let Uncle Perce have a look at him. Please now, sister?" He put his arm about her waist; it was a large, strong, sophisticated arm, and very agreeable; he grinned at her with a devastating knowingness, while Kennicott glowed inanely. She flushed; she was alarmed by the ease with which the big-city man invaded her guarded personality. She was glad, in retreat, to scamper ahead of the two men up-stairs to the hall-room in which Hugh slept. All the way Kennicott muttered, "Well, well, say, gee whittakers but it's good to have you back, certainly is good to see you!" Hugh lay on his stomach, making an earnest business of sleeping. He burrowed his eyes in the dwarf blue pillow to escape the electric light, then sat up abruptly, small and frail in his woolly nightdrawers, his floss of brown hair wild, the pillow clutched to his breast. He wailed. He stared at the stranger, in a manner of patient dismissal. He explained confidentially to Carol, "Daddy wouldn't let it be morning yet. What does the pillow say?" Bresnahan dropped his arm caressingly on Carol's shoulder; he pronounced, "My Lord, you're a lucky girl to have a fine young husk like that. I figure Will knew what he was doing when he persuaded you to take a chance on an old bum like him! They tell me you come from St. Paul. We're going to get you to come to Boston some day." He leaned over the bed. "Young man, you're the slickest sight I've seen this side of Boston. With your permission, may we present you with a slight token of our regard and appreciation of your long service?" He held out a red rubber Pierrot. Hugh remarked, "Gimme it," hid it under the bedclothes, and stared at Bresnahan as though he had never seen the man before. For once Carol permitted herself the spiritual luxury of not asking "Why, Hugh dear, what do you say when some one gives you a present?" The great man was apparently waiting. They stood in inane suspense till Bresnahan led them out, rumbling, "How about planning a fishing-trip, Will?" He remained for half an hour. Always he told Carol what a charming person she was; always he looked at her knowingly. "Yes. He probably would make a woman fall in love with him. But it wouldn't last a week. I'd get tired of his confounded buoyancy. His hypocrisy. He's a spiritual bully. He makes me rude to him in self-defense. Oh yes, he is glad to be here. He does like us. He's so good an actor that he convinces his own self. . . . I'd HATE him in Boston. He'd have all the obvious big-city things. Limousines. Discreet evening-clothes. Order a clever dinner at a smart restaurant. Drawing-room decorated by the best firm--but the pictures giving him away. I'd rather talk to Guy Pollock in his dusty office. . . . How I lie! His arm coaxed my shoulder and his eyes dared me not to admire him. I'd be afraid of him. I hate him! . . . Oh, the inconceivable egotistic imagination of women! All this stew of analysis about a man, a good, decent, friendly, efficient man, because he was kind to me, as Will's wife!" IV The Kennicotts, the Elders, the Clarks, and Bresnahan went fishing at Red Squaw Lake. They drove forty miles to the lake in Elder's new Cadillac. There was much laughter and bustle at the start, much storing of lunch-baskets and jointed poles, much inquiry as to whether it would really bother Carol to sit with her feet up on a roll of shawls. When they were ready to go Mrs. Clark lamented, "Oh, Sam, I forgot my magazine," and Bresnahan bullied, "Come on now, if you women think you're going to be literary, you can't go with us tough guys!" Every one laughed a great deal, and as they drove on Mrs. Clark explained that though probably she would not have read it, still, she might have wanted to, while the other girls had a nap in the afternoon, and she was right in the middle of a serial--it was an awfully exciting story--it seems that this girl was a Turkish dancer (only she was really the daughter of an American lady and a Russian prince) and men kept running after her, just disgustingly, but she remained pure, and there was a scene---- While the men floated on the lake, casting for black bass, the women prepared lunch and yawned. Carol was a little resentful of the manner in which the men assumed that they did not care to fish. "I don't want to go with them, but I would like the privilege of refusing." The lunch was long and pleasant. It was a background for the talk of the great man come home, hints of cities and large imperative affairs and famous people, jocosely modest admissions that, yes, their friend Perce was doing about as well as most of these "Boston swells that think so much of themselves because they come from rich old families and went to college and everything. Believe me, it's us new business men that are running Beantown today, and not a lot of fussy old bucks snoozing in their clubs!" Carol realized that he was not one of the sons of Gopher Prairie who, if they do not actually starve in the East, are invariably spoken of as "highly successful"; and she found behind his too incessant flattery a genuine affection for his mates. It was in the matter of the war that he most favored and thrilled them. Dropping his voice while they bent nearer (there was no one within two miles to overhear), he disclosed the fact that in both Boston and Washington he'd been getting a lot of inside stuff on the war--right straight from headquarters--he was in touch with some men--couldn't name them but they were darn high up in both the War and State Departments--and he would say--only for Pete's sake they mustn't breathe one word of this; it was strictly on the Q.T. and not generally known outside of Washington--but just between ourselves--and they could take this for gospel--Spain had finally decided to join the Entente allies in the Grand Scrap. Yes, sir, there'd be two million fully equipped Spanish soldiers fighting with us in France in one month now. Some surprise for Germany, all right! "How about the prospects for revolution in Germany?" reverently asked Kennicott. The authority grunted, "Nothing to it. The one thing you can bet on is that no matter what happens to the German people, win or lose, they'll stick by the Kaiser till hell freezes over. I got that absolutely straight, from a fellow who's on the inside of the inside in Washington. No, sir! I don't pretend to know much about international affairs but one thing you can put down as settled is that Germany will be a Hohenzollern empire for the next forty years. At that, I don't know as it's so bad. The Kaiser and the Junkers keep a firm hand on a lot of these red agitators who'd be worse than a king if they could get control." "I'm terribly interested in this uprising that overthrew the Czar in Russia," suggested Carol. She had finally been conquered by the man's wizard knowledge of affairs. Kennicott apologized for her: "Carrie's nuts about this Russian revolution. Is there much to it, Perce?" "There is not!" Bresnahan said flatly. "I can speak by the book there. Carol, honey, I'm surprised to find you talking like a New York Russian Jew, or one of these long-hairs! I can tell you, only you don't need to let every one in on it, this is confidential, I got it from a man who's close to the State Department, but as a matter of fact the Czar will be back in power before the end of the year. You read a lot about his retiring and about his being killed, but I know he's got a big army back of him, and he'll show these damn agitators, lazy beggars hunting for a soft berth bossing the poor goats that fall for 'em, he'll show 'em where they get off!" Carol was sorry to hear that the Czar was coming back, but she said nothing. The others had looked vacant at the mention of a country so far away as Russia. Now they edged in and asked Bresnahan what he thought about the Packard car, investments in Texas oil-wells, the comparative merits of young men born in Minnesota and in Massachusetts, the question of prohibition, the future cost of motor tires, and wasn't it true that American aviators put it all over these Frenchmen? They were glad to find that he agreed with them on every point. As she heard Bresnahan announce, "We're perfectly willing to talk to any committee the men may choose, but we're not going to stand for some outside agitator butting in and telling us how we're going to run our plant!" Carol remembered that Jackson Elder (now meekly receiving New Ideas) had said the same thing in the same words. While Sam Clark was digging up from his memory a long and immensely detailed story of the crushing things he had said to a Pullman porter, named George, Bresnahan hugged his knees and rocked and watched Carol. She wondered if he did not understand the laboriousness of the smile with which she listened to Kennicott's account of the "good one he had on Carrie," that marital, coyly improper, ten-times-told tale of how she had forgotten to attend to Hugh because she was "all het up pounding the box"--which may be translated as "eagerly playing the piano." She was certain that Bresnahan saw through her when she pretended not to hear Kennicott's invitation to join a game of cribbage. She feared the comments he might make; she was irritated by her fear. She was equally irritated, when the motor returned through Gopher Prairie, to find that she was proud of sharing in Bresnahan's kudos as people waved, and Juanita Haydock leaned from a window. She said to herself, "As though I cared whether I'm seen with this fat phonograph!" and simultaneously, "Everybody has noticed how much Will and I are playing with Mr. Bresnahan." The town was full of his stories, his friendliness, his memory for names, his clothes, his trout-flies, his generosity. He had given a hundred dollars to Father Klubok the priest, and a hundred to the Reverend Mr. Zitterel the Baptist minister, for Americanization work. At the Bon Ton, Carol heard Nat Hicks the tailor exulting: "Old Perce certainly pulled a good one on this fellow Bjornstam that always is shooting off his mouth. He's supposed to of settled down since he got married, but Lord, those fellows that think they know it all, they never change. Well, the Red Swede got the grand razz handed to him, all right. He had the nerve to breeze up to Perce, at Dave Dyer's, and he said, he said to Perce, 'I've always wanted to look at a man that was so useful that folks would pay him a million dollars for existing,' and Perce gave him the once-over and come right back, 'Have, eh?' he says. 'Well,' he says, 'I've been looking for a man so useful sweeping floors that I could pay him four dollars a day. Want the job, my friend?' Ha, ha, ha! Say, you know how lippy Bjornstam is? Well for once he didn't have a thing to say. He tried to get fresh, and tell what a rotten town this is, and Perce come right back at him, 'If you don't like this country, you better get out of it and go back to Germany, where you belong!' Say, maybe us fellows didn't give Bjornstam the horse-laugh though! Oh, Perce is the white-haired boy in this burg, all rightee!" V Bresnahan had borrowed Jackson Elder's motor; he stopped at the Kennicotts'; he bawled at Carol, rocking with Hugh on the porch, "Better come for a ride." She wanted to snub him. "Thanks so much, but I'm being maternal." "Bring him along! Bring him along!" Bresnahan was out of the seat, stalking up the sidewalk, and the rest of her protests and dignities were feeble. She did not bring Hugh along. Bresnahan was silent for a mile, in words, But he looked at her as though he meant her to know that he understood everything she thought. She observed how deep was his chest. "Lovely fields over there," he said. "You really like them? There's no profit in them." He chuckled. "Sister, you can't get away with it. I'm onto you. You consider me a big bluff. Well, maybe I am. But so are you, my dear--and pretty enough so that I'd try to make love to you, if I weren't afraid you'd slap me." "Mr. Bresnahan, do you talk that way to your wife's friends? And do you call them 'sister'?" "As a matter of fact, I do! And I make 'em like it. Score two!" But his chuckle was not so rotund, and he was very attentive to the ammeter. In a moment he was cautiously attacking: "That's a wonderful boy, Will Kennicott. Great work these country practitioners are doing. The other day, in Washington, I was talking to a big scientific shark, a professor in Johns Hopkins medical school, and he was saying that no one has ever sufficiently appreciated the general practitioner and the sympathy and help he gives folks. These crack specialists, the young scientific fellows, they're so cocksure and so wrapped up in their laboratories that they miss the human element. Except in the case of a few freak diseases that no respectable human being would waste his time having, it's the old doc that keeps a community well, mind and body. And strikes me that Will is one of the steadiest and clearest-headed counter practitioners I've ever met. Eh?" "I'm sure he is. He's a servant of reality." "Come again? Um. Yes. All of that, whatever that is. . . . Say, child, you don't care a whole lot for Gopher Prairie, if I'm not mistaken." "Nope." "There's where you're missing a big chance. There's nothing to these cities. Believe me, I KNOW! This is a good town, as they go. You're lucky to be here. I wish I could shy on!" "Very well, why don't you?" "Huh? Why--Lord--can't get away fr----" "You don't have to stay. I do! So I want to change it. Do you know that men like you, prominent men, do quite a reasonable amount of harm by insisting that your native towns and native states are perfect? It's you who encourage the denizens not to change. They quote you, and go on believing that they live in paradise, and----" She clenched her fist. "The incredible dullness of it!" "Suppose you were right. Even so, don't you think you waste a lot of thundering on one poor scared little town? Kind of mean!" "I tell you it's dull. DULL!" "The folks don't find it dull. These couples like the Haydocks have a high old time; dances and cards----" "They don't. They're bored. Almost every one here is. Vacuousness and bad manners and spiteful gossip--that's what I hate." "Those things--course they're here. So are they in Boston! And every place else! Why, the faults you find in this town are simply human nature, and never will be changed." "Perhaps. But in a Boston all the good Carols (I'll admit I have no faults) can find one another and play. But here--I'm alone, in a stale pool--except as it's stirred by the great Mr. Bresnahan!" "My Lord, to hear you tell it, a fellow 'd think that all the denizens, as you impolitely call 'em, are so confoundedly unhappy that it's a wonder they don't all up and commit suicide. But they seem to struggle along somehow!" "They don't know what they miss. And anybody can endure anything. Look at men in mines and in prisons." He drew up on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. He glanced across the reeds reflected on the water, the quiver of wavelets like crumpled tinfoil, the distant shores patched with dark woods, silvery oats and deep yellow wheat. He patted her hand. "Sis----Carol, you're a darling girl, but you're difficult. Know what I think?" "Yes." "Humph. Maybe you do, but----My humble (not too humble!) opinion is that you like to be different. You like to think you're peculiar. Why, if you knew how many tens of thousands of women, especially in New York, say just what you do, you'd lose all the fun of thinking you're a lone genius and you'd be on the band-wagon whooping it up for Gopher Prairie and a good decent family life. There's always about a million young women just out of college who want to teach their grandmothers how to suck eggs." "How proud you are of that homely rustic metaphor! You use it at 'banquets' and directors' meetings, and boast of your climb from a humble homestead." "Huh! You may have my number. I'm not telling. But look here: You're so prejudiced against Gopher Prairie that you overshoot the mark; you antagonize those who might be inclined to agree with you in some particulars but----Great guns, the town can't be all wrong!" "No, it isn't. But it could be. Let me tell you a fable. Imagine a cavewoman complaining to her mate. She doesn't like one single thing; she hates the damp cave, the rats running over her bare legs, the stiff skin garments, the eating of half-raw meat, her husband's bushy face, the constant battles, and the worship of the spirits who will hoodoo her unless she gives the priests her best claw necklace. Her man protests, 'But it can't all be wrong!' and he thinks he has reduced her to absurdity. Now you assume that a world which produces a Percy Bresnahan and a Velvet Motor Company must be civilized. It is? Aren't we only about half-way along in barbarism? I suggest Mrs. Bogart as a test. And we'll continue in barbarism just as long as people as nearly intelligent as you continue to defend things as they are because they are." "You're a fair spieler, child. But, by golly, I'd like to see you try to design a new manifold, or run a factory and keep a lot of your fellow reds from Czech-slovenski-magyar-godknowswheria on the job! You'd drop your theories so darn quick! I'm not any defender of things as they are. Sure. They're rotten. Only I'm sensible." He preached his gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty to friends. She had the neophyte's shock of discovery that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics. He was so much the man, the worker, the friend, that she liked him when she most tried to stand out against him; he was so much the successful executive that she did not want him to despise her. His manner of sneering at what he called "parlor socialists" (though the phrase was not overwhelmingly new) had a power which made her wish to placate his company of well-fed, speed-loving administrators. When he demanded, "Would you like to associate with nothing but a lot of turkey-necked, horn-spectacled nuts that have adenoids and need a hair-cut, and that spend all their time kicking about 'conditions' and never do a lick of work?" she said, "No, but just the same----" When he asserted, "Even if your cavewoman was right in knocking the whole works, I bet some red-blooded Regular Fellow, some real He-man, found her a nice dry cave, and not any whining criticizing radical," she wriggled her head feebly, between a nod and a shake. His large hands, sensual lips, easy voice supported his self-confidence. He made her feel young and soft--as Kennicott had once made her feel. She had nothing to say when he bent his powerful head and experimented, "My dear, I'm sorry I'm going away from this town. You'd be a darling child to play with. You ARE pretty! Some day in Boston I'll show you how we buy a lunch. Well, hang it, got to be starting back." The only answer to his gospel of beef which she could find, when she was home, was a wail of "But just the same----" She did not see him again before he departed for Washington. His eyes remained. His glances at her lips and hair and shoulders had revealed to her that she was not a wife-and-mother alone, but a girl; that there still were men in the world, as there had been in college days. That admiration led her to study Kennicott, to tear at the shroud of intimacy, to perceive the strangeness of the most familiar.

Chapter 23

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-23

We're at the point where America has decided to enter World War I. Vida sends her new husband Raymie off to a training camp so he can do his part for his country. Mrs. Bogart's son Cy wants to join the army so he can kill some Germans, but Mrs. Bogart won't let him, since he's still only a teenager. Meanwhile, Carol keeps hearing about how the war is going to bring about a basic change in human psychology and wipe the slate clean. She hopes this is the case, even though it'll take a lot of death to accomplish it. The town gets excited when it finds out that its most famous son, Percy Bresnahan, will be coming to visit. Percy is the president of a car company in Boston, and everyone is proud of how rich and powerful he has become. Bresnahan pays a special visit to the Kennicott house and flirts a little with Carol. Carol is cold with him, but part of her likes the attention. Bresnahan goes on a picnic with Will and Carol the next day, and people from the town are eager to know Bresnahan's inside gossip about the war. He hates the German Empire, but he still thinks it's better than the alternative, which is all the communists and socialists agitating in the German streets. Carol later hears a story about how Miles Bjornstam tried to smack-talk Bresnahan for being a greedy capitalist. But apparently Bresnahan verbally humiliated Miles and got everyone in the town gloating over the victory. Worst of all, Carol is crushed to realize that she thinks of Bresnahan as a real man and feels attracted to him, even though he stands for everything she dislikes in the world.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/24.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_23_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 24

chapter 24

{"name": "Chapter 24", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-24", "summary": "After Bresnahan has left Gopher Prairie, Carol becomes especially sensitive to all the things she finds ugly about her husband. She doesn't bother to act happy when he has his gross friends over for a poker night. Once the poker guys have left, Carol has a huge fight with Will. She calls his friends disgusting and rude, while he says he's sick of his friends not wanting to come over because Carol is so judgmental. Over time, Carol decides that what she really wants is a room of her own. She begins to use a spare room as her place of escape. She also starts sleeping in this room and away from Will. Will seems to sense Carol's dissatisfaction, because one night he tells her he's thinking of building a new house. Carol thinks of this new house as a way to make her mark on the beauty of Gopher Prairie, but she's crushed to realize that Will wants a house that'll look just like anyone else's. After ten days, the thought of the new house is forgotten because Carol loses interest. Carol thinks she would like to take a trip East to New York. Will thinks it's a good idea at first, but then he backs off when he feels like he's too busy with work. Instead, Will takes Carol to a street fair in another middle-of-nowhere prairie town. They stay with a man named Calibree, and even when Carol tries to participate in the conversation, the men talk about other things she doesn't understand. Carol tries to get Will to ride a merry-go-round with her at the street fair, but nothing doing: Will isn't into it. Once again, Carol goes from feeling young to feeling old.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXIV I ALL that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott. She recalled a hundred grotesqueries: her comic dismay at his having chewed tobacco, the evening when she had tried to read poetry to him; matters which had seemed to vanish with no trace or sequence. Always she repeated that he had been heroically patient in his desire to join the army. She made much of her consoling affection for him in little things. She liked the homeliness of his tinkering about the house; his strength and handiness as he tightened the hinges of a shutter; his boyishness when he ran to her to be comforted because he had found rust in the barrel of his pump-gun. But at the highest he was to her another Hugh, without the glamor of Hugh's unknown future. There was, late in June, a day of heat-lightning. Because of the work imposed by the absence of the other doctors the Kennicotts had not moved to the lake cottage but remained in town, dusty and irritable. In the afternoon, when she went to Oleson & McGuire's (formerly Dahl & Oleson's), Carol was vexed by the assumption of the youthful clerk, recently come from the farm, that he had to be neighborly and rude. He was no more brusquely familiar than a dozen other clerks of the town, but her nerves were heat-scorched. When she asked for codfish, for supper, he grunted, "What d'you want that darned old dry stuff for?" "I like it!" "Punk! Guess the doc can afford something better than that. Try some of the new wienies we got in. Swell. The Haydocks use 'em." She exploded. "My dear young man, it is not your duty to instruct me in housekeeping, and it doesn't particularly concern me what the Haydocks condescend to approve!" He was hurt. He hastily wrapped up the leprous fragment of fish; he gaped as she trailed out. She lamented, "I shouldn't have spoken so. He didn't mean anything. He doesn't know when he is being rude." Her repentance was not proof against Uncle Whittier when she stopped in at his grocery for salt and a package of safety matches. Uncle Whittier, in a shirt collarless and soaked with sweat in a brown streak down his back, was whining at a clerk, "Come on now, get a hustle on and lug that pound cake up to Mis' Cass's. Some folks in this town think a storekeeper ain't got nothing to do but chase out 'phone-orders. . . . Hello, Carrie. That dress you got on looks kind of low in the neck to me. May be decent and modest--I suppose I'm old-fashioned--but I never thought much of showing the whole town a woman's bust! Hee, hee, hee! . . . Afternoon, Mrs. Hicks. Sage? Just out of it. Lemme sell you some other spices. Heh?" Uncle Whittier was nasally indignant "CERTAINLY! Got PLENTY other spices jus' good as sage for any purp'se whatever! What's the matter with--well, with allspice?" When Mrs. Hicks had gone, he raged, "Some folks don't know what they want!" "Sweating sanctimonious bully--my husband's uncle!" thought Carol. She crept into Dave Dyer's. Dave held up his arms with, "Don't shoot! I surrender!" She smiled, but it occurred to her that for nearly five years Dave had kept up this game of pretending that she threatened his life. As she went dragging through the prickly-hot street she reflected that a citizen of Gopher Prairie does not have jests--he has a jest. Every cold morning for five winters Lyman Cass had remarked, "Fair to middlin' chilly--get worse before it gets better." Fifty times had Ezra Stowbody informed the public that Carol had once asked, "Shall I indorse this check on the back?" Fifty times had Sam Clark called to her, "Where'd you steal that hat?" Fifty times had the mention of Barney Cahoon, the town drayman, like a nickel in a slot produced from Kennicott the apocryphal story of Barney's directing a minister, "Come down to the depot and get your case of religious books--they're leaking!" She came home by the unvarying route. She knew every house-front, every street-crossing, every billboard, every tree, every dog. She knew every blackened banana-skin and empty cigarette-box in the gutters. She knew every greeting. When Jim Howland stopped and gaped at her there was no possibility that he was about to confide anything but his grudging, "Well, haryuh t'day?" All her future life, this same red-labeled bread-crate in front of the bakery, this same thimble-shaped crack in the sidewalk a quarter of a block beyond Stowbody's granite hitching-post---- She silently handed her purchases to the silent Oscarina. She sat on the porch, rocking, fanning, twitchy with Hugh's whining. Kennicott came home, grumbled, "What the devil is the kid yapping about?" "I guess you can stand it ten minutes if I can stand it all day!" He came to supper in his shirt sleeves, his vest partly open, revealing discolored suspenders. "Why don't you put on your nice Palm Beach suit, and take off that hideous vest?" she complained. "Too much trouble. Too hot to go up-stairs." She realized that for perhaps a year she had not definitely looked at her husband. She regarded his table-manners. He violently chased fragments of fish about his plate with a knife and licked the knife after gobbling them. She was slightly sick. She asserted, "I'm ridiculous. What do these things matter! Don't be so simple!" But she knew that to her they did matter, these solecisms and mixed tenses of the table. She realized that they found little to say; that, incredibly, they were like the talked-out couples whom she had pitied at restaurants. Bresnahan would have spouted in a lively, exciting, unreliable manner. She realized that Kennicott's clothes were seldom pressed. His coat was wrinkled; his trousers would flap at the knees when he arose. His shoes were unblacked, and they were of an elderly shapelessness. He refused to wear soft hats; cleaved to a hard derby, as a symbol of virility and prosperity; and sometimes he forgot to take it off in the house. She peeped at his cuffs. They were frayed in prickles of starched linen. She had turned them once; she clipped them every week; but when she had begged him to throw the shirt away, last Sunday morning at the crisis of the weekly bath, he had uneasily protested, "Oh, it'll wear quite a while yet." He was shaved (by himself or more socially by Del Snafflin) only three times a week. This morning had not been one of the three times. Yet he was vain of his new turn-down collars and sleek ties; he often spoke of the "sloppy dressing" of Dr. McGanum; and he laughed at old men who wore detachable cuffs or Gladstone collars. Carol did not care much for the creamed codfish that evening. She noted that his nails were jagged and ill-shaped from his habit of cutting them with a pocket-knife and despising a nail-file as effeminate and urban. That they were invariably clean, that his were the scoured fingers of the surgeon, made his stubborn untidiness the more jarring. They were wise hands, kind hands, but they were not the hands of love. She remembered him in the days of courtship. He had tried to please her, then, had touched her by sheepishly wearing a colored band on his straw hat. Was it possible that those days of fumbling for each other were gone so completely? He had read books, to impress her; had said (she recalled it ironically) that she was to point out his every fault; had insisted once, as they sat in the secret place beneath the walls of Fort Snelling---- She shut the door on her thoughts. That was sacred ground. But it WAS a shame that---- She nervously pushed away her cake and stewed apricots. After supper, when they had been driven in from the porch by mosquitos, when Kennicott had for the two-hundredth time in five years commented, "We must have a new screen on the porch--lets all the bugs in," they sat reading, and she noted, and detested herself for noting, and noted again his habitual awkwardness. He slumped down in one chair, his legs up on another, and he explored the recesses of his left ear with the end of his little finger--she could hear the faint smack--he kept it up--he kept it up---- He blurted, "Oh. Forgot tell you. Some of the fellows coming in to play poker this evening. Suppose we could have some crackers and cheese and beer?" She nodded. "He might have mentioned it before. Oh well, it's his house." The poker-party straggled in: Sam Clark, Jack Elder, Dave Dyer, Jim Howland. To her they mechanically said, "'Devenin'," but to Kennicott, in a heroic male manner, "Well, well, shall we start playing? Got a hunch I'm going to lick somebody real bad." No one suggested that she join them. She told herself that it was her own fault, because she was not more friendly; but she remembered that they never asked Mrs. Sam Clark to play. Bresnahan would have asked her. She sat in the living-room, glancing across the hall at the men as they humped over the dining table. They were in shirt sleeves; smoking, chewing, spitting incessantly; lowering their voices for a moment so that she did not hear what they said and afterward giggling hoarsely; using over and over the canonical phrases: "Three to dole," "I raise you a finif," "Come on now, ante up; what do you think this is, a pink tea?" The cigar-smoke was acrid and pervasive. The firmness with which the men mouthed their cigars made the lower part of their faces expressionless, heavy, unappealing. They were like politicians cynically dividing appointments. How could they understand her world? Did that faint and delicate world exist? Was she a fool? She doubted her world, doubted herself, and was sick in the acid, smoke-stained air. She slipped back into brooding upon the habituality of the house. Kennicott was as fixed in routine as an isolated old man. At first he had amorously deceived himself into liking her experiments with food--the one medium in which she could express imagination--but now he wanted only his round of favorite dishes: steak, roast beef, boiled pig's-feet, oatmeal, baked apples. Because at some more flexible period he had advanced from oranges to grape-fruit he considered himself an epicure. During their first autumn she had smiled over his affection for his hunting-coat, but now that the leather had come unstitched in dribbles of pale yellow thread, and tatters of canvas, smeared with dirt of the fields and grease from gun-cleaning, hung in a border of rags, she hated the thing. Wasn't her whole life like that hunting-coat? She knew every nick and brown spot on each piece of the set of china purchased by Kennicott's mother in 1895--discreet china with a pattern of washed-out forget-me-nots, rimmed with blurred gold: the gravy-boat, in a saucer which did not match, the solemn and evangelical covered vegetable-dishes, the two platters. Twenty times had Kennicott sighed over the fact that Bea had broken the other platter--the medium-sized one. The kitchen. Damp black iron sink, damp whitey-yellow drain-board with shreds of discolored wood which from long scrubbing were as soft as cotton thread, warped table, alarm clock, stove bravely blackened by Oscarina but an abomination in its loose doors and broken drafts and oven that never would keep an even heat. Carol had done her best by the kitchen: painted it white, put up curtains, replaced a six-year-old calendar by a color print. She had hoped for tiling, and a kerosene range for summer cooking, but Kennicott always postponed these expenses. She was better acquainted with the utensils in the kitchen than with Vida Sherwin or Guy Pollock. The can-opener, whose soft gray metal handle was twisted from some ancient effort to pry open a window, was more pertinent to her than all the cathedrals in Europe; and more significant than the future of Asia was the never-settled weekly question as to whether the small kitchen knife with the unpainted handle or the second-best buckhorn carving-knife was better for cutting up cold chicken for Sunday supper. II She was ignored by the males till midnight. Her husband called, "Suppose we could have some eats, Carrie?" As she passed through the dining-room the men smiled on her, belly-smiles. None of them noticed her while she was serving the crackers and cheese and sardines and beer. They were determining the exact psychology of Dave Dyer in standing pat, two hours before. When they were gone she said to Kennicott, "Your friends have the manners of a barroom. They expect me to wait on them like a servant. They're not so much interested in me as they would be in a waiter, because they don't have to tip me. Unfortunately! Well, good night." So rarely did she nag in this petty, hot-weather fashion that he was astonished rather than angry. "Hey! Wait! What's the idea? I must say I don't get you. The boys----Barroom? Why, Perce Bresnahan was saying there isn't a finer bunch of royal good fellows anywhere than just the crowd that were here tonight!" They stood in the lower hall. He was too shocked to go on with his duties of locking the front door and winding his watch and the clock. "Bresnahan! I'm sick of him!" She meant nothing in particular. "Why, Carrie, he's one of the biggest men in the country! Boston just eats out of his hand!" "I wonder if it does? How do we know but that in Boston, among well-bred people, he may be regarded as an absolute lout? The way he calls women 'Sister,' and the way----" "Now look here! That'll do! Of course I know you don't mean it--you're simply hot and tired, and trying to work off your peeve on me. But just the same, I won't stand your jumping on Perce. You----It's just like your attitude toward the war--so darn afraid that America will become militaristic----" "But you are the pure patriot!" "By God, I am!" "Yes, I heard you talking to Sam Clark tonight about ways of avoiding the income tax!" He had recovered enough to lock the door; he clumped up-stairs ahead of her, growling, "You don't know what you're talking about. I'm perfectly willing to pay my full tax--fact, I'm in favor of the income tax--even though I do think it's a penalty on frugality and enterprise--fact, it's an unjust, darn-fool tax. But just the same, I'll pay it. Only, I'm not idiot enough to pay more than the government makes me pay, and Sam and I were just figuring out whether all automobile expenses oughn't to be exemptions. I'll take a lot off you, Carrie, but I don't propose for one second to stand your saying I'm not patriotic. You know mighty well and good that I've tried to get away and join the army. And at the beginning of the whole fracas I said--I've said right along--that we ought to have entered the war the minute Germany invaded Belgium. You don't get me at all. You can't appreciate a man's work. You're abnormal. You've fussed so much with these fool novels and books and all this highbrow junk----You like to argue!" It ended, a quarter of an hour later, in his calling her a "neurotic" before he turned away and pretended to sleep. For the first time they had failed to make peace. "There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side. His calls mine 'neurotic'; mine calls his 'stupid.' We'll never understand each other, never; and it's madness for us to debate--to lie together in a hot bed in a creepy room--enemies, yoked." III It clarified in her the longing for a place of her own. "While it's so hot, I think I'll sleep in the spare room," she said next day. "Not a bad idea." He was cheerful and kindly. The room was filled with a lumbering double bed and a cheap pine bureau. She stored the bed in the attic; replaced it by a cot which, with a denim cover, made a couch by day; put in a dressing-table, a rocker transformed by a cretonne cover; had Miles Bjornstam build book-shelves. Kennicott slowly understood that she meant to keep up her seclusion. In his queries, "Changing the whole room?" "Putting your books in there?" she caught his dismay. But it was so easy, once her door was closed, to shut out his worry. That hurt her--the ease of forgetting him. Aunt Bessie Smail sleuthed out this anarchy. She yammered, "Why, Carrie, you ain't going to sleep all alone by yourself? I don't believe in that. Married folks should have the same room, of course! Don't go getting silly notions. No telling what a thing like that might lead to. Suppose I up and told your Uncle Whit that I wanted a room of my own!" Carol spoke of recipes for corn-pudding. But from Mrs. Dr. Westlake she drew encouragement. She had made an afternoon call on Mrs. Westlake. She was for the first time invited up-stairs, and found the suave old woman sewing in a white and mahogany room with a small bed. "Oh, do you have your own royal apartments, and the doctor his?" Carol hinted. "Indeed I do! The doctor says it's bad enough to have to stand my temper at meals. Do----" Mrs. Westlake looked at her sharply. "Why, don't you do the same thing?" "I've been thinking about it." Carol laughed in an embarrassed way. "Then you wouldn't regard me as a complete hussy if I wanted to be by myself now and then?" "Why, child, every woman ought to get off by herself and turn over her thoughts--about children, and God, and how bad her complexion is, and the way men don't really understand her, and how much work she finds to do in the house, and how much patience it takes to endure some things in a man's love." "Yes!" Carol said it in a gasp, her hands twisted together. She wanted to confess not only her hatred for the Aunt Bessies but her covert irritation toward those she best loved: her alienation from Kennicott, her disappointment in Guy Pollock, her uneasiness in the presence of Vida. She had enough self-control to confine herself to, "Yes. Men! The dear blundering souls, we do have to get off and laugh at them." "Of course we do. Not that you have to laugh at Dr. Kennicott so much, but MY man, heavens, now there's a rare old bird! Reading story-books when he ought to be tending to business! 'Marcus Westlake,' I say to him, 'you're a romantic old fool.' And does he get angry? He does not! He chuckles and says, 'Yes, my beloved, folks do say that married people grow to resemble each other!' Drat him!" Mrs. Westlake laughed comfortably. After such a disclosure what could Carol do but return the courtesy by remarking that as for Kennicott, he wasn't romantic enough--the darling. Before she left she had babbled to Mrs. Westlake her dislike for Aunt Bessie, the fact that Kennicott's income was now more than five thousand a year, her view of the reason why Vida had married Raymie (which included some thoroughly insincere praise of Raymie's "kind heart"), her opinion of the library-board, just what Kennicott had said about Mrs. Carthal's diabetes, and what Kennicott thought of the several surgeons in the Cities. She went home soothed by confession, inspirited by finding a new friend. IV The tragicomedy of the "domestic situation." Oscarina went back home to help on the farm, and Carol had a succession of maids, with gaps between. The lack of servants was becoming one of the most cramping problems of the prairie town. Increasingly the farmers' daughters rebelled against village dullness, and against the unchanged attitude of the Juanitas toward "hired girls." They went off to city kitchens, or to city shops and factories, that they might be free and even human after hours. The Jolly Seventeen were delighted at Carol's desertion by the loyal Oscarina. They reminded her that she had said, "I don't have any trouble with maids; see how Oscarina stays on." Between incumbencies of Finn maids from the North Woods, Germans from the prairies, occasional Swedes and Norwegians and Icelanders, Carol did her own work--and endured Aunt Bessie's skittering in to tell her how to dampen a broom for fluffy dust, how to sugar doughnuts, how to stuff a goose. Carol was deft, and won shy praise from Kennicott, but as her shoulder blades began to sting, she wondered how many millions of women had lied to themselves during the death-rimmed years through which they had pretended to enjoy the puerile methods persisting in housework. She doubted the convenience and, as a natural sequent, the sanctity of the monogamous and separate home which she had regarded as the basis of all decent life. She considered her doubts vicious. She refused to remember how many of the women of the Jolly Seventeen nagged their husbands and were nagged by them. She energetically did not whine to Kennicott. But her eyes ached; she was not the girl in breeches and a flannel shirt who had cooked over a camp-fire in the Colorado mountains five years ago. Her ambition was to get to bed at nine; her strongest emotion was resentment over rising at half-past six to care for Hugh. The back of her neck ached as she got out of bed. She was cynical about the joys of a simple laborious life. She understood why workmen and workmen's wives are not grateful to their kind employers. At mid-morning, when she was momentarily free from the ache in her neck and back, she was glad of the reality of work. The hours were living and nimble. But she had no desire to read the eloquent little newspaper essays in praise of labor which are daily written by the white-browed journalistic prophets. She felt independent and (though she hid it) a bit surly. In cleaning the house she pondered upon the maid's-room. It was a slant-roofed, small-windowed hole above the kitchen, oppressive in summer, frigid in winter. She saw that while she had been considering herself an unusually good mistress, she had been permitting her friends Bea and Oscarina to live in a sty. She complained to Kennicott. "What's the matter with it?" he growled, as they stood on the perilous stairs dodging up from the kitchen. She commented upon the sloping roof of unplastered boards stained in brown rings by the rain, the uneven floor, the cot and its tumbled discouraged-looking quilts, the broken rocker, the distorting mirror. "Maybe it ain't any Hotel Radisson parlor, but still, it's so much better than anything these hired girls are accustomed to at home that they think it's fine. Seems foolish to spend money when they wouldn't appreciate it." But that night he drawled, with the casualness of a man who wishes to be surprising and delightful, "Carrie, don't know but what we might begin to think about building a new house, one of these days. How'd you like that?" "W-why----" "I'm getting to the point now where I feel we can afford one--and a corker! I'll show this burg something like a real house! We'll put one over on Sam and Harry! Make folks sit up an' take notice!" "Yes," she said. He did not go on. Daily he returned to the subject of the new house, but as to time and mode he was indefinite. At first she believed. She babbled of a low stone house with lattice windows and tulip-beds, of colonial brick, of a white frame cottage with green shutters and dormer windows. To her enthusiasms he answered, "Well, ye-es, might be worth thinking about. Remember where I put my pipe?" When she pressed him he fidgeted, "I don't know; seems to me those kind of houses you speak of have been overdone." It proved that what he wanted was a house exactly like Sam Clark's, which was exactly like every third new house in every town in the country: a square, yellow stolidity with immaculate clapboards, a broad screened porch, tidy grass-plots, and concrete walks; a house resembling the mind of a merchant who votes the party ticket straight and goes to church once a month and owns a good car. He admitted, "Well, yes, maybe it isn't so darn artistic but----Matter of fact, though, I don't want a place just like Sam's. Maybe I would cut off that fool tower he's got, and I think probably it would look better painted a nice cream color. That yellow on Sam's house is too kind of flashy. Then there's another kind of house that's mighty nice and substantial-looking, with shingles, in a nice brown stain, instead of clapboards--seen some in Minneapolis. You're way off your base when you say I only like one kind of house!" Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie came in one evening when Carol was sleepily advocating a rose-garden cottage. "You've had a lot of experience with housekeeping, aunty, and don't you think," Kennicott appealed, "that it would be sensible to have a nice square house, and pay more attention to getting a crackajack furnace than to all this architecture and doodads?" Aunt Bessie worked her lips as though they were an elastic band. "Why of course! I know how it is with young folks like you, Carrie; you want towers and bay-windows and pianos and heaven knows what all, but the thing to get is closets and a good furnace and a handy place to hang out the washing, and the rest don't matter." Uncle Whittier dribbled a little, put his face near to Carol's, and sputtered, "Course it don't! What d'you care what folks think about the outside of your house? It's the inside you're living in. None of my business, but I must say you young folks that'd rather have cakes than potatoes get me riled." She reached her room before she became savage. Below, dreadfully near, she could hear the broom-swish of Aunt Bessie's voice, and the mop-pounding of Uncle Whittier's grumble. She had a reasonless dread that they would intrude on her, then a fear that she would yield to Gopher Prairie's conception of duty toward an Aunt Bessie and go down-stairs to be "nice." She felt the demand for standardized behavior coming in waves from all the citizens who sat in their sitting-rooms watching her with respectable eyes, waiting, demanding, unyielding. She snarled, "Oh, all right, I'll go!" She powdered her nose, straightened her collar, and coldly marched down-stairs. The three elders ignored her. They had advanced from the new house to agreeable general fussing. Aunt Bessie was saying, in a tone like the munching of dry toast: "I do think Mr. Stowbody ought to have had the rain-pipe fixed at our store right away. I went to see him on Tuesday morning before ten, no, it was couple minutes after ten, but anyway, it was long before noon--I know because I went right from the bank to the meat market to get some steak--my! I think it's outrageous, the prices Oleson & McGuire charge for their meat, and it isn't as if they gave you a good cut either but just any old thing, and I had time to get it, and I stopped in at Mrs. Bogart's to ask about her rheumatism----" Carol was watching Uncle Whittier. She knew from his taut expression that he was not listening to Aunt Bessie but herding his own thoughts, and that he would interrupt her bluntly. He did: "Will, where c'n I get an extra pair of pants for this coat and vest? D' want to pay too much." "Well, guess Nat Hicks could make you up a pair. But if I were you, I'd drop into Ike Rifkin's--his prices are lower than the Bon Ton's." "Humph. Got the new stove in your office yet?" "No, been looking at some at Sam Clark's but----" "Well, y' ought get 't in. Don't do to put off getting a stove all summer, and then have it come cold on you in the fall." Carol smiled upon them ingratiatingly. "Do you dears mind if I slip up to bed? I'm rather tired--cleaned the upstairs today." She retreated. She was certain that they were discussing her, and foully forgiving her. She lay awake till she heard the distant creak of a bed which indicated that Kennicott had retired. Then she felt safe. It was Kennicott who brought up the matter of the Smails at breakfast. With no visible connection he said, "Uncle Whit is kind of clumsy, but just the same, he's a pretty wise old coot. He's certainly making good with the store." Carol smiled, and Kennicott was pleased that she had come to her senses. "As Whit says, after all the first thing is to have the inside of a house right, and darn the people on the outside looking in!" It seemed settled that the house was to be a sound example of the Sam Clark school. Kennicott made much of erecting it entirely for her and the baby. He spoke of closets for her frocks, and "a comfy sewing-room." But when he drew on a leaf from an old account-book (he was a paper-saver and a string-picker) the plans for the garage, he gave much more attention to a cement floor and a work-bench and a gasoline-tank than he had to sewing-rooms. She sat back and was afraid. In the present rookery there were odd things--a step up from the hall to the dining-room, a picturesqueness in the shed and bedraggled lilac bush. But the new place would be smooth, standardized, fixed. It was probable, now that Kennicott was past forty, and settled, that this would be the last venture he would ever make in building. So long as she stayed in this ark, she would always have a possibility of change, but once she was in the new house, there she would sit for all the rest of her life--there she would die. Desperately she wanted to put it off, against the chance of miracles. While Kennicott was chattering about a patent swing-door for the garage she saw the swing-doors of a prison. She never voluntarily returned to the project. Aggrieved, Kennicott stopped drawing plans, and in ten days the new house was forgotten. V Every year since their marriage Carol had longed for a trip through the East. Every year Kennicott had talked of attending the American Medical Association convention, "and then afterwards we could do the East up brown. I know New York clean through--spent pretty near a week there--but I would like to see New England and all these historic places and have some sea-food." He talked of it from February to May, and in May he invariably decided that coming confinement-cases or land-deals would prevent his "getting away from home-base for very long THIS year--and no sense going till we can do it right." The weariness of dish-washing had increased her desire to go. She pictured herself looking at Emerson's manse, bathing in a surf of jade and ivory, wearing a trottoir and a summer fur, meeting an aristocratic Stranger. In the spring Kennicott had pathetically volunteered, "S'pose you'd like to get in a good long tour this summer, but with Gould and Mac away and so many patients depending on me, don't see how I can make it. By golly, I feel like a tightwad though, not taking you." Through all this restless July after she had tasted Bresnahan's disturbing flavor of travel and gaiety, she wanted to go, but she said nothing. They spoke of and postponed a trip to the Twin Cities. When she suggested, as though it were a tremendous joke, "I think baby and I might up and leave you, and run off to Cape Cod by ourselves!" his only reaction was "Golly, don't know but what you may almost have to do that, if we don't get in a trip next year." Toward the end of July he proposed, "Say, the Beavers are holding a convention in Joralemon, street fair and everything. We might go down tomorrow. And I'd like to see Dr. Calibree about some business. Put in the whole day. Might help some to make up for our trip. Fine fellow, Dr. Calibree." Joralemon was a prairie town of the size of Gopher Prairie. Their motor was out of order, and there was no passenger-train at an early hour. They went down by freight-train, after the weighty and conversational business of leaving Hugh with Aunt Bessie. Carol was exultant over this irregular jaunting. It was the first unusual thing, except the glance of Bresnahan, that had happened since the weaning of Hugh. They rode in the caboose, the small red cupola-topped car jerked along at the end of the train. It was a roving shanty, the cabin of a land schooner, with black oilcloth seats along the side, and for desk, a pine board to be let down on hinges. Kennicott played seven-up with the conductor and two brakemen. Carol liked the blue silk kerchiefs about the brakemen's throats; she liked their welcome to her, and their air of friendly independence. Since there were no sweating passengers crammed in beside her, she reveled in the train's slowness. She was part of these lakes and tawny wheat-fields. She liked the smell of hot earth and clean grease; and the leisurely chug-a-chug, chug-a-chug of the trucks was a song of contentment in the sun. She pretended that she was going to the Rockies. When they reached Joralemon she was radiant with holiday-making. Her eagerness began to lessen the moment they stopped at a red frame station exactly like the one they had just left at Gopher Prairie, and Kennicott yawned, "Right on time. Just in time for dinner at the Calibrees'. I 'phoned the doctor from G. P. that we'd be here. 'We'll catch the freight that gets in before twelve,' I told him. He said he'd meet us at the depot and take us right up to the house for dinner. Calibree is a good man, and you'll find his wife is a mighty brainy little woman, bright as a dollar. By golly, there he is." Dr. Calibree was a squat, clean-shaven, conscientious-looking man of forty. He was curiously like his own brown-painted motor car, with eye-glasses for windshield. "Want you to meet my wife, doctor--Carrie, make you 'quainted with Dr. Calibree," said Kennicott. Calibree bowed quietly and shook her hand, but before he had finished shaking it he was concentrating upon Kennicott with, "Nice to see you, doctor. Say, don't let me forget to ask you about what you did in that exopthalmic goiter case--that Bohemian woman at Wahkeenyan." The two men, on the front seat of the car, chanted goiters and ignored her. She did not know it. She was trying to feed her illusion of adventure by staring at unfamiliar houses . . . drab cottages, artificial stone bungalows, square painty stolidities with immaculate clapboards and broad screened porches and tidy grass-plots. Calibree handed her over to his wife, a thick woman who called her "dearie," and asked if she was hot and, visibly searching for conversation, produced, "Let's see, you and the doctor have a Little One, haven't you?" At dinner Mrs. Calibree served the corned beef and cabbage and looked steamy, looked like the steamy leaves of cabbage. The men were oblivious of their wives as they gave the social passwords of Main Street, the orthodox opinions on weather, crops, and motor cars, then flung away restraint and gyrated in the debauch of shop-talk. Stroking his chin, drawling in the ecstasy of being erudite, Kennicott inquired, "Say, doctor, what success have you had with thyroid for treatment of pains in the legs before child-birth?" Carol did not resent their assumption that she was too ignorant to be admitted to masculine mysteries. She was used to it. But the cabbage and Mrs. Calibree's monotonous "I don't know what we're coming to with all this difficulty getting hired girls" were gumming her eyes with drowsiness. She sought to clear them by appealing to Calibree, in a manner of exaggerated liveliness, "Doctor, have the medical societies in Minnesota ever advocated legislation for help to nursing mothers?" Calibree slowly revolved toward her. "Uh--I've never--uh--never looked into it. I don't believe much in getting mixed up in politics." He turned squarely from her and, peering earnestly at Kennicott, resumed, "Doctor, what's been your experience with unilateral pyelonephritis? Buckburn of Baltimore advocates decapsulation and nephrotomy, but seems to me----" Not till after two did they rise. In the lee of the stonily mature trio Carol proceeded to the street fair which added mundane gaiety to the annual rites of the United and Fraternal Order of Beavers. Beavers, human Beavers, were everywhere: thirty-second degree Beavers in gray sack suits and decent derbies, more flippant Beavers in crash summer coats and straw hats, rustic Beavers in shirt sleeves and frayed suspenders; but whatever his caste-symbols, every Beaver was distinguished by an enormous shrimp-colored ribbon lettered in silver, "Sir Knight and Brother, U. F. O. B., Annual State Convention." On the motherly shirtwaist of each of their wives was a badge "Sir Knight's Lady." The Duluth delegation had brought their famous Beaver amateur band, in Zouave costumes of green velvet jacket, blue trousers, and scarlet fez. The strange thing was that beneath their scarlet pride the Zouaves' faces remained those of American business-men, pink, smooth, eye-glassed; and as they stood playing in a circle, at the corner of Main Street and Second, as they tootled on fifes or with swelling cheeks blew into cornets, their eyes remained as owlish as though they were sitting at desks under the sign "This Is My Busy Day." Carol had supposed that the Beavers were average citizens organized for the purposes of getting cheap life-insurance and playing poker at the lodge-rooms every second Wednesday, but she saw a large poster which proclaimed: BEAVERS U. F. O. B. The greatest influence for good citizenship in the country. The jolliest aggregation of red-blooded, open-handed, hustle-em-up good fellows in the world. Joralemon welcomes you to her hospitable city. Kennicott read the poster and to Calibree admired, "Strong lodge, the Beavers. Never joined. Don't know but what I will." Calibree adumbrated, "They're a good bunch. Good strong lodge. See that fellow there that's playing the snare drum? He's the smartest wholesale grocer in Duluth, they say. Guess it would be worth joining. Oh say, are you doing much insurance examining?" They went on to the street fair. Lining one block of Main Street were the "attractions"--two hot-dog stands, a lemonade and pop-corn stand, a merry-go-round, and booths in which balls might be thrown at rag dolls, if one wished to throw balls at rag dolls. The dignified delegates were shy of the booths, but country boys with brickred necks and pale-blue ties and bright-yellow shoes, who had brought sweethearts into town in somewhat dusty and listed Fords, were wolfing sandwiches, drinking strawberry pop out of bottles, and riding the revolving crimson and gold horses. They shrieked and giggled; peanut-roasters whistled; the merry-go-round pounded out monotonous music; the barkers bawled, "Here's your chance--here's your chance--come on here, boy--come on here--give that girl a good time--give her a swell time--here's your chance to win a genuwine gold watch for five cents, half a dime, the twentieth part of a dollah!" The prairie sun jabbed the unshaded street with shafts that were like poisonous thorns the tinny cornices above the brick stores were glaring; the dull breeze scattered dust on sweaty Beavers who crawled along in tight scorching new shoes, up two blocks and back, up two blocks and back, wondering what to do next, working at having a good time. Carol's head ached as she trailed behind the unsmiling Calibrees along the block of booths. She chirruped at Kennicott, "Let's be wild! Let's ride on the merry-go-round and grab a gold ring!" Kennicott considered it, and mumbled to Calibree, "Think you folks would like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round?" Calibree considered it, and mumbled to his wife, "Think you'd like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round?" Mrs. Calibree smiled in a washed-out manner, and sighed, "Oh no, I don't believe I care to much, but you folks go ahead and try it." Calibree stated to Kennicott, "No, I don't believe we care to a whole lot, but you folks go ahead and try it." Kennicott summarized the whole case against wildness: "Let's try it some other time, Carrie." She gave it up. She looked at the town. She saw that in adventuring from Main Street, Gopher Prairie, to Main Street, Joralemon, she had not stirred. There were the same two-story brick groceries with lodge-signs above the awnings; the same one-story wooden millinery shop; the same fire-brick garages; the same prairie at the open end of the wide street; the same people wondering whether the levity of eating a hot-dog sandwich would break their taboos. They reached Gopher Prairie at nine in the evening. "You look kind of hot," said Kennicott. "Yes." "Joralemon is an enterprising town, don't you think so?" She broke. "No! I think it's an ash-heap." "Why, Carrie!" He worried over it for a week. While he ground his plate with his knife as he energetically pursued fragments of bacon, he peeped at her.

Chapter 24

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After Bresnahan has left Gopher Prairie, Carol becomes especially sensitive to all the things she finds ugly about her husband. She doesn't bother to act happy when he has his gross friends over for a poker night. Once the poker guys have left, Carol has a huge fight with Will. She calls his friends disgusting and rude, while he says he's sick of his friends not wanting to come over because Carol is so judgmental. Over time, Carol decides that what she really wants is a room of her own. She begins to use a spare room as her place of escape. She also starts sleeping in this room and away from Will. Will seems to sense Carol's dissatisfaction, because one night he tells her he's thinking of building a new house. Carol thinks of this new house as a way to make her mark on the beauty of Gopher Prairie, but she's crushed to realize that Will wants a house that'll look just like anyone else's. After ten days, the thought of the new house is forgotten because Carol loses interest. Carol thinks she would like to take a trip East to New York. Will thinks it's a good idea at first, but then he backs off when he feels like he's too busy with work. Instead, Will takes Carol to a street fair in another middle-of-nowhere prairie town. They stay with a man named Calibree, and even when Carol tries to participate in the conversation, the men talk about other things she doesn't understand. Carol tries to get Will to ride a merry-go-round with her at the street fair, but nothing doing: Will isn't into it. Once again, Carol goes from feeling young to feeling old.

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Main Street.chapter 25

chapter 25

{"name": "Chapter 25", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-25", "summary": "Will sits in his office and broods about Carol's dissatisfaction. He simply can't see why she hasn't gotten used to her situation in Gopher Prairie yet. Part of him thinks that she's intentionally resisting satisfaction because she has too much pride. While Will broods, a woman named Maud Dyer comes into his office asking him to examine her. He's surprised to see her, because Maud supposedly believes that only God should heal sickness. We get the sense, though, that Maud just wants Will to examine her body for its own sake, if you catch our meaning... Will seems to catch Mrs. Dyer's drift, too. So he tells her that she has a repressed sex instinct and instructs her to take a vacation to help give herself an outlet for it. Before leaving, Mrs. Dyer asks Will to come to her house that night and \"scold\" her, since her husband will be out and she'll be feeling lonely. Instead of going to Maud Dyer's, Will goes home to be with Carol and their son Hugh. But the temptations keep coming when his buddy Nat Hicks comes to his house and invites him out for a rowdy night with some beer and some local girls. Again, Will does the right thing and turns down the opportunity to get wild. When he comes back into the house, Will is so proud of himself that he asks Carol to start sleeping in the same bed with him again. She refuses and says she likes her own bed. So once again, Will hits a brick wall when he tries to establish intimacy with his wife. Will heads back out into the street and walks to Maud Dyer's house. He peeks through the window and sees she's alone. The last time we see him, he's pushing the gate of the house and walking through. Back at the Kennicott house, we find Mrs. Bogart paying a visit to Carol. Mrs. Bogart is complaining about a local woman named Mrs. Swiftwaite, who's new to town and apparently a little too friendly with the men. Mrs. Bogart tells Carol to be careful letting Will around this new woman. Carol gets offended and says that Will is the most loyal husband in the world. She doesn't realize that at this very moment, Will is alone with another woman. Carol makes the mistake of thinking that Will only thinks about furnaces and cutting the grass.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXV "CARRIE'S all right. She's finicky, but she'll get over it. But I wish she'd hurry up about it! What she can't understand is that a fellow practising medicine in a small town like this has got to cut out the highbrow stuff, and not spend all his time going to concerts and shining his shoes. (Not but what he might be just as good at all these intellectual and art things as some other folks, if he had the time for it!)" Dr. Will Kennicott was brooding in his office, during a free moment toward the end of the summer afternoon. He hunched down in his tilted desk-chair, undid a button of his shirt, glanced at the state news in the back of the Journal of the American Medical Association, dropped the magazine, leaned back with his right thumb hooked in the arm-hole of his vest and his left thumb stroking the back of his hair. "By golly, she's taking an awful big chance, though. You'd expect her to learn by and by that I won't be a parlor lizard. She says we try to 'make her over.' Well, she's always trying to make me over, from a perfectly good M. D. into a damn poet with a socialist necktie! She'd have a fit if she knew how many women would be willing to cuddle up to Friend Will and comfort him, if he'd give 'em the chance! There's still a few dames that think the old man isn't so darn unattractive! I'm glad I've ducked all that woman-game since I've been married but----Be switched if sometimes I don't feel tempted to shine up to some girl that has sense enough to take life as it is; some frau that doesn't want to talk Longfellow all the time, but just hold my hand and say, 'You look all in, honey. Take it easy, and don't try to talk.' "Carrie thinks she's such a whale at analyzing folks. Giving the town the once-over. Telling us where we get off. Why, she'd simply turn up her toes and croak if she found out how much she doesn't know about the high old times a wise guy could have in this burg on the Q.T., if he wasn't faithful to his wife. But I am. At that, no matter what faults she's got, there's nobody here, no, nor in Minn'aplus either, that's as nice-looking and square and bright as Carrie. She ought to of been an artist or a writer or one of those things. But once she took a shot at living here, she ought to stick by it. Pretty----Lord yes. But cold. She simply doesn't know what passion is. She simply hasn't got an i-dea how hard it is for a full-blooded man to go on pretending to be satisfied with just being endured. It gets awful tiresome, having to feel like a criminal just because I'm normal. She's getting so she doesn't even care for my kissing her. Well---- "I guess I can weather it, same as I did earning my way through school and getting started in practise. But I wonder how long I can stand being an outsider in my own home?" He sat up at the entrance of Mrs. Dave Dyer. She slumped into a chair and gasped with the heat. He chuckled, "Well, well, Maud, this is fine. Where's the subscription-list? What cause do I get robbed for, this trip?" "I haven't any subscription-list, Will. I want to see you professionally." "And you a Christian Scientist? Have you given that up? What next? New Thought or Spiritualism?" "No, I have not given it up!" "Strikes me it's kind of a knock on the sisterhood, your coming to see a doctor!" "No, it isn't. It's just that my faith isn't strong enough yet. So there now! And besides, you ARE kind of consoling, Will. I mean as a man, not just as a doctor. You're so strong and placid." He sat on the edge of his desk, coatless, his vest swinging open with the thick gold line of his watch-chain across the gap, his hands in his trousers pockets, his big arms bent and easy. As she purred he cocked an interested eye. Maud Dyer was neurotic, religiocentric, faded; her emotions were moist, and her figure was unsystematic--splendid thighs and arms, with thick ankles, and a body that was bulgy in the wrong places. But her milky skin was delicious, her eyes were alive, her chestnut hair shone, and there was a tender slope from her ears to the shadowy place below her jaw. With unusual solicitude he uttered his stock phrase, "Well, what seems to be the matter, Maud?" "I've got such a backache all the time. I'm afraid the organic trouble that you treated me for is coming back." "Any definite signs of it?" "N-no, but I think you'd better examine me." "Nope. Don't believe it's necessary, Maud. To be honest, between old friends, I think your troubles are mostly imaginary. I can't really advise you to have an examination." She flushed, looked out of the window. He was conscious that his voice was not impersonal and even. She turned quickly. "Will, you always say my troubles are imaginary. Why can't you be scientific? I've been reading an article about these new nerve-specialists, and they claim that lots of 'imaginary' ailments, yes, and lots of real pain, too, are what they call psychoses, and they order a change in a woman's way of living so she can get on a higher plane----" "Wait! Wait! Whoa-up! Wait now! Don't mix up your Christian Science and your psychology! They're two entirely different fads! You'll be mixing in socialism next! You're as bad as Carrie, with your 'psychoses.' Why, Good Lord, Maud, I could talk about neuroses and psychoses and inhibitions and repressions and complexes just as well as any damn specialist, if I got paid for it, if I was in the city and had the nerve to charge the fees that those fellows do. If a specialist stung you for a hundred-dollar consultation-fee and told you to go to New York to duck Dave's nagging, you'd do it, to save the hundred dollars! But you know me--I'm your neighbor--you see me mowing the lawn--you figure I'm just a plug general practitioner. If I said, 'Go to New York,' Dave and you would laugh your heads off and say, 'Look at the airs Will is putting on. What does he think he is?' "As a matter of fact, you're right. You have a perfectly well-developed case of repression of sex instinct, and it raises the old Ned with your body. What you need is to get away from Dave and travel, yes, and go to every dog-gone kind of New Thought and Bahai and Swami and Hooptedoodle meeting you can find. I know it, well 's you do. But how can I advise it? Dave would be up here taking my hide off. I'm willing to be family physician and priest and lawyer and plumber and wet-nurse, but I draw the line at making Dave loosen up on money. Too hard a job in weather like this! So, savvy, my dear? Believe it will rain if this heat keeps----" "But, Will, he'd never give it to me on my say-so. He'd never let me go away. You know how Dave is: so jolly and liberal in society, and oh, just LOVES to match quarters, and such a perfect sport if he loses! But at home he pinches a nickel till the buffalo drips blood. I have to nag him for every single dollar." "Sure, I know, but it's your fight, honey. Keep after him. He'd simply resent my butting in." He crossed over and patted her shoulder. Outside the window, beyond the fly-screen that was opaque with dust and cottonwood lint, Main Street was hushed except for the impatient throb of a standing motor car. She took his firm hand, pressed his knuckles against her cheek. "O Will, Dave is so mean and little and noisy--the shrimp! You're so calm. When he's cutting up at parties I see you standing back and watching him--the way a mastiff watches a terrier." He fought for professional dignity with, "Dave 's not a bad fellow." Lingeringly she released his hand. "Will, drop round by the house this evening and scold me. Make me be good and sensible. And I'm so lonely." "If I did, Dave would be there, and we'd have to play cards. It's his evening off from the store." "No. The clerk just got called to Corinth--mother sick. Dave will be in the store till midnight. Oh, come on over. There's some lovely beer on the ice, and we can sit and talk and be all cool and lazy. That wouldn't be wrong of us, WOULD it!" "No, no, course it wouldn't be wrong. But still, oughtn't to----" He saw Carol, slim black and ivory, cool, scornful of intrigue. "All right. But I'll be so lonely." Her throat seemed young, above her loose blouse of muslin and machine-lace. "Tell you, Maud: I'll drop in just for a minute, if I happen to be called down that way." "If you'd like," demurely. "O Will, I just want comfort. I know you're all married, and my, such a proud papa, and of course now----If I could just sit near you in the dusk, and be quiet, and forget Dave! You WILL come?" "Sure I will!" "I'll expect you. I'll be lonely if you don't come! Good-by." He cursed himself: "Darned fool, what 'd I promise to go for? I'll have to keep my promise, or she'll feel hurt. She's a good, decent, affectionate girl, and Dave's a cheap skate, all right. She's got more life to her than Carol has. All my fault, anyway. Why can't I be more cagey, like Calibree and McGanum and the rest of the doctors? Oh, I am, but Maud's such a demanding idiot. Deliberately bamboozling me into going up there tonight. Matter of principle: ought not to let her get away with it. I won't go. I'll call her up and tell her I won't go. Me, with Carrie at home, finest little woman in the world, and a messy-minded female like Maud Dyer--no, SIR! Though there's no need of hurting her feelings. I may just drop in for a second, to tell her I can't stay. All my fault anyway; ought never to have started in and jollied Maud along in the old days. If it's my fault, I've got no right to punish Maud. I could just drop in for a second and then pretend I had a country call and beat it. Damn nuisance, though, having to fake up excuses. Lord, why can't the women let you alone? Just because once or twice, seven hundred million years ago, you were a poor fool, why can't they let you forget it? Maud's own fault. I'll stay strictly away. Take Carrie to the movies, and forget Maud. . . . But it would be kind of hot at the movies tonight." He fled from himself. He rammed on his hat, threw his coat over his arm, banged the door, locked it, tramped downstairs. "I won't go!" he said sturdily and, as he said it, he would have given a good deal to know whether he was going. He was refreshed, as always, by the familiar windows and faces. It restored his soul to have Sam Clark trustingly bellow, "Better come down to the lake this evening and have a swim, doc. Ain't you going to open your cottage at all, this summer? By golly, we miss you." He noted the progress on the new garage. He had triumphed in the laying of every course of bricks; in them he had seen the growth of the town. His pride was ushered back to its throne by the respectfulness of Oley Sundquist: "Evenin', doc! The woman is a lot better. That was swell medicine you gave her." He was calmed by the mechanicalness of the tasks at home: burning the gray web of a tent-worm on the wild cherry tree, sealing with gum a cut in the right front tire of the car, sprinkling the road before the house. The hose was cool to his hands. As the bright arrows fell with a faint puttering sound, a crescent of blackness was formed in the gray dust. Dave Dyer came along. "Where going, Dave?" "Down to the store. Just had supper." "But Thursday 's your night off." "Sure, but Pete went home. His mother 's supposed to be sick. Gosh, these clerks you get nowadays--overpay 'em and then they won't work!" "That's tough, Dave. You'll have to work clear up till twelve, then." "Yup. Better drop in and have a cigar, if you're downtown. "Well, I may, at that. May have to go down and see Mrs. Champ Perry. She's ailing. So long, Dave." Kennicott had not yet entered the house. He was conscious that Carol was near him, that she was important, that he was afraid of her disapproval; but he was content to be alone. When he had finished sprinkling he strolled into the house, up to the baby's room, and cried to Hugh, "Story-time for the old man, eh?" Carol was in a low chair, framed and haloed by the window behind her, an image in pale gold. The baby curled in her lap, his head on her arm, listening with gravity while she sang from Gene Field: 'Tis little Luddy-Dud in the morning-- 'Tis little Luddy-Dud at night: And all day long 'Tis the same dear song Of that growing, crowing, knowing little sprite. Kennicott was enchanted. "Maud Dyer? I should say not!" When the current maid bawled up-stairs, "Supper on de table!" Kennicott was upon his back, flapping his hands in the earnest effort to be a seal, thrilled by the strength with which his son kicked him. He slipped his arm about Carol's shoulder; he went down to supper rejoicing that he was cleansed of perilous stuff. While Carol was putting the baby to bed he sat on the front steps. Nat Hicks, tailor and roue, came to sit beside him. Between waves of his hand as he drove off mosquitos, Nat whispered, "Say, doc, you don't feel like imagining you're a bacheldore again, and coming out for a Time tonight, do you?" "As how?" "You know this new dressmaker, Mrs. Swiftwaite?--swell dame with blondine hair? Well, she's a pretty good goer. Me and Harry Haydock are going to take her and that fat wren that works in the Bon Ton--nice kid, too--on an auto ride tonight. Maybe we'll drive down to that farm Harry bought. We're taking some beer, and some of the smoothest rye you ever laid tongue to. I'm not predicting none, but if we don't have a picnic, I'll miss my guess." "Go to it. No skin off my ear, Nat. Think I want to be fifth wheel in the coach?" "No, but look here: The little Swiftwaite has a friend with her from Winona, dandy looker and some gay bird, and Harry and me thought maybe you'd like to sneak off for one evening." "No--no----" "Rats now, doc, forget your everlasting dignity. You used to be a pretty good sport yourself, when you were foot-free." It may have been the fact that Mrs. Swiftwaite's friend remained to Kennicott an ill-told rumor, it may have been Carol's voice, wistful in the pallid evening as she sang to Hugh, it may have been natural and commendable virtue, but certainly he was positive: "Nope. I'm married for keeps. Don't pretend to be any saint. Like to get out and raise Cain and shoot a few drinks. But a fellow owes a duty----Straight now, won't you feel like a sneak when you come back to the missus after your jamboree?" "Me? My moral in life is, 'What they don't know won't hurt 'em none.' The way to handle wives, like the fellow says, is to catch 'em early, treat 'em rough, and tell 'em nothing!" "Well, that's your business, I suppose. But I can't get away with it. Besides that--way I figure it, this illicit love-making is the one game that you always lose at. If you do lose, you feel foolish; and if you win, as soon as you find out how little it is that you've been scheming for, why then you lose worse than ever. Nature stinging us, as usual. But at that, I guess a lot of wives in this burg would be surprised if they knew everything that goes on behind their backs, eh, Nattie?" "WOULD they! Say, boy! If the good wives knew what some of the boys get away with when they go down to the Cities, why, they'd throw a fit! Sure you won't come, doc? Think of getting all cooled off by a good long drive, and then the lov-e-ly Swiftwaite's white hand mixing you a good stiff highball!" "Nope. Nope. Sorry. Guess I won't," grumbled Kennicott. He was glad that Nat showed signs of going. But he was restless. He heard Carol on the stairs. "Come have a seat--have the whole earth!" he shouted jovially. She did not answer his joviality. She sat on the porch, rocked silently, then sighed, "So many mosquitos out here. You haven't had the screen fixed." As though he was testing her he said quietly, "Head aching again?" "Oh, not much, but----This maid is SO slow to learn. I have to show her everything. I had to clean most of the silver myself. And Hugh was so bad all afternoon. He whined so. Poor soul, he was hot, but he did wear me out." "Uh----You usually want to get out. Like to walk down to the lake shore? (The girl can stay home.) Or go to the movies? Come on, let's go to the movies! Or shall we jump in the car and run out to Sam's, for a swim?" "If you don't mind, dear, I'm afraid I'm rather tired." "Why don't you sleep down-stairs tonight, on the couch? Be cooler. I'm going to bring down my mattress. Come on! Keep the old man company. Can't tell--I might get scared of burglars. Lettin' little fellow like me stay all alone by himself!" "It's sweet of you to think of it, but I like my own room so much. But you go ahead and do it, dear. Why don't you sleep on the couch, instead of putting your mattress on the floor? Well I believe I'll run in and read for just a second--want to look at the last Vogue--and then perhaps I'll go by-by. Unless you want me, dear? Of course if there's anything you really WANT me for?" "No. No. . . . Matter of fact, I really ought to run down and see Mrs. Champ Perry. She's ailing. So you skip in and----May drop in at the drug store. If I'm not home when you get sleepy, don't wait up for me." He kissed her, rambled off, nodded to Jim Howland, stopped indifferently to speak to Mrs. Terry Gould. But his heart was racing, his stomach was constricted. He walked more slowly. He reached Dave Dyer's yard. He glanced in. On the porch, sheltered by a wild-grape vine, was the figure of a woman in white. He heard the swing-couch creak as she sat up abruptly, peered, then leaned back and pretended to relax. "Be nice to have some cool beer. Just drop in for a second," he insisted, as he opened the Dyer gate. II Mrs. Bogart was calling upon Carol, protected by Aunt Bessie Smail. "Have you heard about this awful woman that's supposed to have come here to do dressmaking--a Mrs. Swiftwaite--awful peroxide blonde?" moaned Mrs. Bogart. "They say there's some of the awfullest goings-on at her house--mere boys and old gray-headed rips sneaking in there evenings and drinking licker and every kind of goings-on. We women can't never realize the carnal thoughts in the hearts of men. I tell you, even though I been acquainted with Will Kennicott almost since he was a mere boy, seems like, I wouldn't trust even him! Who knows what designin' women might tempt him! Especially a doctor, with women rushin' in to see him at his office and all! You know I never hint around, but haven't you felt that----" Carol was furious. "I don't pretend that Will has no faults. But one thing I do know: He's as simple-hearted about what you call 'goings-on' as a babe. And if he ever were such a sad dog as to look at another woman, I certainly hope he'd have spirit enough to do the tempting, and not be coaxed into it, as in your depressing picture!" "Why, what a wicked thing to say, Carrie!" from Aunt Bessie. "No, I mean it! Oh, of course, I don't mean it! But----I know every thought in his head so well that he couldn't hide anything even if he wanted to. Now this morning----He was out late, last night; he had to go see Mrs. Perry, who is ailing, and then fix a man's hand, and this morning he was so quiet and thoughtful at breakfast and----" She leaned forward, breathed dramatically to the two perched harpies, "What do you suppose he was thinking of?" "What?" trembled Mrs. Bogart. "Whether the grass needs cutting, probably! There, there! Don't mind my naughtiness. I have some fresh-made raisin cookies for you."

Chapter 25

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-25

Will sits in his office and broods about Carol's dissatisfaction. He simply can't see why she hasn't gotten used to her situation in Gopher Prairie yet. Part of him thinks that she's intentionally resisting satisfaction because she has too much pride. While Will broods, a woman named Maud Dyer comes into his office asking him to examine her. He's surprised to see her, because Maud supposedly believes that only God should heal sickness. We get the sense, though, that Maud just wants Will to examine her body for its own sake, if you catch our meaning... Will seems to catch Mrs. Dyer's drift, too. So he tells her that she has a repressed sex instinct and instructs her to take a vacation to help give herself an outlet for it. Before leaving, Mrs. Dyer asks Will to come to her house that night and "scold" her, since her husband will be out and she'll be feeling lonely. Instead of going to Maud Dyer's, Will goes home to be with Carol and their son Hugh. But the temptations keep coming when his buddy Nat Hicks comes to his house and invites him out for a rowdy night with some beer and some local girls. Again, Will does the right thing and turns down the opportunity to get wild. When he comes back into the house, Will is so proud of himself that he asks Carol to start sleeping in the same bed with him again. She refuses and says she likes her own bed. So once again, Will hits a brick wall when he tries to establish intimacy with his wife. Will heads back out into the street and walks to Maud Dyer's house. He peeks through the window and sees she's alone. The last time we see him, he's pushing the gate of the house and walking through. Back at the Kennicott house, we find Mrs. Bogart paying a visit to Carol. Mrs. Bogart is complaining about a local woman named Mrs. Swiftwaite, who's new to town and apparently a little too friendly with the men. Mrs. Bogart tells Carol to be careful letting Will around this new woman. Carol gets offended and says that Will is the most loyal husband in the world. She doesn't realize that at this very moment, Will is alone with another woman. Carol makes the mistake of thinking that Will only thinks about furnaces and cutting the grass.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/26.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_25_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 26

chapter 26

{"name": "Chapter 26", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-26", "summary": "Carol's favorite thing to do in Gopher Prairie is to take her son Hugh and visit Miles and Bea Bjornstam. Will doesn't like it one bit, because he thinks the Bjornstams are beneath them socially. Plus, Miles is a labor agitator. But Carol goes to the Bjornstams' anyway. She loves the way Miles lets the children hold his tools. She thinks that Miles's farm life is more authentic than her world of upper-class boredom. She's sad when Miles starts talking about moving his family West. One day, Carol drops by to find Miles's son Olaf and wife Bea looking pretty sick. Miles didn't want to call Will, because he thinks Will doesn't like him. But Carol calls Will right away. When Will has a chance to inspect Bea and Olaf, the news isn't good: he's figured out that both of them have typhoid fever. Carol volunteers to be the nurse while Will tries to treat them. When it becomes clear that neither Bea or Olaf will survive, some of the town's women come with food and offers for help, but Miles throws them off his front step, saying that his wife Bea had always hoped for visitors but had never had any, because everyone in the town was too stuck up. After Bea and Olaf have died, Carol goes home. Her son Hugh runs up to her crying and says he wants to play with Olaf. Meanwhile, the people around town hate Miles more than ever after he dared to insult the town's women. They also blame him for making his wife and child sick by being a terrible person. It's clear that this kind of talk totally shreds Carol's soul.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXVI CAROL'S liveliest interest was in her walks with the baby. Hugh wanted to know what the box-elder tree said, and what the Ford garage said, and what the big cloud said, and she told him, with a feeling that she was not in the least making up stories, but discovering the souls of things. They had an especial fondness for the hitching-post in front of the mill. It was a brown post, stout and agreeable; the smooth leg of it held the sunlight, while its neck, grooved by hitching-straps, tickled one's fingers. Carol had never been awake to the earth except as a show of changing color and great satisfying masses; she had lived in people and in ideas about having ideas; but Hugh's questions made her attentive to the comedies of sparrows, robins, blue jays, yellowhammers; she regained her pleasure in the arching flight of swallows, and added to it a solicitude about their nests and family squabbles. She forgot her seasons of boredom. She said to Hugh, "We're two fat disreputable old minstrels roaming round the world," and he echoed her, "Roamin' round--roamin' round." The high adventure, the secret place to which they both fled joyously, was the house of Miles and Bea and Olaf Bjornstam. Kennicott steadily disapproved of the Bjornstams. He protested, "What do you want to talk to that crank for?" He hinted that a former "Swede hired girl" was low company for the son of Dr. Will Kennicott. She did not explain. She did not quite understand it herself; did not know that in the Bjornstams she found her friends, her club, her sympathy and her ration of blessed cynicism. For a time the gossip of Juanita Haydock and the Jolly Seventeen had been a refuge from the droning of Aunt Bessie, but the relief had not continued. The young matrons made her nervous. They talked so loud, always so loud. They filled a room with clashing cackle; their jests and gags they repeated nine times over. Unconsciously, she had discarded the Jolly Seventeen, Guy Pollock, Vida, and every one save Mrs. Dr. Westlake and the friends whom she did not clearly know as friends--the Bjornstams. To Hugh, the Red Swede was the most heroic and powerful person in the world. With unrestrained adoration he trotted after while Miles fed the cows, chased his one pig--an animal of lax and migratory instincts--or dramatically slaughtered a chicken. And to Hugh, Olaf was lord among mortal men, less stalwart than the old monarch, King Miles, but more understanding of the relations and values of things, of small sticks, lone playing-cards, and irretrievably injured hoops. Carol saw, though she did not admit, that Olaf was not only more beautiful than her own dark child, but more gracious. Olaf was a Norse chieftain: straight, sunny-haired, large-limbed, resplendently amiable to his subjects. Hugh was a vulgarian; a bustling business man. It was Hugh that bounced and said "Let's play"; Olaf that opened luminous blue eyes and agreed "All right," in condescending gentleness. If Hugh batted him--and Hugh did bat him--Olaf was unafraid but shocked. In magnificent solitude he marched toward the house, while Hugh bewailed his sin and the overclouding of august favor. The two friends played with an imperial chariot which Miles had made out of a starch-box and four red spools; together they stuck switches into a mouse-hole, with vast satisfaction though entirely without known results. Bea, the chubby and humming Bea, impartially gave cookies and scoldings to both children, and if Carol refused a cup of coffee and a wafer of buttered knackebrod, she was desolated. Miles had done well with his dairy. He had six cows, two hundred chickens, a cream separator, a Ford truck. In the spring he had built a two-room addition to his shack. That illustrious building was to Hugh a carnival. Uncle Miles did the most spectacular, unexpected things: ran up the ladder; stood on the ridge-pole, waving a hammer and singing something about "To arms, my citizens"; nailed shingles faster than Aunt Bessie could iron handkerchiefs; and lifted a two-by-six with Hugh riding on one end and Olaf on the other. Uncle Miles's most ecstatic trick was to make figures not on paper but right on a new pine board, with the broadest softest pencil in the world. There was a thing worth seeing! The tools! In his office Father had tools fascinating in their shininess and curious shapes, but they were sharp, they were something called sterized, and they distinctly were not for boys to touch. In fact it was a good dodge to volunteer "I must not touch," when you looked at the tools on the glass shelves in Father's office. But Uncle Miles, who was a person altogether superior to Father, let you handle all his kit except the saws. There was a hammer with a silver head; there was a metal thing like a big L; there was a magic instrument, very precious, made out of costly red wood and gold, with a tube which contained a drop--no, it wasn't a drop, it was a nothing, which lived in the water, but the nothing LOOKED like a drop, and it ran in a frightened way up and down the tube, no matter how cautiously you tilted the magic instrument. And there were nails, very different and clever--big valiant spikes, middle-sized ones which were not very interesting, and shingle-nails much jollier than the fussed-up fairies in the yellow book. II While he had worked on the addition Miles had talked frankly to Carol. He admitted now that so long as he stayed in Gopher Prairie he would remain a pariah. Bea's Lutheran friends were as much offended by his agnostic gibes as the merchants by his radicalism. "And I can't seem to keep my mouth shut. I think I'm being a baa-lamb, and not springing any theories wilder than 'c-a-t spells cat,' but when folks have gone, I re'lize I've been stepping on their pet religious corns. Oh, the mill foreman keeps dropping in, and that Danish shoemaker, and one fellow from Elder's factory, and a few Svenskas, but you know Bea: big good-hearted wench like her wants a lot of folks around--likes to fuss over 'em--never satisfied unless she tiring herself out making coffee for somebody. "Once she kidnapped me and drug me to the Methodist Church. I goes in, pious as Widow Bogart, and sits still and never cracks a smile while the preacher is favoring us with his misinformation on evolution. But afterwards, when the old stalwarts were pumphandling everybody at the door and calling 'em 'Brother' and 'Sister,' they let me sail right by with nary a clinch. They figure I'm the town badman. Always will be, I guess. It'll have to be Olaf who goes on. 'And sometimes----Blamed if I don't feel like coming out and saying, 'I've been conservative. Nothing to it. Now I'm going to start something in these rotten one-horse lumber-camps west of town.' But Bea's got me hypnotized. Lord, Mrs. Kennicott, do you re'lize what a jolly, square, faithful woman she is? And I love Olaf----Oh well, I won't go and get sentimental on you. "Course I've had thoughts of pulling up stakes and going West. Maybe if they didn't know it beforehand, they wouldn't find out I'd ever been guilty of trying to think for myself. But--oh, I've worked hard, and built up this dairy business, and I hate to start all over again, and move Bea and the kid into another one-room shack. That's how they get us! Encourage us to be thrifty and own our own houses, and then, by golly, they've got us; they know we won't dare risk everything by committing lez--what is it? lez majesty?--I mean they know we won't be hinting around that if we had a co-operative bank, we could get along without Stowbody. Well----As long as I can sit and play pinochle with Bea, and tell whoppers to Olaf about his daddy's adventures in the woods, and how he snared a wapaloosie and knew Paul Bunyan, why, I don't mind being a bum. It's just for them that I mind. Say! Say! Don't whisper a word to Bea, but when I get this addition done, I'm going to buy her a phonograph!" He did. While she was busy with the activities her work-hungry muscles found--washing, ironing, mending, baking, dusting, preserving, plucking a chicken, painting the sink; tasks which, because she was Miles's full partner, were exciting and creative--Bea listened to the phonograph records with rapture like that of cattle in a warm stable. The addition gave her a kitchen with a bedroom above. The original one-room shack was now a living-room, with the phonograph, a genuine leather-upholstered golden-oak rocker, and a picture of Governor John Johnson. In late July Carol went to the Bjornstams' desirous of a chance to express her opinion of Beavers and Calibrees and Joralemons. She found Olaf abed, restless from a slight fever, and Bea flushed and dizzy but trying to keep up her work. She lured Miles aside and worried: "They don't look at all well. What's the matter?" "Their stomachs are out of whack. I wanted to call in Doc Kennicott, but Bea thinks the doc doesn't like us--she thinks maybe he's sore because you come down here. But I'm getting worried." "I'm going to call the doctor at once." She yearned over Olaf. His lambent eyes were stupid, he moaned, he rubbed his forehead. "Have they been eating something that's been bad for them?" she fluttered to Miles. "Might be bum water. I'll tell you: We used to get our water at Oscar Eklund's place, over across the street, but Oscar kept dinging at me, and hinting I was a tightwad not to dig a well of my own. One time he said, 'Sure, you socialists are great on divvying up other folks' money--and water!' I knew if he kept it up there'd be a fuss, and I ain't safe to have around, once a fuss starts; I'm likely to forget myself and let loose with a punch in the snoot. I offered to pay Oscar but he refused--he'd rather have the chance to kid me. So I starts getting water down at Mrs. Fageros's, in the hollow there, and I don't believe it's real good. Figuring to dig my own well this fall." One scarlet word was before Carol's eyes while she listened. She fled to Kennicott's office. He gravely heard her out; nodded, said, "Be right over." He examined Bea and Olaf. He shook his head. "Yes. Looks to me like typhoid." "Golly, I've seen typhoid in lumber-camps," groaned Miles, all the strength dripping out of him. "Have they got it very bad?" "Oh, we'll take good care of them," said Kennicott, and for the first time in their acquaintance he smiled on Miles and clapped his shoulder. "Won't you need a nurse?" demanded Carol. "Why----" To Miles, Kennicott hinted, "Couldn't you get Bea's cousin, Tina?" "She's down at the old folks', in the country." "Then let me do it!" Carol insisted. "They need some one to cook for them, and isn't it good to give them sponge baths, in typhoid?" "Yes. All right." Kennicott was automatic; he was the official, the physician. "I guess probably it would be hard to get a nurse here in town just now. Mrs. Stiver is busy with an obstetrical case, and that town nurse of yours is off on vacation, ain't she? All right, Bjornstam can spell you at night." All week, from eight each morning till midnight, Carol fed them, bathed them, smoothed sheets, took temperatures. Miles refused to let her cook. Terrified, pallid, noiseless in stocking feet, he did the kitchen work and the sweeping, his big red hands awkwardly careful. Kennicott came in three times a day, unchangingly tender and hopeful in the sick-room, evenly polite to Miles. Carol understood how great was her love for her friends. It bore her through; it made her arm steady and tireless to bathe them. What exhausted her was the sight of Bea and Olaf turned into flaccid invalids, uncomfortably flushed after taking food, begging for the healing of sleep at night. During the second week Olaf's powerful legs were flabby. Spots of a viciously delicate pink came out on his chest and back. His cheeks sank. He looked frightened. His tongue was brown and revolting. His confident voice dwindled to a bewildered murmur, ceaseless and racking. Bea had stayed on her feet too long at the beginning. The moment Kennicott had ordered her to bed she had begun to collapse. One early evening she startled them by screaming, in an intense abdominal pain, and within half an hour she was in a delirium. Till dawn Carol was with her, and not all of Bea's groping through the blackness of half-delirious pain was so pitiful to Carol as the way in which Miles silently peered into the room from the top of the narrow stairs. Carol slept three hours next morning, and ran back. Bea was altogether delirious but she muttered nothing save, "Olaf--ve have such a good time----" At ten, while Carol was preparing an ice-bag in the kitchen, Miles answered a knock. At the front door she saw Vida Sherwin, Maud Dyer, and Mrs. Zitterel, wife of the Baptist pastor. They were carrying grapes, and women's-magazines, magazines with high-colored pictures and optimistic fiction. "We just heard your wife was sick. We've come to see if there isn't something we can do," chirruped Vida. Miles looked steadily at the three women. "You're too late. You can't do nothing now. Bea's always kind of hoped that you folks would come see her. She wanted to have a chance and be friends. She used to sit waiting for somebody to knock. I've seen her sitting here, waiting. Now----Oh, you ain't worth God-damning." He shut the door. All day Carol watched Olaf's strength oozing. He was emaciated. His ribs were grim clear lines, his skin was clammy, his pulse was feeble but terrifyingly rapid. It beat--beat--beat in a drum-roll of death. Late that afternoon he sobbed, and died. Bea did not know it. She was delirious. Next morning, when she went, she did not know that Olaf would no longer swing his lath sword on the door-step, no longer rule his subjects of the cattle-yard; that Miles's son would not go East to college. Miles, Carol, Kennicott were silent. They washed the bodies together, their eyes veiled. "Go home now and sleep. You're pretty tired. I can't ever pay you back for what you done," Miles whispered to Carol. "Yes. But I'll be back here tomorrow. Go with you to the funeral," she said laboriously. When the time for the funeral came, Carol was in bed, collapsed. She assumed that neighbors would go. They had not told her that word of Miles's rebuff to Vida had spread through town, a cyclonic fury. It was only by chance that, leaning on her elbow in bed, she glanced through the window and saw the funeral of Bea and Olaf. There was no music, no carriages. There was only Miles Bjornstam, in his black wedding-suit, walking quite alone, head down, behind the shabby hearse that bore the bodies of his wife and baby. An hour after, Hugh came into her room crying, and when she said as cheerily as she could, "What is it, dear?" he besought, "Mummy, I want to go play with Olaf." That afternoon Juanita Haydock dropped in to brighten Carol. She said, "Too bad about this Bea that was your hired girl. But I don't waste any sympathy on that man of hers. Everybody says he drank too much, and treated his family awful, and that's how they got sick."

Chapter 26

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-26

Carol's favorite thing to do in Gopher Prairie is to take her son Hugh and visit Miles and Bea Bjornstam. Will doesn't like it one bit, because he thinks the Bjornstams are beneath them socially. Plus, Miles is a labor agitator. But Carol goes to the Bjornstams' anyway. She loves the way Miles lets the children hold his tools. She thinks that Miles's farm life is more authentic than her world of upper-class boredom. She's sad when Miles starts talking about moving his family West. One day, Carol drops by to find Miles's son Olaf and wife Bea looking pretty sick. Miles didn't want to call Will, because he thinks Will doesn't like him. But Carol calls Will right away. When Will has a chance to inspect Bea and Olaf, the news isn't good: he's figured out that both of them have typhoid fever. Carol volunteers to be the nurse while Will tries to treat them. When it becomes clear that neither Bea or Olaf will survive, some of the town's women come with food and offers for help, but Miles throws them off his front step, saying that his wife Bea had always hoped for visitors but had never had any, because everyone in the town was too stuck up. After Bea and Olaf have died, Carol goes home. Her son Hugh runs up to her crying and says he wants to play with Olaf. Meanwhile, the people around town hate Miles more than ever after he dared to insult the town's women. They also blame him for making his wife and child sick by being a terrible person. It's clear that this kind of talk totally shreds Carol's soul.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/27.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_26_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 27

chapter 27

{"name": "Chapter 27", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-27", "summary": "We learn that Vida Sherwin's husband, Raymie Wutherspoon, has been wounded in the war and made into a fancy military captain for his trouble. Meanwhile, Miles Bjornstam sells his dairy and gets out of Gopher Prairie once and for all. His departure is crushing to Carol. A woman named Mrs. Flickerbaugh invites Carol over for tea. Carol is hesitant because the woman is eccentric, but she eventually agrees. Once they talk for a while, Carol is horrified to learn that Mrs. Flickerbaugh has hated Gopher Prairie her whole life and that she will probably end up like her.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXVII I A LETTER from Raymie Wutherspoon, in France, said that he had been sent to the front, been slightly wounded, been made a captain. From Vida's pride Carol sought to draw a stimulant to rouse her from depression. Miles had sold his dairy. He had several thousand dollars. To Carol he said good-by with a mumbled word, a harsh hand-shake, "Going to buy a farm in northern Alberta--far off from folks as I can get." He turned sharply away, but he did not walk with his former spring. His shoulders seemed old. It was said that before he went he cursed the town. There was talk of arresting him, of riding him on a rail. It was rumored that at the station old Champ Perry rebuked him, "You better not come back here. We've got respect for your dead, but we haven't got any for a blasphemer and a traitor that won't do anything for his country and only bought one Liberty Bond." Some of the people who had been at the station declared that Miles made some dreadful seditious retort: something about loving German workmen more than American bankers; but others asserted that he couldn't find one word with which to answer the veteran; that he merely sneaked up on the platform of the train. He must have felt guilty, everybody agreed, for as the train left town, a farmer saw him standing in the vestibule and looking out. His house--with the addition which he had built four months ago--was very near the track on which his train passed. When Carol went there, for the last time, she found Olaf's chariot with its red spool wheels standing in the sunny corner beside the stable. She wondered if a quick eye could have noticed it from a train. That day and that week she went reluctantly to Red Cross work; she stitched and packed silently, while Vida read the war bulletins. And she said nothing at all when Kennicott commented, "From what Champ says, I guess Bjornstam was a bad egg, after all. In spite of Bea, don't know but what the citizens' committee ought to have forced him to be patriotic--let on like they could send him to jail if he didn't volunteer and come through for bonds and the Y. M. C. A. They've worked that stunt fine with all these German farmers." II She found no inspiration but she did find a dependable kindness in Mrs. Westlake, and at last she yielded to the old woman's receptivity and had relief in sobbing the story of Bea. Guy Pollock she often met on the street, but he was merely a pleasant voice which said things about Charles Lamb and sunsets. Her most positive experience was the revelation of Mrs. Flickerbaugh, the tall, thin, twitchy wife of the attorney. Carol encountered her at the drug store. "Walking?" snapped Mrs. Flickerbaugh. "Why, yes." "Humph. Guess you're the only female in this town that retains the use of her legs. Come home and have a cup o' tea with me." Because she had nothing else to do, Carol went. But she was uncomfortable in the presence of the amused stares which Mrs. Flickerbaugh's raiment drew. Today, in reeking early August, she wore a man's cap, a skinny fur like a dead cat, a necklace of imitation pearls, a scabrous satin blouse, and a thick cloth skirt hiked up in front. "Come in. Sit down. Stick the baby in that rocker. Hope you don't mind the house looking like a rat's nest. You don't like this town. Neither do I," said Mrs. Flickerbaugh. "Why----" "Course you don't!" "Well then, I don't! But I'm sure that some day I'll find some solution. Probably I'm a hexagonal peg. Solution: find the hexagonal hole." Carol was very brisk. "How do you know you ever will find it?" "There's Mrs. Westlake. She's naturally a big-city woman--she ought to have a lovely old house in Philadelphia or Boston--but she escapes by being absorbed in reading." "You be satisfied to never do anything but read?" "No, but Heavens, one can't go on hating a town always!" "Why not? I can! I've hated it for thirty-two years. I'll die here--and I'll hate it till I die. I ought to have been a business woman. I had a good deal of talent for tending to figures. All gone now. Some folks think I'm crazy. Guess I am. Sit and grouch. Go to church and sing hymns. Folks think I'm religious. Tut! Trying to forget washing and ironing and mending socks. Want an office of my own, and sell things. Julius never hear of it. Too late." Carol sat on the gritty couch, and sank into fear. Could this drabness of life keep up forever, then? Would she some day so despise herself and her neighbors that she too would walk Main Street an old skinny eccentric woman in a mangy cat's-fur? As she crept home she felt that the trap had finally closed. She went into the house, a frail small woman, still winsome but hopeless of eye as she staggered with the weight of the drowsy boy in her arms. She sat alone on the porch, that evening. It seemed that Kennicott had to make a professional call on Mrs. Dave Dyer. Under the stilly boughs and the black gauze of dusk the street was meshed in silence. There was but the hum of motor tires crunching the road, the creak of a rocker on the Howlands' porch, the slap of a hand attacking a mosquito, a heat-weary conversation starting and dying, the precise rhythm of crickets, the thud of moths against the screen--sounds that were a distilled silence. It was a street beyond the end of the world, beyond the boundaries of hope. Though she should sit here forever, no brave procession, no one who was interesting, would be coming by. It was tediousness made tangible, a street builded of lassitude and of futility. Myrtle Cass appeared, with Cy Bogart. She giggled and bounced when Cy tickled her ear in village love. They strolled with the half-dancing gait of lovers, kicking their feet out sideways or shuffling a dragging jig, and the concrete walk sounded to the broken two-four rhythm. Their voices had a dusky turbulence. Suddenly, to the woman rocking on the porch of the doctor's house, the night came alive, and she felt that everywhere in the darkness panted an ardent quest which she was missing as she sank back to wait for----There must be something.

Chapter 27

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-27

We learn that Vida Sherwin's husband, Raymie Wutherspoon, has been wounded in the war and made into a fancy military captain for his trouble. Meanwhile, Miles Bjornstam sells his dairy and gets out of Gopher Prairie once and for all. His departure is crushing to Carol. A woman named Mrs. Flickerbaugh invites Carol over for tea. Carol is hesitant because the woman is eccentric, but she eventually agrees. Once they talk for a while, Carol is horrified to learn that Mrs. Flickerbaugh has hated Gopher Prairie her whole life and that she will probably end up like her.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/28.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_27_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 28

chapter 28

{"name": "Chapter 28", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-28", "summary": "Carol goes to a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen and speaks to Maud Dyer, who for some reason has been really nice to Carol lately. Let's not forget that the last time we saw her, she was getting a private visit from Carol's husband Will... Maud Dyer tells all about a new young tailor named Erik who has moved into Gopher Prairie. He's so fancy in his manner and dress that people have nicknamed him Elizabeth. Apparently, this dude whines and moans about how he can't find any intellectual companionship in the town. Everyone laughs, including Carol. They even find out that it's Erik's dream to design clothing for women. When the meeting is over, Carol decides that she'll walk by the tailor shop to have a look at the new \"freak\" in town. Next, Carol attends a sermon by the local Baptist reverend that's all about loving America and crushing communism... and apparently Mormonism. During the sermon, Carol looks around and sees a young man who shines out from among the boring people of Gopher Prairie. After the sermon, she asks who the young man was and finds out that he's none other than Erik Valbourg, the effeminate tailor no one seems to like. She decides that she must meet him. Later, Carol brings Valbourg up when talking to Will and her in-laws. They make fun of Erik, and Carol thinks about murdering her in-laws with a knife. When Erik Valbourg first came to Gopher Prairie, there was a young woman named Fern Mullins who came on the same train. The folks around the town are suspicious of her because she's so pretty and not shy about showing it off. Carol goes to introduce herself to Fern and learns that Fern wishes she were back in a big city. Carol can relate and feels an instant connection with Fern. One day, Carol takes a pair of Will's pants to get pressed at the tailor's. She runs into Erik Valbourg and he gets excited when he finds out who she is. He's heard all about her knowledge of culture and her efforts to start a dramatic club. He feels like he's found someone he can finally talk to. He thinks Carol should get a club together again and volunteers to make the costumes. Carol goes away thinking that Erik has no sense of humor and only a superficial bit of knowledge. But she's still attracted by the way he seems to reach for the stars with everything he does. Will, meanwhile, always greets Erik rudely, because he thinks Erik is beneath him. Sure enough, Carol holds another meeting of the Gopher Prairie Dramatic Club, and Erik is one of the first to arrive. He has a grand vision for the play they should put on, although the ending is a little gruesome for the conservative folks of Gopher Prairie.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXVIII IT WAS at a supper of the Jolly Seventeen in August that Carol heard of "Elizabeth," from Mrs. Dave Dyer. Carol was fond of Maud Dyer, because she had been particularly agreeable lately; had obviously repented of the nervous distaste which she had once shown. Maud patted her hand when they met, and asked about Hugh. Kennicott said that he was "kind of sorry for the girl, some ways; she's too darn emotional, but still, Dave is sort of mean to her." He was polite to poor Maud when they all went down to the cottages for a swim. Carol was proud of that sympathy in him, and now she took pains to sit with their new friend. Mrs. Dyer was bubbling, "Oh, have you folks heard about this young fellow that's just come to town that the boys call 'Elizabeth'? He's working in Nat Hicks's tailor shop. I bet he doesn't make eighteen a week, but my! isn't he the perfect lady though! He talks so refined, and oh, the lugs he puts on--belted coat, and pique collar with a gold pin, and socks to match his necktie, and honest--you won't believe this, but I got it straight--this fellow, you know he's staying at Mrs. Gurrey's punk old boarding-house, and they say he asked Mrs. Gurrey if he ought to put on a dress-suit for supper! Imagine! Can you beat that? And him nothing but a Swede tailor--Erik Valborg his name is. But he used to be in a tailor shop in Minneapolis (they do say he's a smart needle-pusher, at that) and he tries to let on that he's a regular city fellow. They say he tries to make people think he's a poet--carries books around and pretends to read 'em. Myrtle Cass says she met him at a dance, and he was mooning around all over the place, and he asked her did she like flowers and poetry and music and everything; he spieled like he was a regular United States Senator; and Myrtle--she's a devil, that girl, ha! ha!--she kidded him along, and got him going, and honest, what d'you think he said? He said he didn't find any intellectual companionship in this town. Can you BEAT it? Imagine! And him a Swede tailor! My! And they say he's the most awful mollycoddle--looks just like a girl. The boys call him 'Elizabeth,' and they stop him and ask about the books he lets on to have read, and he goes and tells them, and they take it all in and jolly him terribly, and he never gets onto the fact they're kidding him. Oh, I think it's just TOO funny!" The Jolly Seventeen laughed, and Carol laughed with them. Mrs. Jack Elder added that this Erik Valborg had confided to Mrs. Gurrey that he would "love to design clothes for women." Imagine! Mrs. Harvey Dillon had had a glimpse of him, but honestly, she'd thought he was awfully handsome. This was instantly controverted by Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker. Mrs. Gougerling had had, she reported, a good look at this Valborg fellow. She and B. J. had been motoring, and passed "Elizabeth" out by McGruder's Bridge. He was wearing the awfullest clothes, with the waist pinched in like a girl's. He was sitting on a rock doing nothing, but when he heard the Gougerling car coming he snatched a book out of his pocket, and as they went by he pretended to be reading it, to show off. And he wasn't really good-looking--just kind of soft, as B. J. had pointed out. When the husbands came they joined in the expose. "My name is Elizabeth. I'm the celebrated musical tailor. The skirts fall for me by the thou. Do I get some more veal loaf?" merrily shrieked Dave Dyer. He had some admirable stories about the tricks the town youngsters had played on Valborg. They had dropped a decaying perch into his pocket. They had pinned on his back a sign, "I'm the prize boob, kick me." Glad of any laughter, Carol joined the frolic, and surprised them by crying, "Dave, I do think you're the dearest thing since you got your hair cut!" That was an excellent sally. Everybody applauded. Kennicott looked proud. She decided that sometime she really must go out of her way to pass Hicks's shop and see this freak. II She was at Sunday morning service at the Baptist Church, in a solemn row with her husband, Hugh, Uncle Whittier, Aunt Bessie. Despite Aunt Bessie's nagging the Kennicotts rarely attended church. The doctor asserted, "Sure, religion is a fine influence--got to have it to keep the lower classes in order--fact, it's the only thing that appeals to a lot of those fellows and makes 'em respect the rights of property. And I guess this theology is O.K.; lot of wise old coots figured it all out, and they knew more about it than we do." He believed in the Christian religion, and never thought about it, he believed in the church, and seldom went near it; he was shocked by Carol's lack of faith, and wasn't quite sure what was the nature of the faith that she lacked. Carol herself was an uneasy and dodging agnostic. When she ventured to Sunday School and heard the teachers droning that the genealogy of Shamsherai was a valuable ethical problem for children to think about; when she experimented with Wednesday prayer-meeting and listened to store-keeping elders giving their unvarying weekly testimony in primitive erotic symbols and such gory Chaldean phrases as "washed in the blood of the lamb" and "a vengeful God"; when Mrs. Bogart boasted that through his boyhood she had made Cy confess nightly upon the basis of the Ten Commandments; then Carol was dismayed to find the Christian religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as Zoroastrianism--without the splendor. But when she went to church suppers and felt the friendliness, saw the gaiety with which the sisters served cold ham and scalloped potatoes; when Mrs. Champ Perry cried to her, on an afternoon call, "My dear, if you just knew how happy it makes you to come into abiding grace," then Carol found the humanness behind the sanguinary and alien theology. Always she perceived that the churches--Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Catholic, all of them--which had seemed so unimportant to the judge's home in her childhood, so isolated from the city struggle in St. Paul, were still, in Gopher Prairie, the strongest of the forces compelling respectability. This August Sunday she had been tempted by the announcement that the Reverend Edmund Zitterel would preach on the topic "America, Face Your Problems!" With the great war, workmen in every nation showing a desire to control industries, Russia hinting a leftward revolution against Kerensky, woman suffrage coming, there seemed to be plenty of problems for the Reverend Mr. Zitterel to call on America to face. Carol gathered her family and trotted off behind Uncle Whittier. The congregation faced the heat with informality. Men with highly plastered hair, so painfully shaved that their faces looked sore, removed their coats, sighed, and unbuttoned two buttons of their uncreased Sunday vests. Large-bosomed, white-bloused, hot-necked, spectacled matrons--the Mothers in Israel, pioneers and friends of Mrs. Champ Perry--waved their palm-leaf fans in a steady rhythm. Abashed boys slunk into the rear pews and giggled, while milky little girls, up front with their mothers, self-consciously kept from turning around. The church was half barn and half Gopher Prairie parlor. The streaky brown wallpaper was broken in its dismal sweep only by framed texts, "Come unto Me" and "The Lord is My Shepherd," by a list of hymns, and by a crimson and green diagram, staggeringly drawn upon hemp-colored paper, indicating the alarming ease with which a young man may descend from Palaces of Pleasure and the House of Pride to Eternal Damnation. But the varnished oak pews and the new red carpet and the three large chairs on the platform, behind the bare reading-stand, were all of a rocking-chair comfort. Carol was civic and neighborly and commendable today. She beamed and bowed. She trolled out with the others the hymn: How pleasant 'tis on Sabbath morn To gather in the church And there I'll have no carnal thoughts, Nor sin shall me besmirch. With a rustle of starched linen skirts and stiff shirt-fronts, the congregation sat down, and gave heed to the Reverend Mr. Zitterel. The priest was a thin, swart, intense young man with a bang. He wore a black sack suit and a lilac tie. He smote the enormous Bible on the reading-stand, vociferated, "Come, let us reason together," delivered a prayer informing Almighty God of the news of the past week, and began to reason. It proved that the only problems which America had to face were Mormonism and Prohibition: "Don't let any of these self-conceited fellows that are always trying to stir up trouble deceive you with the belief that there's anything to all these smart-aleck movements to let the unions and the Farmers' Nonpartisan League kill all our initiative and enterprise by fixing wages and prices. There isn't any movement that amounts to a whoop without it's got a moral background. And let me tell you that while folks are fussing about what they call 'economics' and 'socialism' and 'science' and a lot of things that are nothing in the world but a disguise for atheism, the Old Satan is busy spreading his secret net and tentacles out there in Utah, under his guise of Joe Smith or Brigham Young or whoever their leaders happen to be today, it doesn't make any difference, and they're making game of the Old Bible that has led this American people through its manifold trials and tribulations to its firm position as the fulfilment of the prophecies and the recognized leader of all nations. 'Sit thou on my right hand till I make thine enemies the footstool of my feet,' said the Lord of Hosts, Acts II, the thirty-fourth verse--and let me tell you right now, you got to get up a good deal earlier in the morning than you get up even when you're going fishing, if you want to be smarter than the Lord, who has shown us the straight and narrow way, and he that passeth therefrom is in eternal peril and, to return to this vital and terrible subject of Mormonism--and as I say, it is terrible to realize how little attention is given to this evil right here in our midst and on our very doorstep, as it were--it's a shame and a disgrace that the Congress of these United States spends all its time talking about inconsequential financial matters that ought to be left to the Treasury Department, as I understand it, instead of arising in their might and passing a law that any one admitting he is a Mormon shall simply be deported and as it were kicked out of this free country in which we haven't got any room for polygamy and the tyrannies of Satan. "And, to digress for a moment, especially as there are more of them in this state than there are Mormons, though you never can tell what will happen with this vain generation of young girls, that think more about wearing silk stockings than about minding their mothers and learning to bake a good loaf of bread, and many of them listening to these sneaking Mormon missionaries--and I actually heard one of them talking right out on a street-corner in Duluth, a few years ago, and the officers of the law not protesting--but still, as they are a smaller but more immediate problem, let me stop for just a moment to pay my respects to these Seventh-Day Adventists. Not that they are immoral, I don't mean, but when a body of men go on insisting that Saturday is the Sabbath, after Christ himself has clearly indicated the new dispensation, then I think the legislature ought to step in----" At this point Carol awoke. She got through three more minutes by studying the face of a girl in the pew across: a sensitive unhappy girl whose longing poured out with intimidating self-revelation as she worshiped Mr. Zitterel. Carol wondered who the girl was. She had seen her at church suppers. She considered how many of the three thousand people in the town she did not know; to how many of them the Thanatopsis and the Jolly Seventeen were icy social peaks; how many of them might be toiling through boredom thicker than her own--with greater courage. She examined her nails. She read two hymns. She got some satisfaction out of rubbing an itching knuckle. She pillowed on her shoulder the head of the baby who, after killing time in the same manner as his mother, was so fortunate as to fall asleep. She read the introduction, title-page, and acknowledgment of copyrights, in the hymnal. She tried to evolve a philosophy which would explain why Kennicott could never tie his scarf so that it would reach the top of the gap in his turn-down collar. There were no other diversions to be found in the pew. She glanced back at the congregation. She thought that it would be amiable to bow to Mrs. Champ Perry. Her slow turning head stopped, galvanized. Across the aisle, two rows back, was a strange young man who shone among the cud-chewing citizens like a visitant from the sun-amber curls, low forehead, fine nose, chin smooth but not raw from Sabbath shaving. His lips startled her. The lips of men in Gopher Prairie are flat in the face, straight and grudging. The stranger's mouth was arched, the upper lip short. He wore a brown jersey coat, a delft-blue bow, a white silk shirt, white flannel trousers. He suggested the ocean beach, a tennis court, anything but the sun-blistered utility of Main Street. A visitor from Minneapolis, here for business? No. He wasn't a business man. He was a poet. Keats was in his face, and Shelley, and Arthur Upson, whom she had once seen in Minneapolis. He was at once too sensitive and too sophisticated to touch business as she knew it in Gopher Prairie. With restrained amusement he was analyzing the noisy Mr. Zitterel. Carol was ashamed to have this spy from the Great World hear the pastor's maundering. She felt responsible for the town. She resented his gaping at their private rites. She flushed, turned away. But she continued to feel his presence. How could she meet him? She must! For an hour of talk. He was all that she was hungry for. She could not let him get away without a word--and she would have to. She pictured, and ridiculed, herself as walking up to him and remarking, "I am sick with the Village Virus. Will you please tell me what people are saying and playing in New York?" She pictured, and groaned over, the expression of Kennicott if she should say, "Why wouldn't it be reasonable for you, my soul, to ask that complete stranger in the brown jersey coat to come to supper tonight?" She brooded, not looking back. She warned herself that she was probably exaggerating; that no young man could have all these exalted qualities. Wasn't he too obviously smart, too glossy-new? Like a movie actor. Probably he was a traveling salesman who sang tenor and fancied himself in imitations of Newport clothes and spoke of "the swellest business proposition that ever came down the pike." In a panic she peered at him. No! This was no hustling salesman, this boy with the curving Grecian lips and the serious eyes. She rose after the service, carefully taking Kennicott's arm and smiling at him in a mute assertion that she was devoted to him no matter what happened. She followed the Mystery's soft brown jersey shoulders out of the church. Fatty Hicks, the shrill and puffy son of Nat, flapped his hand at the beautiful stranger and jeered, "How's the kid? All dolled up like a plush horse today, ain't we!" Carol was exceeding sick. Her herald from the outside was Erik Valborg, "Elizabeth." Apprentice tailor! Gasoline and hot goose! Mending dirty jackets! Respectfully holding a tape-measure about a paunch! And yet, she insisted, this boy was also himself. III They had Sunday dinner with the Smails, in a dining-room which centered about a fruit and flower piece and a crayon-enlargement of Uncle Whittier. Carol did not heed Aunt Bessie's fussing in regard to Mrs. Robert B. Schminke's bead necklace and Whittier's error in putting on the striped pants, day like this. She did not taste the shreds of roast pork. She said vacuously: "Uh--Will, I wonder if that young man in the white flannel trousers, at church this morning, was this Valborg person that they're all talking about?" "Yump. That's him. Wasn't that the darndest get-up he had on!" Kennicott scratched at a white smear on his hard gray sleeve. "It wasn't so bad. I wonder where he comes from? He seems to have lived in cities a good deal. Is he from the East?" "The East? Him? Why, he comes from a farm right up north here, just this side of Jefferson. I know his father slightly--Adolph Valborg--typical cranky old Swede farmer." "Oh, really?" blandly. "Believe he has lived in Minneapolis for quite some time, though. Learned his trade there. And I will say he's bright, some ways. Reads a lot. Pollock says he takes more books out of the library than anybody else in town. Huh! He's kind of like you in that!" The Smails and Kennicott laughed very much at this sly jest. Uncle Whittier seized the conversation. "That fellow that's working for Hicks? Milksop, that's what he is. Makes me tired to see a young fellow that ought to be in the war, or anyway out in the fields earning his living honest, like I done when I was young, doing a woman's work and then come out and dress up like a show-actor! Why, when I was his age----" Carol reflected that the carving-knife would make an excellent dagger with which to kill Uncle Whittier. It would slide in easily. The headlines would be terrible. Kennicott said judiciously, "Oh, I don't want to be unjust to him. I believe he took his physical examination for military service. Got varicose veins--not bad, but enough to disqualify him. Though I will say he doesn't look like a fellow that would be so awful darn crazy to poke his bayonet into a Hun's guts." "Will! PLEASE!" "Well, he don't. Looks soft to me. And they say he told Del Snafflin, when he was getting a hair-cut on Saturday, that he wished he could play the piano." "Isn't it wonderful how much we all know about one another in a town like this," said Carol innocently. Kennicott was suspicious, but Aunt Bessie, serving the floating island pudding, agreed, "Yes, it is wonderful. Folks can get away with all sorts of meannesses and sins in these terrible cities, but they can't here. I was noticing this tailor fellow this morning, and when Mrs. Riggs offered to share her hymn-book with him, he shook his head, and all the while we was singing he just stood there like a bump on a log and never opened his mouth. Everybody says he's got an idea that he's got so much better manners and all than what the rest of us have, but if that's what he calls good manners, I want to know!" Carol again studied the carving-knife. Blood on the whiteness of a tablecloth might be gorgeous. Then: "Fool! Neurotic impossibilist! Telling yourself orchard fairy-tales--at thirty. . . . Dear Lord, am I really THIRTY? That boy can't be more than twenty-five." IV She went calling. Boarding with the Widow Bogart was Fern Mullins, a girl of twenty-two who was to be teacher of English, French, and gymnastics in the high school this coming session. Fern Mullins had come to town early, for the six-weeks normal course for country teachers. Carol had noticed her on the street, had heard almost as much about her as about Erik Valborg. She was tall, weedy, pretty, and incurably rakish. Whether she wore a low middy collar or dressed reticently for school in a black suit with a high-necked blouse, she was airy, flippant. "She looks like an absolute totty," said all the Mrs. Sam Clarks, disapprovingly, and all the Juanita Haydocks, enviously. That Sunday evening, sitting in baggy canvas lawn-chairs beside the house, the Kennicotts saw Fern laughing with Cy Bogart who, though still a junior in high school, was now a lump of a man, only two or three years younger than Fern. Cy had to go downtown for weighty matters connected with the pool-parlor. Fern drooped on the Bogart porch, her chin in her hands. "She looks lonely," said Kennicott. "She does, poor soul. I believe I'll go over and speak to her. I was introduced to her at Dave's but I haven't called." Carol was slipping across the lawn, a white figure in the dimness, faintly brushing the dewy grass. She was thinking of Erik and of the fact that her feet were wet, and she was casual in her greeting: "Hello! The doctor and I wondered if you were lonely." Resentfully, "I am!" Carol concentrated on her. "My dear, you sound so! I know how it is. I used to be tired when I was on the job--I was a librarian. What was your college? I was Blodgett." More interestedly, "I went to the U." Fern meant the University of Minnesota. "You must have had a splendid time. Blodgett was a bit dull." "Where were you a librarian?" challengingly. "St. Paul--the main library." "Honest? Oh dear, I wish I was back in the Cities! This is my first year of teaching, and I'm scared stiff. I did have the best time in college: dramatics and basket-ball and fussing and dancing--I'm simply crazy about dancing. And here, except when I have the kids in gymnasium class, or when I'm chaperoning the basket-ball team on a trip out-of-town, I won't dare to move above a whisper. I guess they don't care much if you put any pep into teaching or not, as long as you look like a Good Influence out of school-hours--and that means never doing anything you want to. This normal course is bad enough, but the regular school will be FIERCE! If it wasn't too late to get a job in the Cities, I swear I'd resign here. I bet I won't dare to go to a single dance all winter. If I cut loose and danced the way I like to, they'd think I was a perfect hellion--poor harmless me! Oh, I oughtn't to be talking like this. Fern, you never could be cagey!" "Don't be frightened, my dear! . . . Doesn't that sound atrociously old and kind! I'm talking to you the way Mrs. Westlake talks to me! That's having a husband and a kitchen range, I suppose. But I feel young, and I want to dance like a--like a hellion?--too. So I sympathize." Fern made a sound of gratitude. Carol inquired, "What experience did you have with college dramatics? I tried to start a kind of Little Theater here. It was dreadful. I must tell you about it----" Two hours later, when Kennicott came over to greet Fern and to yawn, "Look here, Carrie, don't you suppose you better be thinking about turning in? I've got a hard day tomorrow," the two were talking so intimately that they constantly interrupted each other. As she went respectably home, convoyed by a husband, and decorously holding up her skirts, Carol rejoiced, "Everything has changed! I have two friends, Fern and----But who's the other? That's queer; I thought there was----Oh, how absurd!" V She often passed Erik Valborg on the street; the brown jersey coat became unremarkable. When she was driving with Kennicott, in early evening, she saw him on the lake shore, reading a thin book which might easily have been poetry. She noted that he was the only person in the motorized town who still took long walks. She told herself that she was the daughter of a judge, the wife of a doctor, and that she did not care to know a capering tailor. She told herself that she was not responsive to men . . . not even to Percy Bresnahan. She told herself that a woman of thirty who heeded a boy of twenty-five was ridiculous. And on Friday, when she had convinced herself that the errand was necessary, she went to Nat Hicks's shop, bearing the not very romantic burden of a pair of her husband's trousers. Hicks was in the back room. She faced the Greek god who, in a somewhat ungodlike way, was stitching a coat on a scaley sewing-machine, in a room of smutted plaster walls. She saw that his hands were not in keeping with a Hellenic face. They were thick, roughened with needle and hot iron and plow-handle. Even in the shop he persisted in his finery. He wore a silk shirt, a topaz scarf, thin tan shoes. This she absorbed while she was saying curtly, "Can I get these pressed, please?" Not rising from the sewing-machine he stuck out his hand, mumbled, "When do you want them?" "Oh, Monday." The adventure was over. She was marching out. "What name?" he called after her. He had risen and, despite the farcicality of Dr. Will Kennicott's bulgy trousers draped over his arm, he had the grace of a cat. "Kennicott." "Kennicott. Oh! Oh say, you're Mrs. Dr. Kennicott then, aren't you?" "Yes." She stood at the door. Now that she had carried out her preposterous impulse to see what he was like, she was cold, she was as ready to detect familiarities as the virtuous Miss Ella Stowbody. "I've heard about you. Myrtle Cass was saying you got up a dramatic club and gave a dandy play. I've always wished I had a chance to belong to a Little Theater, and give some European plays, or whimsical like Barrie, or a pageant." He pronounced it "pagent"; he rhymed "pag" with "rag." Carol nodded in the manner of a lady being kind to a tradesman, and one of her selves sneered, "Our Erik is indeed a lost John Keats." He was appealing, "Do you suppose it would be possible to get up another dramatic club this coming fall?" "Well, it might be worth thinking of." She came out of her several conflicting poses, and said sincerely, "There's a new teacher, Miss Mullins, who might have some talent. That would make three of us for a nucleus. If we could scrape up half a dozen we might give a real play with a small cast. Have you had any experience?" "Just a bum club that some of us got up in Minneapolis when I was working there. We had one good man, an interior decorator--maybe he was kind of sis and effeminate, but he really was an artist, and we gave one dandy play. But I----Of course I've always had to work hard, and study by myself, and I'm probably sloppy, and I'd love it if I had training in rehearsing--I mean, the crankier the director was, the better I'd like it. If you didn't want to use me as an actor, I'd love to design the costumes. I'm crazy about fabrics--textures and colors and designs." She knew that he was trying to keep her from going, trying to indicate that he was something more than a person to whom one brought trousers for pressing. He besought: "Some day I hope I can get away from this fool repairing, when I have the money saved up. I want to go East and work for some big dressmaker, and study art drawing, and become a high-class designer. Or do you think that's a kind of fiddlin' ambition for a fellow? I was brought up on a farm. And then monkeyin' round with silks! I don't know. What do you think? Myrtle Cass says you're awfully educated." "I am. Awfully. Tell me: Have the boys made fun of your ambition?" She was seventy years old, and sexless, and more advisory than Vida Sherwin. "Well, they have, at that. They've jollied me a good deal, here and Minneapolis both. They say dressmaking is ladies' work. (But I was willing to get drafted for the war! I tried to get in. But they rejected me. But I did try! ) I thought some of working up in a gents' furnishings store, and I had a chance to travel on the road for a clothing house, but somehow--I hate this tailoring, but I can't seem to get enthusiastic about salesmanship. I keep thinking about a room in gray oatmeal paper with prints in very narrow gold frames--or would it be better in white enamel paneling?--but anyway, it looks out on Fifth Avenue, and I'm designing a sumptuous----" He made it "sump-too-ous"--"robe of linden green chiffon over cloth of gold! You know--tileul. It's elegant. . . . What do you think?" "Why not? What do you care for the opinion of city rowdies, or a lot of farm boys? But you mustn't, you really mustn't, let casual strangers like me have a chance to judge you." "Well----You aren't a stranger, one way. Myrtle Cass--Miss Cass, should say--she's spoken about you so often. I wanted to call on you--and the doctor--but I didn't quite have the nerve. One evening I walked past your house, but you and your husband were talking on the porch, and you looked so chummy and happy I didn't dare butt in." Maternally, "I think it's extremely nice of you to want to be trained in--in enunciation by a stage-director. Perhaps I could help you. I'm a thoroughly sound and uninspired schoolma'am by instinct; quite hopelessly mature." "Oh, you aren't EITHER!" She was not very successful at accepting his fervor with the air of amused woman of the world, but she sounded reasonably impersonal: "Thank you. Shall we see if we really can get up a new dramatic club? I'll tell you: Come to the house this evening, about eight. I'll ask Miss Mullins to come over, and we'll talk about it." VI "He has absolutely no sense of humor. Less than Will. But hasn't he-----What is a 'sense of humor'? Isn't the thing he lacks the back-slapping jocosity that passes for humor here? Anyway----Poor lamb, coaxing me to stay and play with him! Poor lonely lamb! If he could be free from Nat Hickses, from people who say 'dandy' and 'bum,' would he develop? "I wonder if Whitman didn't use Brooklyn back-street slang, as a boy? "No. Not Whitman. He's Keats--sensitive to silken things. 'Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes as are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings.' Keats, here! A bewildered spirit fallen on Main Street. And Main Street laughs till it aches, giggles till the spirit doubts his own self and tries to give up the use of wings for the correct uses of a 'gents' furnishings store.' Gopher Prairie with its celebrated eleven miles of cement walk. . . . I wonder how much of the cement is made out of the tombstones of John Keatses?" VII Kennicott was cordial to Fern Mullins, teased her, told her he was a "great hand for running off with pretty school-teachers," and promised that if the school-board should object to her dancing, he would "bat 'em one over the head and tell 'em how lucky they were to get a girl with some go to her, for once." But to Erik Valborg he was not cordial. He shook hands loosely, and said, "H' are yuh." Nat Hicks was socially acceptable; he had been here for years, and owned his shop; but this person was merely Nat's workman, and the town's principle of perfect democracy was not meant to be applied indiscriminately. The conference on a dramatic club theoretically included Kennicott, but he sat back, patting yawns, conscious of Fern's ankles, smiling amiably on the children at their sport. Fern wanted to tell her grievances; Carol was sulky every time she thought of "The Girl from Kankakee"; it was Erik who made suggestions. He had read with astounding breadth, and astounding lack of judgment. His voice was sensitive to liquids, but he overused the word "glorious." He mispronounced a tenth of the words he had from books, but he knew it. He was insistent, but he was shy. When he demanded, "I'd like to stage 'Suppressed Desires,' by Cook and Miss Glaspell," Carol ceased to be patronizing. He was not the yearner: he was the artist, sure of his vision. "I'd make it simple. Use a big window at the back, with a cyclorama of a blue that would simply hit you in the eye, and just one tree-branch, to suggest a park below. Put the breakfast table on a dais. Let the colors be kind of arty and tea-roomy--orange chairs, and orange and blue table, and blue Japanese breakfast set, and some place, one big flat smear of black--bang! Oh. Another play I wish we could do is Tennyson Jesse's 'The Black Mask.' I've never seen it but----Glorious ending, where this woman looks at the man with his face all blown away, and she just gives one horrible scream." "Good God, is that your idea of a glorious ending?" bayed Kennicott. "That sounds fierce! I do love artistic things, but not the horrible ones," moaned Fern Mullins. Erik was bewildered; glanced at Carol. She nodded loyally. At the end of the conference they had decided nothing.

Chapter 28

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Carol goes to a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen and speaks to Maud Dyer, who for some reason has been really nice to Carol lately. Let's not forget that the last time we saw her, she was getting a private visit from Carol's husband Will... Maud Dyer tells all about a new young tailor named Erik who has moved into Gopher Prairie. He's so fancy in his manner and dress that people have nicknamed him Elizabeth. Apparently, this dude whines and moans about how he can't find any intellectual companionship in the town. Everyone laughs, including Carol. They even find out that it's Erik's dream to design clothing for women. When the meeting is over, Carol decides that she'll walk by the tailor shop to have a look at the new "freak" in town. Next, Carol attends a sermon by the local Baptist reverend that's all about loving America and crushing communism... and apparently Mormonism. During the sermon, Carol looks around and sees a young man who shines out from among the boring people of Gopher Prairie. After the sermon, she asks who the young man was and finds out that he's none other than Erik Valbourg, the effeminate tailor no one seems to like. She decides that she must meet him. Later, Carol brings Valbourg up when talking to Will and her in-laws. They make fun of Erik, and Carol thinks about murdering her in-laws with a knife. When Erik Valbourg first came to Gopher Prairie, there was a young woman named Fern Mullins who came on the same train. The folks around the town are suspicious of her because she's so pretty and not shy about showing it off. Carol goes to introduce herself to Fern and learns that Fern wishes she were back in a big city. Carol can relate and feels an instant connection with Fern. One day, Carol takes a pair of Will's pants to get pressed at the tailor's. She runs into Erik Valbourg and he gets excited when he finds out who she is. He's heard all about her knowledge of culture and her efforts to start a dramatic club. He feels like he's found someone he can finally talk to. He thinks Carol should get a club together again and volunteers to make the costumes. Carol goes away thinking that Erik has no sense of humor and only a superficial bit of knowledge. But she's still attracted by the way he seems to reach for the stars with everything he does. Will, meanwhile, always greets Erik rudely, because he thinks Erik is beneath him. Sure enough, Carol holds another meeting of the Gopher Prairie Dramatic Club, and Erik is one of the first to arrive. He has a grand vision for the play they should put on, although the ending is a little gruesome for the conservative folks of Gopher Prairie.