Datasets:

pszemraj

/

booksum-short

like 4

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/02.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_1_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 2

chapter 2

{"name": "Chapter 2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-i-chapter-2", "summary": "Late one night Charles was awakened with a request to come 18 miles out in the country and set a broken leg. He sent the messenger on ahead and promised to follow in a couple of hours. At four in the morning, Charles set out on the journey, trying to search his memory for everything he knew about fractures. When he arrived at the farm house, he was admitted by a charming young lady. Upon seeing the patient, he was greatly relieved to find a simple fracture with no complications. Mademoiselle Emma came in and assisted with preparing bandages. Charles was struck by the beauty of her flashing brown eyes which appeared to be almost black. When he had finished, she led him into the dining room where he ate and talked with Mademoiselle Emma about the patient. Upon leaving, he promised to come back in three days. But instead, he found himself returning the next day and went twice a week regularly in spite of the long ride. In about eight weeks, the patient was able to walk about. During the entire episode, Charles never questioned himself as to why he went so often to see the patient, but his wife did. She made inquiries and found out that the patient had a daughter who had been brought up in a convent and was known to give herself airs. After much complaining, nagging, and pleading, Charles' wife finally extracted a promise from him that he would not go there again. As time passed, Charles' mother and wife both began to pick at him incessantly. Suddenly it was learned that the lawyer who had been administering Heloise's estate had absconded with nearly all her money. Furthermore, it was discovered upon investigation that her remaining property was of little value and that the woman had lied about her wealth prior to the wedding. Bovary's parents had a violent argument about this, and Heloise was very upset. About a week later she had a stroke and died.", "analysis": "In this chapter, we meet Mademoiselle Emma. But Flaubert is interested in presenting her from a distant view -- that is, we hear about her first from other viewpoints. He is saving his personal or direct introduction of Emma until a later chapter and is here presenting Charles' and Heloise's view of Emma. This technique is called the delayed emergence. It functions to arouse the reader's interest in the main character. It is a part of Charles' character that he is not even aware of why he went so often to see his patient. It might even be said that he was surprised when his wife accused him of going solely to see Mademoiselle Emma. Denied of the privilege of seeing her, Charles determined that he could then justifiably love her at a distance. Again, note that Charles' present wife is such a shrew, is so bad and so demanding and so ugly , and is so unpleasant that by contrast Emma seems like an angel to Charles. Thus Charles' miserable experiences with his first wife prepare him to be so indulgent and yielding to Emma later in his life. The reader who is not aware of Flaubert's method of evoking a scene is missing a large measure of the greatness of this novel. The reader should select a passage, such as Charles' arrival at his patient's house, and examine the careful way in which Flaubert makes you feel this scene. His choice of language and careful description paints an accurate description of what he is writing about. The technique that Flaubert uses may be compared to that of a camera coming slowly in for a close shot and then moving subtly away for another shot."}

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!

Chapter 2

https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-i-chapter-2

Late one night Charles was awakened with a request to come 18 miles out in the country and set a broken leg. He sent the messenger on ahead and promised to follow in a couple of hours. At four in the morning, Charles set out on the journey, trying to search his memory for everything he knew about fractures. When he arrived at the farm house, he was admitted by a charming young lady. Upon seeing the patient, he was greatly relieved to find a simple fracture with no complications. Mademoiselle Emma came in and assisted with preparing bandages. Charles was struck by the beauty of her flashing brown eyes which appeared to be almost black. When he had finished, she led him into the dining room where he ate and talked with Mademoiselle Emma about the patient. Upon leaving, he promised to come back in three days. But instead, he found himself returning the next day and went twice a week regularly in spite of the long ride. In about eight weeks, the patient was able to walk about. During the entire episode, Charles never questioned himself as to why he went so often to see the patient, but his wife did. She made inquiries and found out that the patient had a daughter who had been brought up in a convent and was known to give herself airs. After much complaining, nagging, and pleading, Charles' wife finally extracted a promise from him that he would not go there again. As time passed, Charles' mother and wife both began to pick at him incessantly. Suddenly it was learned that the lawyer who had been administering Heloise's estate had absconded with nearly all her money. Furthermore, it was discovered upon investigation that her remaining property was of little value and that the woman had lied about her wealth prior to the wedding. Bovary's parents had a violent argument about this, and Heloise was very upset. About a week later she had a stroke and died.

In this chapter, we meet Mademoiselle Emma. But Flaubert is interested in presenting her from a distant view -- that is, we hear about her first from other viewpoints. He is saving his personal or direct introduction of Emma until a later chapter and is here presenting Charles' and Heloise's view of Emma. This technique is called the delayed emergence. It functions to arouse the reader's interest in the main character. It is a part of Charles' character that he is not even aware of why he went so often to see his patient. It might even be said that he was surprised when his wife accused him of going solely to see Mademoiselle Emma. Denied of the privilege of seeing her, Charles determined that he could then justifiably love her at a distance. Again, note that Charles' present wife is such a shrew, is so bad and so demanding and so ugly , and is so unpleasant that by contrast Emma seems like an angel to Charles. Thus Charles' miserable experiences with his first wife prepare him to be so indulgent and yielding to Emma later in his life. The reader who is not aware of Flaubert's method of evoking a scene is missing a large measure of the greatness of this novel. The reader should select a passage, such as Charles' arrival at his patient's house, and examine the careful way in which Flaubert makes you feel this scene. His choice of language and careful description paints an accurate description of what he is writing about. The technique that Flaubert uses may be compared to that of a camera coming slowly in for a close shot and then moving subtly away for another shot.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/03.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_2_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 3

chapter 3

{"name": "Chapter 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-i-chapter-3", "summary": "Sometime after, Roualt paid Charles a call to settle his bill and to offer his condolences. He invited Bovary to visit at the farm. Charles accepted the offer and became a frequent guest at the Roualt house. In these circumstances, Bovary's interest in Emma matured, and soon he found himself in love with her. Emma's father had never been a very good farmer. He had debts and constantly drank the best cider rather than sending it to the market. Thus, when he realized that Charles was interested in Emma, he resolved to give his consent, especially since Emma had never been very good around the farm. Thus Charles' proposal was accepted. Charles and Emma decided that the wedding would take place as soon as Charles was out of mourning. He visited often and they discussed the details of the wedding. Emma would have preferred a midnight wedding with torches, but her father would not stand for that. Instead, there was a traditional wedding with a party that lasted sixteen hours.", "analysis": "We should note with what delight Charles observes everything that Emma does. He is charmed with her looks, her way of talking, her actions, and everything about her. He can find no fault with her. This attitude or view toward his future wife will essentially continue during his entire married life, making it easy for Emma to commit her indiscretions. Flaubert begins already to offer little hints as to Emma's character. We see that her father thinks of her as rather useless around the farm and is not sorry to lose her in marriage. Emma's romanticism, which will later be seen to be the cause of her tragic life, is here suggested by her desire to have a midnight wedding with torches. This is the first hint that Emma is a person who seeks something of the strange and marvelous, something that will break the monotony of living in a dull world."}

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.

Chapter 3

https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-i-chapter-3

Sometime after, Roualt paid Charles a call to settle his bill and to offer his condolences. He invited Bovary to visit at the farm. Charles accepted the offer and became a frequent guest at the Roualt house. In these circumstances, Bovary's interest in Emma matured, and soon he found himself in love with her. Emma's father had never been a very good farmer. He had debts and constantly drank the best cider rather than sending it to the market. Thus, when he realized that Charles was interested in Emma, he resolved to give his consent, especially since Emma had never been very good around the farm. Thus Charles' proposal was accepted. Charles and Emma decided that the wedding would take place as soon as Charles was out of mourning. He visited often and they discussed the details of the wedding. Emma would have preferred a midnight wedding with torches, but her father would not stand for that. Instead, there was a traditional wedding with a party that lasted sixteen hours.

We should note with what delight Charles observes everything that Emma does. He is charmed with her looks, her way of talking, her actions, and everything about her. He can find no fault with her. This attitude or view toward his future wife will essentially continue during his entire married life, making it easy for Emma to commit her indiscretions. Flaubert begins already to offer little hints as to Emma's character. We see that her father thinks of her as rather useless around the farm and is not sorry to lose her in marriage. Emma's romanticism, which will later be seen to be the cause of her tragic life, is here suggested by her desire to have a midnight wedding with torches. This is the first hint that Emma is a person who seeks something of the strange and marvelous, something that will break the monotony of living in a dull world.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/part_1_chapters_4_to_5.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_3_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapters 4-5

chapters 4-5

{"name": "Chapters 4-5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-i-chapters-45", "summary": "The wedding was a gala affair with many friends and relatives present. There was much good fun; the only unpleasant note was the sullen attitude of Bovary's mother who resented not having had a hand in the plans or preparations. Charles' great happiness was apparent to all who saw him, and Emma too seemed pleased by her marriage. After two days at Roualt's farm, the couple returned to Tostes. Charles proudly led Emma into her new house, the furnishings and arrangement of which are described in great detail. Emma discovered her predecessor's wedding bouquet on display in the bedroom, where Bovary had thoughtlessly left it. She indulged in some morbid thoughts, but her sorrowful mood passed quickly in the excitement of the moment. In the days that followed, Bovary's every thought was with his wife, and all his efforts were devoted to pleasing her. He took her for walks and enjoyed fulfilling her every whim. He had never known that life could be so pleasant. But Emma wondered why she had not attained the happiness she expected from marriage and what happened to such words as \"bliss\" \"passion,\" and \"ecstasy,\" words that had sounded so wonderful when read in books.", "analysis": "Chapter 4 devotes itself to creating a realistic picture of a country wedding. Flaubert, in a few masterful strokes, makes us feel the entire provincial life. Scenes such as these account for Flaubert's title as the first master of perfect realism. In both chapters, the reader should note how utterly Charles dotes on Emma. His dogged devotion accounts for his later blindness to Emma's faults and his later desire to fulfill her every whim. Emma's desire to change the house should not be seen as a touch of individuality on her part. Rather, she will be seen to be constantly desiring a change, thinking that in every change she will find the happiness that she is seeking. The first blow to Emma's romantic nature comes when she sees the still-preserved bridal bouquet held over from Charles' first marriage. This takes away from the sentimentality she is trying to attach to her own bouquet. At the end of Chapter 5, Emma's true nature is beginning to emerge. She is already disillusioned because marriage is not as great in real life as it was in her books. She is disappointed because she has not found all of the \"bliss, passion, and ecstasy\" that she had read about in novels. This idea will now be developed as the main theme of the book. That is, the contrast Emma finds between the realistic world and her dreams of what life should be."}

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. 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.

Chapters 4-5

https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-i-chapters-45

The wedding was a gala affair with many friends and relatives present. There was much good fun; the only unpleasant note was the sullen attitude of Bovary's mother who resented not having had a hand in the plans or preparations. Charles' great happiness was apparent to all who saw him, and Emma too seemed pleased by her marriage. After two days at Roualt's farm, the couple returned to Tostes. Charles proudly led Emma into her new house, the furnishings and arrangement of which are described in great detail. Emma discovered her predecessor's wedding bouquet on display in the bedroom, where Bovary had thoughtlessly left it. She indulged in some morbid thoughts, but her sorrowful mood passed quickly in the excitement of the moment. In the days that followed, Bovary's every thought was with his wife, and all his efforts were devoted to pleasing her. He took her for walks and enjoyed fulfilling her every whim. He had never known that life could be so pleasant. But Emma wondered why she had not attained the happiness she expected from marriage and what happened to such words as "bliss" "passion," and "ecstasy," words that had sounded so wonderful when read in books.

Chapter 4 devotes itself to creating a realistic picture of a country wedding. Flaubert, in a few masterful strokes, makes us feel the entire provincial life. Scenes such as these account for Flaubert's title as the first master of perfect realism. In both chapters, the reader should note how utterly Charles dotes on Emma. His dogged devotion accounts for his later blindness to Emma's faults and his later desire to fulfill her every whim. Emma's desire to change the house should not be seen as a touch of individuality on her part. Rather, she will be seen to be constantly desiring a change, thinking that in every change she will find the happiness that she is seeking. The first blow to Emma's romantic nature comes when she sees the still-preserved bridal bouquet held over from Charles' first marriage. This takes away from the sentimentality she is trying to attach to her own bouquet. At the end of Chapter 5, Emma's true nature is beginning to emerge. She is already disillusioned because marriage is not as great in real life as it was in her books. She is disappointed because she has not found all of the "bliss, passion, and ecstasy" that she had read about in novels. This idea will now be developed as the main theme of the book. That is, the contrast Emma finds between the realistic world and her dreams of what life should be.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/06.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_4_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 6

chapter 6

{"name": "Chapter 6", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-i-chapter-6", "summary": "Emma recalls her thirteenth year, when her father took her to the convent to live. She enjoyed the convent at first; she liked talking with the nuns and she enjoyed answering the difficult questions correctly. But she soon relinquished herself to the languid atmosphere of the convent and found herself admiring the beauty of the chapel rather than listening to the lessons. She gave herself over to romantic notions concerning the church and dreamed of the \"sick lamb\" and the metaphors of a \"betrothed spouse, heavenly lover, marriage everlasting,\" and she listened only to the romantic melancholy of the lamentations. There was an old maid who came to the convent and who would sing romantic ballads to the girls on the sly. Emma then read voraciously from tales of romance involving lonely meetings, secret encounters, gloomy forests, and troubles of the heart. She became enthusiastic over Sir Walter Scott and dreamed of living in some romantic palace where a cavalier with a white plume could come galloping up and rescue her. When her mother died, Emma had a lock of her dead mother's hair mounted and wrote her father that when she died she would like to be buried in the same grave. She gave her time to reading romantic, sentimental poetry and while enjoying the mysteries of the church, she rebelled against the discipline. When her father took her from the convent, she enjoyed managing the servants for a while, but soon tired of it and longed for the convent. When Charles appeared, she found it difficult to believe that the quietness and dullness of her romance was what she had read about in the novels.", "analysis": "The earliest chapters have been concerned with Emma only from an indirect view. Now Flaubert is ready to present his view or analysis of Emma. As pointed out earlier, this technique -- a delayed emergence of the main character -- serves to heighten the reader's interest in hearing about the main character. This chapter presents Emma as an incurable romantic, a person who lives in a dream world, in a world of fiction rather than in the real world. She is a dreamer and a sentimentalist. When young, she had read Paul and Virginia, a highly sentimental and romanticized view of life and love. This novel of idyllic love contributed to Emma's dreamy sentimentalism. The chapter then proceeds to show how a person already endowed with a strong degree of sentimentality was placed in a type of life in the convent which nourished her already excessive tendency toward this type of sentimentalism. In religion she searched for the unusual, the mystic, the dreamy. In the convent, she read stories of romance while being unable to see the real world. She concentrated her attention upon the beautiful and artistic rather than finding the basic elements of a natural life. Novels read on the sly only increased the value of the romance by being forbidden. Thus, left alone with her dreams, she developed into a dreamy girl who wanted all the elements of romantic fiction to come alive in her own life. She longs for old castles, for romantic lovers charging up to a balcony on a white horse, for moonlight meetings in far-away places. She feels the need of excitement and mystery, and cannot tolerate the normal life of everyday living. Thus, when Charles comes calling, she cannot understand why her life wasn't suddenly filled with passion, bliss and ecstasy. Another of Emma's characteristics is suggested in this chapter: Emma's constant need for a change. She at first enjoyed being out of the convent and at home managing the servants, but then grew rapidly tired of this and longed again for the convent. Thus throughout the novel, Emma will begin one project and drop it only to begin another, always in the constant search for something new and exciting."}

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.

Chapter 6

https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-i-chapter-6

Emma recalls her thirteenth year, when her father took her to the convent to live. She enjoyed the convent at first; she liked talking with the nuns and she enjoyed answering the difficult questions correctly. But she soon relinquished herself to the languid atmosphere of the convent and found herself admiring the beauty of the chapel rather than listening to the lessons. She gave herself over to romantic notions concerning the church and dreamed of the "sick lamb" and the metaphors of a "betrothed spouse, heavenly lover, marriage everlasting," and she listened only to the romantic melancholy of the lamentations. There was an old maid who came to the convent and who would sing romantic ballads to the girls on the sly. Emma then read voraciously from tales of romance involving lonely meetings, secret encounters, gloomy forests, and troubles of the heart. She became enthusiastic over Sir Walter Scott and dreamed of living in some romantic palace where a cavalier with a white plume could come galloping up and rescue her. When her mother died, Emma had a lock of her dead mother's hair mounted and wrote her father that when she died she would like to be buried in the same grave. She gave her time to reading romantic, sentimental poetry and while enjoying the mysteries of the church, she rebelled against the discipline. When her father took her from the convent, she enjoyed managing the servants for a while, but soon tired of it and longed for the convent. When Charles appeared, she found it difficult to believe that the quietness and dullness of her romance was what she had read about in the novels.

The earliest chapters have been concerned with Emma only from an indirect view. Now Flaubert is ready to present his view or analysis of Emma. As pointed out earlier, this technique -- a delayed emergence of the main character -- serves to heighten the reader's interest in hearing about the main character. This chapter presents Emma as an incurable romantic, a person who lives in a dream world, in a world of fiction rather than in the real world. She is a dreamer and a sentimentalist. When young, she had read Paul and Virginia, a highly sentimental and romanticized view of life and love. This novel of idyllic love contributed to Emma's dreamy sentimentalism. The chapter then proceeds to show how a person already endowed with a strong degree of sentimentality was placed in a type of life in the convent which nourished her already excessive tendency toward this type of sentimentalism. In religion she searched for the unusual, the mystic, the dreamy. In the convent, she read stories of romance while being unable to see the real world. She concentrated her attention upon the beautiful and artistic rather than finding the basic elements of a natural life. Novels read on the sly only increased the value of the romance by being forbidden. Thus, left alone with her dreams, she developed into a dreamy girl who wanted all the elements of romantic fiction to come alive in her own life. She longs for old castles, for romantic lovers charging up to a balcony on a white horse, for moonlight meetings in far-away places. She feels the need of excitement and mystery, and cannot tolerate the normal life of everyday living. Thus, when Charles comes calling, she cannot understand why her life wasn't suddenly filled with passion, bliss and ecstasy. Another of Emma's characteristics is suggested in this chapter: Emma's constant need for a change. She at first enjoyed being out of the convent and at home managing the servants, but then grew rapidly tired of this and longed again for the convent. Thus throughout the novel, Emma will begin one project and drop it only to begin another, always in the constant search for something new and exciting.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/07.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_5_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 7

chapter 7

{"name": "Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-i-chapter-7", "summary": "Emma wondered if the honeymoon was actually to be the finest part of her life. She wondered why she couldn't be standing in a Swiss chalet with a husband in a dashing outfit of velvet, soft boots, peaked hat, and so forth. As Charles' outward attraction for her increased, she began inwardly to detach herself from him. As she observed Charles, she noted that he simply trudged through every day. His talk was dull, he provoked no emotions in her, he had no desire to do or see anything, and he couldn't even explain a riding term in one of her novels. Ideally, she dreamed of a man who would introduce her to a multitude of activities and passions, who would inspire her to live to the fullest. And when she perceived that Charles was perfectly content simply to be with her, she hated him for his placid immobility and contentment. Charles, on the other hand, found no fault with his wife. She was an excellent manager and played the piano with skill. All her acts gave him pleasure, and in every way he was content with his life and good fortune. Whenever Mrs. Bovary visited, however, he was confounded by the coldness between his wife and mother. Emma resented the older woman's advice or interference, and the mother was jealous of her son's affection for his wife. Meanwhile, Emma continued to crave the exalted and passionate love which she sadly felt had been denied her. She criticized herself for ever having married and suffered from envy of the imagined happiness of the girls with whom she had gone to school. One September the Bovarys were invited to a ball at the chateau of the Marquis d'Andervilliers, whom Charles had treated. The Marquis was far above them in social rank but wanted to demonstrate his gratitude for the service Bovary had done him. Emma looked forward to this unique event with great eagerness.", "analysis": "Emma continues her dreaming of another life and another husband. She pictures to herself a fabulous life with another person and begins to detach herself from Charles. The contrast between her dreams and her life is brought out rather concisely in two paragraphs, the first describing Charles' commonplace banalities, his slow plodding ways, his lack of emotional stimulation and his contentment, whereas in her dreams, she sees a man sweeping her off her feet and introducing her to all the intense passions of life. Finally, to observe her dull husband being content with a snack, falling into bed, and snoring fills her with indescribable longings for another life. This chapter begins to depict the complete contrast between Emma and Charles. His plodding nature and his routine ardors and embraces destroyed all the excitement in life for Emma. She becomes increasingly irritated with his coarse ways and his dullness. This chapter marks the beginning of her life of waiting for something exciting to happen. Her entire life will be characterized by her unfilled longing and incessant waiting for some excitement to enter into it. Her disappointment prompted her first words to be spoken in the novel: \"O God, O God, why did I get married?\" Previous to this statement, we have heard about Emma and about her thoughts, but significantly, these are her first spoken words. The excitement that Emma has been waiting for comes in the form of an invitation to La Vaubyessard. This will soon become one of the high points of her life."}

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/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-i-chapter-7

Emma wondered if the honeymoon was actually to be the finest part of her life. She wondered why she couldn't be standing in a Swiss chalet with a husband in a dashing outfit of velvet, soft boots, peaked hat, and so forth. As Charles' outward attraction for her increased, she began inwardly to detach herself from him. As she observed Charles, she noted that he simply trudged through every day. His talk was dull, he provoked no emotions in her, he had no desire to do or see anything, and he couldn't even explain a riding term in one of her novels. Ideally, she dreamed of a man who would introduce her to a multitude of activities and passions, who would inspire her to live to the fullest. And when she perceived that Charles was perfectly content simply to be with her, she hated him for his placid immobility and contentment. Charles, on the other hand, found no fault with his wife. She was an excellent manager and played the piano with skill. All her acts gave him pleasure, and in every way he was content with his life and good fortune. Whenever Mrs. Bovary visited, however, he was confounded by the coldness between his wife and mother. Emma resented the older woman's advice or interference, and the mother was jealous of her son's affection for his wife. Meanwhile, Emma continued to crave the exalted and passionate love which she sadly felt had been denied her. She criticized herself for ever having married and suffered from envy of the imagined happiness of the girls with whom she had gone to school. One September the Bovarys were invited to a ball at the chateau of the Marquis d'Andervilliers, whom Charles had treated. The Marquis was far above them in social rank but wanted to demonstrate his gratitude for the service Bovary had done him. Emma looked forward to this unique event with great eagerness.

Emma continues her dreaming of another life and another husband. She pictures to herself a fabulous life with another person and begins to detach herself from Charles. The contrast between her dreams and her life is brought out rather concisely in two paragraphs, the first describing Charles' commonplace banalities, his slow plodding ways, his lack of emotional stimulation and his contentment, whereas in her dreams, she sees a man sweeping her off her feet and introducing her to all the intense passions of life. Finally, to observe her dull husband being content with a snack, falling into bed, and snoring fills her with indescribable longings for another life. This chapter begins to depict the complete contrast between Emma and Charles. His plodding nature and his routine ardors and embraces destroyed all the excitement in life for Emma. She becomes increasingly irritated with his coarse ways and his dullness. This chapter marks the beginning of her life of waiting for something exciting to happen. Her entire life will be characterized by her unfilled longing and incessant waiting for some excitement to enter into it. Her disappointment prompted her first words to be spoken in the novel: "O God, O God, why did I get married?" Previous to this statement, we have heard about Emma and about her thoughts, but significantly, these are her first spoken words. The excitement that Emma has been waiting for comes in the form of an invitation to La Vaubyessard. This will soon become one of the high points of her life.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/08.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_6_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 8

chapter 8

{"name": "Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-i-chapter-8", "summary": "The chateau was a building of stately proportions, situated on a large and prosperous estate. The many rooms were filled with expensive and artistic furnishings and decorations. The ball was attended by all the aristocracy and gentry of the surrounding area. Emma was overjoyed at the opportunity of being able to move freely in such noble company. During their stay at the chateau she constantly berated Bovary, whom she felt looked like a country buffoon and whose presence embarrassed her. Emma dressed and attempted to behave as if she too were a great lady and mingled with the other guests. All night she basked in the reflected glory of those around her. The ball and the people at it seemed to be transported from out of the novels and dreams she had long cherished. Emma was so ecstatic she never noticed that most of the guests ignored her. The high point of her evening came when a man known only as \"Vicomte\" danced with her. On the trip home Emma suffered from bitter disappointment that she, who was so obviously entitled to preferment, could not live this way all year round. In her disillusionment she saw Bovary as a clumsy, simple oaf. Back home her frustration caused her to be cross with him, and in a fit of pique she fired the maid, despite the woman's devotion and good service. Each day Emma attempted to recall the great events of the ball, but in time they became vague memories.", "analysis": "This chapter presents in reality all of the grand elegance that Emma had dreamed and read about. Here then are her dreams turning into reality. Everything that she dreamed of is here: the grand dinner, the magnificent ball, the elegant dances, the discussions of faraway people and even an old man who had slept with the queen, and a young lady carrying on an intrigue with a young man. And finally, Emma's being requested to dance with a Viscount testifies to her own superiority over her upbringing. This chapter focuses almost all of the attention on Emma. It is important here to see that Emma does possess the necessary qualities so as to blend in with an aristocratic world. Unlike Charles, who stands limply around for five hours watching a game he doesn't understand, Emma is moving graciously and rather charmingly amid this aristocratic society. Even though she does not attract people to her, she seems to blend in. Her invitation to dance with the Viscount and her ability to learn the dance attest to her acceptance. Thus, Emma's later degradation should be contrasted to the success she attains here, and by the comparison, Emma's later plight will be seen to be more pathetic. Note the cigar box that Charles found. Emma will later dawdle over this as a reminder of her experience at the ball and convince herself that it belonged to the Viscount. Returning to her own drab surroundings, Emma can barely tolerate the dull routine of everyone doing the same dull things. She therefore loses herself in her reveries about the ball."}

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/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-i-chapter-8

The chateau was a building of stately proportions, situated on a large and prosperous estate. The many rooms were filled with expensive and artistic furnishings and decorations. The ball was attended by all the aristocracy and gentry of the surrounding area. Emma was overjoyed at the opportunity of being able to move freely in such noble company. During their stay at the chateau she constantly berated Bovary, whom she felt looked like a country buffoon and whose presence embarrassed her. Emma dressed and attempted to behave as if she too were a great lady and mingled with the other guests. All night she basked in the reflected glory of those around her. The ball and the people at it seemed to be transported from out of the novels and dreams she had long cherished. Emma was so ecstatic she never noticed that most of the guests ignored her. The high point of her evening came when a man known only as "Vicomte" danced with her. On the trip home Emma suffered from bitter disappointment that she, who was so obviously entitled to preferment, could not live this way all year round. In her disillusionment she saw Bovary as a clumsy, simple oaf. Back home her frustration caused her to be cross with him, and in a fit of pique she fired the maid, despite the woman's devotion and good service. Each day Emma attempted to recall the great events of the ball, but in time they became vague memories.

This chapter presents in reality all of the grand elegance that Emma had dreamed and read about. Here then are her dreams turning into reality. Everything that she dreamed of is here: the grand dinner, the magnificent ball, the elegant dances, the discussions of faraway people and even an old man who had slept with the queen, and a young lady carrying on an intrigue with a young man. And finally, Emma's being requested to dance with a Viscount testifies to her own superiority over her upbringing. This chapter focuses almost all of the attention on Emma. It is important here to see that Emma does possess the necessary qualities so as to blend in with an aristocratic world. Unlike Charles, who stands limply around for five hours watching a game he doesn't understand, Emma is moving graciously and rather charmingly amid this aristocratic society. Even though she does not attract people to her, she seems to blend in. Her invitation to dance with the Viscount and her ability to learn the dance attest to her acceptance. Thus, Emma's later degradation should be contrasted to the success she attains here, and by the comparison, Emma's later plight will be seen to be more pathetic. Note the cigar box that Charles found. Emma will later dawdle over this as a reminder of her experience at the ball and convince herself that it belonged to the Viscount. Returning to her own drab surroundings, Emma can barely tolerate the dull routine of everyone doing the same dull things. She therefore loses herself in her reveries about the ball.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/part_2_chapters_1_to_2.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_8_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapters 1-2

chapters 1-2

{"name": "Chapters 1-2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-ii-chapters-12", "summary": "Yonville was a market town located in the center of a farming district, not far from Rouen. The main features of the surrounding region and of the town itself are described in some detail. Various inhabitants of Yonville, including Madame Lefrancois, the innkeeper, Hivert and Artemise, her servants, Binet, the tax collector, and Homais, the apothecary, make their first appearances in this chapter. Homais, with whom Bovary had corresponded before deciding to move to Yonville, was an outspoken and pretentious fellow of some education and status. He was always eager to impress people with his knowledge and sophistication, although in fact he did not possess much of either. The Bovarys and Felicite, their new maid, arrived in Yonville after a very tiring trip and an accident in which Emma lost her pet greyhound. She was in her usual irritable mood. Bovary and his wife dined at the inn. They were joined at the table by Homais and his boarder, Leon, a shy young man who was the town lawyer's clerk. During the meal Homais devoted most of his attention to Bovary, seeking to awe him by his extensive acquaintance with science and local affairs. Meanwhile, Emma and Leon fell into conversation. He shared many of her romanticized notions and was also an avid reader of sentimental novels. An immediate rapport sprang up between them. Their talk consisted of platitudes and conventionalities, but they each interpreted them as sensitive and profound observations. Later on, the Bovarys took possession of their new house. Emma recalled the other places in which she had lived and been unhappy. She hoped that the future would bring an improvement in her life.", "analysis": "Flaubert's masterful description and rendition of the town is a masterpiece of realistic writing. It captures all of the mediocrity of a small town. And what Flaubert never says directly, but depicts through his descriptions is that this town is just about the same as was Tostes. Yonville is just as monotonous, routine, and boring as was Tostes. Here, nothing has changed in years and nothing will change. So suddenly, we realize that this town will depress Emma as much as did Tostes. We meet the chemist Homais for the first time. He will develop into a stereotype. It will suffice here to begin to note certain characteristics which make up the stereotype. 1) He is the man who professes to keep up with the times. 2) He feels it is his duty to ridicule the church, therefore aligning himself with the advanced thinkers of the world. 3) He has accumulated many facts which he enjoys reciting, but the reader should note that his facts are of a trivial nature. Emma's first meeting with Leon is an exciting event for her. For the first time in her life, she has met a person who shares the same interest in literature, music, and related subjects. She immediately feels that they are kindred spirits and an immediate rapport sprang up between them. But the reader should note that their talk consisted of platitudes and conventionalities, but they each interpreted them as sensitive and profound observations."}

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. 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.

Chapters 1-2

https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-ii-chapters-12

Yonville was a market town located in the center of a farming district, not far from Rouen. The main features of the surrounding region and of the town itself are described in some detail. Various inhabitants of Yonville, including Madame Lefrancois, the innkeeper, Hivert and Artemise, her servants, Binet, the tax collector, and Homais, the apothecary, make their first appearances in this chapter. Homais, with whom Bovary had corresponded before deciding to move to Yonville, was an outspoken and pretentious fellow of some education and status. He was always eager to impress people with his knowledge and sophistication, although in fact he did not possess much of either. The Bovarys and Felicite, their new maid, arrived in Yonville after a very tiring trip and an accident in which Emma lost her pet greyhound. She was in her usual irritable mood. Bovary and his wife dined at the inn. They were joined at the table by Homais and his boarder, Leon, a shy young man who was the town lawyer's clerk. During the meal Homais devoted most of his attention to Bovary, seeking to awe him by his extensive acquaintance with science and local affairs. Meanwhile, Emma and Leon fell into conversation. He shared many of her romanticized notions and was also an avid reader of sentimental novels. An immediate rapport sprang up between them. Their talk consisted of platitudes and conventionalities, but they each interpreted them as sensitive and profound observations. Later on, the Bovarys took possession of their new house. Emma recalled the other places in which she had lived and been unhappy. She hoped that the future would bring an improvement in her life.

Flaubert's masterful description and rendition of the town is a masterpiece of realistic writing. It captures all of the mediocrity of a small town. And what Flaubert never says directly, but depicts through his descriptions is that this town is just about the same as was Tostes. Yonville is just as monotonous, routine, and boring as was Tostes. Here, nothing has changed in years and nothing will change. So suddenly, we realize that this town will depress Emma as much as did Tostes. We meet the chemist Homais for the first time. He will develop into a stereotype. It will suffice here to begin to note certain characteristics which make up the stereotype. 1) He is the man who professes to keep up with the times. 2) He feels it is his duty to ridicule the church, therefore aligning himself with the advanced thinkers of the world. 3) He has accumulated many facts which he enjoys reciting, but the reader should note that his facts are of a trivial nature. Emma's first meeting with Leon is an exciting event for her. For the first time in her life, she has met a person who shares the same interest in literature, music, and related subjects. She immediately feels that they are kindred spirits and an immediate rapport sprang up between them. But the reader should note that their talk consisted of platitudes and conventionalities, but they each interpreted them as sensitive and profound observations.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/12.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_9_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 3

chapter 3

{"name": "Chapter 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-ii-chapter-3", "summary": "All the next day Leon thought about Emma, for their meeting had been a very special event to him. This was the first time that the bashful youth had ever spoken to a lady at such length, and he was surprised at his own eloquence. In the days that followed, Homais was of great assistance to Bovary in establishing himself, although it must be said that the druggist's motives were partly selfish. Charles was a bit gloomy, because his medical practice was slow in starting and he had financial worries. The cost of moving had been high, he had lost money on the sale of the house at Tostes, and there was now a child on the way. However, the thought of having a \"baby Emma\" to love also, and to watch grow, was a source of great joy to him. Emma had originally been surprised by her pregnancy but was now accustomed to the idea. She was eager to have the child, although all the preparations made her impatient since they could not afford the kind of layette she insisted was necessary. She hoped the baby would be a boy, for she felt that only a man could have the freedom and strength to overcome the constraints that had always so frustrated her. The child was born, and after much discussion the name of \"Berthe\" was selected. There was a spirited christening party, and Bovary's parents visited Yonville for a month. One day Emma decided to visit the baby at the home of its wet nurse. She was still weak after her confinement and was beginning to feel faint, when she encountered Leon. She asked him to accompany her. Leon consented and by nightfall, rumors had spread through the town that Madame Bovary was compromising herself. After seeing the child, Madame Bovary was pestered with lots of trivial requests from the nurse. She quickly consented to give the woman more supplies and even some brandy for the woman's husband. Then she and Leon took a long stroll along the river. Even though they didn't say very much to each other, both were aware of a strange bliss and a deeper communication. After Leon left her, he thought how radiantly she stood out, especially amid all the banalities of Yonville.", "analysis": "When Emma first learned she was pregnant, she thought that this could be a new experience for her, could fill her empty life with excitement, especially if it were a boy. But when the girl was born, she soon lost interest in it. Again this shows Emma's erratic nature, her inability to maintain an interest in any aspect of life. Her reaction differs significantly with Charles' and the difference emphasizes the growing breach between them. Charles thinks that with the birth of the child, he will have been through the entire range of human experience. Emma's indiscretion in asking Leon to accompany her, foreshadows her later promiscuities. We have seen that Emma possesses an impetuous nature, and this quality will also contribute to her series of indiscretions. Emma's encounter with the nurse foreshadows her handlings with the various tradesmen which will later take her so deeply in debt. It seems that Emma would rather give in than discuss the needs of the nurse. Later, her financial troubles are a result of her impetuousness and her failure to consider her needs."}

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/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-ii-chapter-3

All the next day Leon thought about Emma, for their meeting had been a very special event to him. This was the first time that the bashful youth had ever spoken to a lady at such length, and he was surprised at his own eloquence. In the days that followed, Homais was of great assistance to Bovary in establishing himself, although it must be said that the druggist's motives were partly selfish. Charles was a bit gloomy, because his medical practice was slow in starting and he had financial worries. The cost of moving had been high, he had lost money on the sale of the house at Tostes, and there was now a child on the way. However, the thought of having a "baby Emma" to love also, and to watch grow, was a source of great joy to him. Emma had originally been surprised by her pregnancy but was now accustomed to the idea. She was eager to have the child, although all the preparations made her impatient since they could not afford the kind of layette she insisted was necessary. She hoped the baby would be a boy, for she felt that only a man could have the freedom and strength to overcome the constraints that had always so frustrated her. The child was born, and after much discussion the name of "Berthe" was selected. There was a spirited christening party, and Bovary's parents visited Yonville for a month. One day Emma decided to visit the baby at the home of its wet nurse. She was still weak after her confinement and was beginning to feel faint, when she encountered Leon. She asked him to accompany her. Leon consented and by nightfall, rumors had spread through the town that Madame Bovary was compromising herself. After seeing the child, Madame Bovary was pestered with lots of trivial requests from the nurse. She quickly consented to give the woman more supplies and even some brandy for the woman's husband. Then she and Leon took a long stroll along the river. Even though they didn't say very much to each other, both were aware of a strange bliss and a deeper communication. After Leon left her, he thought how radiantly she stood out, especially amid all the banalities of Yonville.

When Emma first learned she was pregnant, she thought that this could be a new experience for her, could fill her empty life with excitement, especially if it were a boy. But when the girl was born, she soon lost interest in it. Again this shows Emma's erratic nature, her inability to maintain an interest in any aspect of life. Her reaction differs significantly with Charles' and the difference emphasizes the growing breach between them. Charles thinks that with the birth of the child, he will have been through the entire range of human experience. Emma's indiscretion in asking Leon to accompany her, foreshadows her later promiscuities. We have seen that Emma possesses an impetuous nature, and this quality will also contribute to her series of indiscretions. Emma's encounter with the nurse foreshadows her handlings with the various tradesmen which will later take her so deeply in debt. It seems that Emma would rather give in than discuss the needs of the nurse. Later, her financial troubles are a result of her impetuousness and her failure to consider her needs.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/16.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_12_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 7

chapter 7

{"name": "Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-ii-chapter-7", "summary": "After Leon had gone, Emma began a period of secret mourning. She drifted about aimlessly and was often melancholy. She saw Leon in her imagination as the hero of all her dreams and remembered their walks and conversations. She reproached herself for not having responded to his love, and he became the center of all her thoughts. In her misery, she began again the strange and unpredictable behavior that had marked her in Tostes. Her moods constantly changed, and she was often giddy and nervous. One day Rodolphe Boulanger, a handsome and wealthy landowner, brought one of his servants to be treated by Bovary. While there he saw Emma and was immediately attracted by her good looks and ladylike bearing. Boulanger was a suave bachelor, both coarse and shrewd. At once his thoughts turned to Emma's seduction, and he began to lay his plans.", "analysis": "Emma's long melancholy and regret over not having seized her opportunity with Leon actually cause her to become sick. She then goes into one of her spending sprees, justifying her spending by feeling she has sacrificed so much by being faithful to Charles. These are the same types of spending sprees which will later lead her into heavy debts. Note again Emma's erratic actions. She would take something up, leave it, go to something else only to leave it. It seems that nothing fulfills her. Flaubert's description of Emma's actions and looks implies that Emma fits ironically into the tradition of the courtly love. The \"vaporish airs,\" the fact that she was \"pale all over, white as a sheet,\" and given to spells of dizziness are all characteristics of the courtly love tradition or are signs of disappointed or unfulfilled love. Emma is, after all, essentially middle-class, but she is also more than this. In a sense, she raises herself above the town because unlike others, she is vaguely aware that there are emotions of a higher and purer nature than those with which she finds herself surrounded. This realization does raise Emma in our estimation although this is also the ultimate cause of her tragedy. Note that Rodolphe is able to see through Emma immediately. He sees her boredom, recognizes that she dislikes her husband and her present life, and realizes that she is \"gasping for love\" and is ready for a love affair. What we know is that this is true, but partly because she regrets not having an affair with Leon."}

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/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-ii-chapter-7

After Leon had gone, Emma began a period of secret mourning. She drifted about aimlessly and was often melancholy. She saw Leon in her imagination as the hero of all her dreams and remembered their walks and conversations. She reproached herself for not having responded to his love, and he became the center of all her thoughts. In her misery, she began again the strange and unpredictable behavior that had marked her in Tostes. Her moods constantly changed, and she was often giddy and nervous. One day Rodolphe Boulanger, a handsome and wealthy landowner, brought one of his servants to be treated by Bovary. While there he saw Emma and was immediately attracted by her good looks and ladylike bearing. Boulanger was a suave bachelor, both coarse and shrewd. At once his thoughts turned to Emma's seduction, and he began to lay his plans.

Emma's long melancholy and regret over not having seized her opportunity with Leon actually cause her to become sick. She then goes into one of her spending sprees, justifying her spending by feeling she has sacrificed so much by being faithful to Charles. These are the same types of spending sprees which will later lead her into heavy debts. Note again Emma's erratic actions. She would take something up, leave it, go to something else only to leave it. It seems that nothing fulfills her. Flaubert's description of Emma's actions and looks implies that Emma fits ironically into the tradition of the courtly love. The "vaporish airs," the fact that she was "pale all over, white as a sheet," and given to spells of dizziness are all characteristics of the courtly love tradition or are signs of disappointed or unfulfilled love. Emma is, after all, essentially middle-class, but she is also more than this. In a sense, she raises herself above the town because unlike others, she is vaguely aware that there are emotions of a higher and purer nature than those with which she finds herself surrounded. This realization does raise Emma in our estimation although this is also the ultimate cause of her tragedy. Note that Rodolphe is able to see through Emma immediately. He sees her boredom, recognizes that she dislikes her husband and her present life, and realizes that she is "gasping for love" and is ready for a love affair. What we know is that this is true, but partly because she regrets not having an affair with Leon.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/17.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_13_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapter 8

chapter 8

{"name": "Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-ii-chapter-8", "summary": "At the time of this story, the annual Agricultural Show for the Prefecture of the Seine-Inferieure was held at Yonville. Everyone looked forward to the fair with great enthusiasm; when the long-awaited day finally arrived, Yonville was crowded with visitors from all the surrounding farms and towns. There were exhibits and contests of many kinds, and everything had a carnival aspect. The most important event of the day was the speech and presentation of awards by a representative of the Prefect. According to his carefully calculated plan, Rodolphe took advantage of the excitement of the day to renew his acquaintance with Emma. They went walking together and spoke about a variety of things. Rodolphe took every opportunity to drop some hint about his love for Emma. He gradually leads her toward the city hall so that they can be alone. Meanwhile the representative from the Prefect arrived, and even though the people expected the Prefect himself, they were still honored by this man. However, in trying to pay homage to him, the battalion of men confused their orders and everything ended in confusion. While he spoke about the government, Rodolphe begins to hint to Emma his affections for her. And while the speech is going on in the background about morality and government, Rodolphe begins to declare his love for Emma and to insist that his feelings are nobler than common morality. He continues to declare his love for her in high-sounding language while the representative of the Prefect awards prizes to various people. After the awarding of the prices, Emma separates from Rodolphe and does not see him again until that night at the banquet and later at the fireworks. She was complimented by his attention but had constantly acted as she thought proper for a respectable, married woman. As the fireworks were being set off, Emma watched Rodolphe. She was not even aware that the fireworks had gotten wet and wouldn't go off. Later, however, Homais wrote a glowing account of the entire day's activities.", "analysis": "The inexperienced reader will often overlook the greatness of this particular chapter. It is often referred to when the subject of Flaubert's greatness is being discussed. It will profit the reader to reread the chapter and observe many of the following factors: the number of things that are contrasted -- the use of subtle irony, especially in passages that seem to be simply description; the elaborately described show, the gold medal won by the old peasant woman, and the subtle but damning description of the pompous dignitaries; and the use of foreshadowing, especially in the way in which Emma is able to see unknowingly her whole pathetic life unfold before her in symbolic events. Use of Contrast and Description: There are so many masterfully descriptive passages, it will suffice to point out only one. In the first part of the chapter, Flaubert is describing all the animals that are gathered together for the show. Most of the details of this description suggest symbolically that this animal world is the same world in which the action of the entire novel is being played. The animals are described in the same manner in which people will later be described. For example, later in the chapter, when Flaubert is describing the feast, the same type of description is used for both the animals and the people. They were both herded into a small place with noses together, sweating and stuffing themselves. One could even maintain that the animals are described in terms of people and the people are described in terms of animals, emphasizing the nature of the people that Flaubert is dealing with. Use of Irony: The speech of the representative of the Prefect is filled with cliches and pompous platitudes. The speaker says only what every other speaker has been saying for years, yet his speech is highly praised. Rodolphe's speech to Emma, delivered against the background of the general prizes being awarded, is a masterpiece of irony. First, we hear about the old peasant woman who is winning a prize for fifty-four years of faithful service and fidelity as a servant. At the same time, Emma is planning on being unfaithful and on beginning a love affair with Rodolphe, whom we know can never be faithful to any person very long. It is a further stroke of irony that his false speeches of passion such as \"I stayed with you, because I couldn't tear myself away\" are spoken during the awarding of the first prize in manure. Subtly speaking, Rodolphe's speech is just so much manure, but Emma is not capable of recognizing it. Foreshadowing: In the discussion of Lheureux's being the cause of the downfall of a certain man, we are warned that Emma will herself get into trouble because of her dealings with this man. He is even described here as a wheedling, grovelling creature. The tremendous waste of human energy in preparing for the show indicates how the energies of Emma are wasted throughout the entire novel. Emma's view of the ancient Hirondelle as it approaches the town, foreshadows her degradation and involvement with Leon later in the novel, as this coach will be instrumental in her love affair. Homais' role in the entire pageant and his essay sent to the paper afterwards reaches the height of the comic absurd. First of all, from all of the description, the entire day was a failure if not a fiasco. The dignitary was late and when he finally arrived he was only a representative of the Prefect; the presentation of arms was sloppy, confused, and ridiculous; the speeches were dull; there were not enough seats; the feast was long and noisy and badly served and too crowded; the fireworks were damp and would not go off, and it rained during the proceedings. But Homais' account of the day written for the newspaper was so frankly false that his exaggerations seem the height of the comic. And ironically speaking, an earlier description of Homais says that he \"had the right form of words for every conceivable occasion.\""}

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

https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-ii-chapter-8

At the time of this story, the annual Agricultural Show for the Prefecture of the Seine-Inferieure was held at Yonville. Everyone looked forward to the fair with great enthusiasm; when the long-awaited day finally arrived, Yonville was crowded with visitors from all the surrounding farms and towns. There were exhibits and contests of many kinds, and everything had a carnival aspect. The most important event of the day was the speech and presentation of awards by a representative of the Prefect. According to his carefully calculated plan, Rodolphe took advantage of the excitement of the day to renew his acquaintance with Emma. They went walking together and spoke about a variety of things. Rodolphe took every opportunity to drop some hint about his love for Emma. He gradually leads her toward the city hall so that they can be alone. Meanwhile the representative from the Prefect arrived, and even though the people expected the Prefect himself, they were still honored by this man. However, in trying to pay homage to him, the battalion of men confused their orders and everything ended in confusion. While he spoke about the government, Rodolphe begins to hint to Emma his affections for her. And while the speech is going on in the background about morality and government, Rodolphe begins to declare his love for Emma and to insist that his feelings are nobler than common morality. He continues to declare his love for her in high-sounding language while the representative of the Prefect awards prizes to various people. After the awarding of the prices, Emma separates from Rodolphe and does not see him again until that night at the banquet and later at the fireworks. She was complimented by his attention but had constantly acted as she thought proper for a respectable, married woman. As the fireworks were being set off, Emma watched Rodolphe. She was not even aware that the fireworks had gotten wet and wouldn't go off. Later, however, Homais wrote a glowing account of the entire day's activities.

The inexperienced reader will often overlook the greatness of this particular chapter. It is often referred to when the subject of Flaubert's greatness is being discussed. It will profit the reader to reread the chapter and observe many of the following factors: the number of things that are contrasted -- the use of subtle irony, especially in passages that seem to be simply description; the elaborately described show, the gold medal won by the old peasant woman, and the subtle but damning description of the pompous dignitaries; and the use of foreshadowing, especially in the way in which Emma is able to see unknowingly her whole pathetic life unfold before her in symbolic events. Use of Contrast and Description: There are so many masterfully descriptive passages, it will suffice to point out only one. In the first part of the chapter, Flaubert is describing all the animals that are gathered together for the show. Most of the details of this description suggest symbolically that this animal world is the same world in which the action of the entire novel is being played. The animals are described in the same manner in which people will later be described. For example, later in the chapter, when Flaubert is describing the feast, the same type of description is used for both the animals and the people. They were both herded into a small place with noses together, sweating and stuffing themselves. One could even maintain that the animals are described in terms of people and the people are described in terms of animals, emphasizing the nature of the people that Flaubert is dealing with. Use of Irony: The speech of the representative of the Prefect is filled with cliches and pompous platitudes. The speaker says only what every other speaker has been saying for years, yet his speech is highly praised. Rodolphe's speech to Emma, delivered against the background of the general prizes being awarded, is a masterpiece of irony. First, we hear about the old peasant woman who is winning a prize for fifty-four years of faithful service and fidelity as a servant. At the same time, Emma is planning on being unfaithful and on beginning a love affair with Rodolphe, whom we know can never be faithful to any person very long. It is a further stroke of irony that his false speeches of passion such as "I stayed with you, because I couldn't tear myself away" are spoken during the awarding of the first prize in manure. Subtly speaking, Rodolphe's speech is just so much manure, but Emma is not capable of recognizing it. Foreshadowing: In the discussion of Lheureux's being the cause of the downfall of a certain man, we are warned that Emma will herself get into trouble because of her dealings with this man. He is even described here as a wheedling, grovelling creature. The tremendous waste of human energy in preparing for the show indicates how the energies of Emma are wasted throughout the entire novel. Emma's view of the ancient Hirondelle as it approaches the town, foreshadows her degradation and involvement with Leon later in the novel, as this coach will be instrumental in her love affair. Homais' role in the entire pageant and his essay sent to the paper afterwards reaches the height of the comic absurd. First of all, from all of the description, the entire day was a failure if not a fiasco. The dignitary was late and when he finally arrived he was only a representative of the Prefect; the presentation of arms was sloppy, confused, and ridiculous; the speeches were dull; there were not enough seats; the feast was long and noisy and badly served and too crowded; the fireworks were damp and would not go off, and it rained during the proceedings. But Homais' account of the day written for the newspaper was so frankly false that his exaggerations seem the height of the comic. And ironically speaking, an earlier description of Homais says that he "had the right form of words for every conceivable occasion."

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/part_2_chapters_14_to_15.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_17_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 2.chapters 14-15

chapters 14-15

{"name": "Chapters 14-15", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-ii-chapters-1415", "summary": "In addition to his concern about Emma, Charles was also bothered by financial worries. The illness had been very expensive, and other bills were piling up. Moreover, Lheureux suddenly presented him with a statement of Emma's debts. Not knowing what else to do, Bovary borrowed money from Lheureux and signed several notes at a high rate of interest. All through the winter months Emma's convalescence continued. During a crisis in her illness, Emma's religious sentiments had reawakened. Now she was very devout and spent much of her time reading religious books or conversing with the priest. By spring Emma was relatively strong again and returned to her household duties. Her religious feelings remained firm, and everyone was surprised by her new generosity, spirituality, and stern principles. One day at Homais' suggestion, Bovary decided to take Emma to the theater at Rouen. He hoped that such an outing would be good for her health. Emma was not eager to go, but Bovary was so persistent that she agreed. On the day of the trip they excitedly left for the city. Emma was embarrassed and upset by Charles' behavior and appearance all that afternoon. She wanted very much to seem a sophisticated, cosmopolitan lady, and she felt that he was just a country bumpkin. She was tense and self-conscious wherever they went. Despite this, however, Emma enjoyed the opera, Lucie de Lammermoor, very much. She found that the story reminded her of events in her own life. During the intermission they were both surprised to encounter Leon, who now lived and worked in Rouen. The three went to a cafe together, where Bovary and Leon talked at length about Yonville, their mutual friends, and old times. Leon also told them a little about his present position and his experiences at the university. Emma was impressed by Leon's suave, citified manners and dress. When they discussed the opera they had just left, Leon at first ridiculed it until he learned that perhaps Emma could stay over to see the second part again. He then praised the opera so highly that Charles suggested that Emma stay while he return to his practice. In any case, before they separated, the Bovarys and Leon arranged to meet again the next day.", "analysis": "After Emma's recovery from her illness, she falls back into the old, established, neurotic pattern of taking up something only to drop it for something else. She gave herself so completely to religion that even the cure thought she went too far. Then she began charity work even though her own household needed attention. Once at the opera, Emma becomes immersed in the romantic world on the stage. She begins to identify with the heroine and she is entranced with the tenor. Here Flaubert's art is very subtle. The objective description of the artist says little, but implies that the artist is false. Like Emma, he misrepresents art. He uses tricks to cover up for his lack of art. There is \"something of the hair dresser and the toreador\" about him. Thus, Emma is lost in this false and sentimental world of cheap art. The scene at the opera prepares the reader and also Emma for the reintroduction of Leon. The romantic elements of the opera provide an apt meeting place to rekindle their attraction to each other."}

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. 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

Chapters 14-15

https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-ii-chapters-1415

In addition to his concern about Emma, Charles was also bothered by financial worries. The illness had been very expensive, and other bills were piling up. Moreover, Lheureux suddenly presented him with a statement of Emma's debts. Not knowing what else to do, Bovary borrowed money from Lheureux and signed several notes at a high rate of interest. All through the winter months Emma's convalescence continued. During a crisis in her illness, Emma's religious sentiments had reawakened. Now she was very devout and spent much of her time reading religious books or conversing with the priest. By spring Emma was relatively strong again and returned to her household duties. Her religious feelings remained firm, and everyone was surprised by her new generosity, spirituality, and stern principles. One day at Homais' suggestion, Bovary decided to take Emma to the theater at Rouen. He hoped that such an outing would be good for her health. Emma was not eager to go, but Bovary was so persistent that she agreed. On the day of the trip they excitedly left for the city. Emma was embarrassed and upset by Charles' behavior and appearance all that afternoon. She wanted very much to seem a sophisticated, cosmopolitan lady, and she felt that he was just a country bumpkin. She was tense and self-conscious wherever they went. Despite this, however, Emma enjoyed the opera, Lucie de Lammermoor, very much. She found that the story reminded her of events in her own life. During the intermission they were both surprised to encounter Leon, who now lived and worked in Rouen. The three went to a cafe together, where Bovary and Leon talked at length about Yonville, their mutual friends, and old times. Leon also told them a little about his present position and his experiences at the university. Emma was impressed by Leon's suave, citified manners and dress. When they discussed the opera they had just left, Leon at first ridiculed it until he learned that perhaps Emma could stay over to see the second part again. He then praised the opera so highly that Charles suggested that Emma stay while he return to his practice. In any case, before they separated, the Bovarys and Leon arranged to meet again the next day.

After Emma's recovery from her illness, she falls back into the old, established, neurotic pattern of taking up something only to drop it for something else. She gave herself so completely to religion that even the cure thought she went too far. Then she began charity work even though her own household needed attention. Once at the opera, Emma becomes immersed in the romantic world on the stage. She begins to identify with the heroine and she is entranced with the tenor. Here Flaubert's art is very subtle. The objective description of the artist says little, but implies that the artist is false. Like Emma, he misrepresents art. He uses tricks to cover up for his lack of art. There is "something of the hair dresser and the toreador" about him. Thus, Emma is lost in this false and sentimental world of cheap art. The scene at the opera prepares the reader and also Emma for the reintroduction of Leon. The romantic elements of the opera provide an apt meeting place to rekindle their attraction to each other.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/25.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_18_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 1

chapter 1

{"name": "Chapter 1", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-iii-chapter-1", "summary": "While attending law school in Paris, Leon was a model student. But he did experience a new way of life even though he remained quiet and respectable. And now that he has returned to Rouen, he has brought with him many of the manners and sophistication that he learned in Paris. He dressed and acted in the Parisian style and felt especially self-confident in Rouen, where he considered himself to be a sophisticate among the local provincials. At first in Paris he had often thought about Emma, but gradually she became a blurred memory. Now his old feelings for her were reawakened. He visited Emma at her hotel the next day while Bovary was out. She and Leon were pleased by this opportunity to see each other in private, and they held an animated conversation for several hours. Their old intimacy was renewed, although both withheld several personal details of their recent experiences. Emma and Leon recalled their sad parting in Yonville and the times they had spent together there and discussed with a new frankness their mutual affection. Before leaving, Leon kissed Emma, and they arranged to have a secret meeting at the cathedral the next day. In the morning, Leon arrived punctually at the place of the rendezvous. Emma was late and tried at first to avoid him, for she hoped to prevent herself from falling in love with him again. She tried to pray but her mind was not on it. Then she readily accepted an invitation from the beadle of the church to see the various parts of the cathedral. Leon suffered the sightseeing as long as possible and then pulled Emma away from the church and into a carriage he had sent for. The carriage driver could not understand why two people would want to ride aimlessly about the countryside on such a pretty day with all the curtains pulled. Every time he made an attempt to stop, he was severely reprimanded by Leon. They were together in the carriage so long that Emma missed the Hirondelle that was to take her back to Yonville. She had to hire a special hack to catch the Hirondelle before it reached Yonville.", "analysis": "Chapter 1 presents Leon's background so as to show how he has changed during the interim. He is no longer so retiring and bashful. Paris has given him a sense of self-assurance which will allow him now to approach Madame Bovary. But we should also note that even though both he and Emma have changed, their talk is still filled with commonplace romantic cliches and platitudes. Flaubert's description of the church where Leon is to meet Emma is a masterpiece of realistic description and subtle suggestion. Flaubert describes the church in terms of a lady's boudoir where the church is waiting to \"gather the confession of her love.\" These descriptions sum up everything about Emma's own religion -- a religion which Emma sees only in her own way. Thus, after Emma enters, she immediately attempts to pray, but her thoughts are not on religion but instead on herself and her relationship with Leon. Throughout the entire scene, it is ironic that both Emma and Leon are seething with a burning passion while the slow, bungling guide shows them through the cold, ancient church. Their view of the huge, magnificent church should be contrasted with the final scene, that of Emma and Leon riding in a small closed carriage while consummating their love. The carriage is even described as being \"sealed tighter than a tomb,\" and if the image is extended, this is the beginning of Emma's last fated episode which will lead to her suicide."}

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/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-iii-chapter-1

While attending law school in Paris, Leon was a model student. But he did experience a new way of life even though he remained quiet and respectable. And now that he has returned to Rouen, he has brought with him many of the manners and sophistication that he learned in Paris. He dressed and acted in the Parisian style and felt especially self-confident in Rouen, where he considered himself to be a sophisticate among the local provincials. At first in Paris he had often thought about Emma, but gradually she became a blurred memory. Now his old feelings for her were reawakened. He visited Emma at her hotel the next day while Bovary was out. She and Leon were pleased by this opportunity to see each other in private, and they held an animated conversation for several hours. Their old intimacy was renewed, although both withheld several personal details of their recent experiences. Emma and Leon recalled their sad parting in Yonville and the times they had spent together there and discussed with a new frankness their mutual affection. Before leaving, Leon kissed Emma, and they arranged to have a secret meeting at the cathedral the next day. In the morning, Leon arrived punctually at the place of the rendezvous. Emma was late and tried at first to avoid him, for she hoped to prevent herself from falling in love with him again. She tried to pray but her mind was not on it. Then she readily accepted an invitation from the beadle of the church to see the various parts of the cathedral. Leon suffered the sightseeing as long as possible and then pulled Emma away from the church and into a carriage he had sent for. The carriage driver could not understand why two people would want to ride aimlessly about the countryside on such a pretty day with all the curtains pulled. Every time he made an attempt to stop, he was severely reprimanded by Leon. They were together in the carriage so long that Emma missed the Hirondelle that was to take her back to Yonville. She had to hire a special hack to catch the Hirondelle before it reached Yonville.

Chapter 1 presents Leon's background so as to show how he has changed during the interim. He is no longer so retiring and bashful. Paris has given him a sense of self-assurance which will allow him now to approach Madame Bovary. But we should also note that even though both he and Emma have changed, their talk is still filled with commonplace romantic cliches and platitudes. Flaubert's description of the church where Leon is to meet Emma is a masterpiece of realistic description and subtle suggestion. Flaubert describes the church in terms of a lady's boudoir where the church is waiting to "gather the confession of her love." These descriptions sum up everything about Emma's own religion -- a religion which Emma sees only in her own way. Thus, after Emma enters, she immediately attempts to pray, but her thoughts are not on religion but instead on herself and her relationship with Leon. Throughout the entire scene, it is ironic that both Emma and Leon are seething with a burning passion while the slow, bungling guide shows them through the cold, ancient church. Their view of the huge, magnificent church should be contrasted with the final scene, that of Emma and Leon riding in a small closed carriage while consummating their love. The carriage is even described as being "sealed tighter than a tomb," and if the image is extended, this is the beginning of Emma's last fated episode which will lead to her suicide.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/part_3_chapters_2_to_4.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_19_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapters 2-4

chapters 2-4

{"name": "Chapters 2-4", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-iii-chapters-24", "summary": "On her return to Yonville, Emma learned that Bovary's father had died. Charles was very upset, particularly because he had not seen the man in a long time. Emma felt no sorrow but made the usual sympathetic gestures, which her husband misunderstood and appreciated very much. After a while, Mrs. Bovary came to stay with them. Emma was polite and attentive but was annoyed because the necessity for being kind to the mourners distracted her from thoughts of Leon. At about this time Lheureux made another appearance and presented Emma with her unpaid bills. He also managed to sell her some more high-priced merchandise. When Emma expressed a worry about managing to pay, he suggested that she get a power of attorney from Bovary. That way, he said, she would not have to bother her husband with \"petty\" financial matters and could find a convenient method to settle her debts. Emma convinced Bovary of the wisdom of this scheme without too much trouble, since he had no idea of the true amount of their debts. Emma even induced him to use the services of Leon, instead of the local attorney, for drawing up the papers, and Bovary trustingly arranged to send her alone to Rouen to take care of this business. Emma spent the next three days in Rouen with Leon. He rented an expensive hotel room for the occasion, and this short period was like a honeymoon for them. They went to some of the best restaurants and places of entertainment and spent most of their time in lovemaking and romantic pursuits. Leon became completely involved in his affair with Emma; he neglected his work and saw little of his friends. The arrival of her letters became a major event in his life, and he even paid a few visits to Yonville, either in secret or on various false pretexts, to see her. Emma, meanwhile, was getting even more deeply enmeshed in financial obligations to Lheureux. In order to see Leon more often, she began to show a renewed interest in the piano, and soon got Bovary to arrange for her to take a weekly lesson with a teacher in Rouen.", "analysis": "Before Emma can continue with her affair with Leon, she is interrupted by the death of her father-in-law. Then she must think of some plan whereby she can get back to Rouen and Leon. Monsieur Lheureux gives her the pretext. Knowing how easily he can convince Emma to buy things from him, he tells her to get Charles' power of attorney. His plan is to eventually foreclose on everything and thereby make a large profit. But his suggestions offer to Emma a pretext for going to Rouen to consult with Leon. So she convinces Charles that she should handle everything. The very short Chapter 3 covers the three days Emma spent with Leon in Rouen. The three days were described as \"a real honeymoon.\" But the readers should remember that this is the third one. The episode is described in romantic terms of bliss and joy. For these few days, the image of beauty and innocence was restored to Emma, but the scene ends on an uglier note. Amid her renewed joys, she is reminded of her sordid affair with Rodolphe by hearing the boatman relate how Rodolphe had taken the same ride last week with some other lady. The short fourth chapter shows Emma and Leon continuing in their plans to make their meetings definite and to meet at least once a week. This of course means that Emma will have to go deeper in debt."}

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.

Chapters 2-4

https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-iii-chapters-24

On her return to Yonville, Emma learned that Bovary's father had died. Charles was very upset, particularly because he had not seen the man in a long time. Emma felt no sorrow but made the usual sympathetic gestures, which her husband misunderstood and appreciated very much. After a while, Mrs. Bovary came to stay with them. Emma was polite and attentive but was annoyed because the necessity for being kind to the mourners distracted her from thoughts of Leon. At about this time Lheureux made another appearance and presented Emma with her unpaid bills. He also managed to sell her some more high-priced merchandise. When Emma expressed a worry about managing to pay, he suggested that she get a power of attorney from Bovary. That way, he said, she would not have to bother her husband with "petty" financial matters and could find a convenient method to settle her debts. Emma convinced Bovary of the wisdom of this scheme without too much trouble, since he had no idea of the true amount of their debts. Emma even induced him to use the services of Leon, instead of the local attorney, for drawing up the papers, and Bovary trustingly arranged to send her alone to Rouen to take care of this business. Emma spent the next three days in Rouen with Leon. He rented an expensive hotel room for the occasion, and this short period was like a honeymoon for them. They went to some of the best restaurants and places of entertainment and spent most of their time in lovemaking and romantic pursuits. Leon became completely involved in his affair with Emma; he neglected his work and saw little of his friends. The arrival of her letters became a major event in his life, and he even paid a few visits to Yonville, either in secret or on various false pretexts, to see her. Emma, meanwhile, was getting even more deeply enmeshed in financial obligations to Lheureux. In order to see Leon more often, she began to show a renewed interest in the piano, and soon got Bovary to arrange for her to take a weekly lesson with a teacher in Rouen.

Before Emma can continue with her affair with Leon, she is interrupted by the death of her father-in-law. Then she must think of some plan whereby she can get back to Rouen and Leon. Monsieur Lheureux gives her the pretext. Knowing how easily he can convince Emma to buy things from him, he tells her to get Charles' power of attorney. His plan is to eventually foreclose on everything and thereby make a large profit. But his suggestions offer to Emma a pretext for going to Rouen to consult with Leon. So she convinces Charles that she should handle everything. The very short Chapter 3 covers the three days Emma spent with Leon in Rouen. The three days were described as "a real honeymoon." But the readers should remember that this is the third one. The episode is described in romantic terms of bliss and joy. For these few days, the image of beauty and innocence was restored to Emma, but the scene ends on an uglier note. Amid her renewed joys, she is reminded of her sordid affair with Rodolphe by hearing the boatman relate how Rodolphe had taken the same ride last week with some other lady. The short fourth chapter shows Emma and Leon continuing in their plans to make their meetings definite and to meet at least once a week. This of course means that Emma will have to go deeper in debt.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/31.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_21_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 7

chapter 7

{"name": "Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-iii-chapter-7", "summary": "In the morning the sheriff's officers arrived and made a complete inventory of the household furnishings and goods, but Emma managed to maintain a stoic attitude all the time they were there. They left a guard on the premises, but she kept him hidden in the attic where Bovary would not see him. That evening Bovary seemed worried, and Emma fearfully imagined that he knew, but he said nothing. She was particularly resentful that she bore all the responsibility in this matter and that Bovary was innocent. As the night passed, she occupied herself in making plans to raise the money. The next morning Emma went to Rouen and called on several bankers, but they all refused to make a loan to her. She asked Leon for help, but he protested that he could never raise such a large sum and became angry when she suggested that he steal the money from his employer. Finally, in order to quiet her, Leon promised that he would see his friends, and if he could raise the sum she required, he would bring it to Yonville. On Monday, Emma was horrified to discover that a public notice of the sheriff's confiscation and auction had been posted in the market place. She went to see Guillaumin, the town lawyer. He offered to help her, but made it clear that he expected favors from her in return. Emma was insulted by his forwardness, shouted that she was not for sale, and left in a fury. Bovary was not home and still did not know what had taken place. Meanwhile, the entire town watched expectantly to see what would happen next. Emma felt weak and afraid; she kept hoping that Leon would gallop up with the money but really had no confidence in this possibility. She was bitter and frightened. Suddenly an idea came to her -- Rodolphe -- and she set out for his estate. She planned to take advantage of his supposed love for her and get the money from him. It never occurred to her that what she was planning to do was actually prostitution -- exactly what she had so angrily refused when Guillaumin had made the same suggestion.", "analysis": "This chapter presents Emma's frantic efforts to obtain money from almost any source. She first goes to her latest lover, Leon; but since Leon is rather anxious to break with Emma, he proves to be of little help. In fact, he hurriedly gets rid of Emma by promising to do something the next day. Her failure is again represented by the appearance of the blind man. This time Homais gives the man a lecture and Emma throws him a half crown piece, the \"sum of her wealth.\" Now she is totally destitute. At the suggestion of her maid, Emma goes to see the lawyer, Monsieur Guillaumin, who supposedly was infatuated with Emma. He offers to give her the money, but she is expected to sleep with him. Emma is horrified and leaves in disgust. There is here a nobility in Emma's make-up. For all of her love affairs, she has never prostituted herself and totally rejects the idea. All of her love affairs have been an attempt to fulfill her dreams."}

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/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-iii-chapter-7

In the morning the sheriff's officers arrived and made a complete inventory of the household furnishings and goods, but Emma managed to maintain a stoic attitude all the time they were there. They left a guard on the premises, but she kept him hidden in the attic where Bovary would not see him. That evening Bovary seemed worried, and Emma fearfully imagined that he knew, but he said nothing. She was particularly resentful that she bore all the responsibility in this matter and that Bovary was innocent. As the night passed, she occupied herself in making plans to raise the money. The next morning Emma went to Rouen and called on several bankers, but they all refused to make a loan to her. She asked Leon for help, but he protested that he could never raise such a large sum and became angry when she suggested that he steal the money from his employer. Finally, in order to quiet her, Leon promised that he would see his friends, and if he could raise the sum she required, he would bring it to Yonville. On Monday, Emma was horrified to discover that a public notice of the sheriff's confiscation and auction had been posted in the market place. She went to see Guillaumin, the town lawyer. He offered to help her, but made it clear that he expected favors from her in return. Emma was insulted by his forwardness, shouted that she was not for sale, and left in a fury. Bovary was not home and still did not know what had taken place. Meanwhile, the entire town watched expectantly to see what would happen next. Emma felt weak and afraid; she kept hoping that Leon would gallop up with the money but really had no confidence in this possibility. She was bitter and frightened. Suddenly an idea came to her -- Rodolphe -- and she set out for his estate. She planned to take advantage of his supposed love for her and get the money from him. It never occurred to her that what she was planning to do was actually prostitution -- exactly what she had so angrily refused when Guillaumin had made the same suggestion.

This chapter presents Emma's frantic efforts to obtain money from almost any source. She first goes to her latest lover, Leon; but since Leon is rather anxious to break with Emma, he proves to be of little help. In fact, he hurriedly gets rid of Emma by promising to do something the next day. Her failure is again represented by the appearance of the blind man. This time Homais gives the man a lecture and Emma throws him a half crown piece, the "sum of her wealth." Now she is totally destitute. At the suggestion of her maid, Emma goes to see the lawyer, Monsieur Guillaumin, who supposedly was infatuated with Emma. He offers to give her the money, but she is expected to sleep with him. Emma is horrified and leaves in disgust. There is here a nobility in Emma's make-up. For all of her love affairs, she has never prostituted herself and totally rejects the idea. All of her love affairs have been an attempt to fulfill her dreams.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/32.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Madame Bovary/section_22_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 3.chapter 8

chapter 8

{"name": "Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-iii-chapter-8", "summary": "Rodolphe was surprised to see Emma. They talked about the past for a while, and she was able, as planned, to arouse his old interest in her. She told him about her debts and asked him to lend her several thousand francs. Rodolphe began to understand the reason for her strange visit and calmly told her that he had no money available. Emma knew he was lying. She lost her temper and left. Now Emma realized that the situation was hopeless. She walked through the fields without seeing and had dazed memories of incidents in her life. Then she became lucid again and decided what she had to do. She ran to Homais' shop and induced the servant, Justin, to let her into the attic. There she opened a jar of arsenic and ate a large quantity of it, while the frightened boy watched. She went home again, for the first time in a long while feeling at peace. Meanwhile, Bovary had learned about the sheriff's confiscation. He searched frantically for Emma, but no one knew her whereabouts. When he returned home, he found her resting in bed. She gave him a letter which he was not to read until the next day. In a short time Emma was torn by spasms of nausea and became violently ill. Despite his concern, she would tell Bovary nothing, so he opened her letter and discovered to his horror that she had poisoned herself. He called for help and soon the news spread through the town. Homais came to his assistance, and they sent for doctors from Rouen and a neighboring town. Bovary was too upset to do anything and sat at Emma's bedside crying. She wept also and for once was tender to him. The other doctors and the priest arrived, but nothing could be done. After a few more hours, Emma died in great pain.", "analysis": "When Emma arrives at Rodolphe's house to ask for money, the reader should remember that they haven't seen each other for over three years. Thus when he first sees Emma, all of his old desires for her are reawakened and Emma is aware that she has some effect on him. Thus in his refusal to give her money, Emma feels that this is again a betrayal of her love. Flaubert intimates that Emma's desire to kill herself comes not from her desperate financial condition and not from the weak Leon's refusal, but from a larger sense of betrayal by Rodolphe. To Emma, who has devoted her life to a search for perfect love, this second betrayal by Rodolphe makes life not worth living. Her reactions and her state of mind immediately after leaving Rodolphe are practically the same as when he first betrayed her. And as she was sick for forty-three days the first time, she decides now to take her life. Thus Emma's suicide is motivated by her sense of betrayal by the one man whom she might have loved. Flaubert perhaps is suggesting that Emma was capable of a profound love. If she was not, then at least, she possessed a dream of love which was worth living for and when this dream was betrayed, there was nothing left but suicide. It is a bit of Flaubert's irony that Justin is directly responsible for Emma's death. This is ironic because he is the one character in the book who has demonstrated a constant, undeviating love for Emma. His love for Emma exists on a plane which Emma herself never felt and never achieved; thus it is ironic that the person who most loved and adored her was also the one responsible for her death. That is, had he not loved her so much, he would never have been intimidated enough so as to give her the keys to the secret room where the arsenic was kept. Emma's death reflects the pathetic misuse of her life. As she has spent her life longing for the unattainable and had failed miserably, so in death she longed for a simple but beautiful death. But instead, her death is one of horrible suffering and ugliness, and the ugliness of her death is emphasized by the appearance of the blind man, the symbol of her degradation in life. Emma's last act is that of taking extreme unction, and this act captures the essence of the novel. Here she returns to the religious fold, but her return is in terms of sensuousness. The kiss that she gives to the crucifix is not one given to God but it is more of an erotic, sensual kiss. And when the priest anoints her, Flaubert subtly reminds the reader that this woman is a sensualist: the priest anoints the eyes \"that had coveted all worldly pomp\" then the nostrils and mouth \"that had uttered lies, that had curled with pride and cried out in lewdness\"; then the hands that \"had delighted in sensual touches,\" and finally the feet which were \"so swift . . . when she was running to satisfy her desires, and that would now walk no more.\" Thus the final picture of Emma is that of the sensualist looking in death for the supreme sensual desire. Many critics have suggested that with the appearance of Dr. Lariviere we have our only admirable character in the novel. Perhaps this characterization is influenced by Flaubert's own father. He does contrast to the other characters, in view of the fact that he is coldly analytical, but yet his presence indicates that he cares for humanity. He does express real sympathy for his patients; and his sense of intelligence, his professional dignity, and his integrity set off all the other characters as being petty and stupid."}

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/20201101053231/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/madame-bovary/summary-and-analysis/part-iii-chapter-8

Rodolphe was surprised to see Emma. They talked about the past for a while, and she was able, as planned, to arouse his old interest in her. She told him about her debts and asked him to lend her several thousand francs. Rodolphe began to understand the reason for her strange visit and calmly told her that he had no money available. Emma knew he was lying. She lost her temper and left. Now Emma realized that the situation was hopeless. She walked through the fields without seeing and had dazed memories of incidents in her life. Then she became lucid again and decided what she had to do. She ran to Homais' shop and induced the servant, Justin, to let her into the attic. There she opened a jar of arsenic and ate a large quantity of it, while the frightened boy watched. She went home again, for the first time in a long while feeling at peace. Meanwhile, Bovary had learned about the sheriff's confiscation. He searched frantically for Emma, but no one knew her whereabouts. When he returned home, he found her resting in bed. She gave him a letter which he was not to read until the next day. In a short time Emma was torn by spasms of nausea and became violently ill. Despite his concern, she would tell Bovary nothing, so he opened her letter and discovered to his horror that she had poisoned herself. He called for help and soon the news spread through the town. Homais came to his assistance, and they sent for doctors from Rouen and a neighboring town. Bovary was too upset to do anything and sat at Emma's bedside crying. She wept also and for once was tender to him. The other doctors and the priest arrived, but nothing could be done. After a few more hours, Emma died in great pain.

When Emma arrives at Rodolphe's house to ask for money, the reader should remember that they haven't seen each other for over three years. Thus when he first sees Emma, all of his old desires for her are reawakened and Emma is aware that she has some effect on him. Thus in his refusal to give her money, Emma feels that this is again a betrayal of her love. Flaubert intimates that Emma's desire to kill herself comes not from her desperate financial condition and not from the weak Leon's refusal, but from a larger sense of betrayal by Rodolphe. To Emma, who has devoted her life to a search for perfect love, this second betrayal by Rodolphe makes life not worth living. Her reactions and her state of mind immediately after leaving Rodolphe are practically the same as when he first betrayed her. And as she was sick for forty-three days the first time, she decides now to take her life. Thus Emma's suicide is motivated by her sense of betrayal by the one man whom she might have loved. Flaubert perhaps is suggesting that Emma was capable of a profound love. If she was not, then at least, she possessed a dream of love which was worth living for and when this dream was betrayed, there was nothing left but suicide. It is a bit of Flaubert's irony that Justin is directly responsible for Emma's death. This is ironic because he is the one character in the book who has demonstrated a constant, undeviating love for Emma. His love for Emma exists on a plane which Emma herself never felt and never achieved; thus it is ironic that the person who most loved and adored her was also the one responsible for her death. That is, had he not loved her so much, he would never have been intimidated enough so as to give her the keys to the secret room where the arsenic was kept. Emma's death reflects the pathetic misuse of her life. As she has spent her life longing for the unattainable and had failed miserably, so in death she longed for a simple but beautiful death. But instead, her death is one of horrible suffering and ugliness, and the ugliness of her death is emphasized by the appearance of the blind man, the symbol of her degradation in life. Emma's last act is that of taking extreme unction, and this act captures the essence of the novel. Here she returns to the religious fold, but her return is in terms of sensuousness. The kiss that she gives to the crucifix is not one given to God but it is more of an erotic, sensual kiss. And when the priest anoints her, Flaubert subtly reminds the reader that this woman is a sensualist: the priest anoints the eyes "that had coveted all worldly pomp" then the nostrils and mouth "that had uttered lies, that had curled with pride and cried out in lewdness"; then the hands that "had delighted in sensual touches," and finally the feet which were "so swift . . . when she was running to satisfy her desires, and that would now walk no more." Thus the final picture of Emma is that of the sensualist looking in death for the supreme sensual desire. Many critics have suggested that with the appearance of Dr. Lariviere we have our only admirable character in the novel. Perhaps this characterization is influenced by Flaubert's own father. He does contrast to the other characters, in view of the fact that he is coldly analytical, but yet his presence indicates that he cares for humanity. He does express real sympathy for his patients; and his sense of intelligence, his professional dignity, and his integrity set off all the other characters as being petty and stupid.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/02.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_1_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 2

chapter 2

{"name": "Chapter 2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary11.asp", "summary": "Late one night, a man comes to Charles with a letter. Apparently, someone in Les Bertaux, about eighteen miles from Tostes, has broken a leg and is in need of immediate medical attention. At his wife's urging, Charles postpones his journey to Les Bertaux by three hours. When Charles does set out, the early morning air lulls his senses. He sees himself \"as two selves, student and husband at once - lying in bed as he had been an hour ago, and going through a ward full of patients as in the old days.\" A small boy guides him through Vassonville to the farmhouse of Monsieur Rouault, the patient. From the boy Charles gathers some information about the Rouault family. The man is a prosperous farmer and a widower who lives with his young, unmarried daughter whose name is Emma. It is she who ushers Charles in and leads him to the patient's room. He is relieved to note that Rouault has suffered a simple fracture, which can easily be set. Rouault is soon on his way to recovery. During this first visit, Charles is fascinated with Emma, and he calls on her father frequently in order to see the daughter. Charles' own wife, Heloise, is upset when she learns that Rouault has a young, well-educated daughter. She nags Charles until he agrees not to go to Les Bertaux any more. His wife and mother constantly team up to scold him for one thing or another. The lawyer in charge of Heloise's investments supposedly disappears with the money. Further investigation, however, reveals that Heloise has little to substantiate her claims of having investments and property. Charles' parents are very upset about this turn of affairs, and they create a scene. Heloise is fatally affected by their feelings, and a week later, she has a stroke and dies, leaving Charles as a very young widower.", "analysis": "Notes Flaubert introduces Emma in this chapter. Before she is seen in person, she is described by the young boy who leads Charles to the Roualt home. Charles then gives his own description of the lovely young girl, and Heloise also reveals her perception of Emma from a distance. Charles, who is not particularly insightful and is seemingly unaware of his own feelings, does not admit that he is attracted to Emma or that his wife is jealous of her. He is aware, however, of the immense contrast between Emma and his wife. The latter is described in unflattering terms as a nag and a bother. Charles seems to regret that he has allowed his mother to convince him to marry this older woman because of her dowry. It, therefore, becomes extremely ironic that Heloise does not really possess a fortune. When his parents become aware of this fact, they are incensed and treat their daughter-in-law cruelly. Heloise is so upset over their behavior that she has a stroke and dies. Her death is a convenient and timely occurrence for Charles, for the path is now clear for him to approach Emma. It is important to notice Flaubert's use of the naturalistic technique in his descriptions. Through this device, he evokes in the readers a 'feel' for the characters and action of the plot. So precise are his descriptive details that the novel becomes a cinematic delight in the mind's eye."}

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!

Chapter 2

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary11.asp

Late one night, a man comes to Charles with a letter. Apparently, someone in Les Bertaux, about eighteen miles from Tostes, has broken a leg and is in need of immediate medical attention. At his wife's urging, Charles postpones his journey to Les Bertaux by three hours. When Charles does set out, the early morning air lulls his senses. He sees himself "as two selves, student and husband at once - lying in bed as he had been an hour ago, and going through a ward full of patients as in the old days." A small boy guides him through Vassonville to the farmhouse of Monsieur Rouault, the patient. From the boy Charles gathers some information about the Rouault family. The man is a prosperous farmer and a widower who lives with his young, unmarried daughter whose name is Emma. It is she who ushers Charles in and leads him to the patient's room. He is relieved to note that Rouault has suffered a simple fracture, which can easily be set. Rouault is soon on his way to recovery. During this first visit, Charles is fascinated with Emma, and he calls on her father frequently in order to see the daughter. Charles' own wife, Heloise, is upset when she learns that Rouault has a young, well-educated daughter. She nags Charles until he agrees not to go to Les Bertaux any more. His wife and mother constantly team up to scold him for one thing or another. The lawyer in charge of Heloise's investments supposedly disappears with the money. Further investigation, however, reveals that Heloise has little to substantiate her claims of having investments and property. Charles' parents are very upset about this turn of affairs, and they create a scene. Heloise is fatally affected by their feelings, and a week later, she has a stroke and dies, leaving Charles as a very young widower.

Notes Flaubert introduces Emma in this chapter. Before she is seen in person, she is described by the young boy who leads Charles to the Roualt home. Charles then gives his own description of the lovely young girl, and Heloise also reveals her perception of Emma from a distance. Charles, who is not particularly insightful and is seemingly unaware of his own feelings, does not admit that he is attracted to Emma or that his wife is jealous of her. He is aware, however, of the immense contrast between Emma and his wife. The latter is described in unflattering terms as a nag and a bother. Charles seems to regret that he has allowed his mother to convince him to marry this older woman because of her dowry. It, therefore, becomes extremely ironic that Heloise does not really possess a fortune. When his parents become aware of this fact, they are incensed and treat their daughter-in-law cruelly. Heloise is so upset over their behavior that she has a stroke and dies. Her death is a convenient and timely occurrence for Charles, for the path is now clear for him to approach Emma. It is important to notice Flaubert's use of the naturalistic technique in his descriptions. Through this device, he evokes in the readers a 'feel' for the characters and action of the plot. So precise are his descriptive details that the novel becomes a cinematic delight in the mind's eye.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/03.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_2_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 3

chapter 3

{"name": "Chapter 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary12.asp", "summary": "After Heloise's death, Rouault pays Charles a condolence visit, during which he settles his account with the doctor. He also tells Charles of the manner in which he had coped when his wife died and assures him that his grief will pass. He then invites Charles to visit Les Bertaux in the spring. Charles is delighted at the invitation, and he soon becomes a regular visitor at the farm. Things are going well for Charles. His practice is flourishing with the sympathy generated by his wife's death, he is delighted to visit with Emma during his trips to Les Bertaux. For the first time, Charles dares to feel \"vaguely hopeful and happy.\" As the meetings between Emma and Charles become more frequent, old Rouault is sharp enough to see Charles' increasing fondness for his daughter. He is worried, however, about providing her with a dowry, since his debts are rising. When Charles asks him for Emma's hand in marriage, he readily consents. The wedding will take place after Charles' period of mourning ends. Emma pictures a romantic midnight wedding with torches.", "analysis": "Notes Rouault appears to be a kind, good-natured man. He calls on Charles to offer his condolences over his wife's death and invites him to spend some time with him at Les Bertaux. His invitation has the dual purpose of taking Charles' mind off of his wife's death and interesting Charles in his own daughter Emma. Since Roualt is suffering from rising debts, he is very concerned about not having a large dowry for his daughter and wants to see her respectably and quickly married. When Rouault sees that Charles is fond of Emma, he does everything possible to encourage their relationship, for he judges the young doctor to be a suitable husband. In this chapter, Flaubert continues to develop Emma. The first hint of her imaginative, romantic nature is depicted as she dreams about a midnight wedding with torches. Probably because of her dreamy, romantic ways, her father does not find Emma helpful enough on the farm and feels she will not be terribly missed when she marries. Charles, on the other hand, is thoroughly infatuated with Emma, believing everything about her, both her actions and her appearance, to be flawless. Emma will later take undue advantage of this devotion of Charles to her."}

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.

Chapter 3

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary12.asp

After Heloise's death, Rouault pays Charles a condolence visit, during which he settles his account with the doctor. He also tells Charles of the manner in which he had coped when his wife died and assures him that his grief will pass. He then invites Charles to visit Les Bertaux in the spring. Charles is delighted at the invitation, and he soon becomes a regular visitor at the farm. Things are going well for Charles. His practice is flourishing with the sympathy generated by his wife's death, he is delighted to visit with Emma during his trips to Les Bertaux. For the first time, Charles dares to feel "vaguely hopeful and happy." As the meetings between Emma and Charles become more frequent, old Rouault is sharp enough to see Charles' increasing fondness for his daughter. He is worried, however, about providing her with a dowry, since his debts are rising. When Charles asks him for Emma's hand in marriage, he readily consents. The wedding will take place after Charles' period of mourning ends. Emma pictures a romantic midnight wedding with torches.

Notes Rouault appears to be a kind, good-natured man. He calls on Charles to offer his condolences over his wife's death and invites him to spend some time with him at Les Bertaux. His invitation has the dual purpose of taking Charles' mind off of his wife's death and interesting Charles in his own daughter Emma. Since Roualt is suffering from rising debts, he is very concerned about not having a large dowry for his daughter and wants to see her respectably and quickly married. When Rouault sees that Charles is fond of Emma, he does everything possible to encourage their relationship, for he judges the young doctor to be a suitable husband. In this chapter, Flaubert continues to develop Emma. The first hint of her imaginative, romantic nature is depicted as she dreams about a midnight wedding with torches. Probably because of her dreamy, romantic ways, her father does not find Emma helpful enough on the farm and feels she will not be terribly missed when she marries. Charles, on the other hand, is thoroughly infatuated with Emma, believing everything about her, both her actions and her appearance, to be flawless. Emma will later take undue advantage of this devotion of Charles to her.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/04.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_3_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 4

chapter 4

{"name": "Chapter 4", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary13.asp", "summary": "In this chapter, the wedding takes place, and \"all relatives on both sides had been invited\" to the celebration. After the ceremony, the bridal couple, along with a band of well-wishers, make their way from the mayor's office to the church on foot. The sumptuous wedding feast is laid in a cart-shed. In the midst of all this joy and merry-making is Charles' mother, who is upset because \"she had not been consulted about the bride's dress, nor about the feast. \" The lively description of the wedding celebration is given in great detail and reflects the social status of the characters. The guests who attend are a mixed lot, ranging from the prosperous to the not- so-well-to-do. It is obvious that for many people this a special occasion calling for special clothing. The men are dressed according to their wealth, wearing dress-coats, frock-coats, waistcoats, or jackets. Many ladies are wearing new dresses, tailored to the prevailing style of the day. For many of the children, it is the first time for them to wear boots or gloves. After the wedding night, Charles appears to be a renewed man, while Emma appears just as innocent and demure as she did before the marriage. When the couple arrives in Tostes two days later, the neighbors gather in their windows to see the doctor's new wife. The maid suggests to Emma that she should look over the house once dinner is ready.", "analysis": "Notes Flaubert's ability to write commendable and powerful descriptions is clearly seen in this chapter. The wedding feast is described with careful detail. While contributing little to plot development, the chapter does much to further develop the characters. The resentful attitude of Charles' mother is in keeping with her desire to control everything, especially her son's life. She cannot stand it that her new daughter-in-law does not depend on her for guidance. Her animosity also foreshadows the mutual distrust with which these two women are to regard each other in future. Emma's continued \"innocence\" after the wedding night, in contrast to Charles' invigorated state, seems to hint that she has not found sexual relations with her husband as satisfying as he has with her. This dissatisfaction foreshadows some of Emma's future need to find sexual relationships outside of her marriage. Flaubert gives a humorous touch to the marriage celebration by describing the ways in which the simple country folk try to imitate their town cousins. But hard work is a way of life for these people, and they cannot easily leave it behind. As a result, the gentlemen arriving for the celebration do not hesitate to unharness the carriages themselves, even though they are dressed in their best finery. Flaubert also presents the traditions of the village community with the wedding itself becoming a communal event. It is important to notice Charles' neighbors who stare out the window at the newlyweds upon their return to Tostes. They seem to be a somewhat nosy group, indicating it will not be easy for Emma to be secretive about her actions or behavior."}

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.

Chapter 4

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary13.asp

In this chapter, the wedding takes place, and "all relatives on both sides had been invited" to the celebration. After the ceremony, the bridal couple, along with a band of well-wishers, make their way from the mayor's office to the church on foot. The sumptuous wedding feast is laid in a cart-shed. In the midst of all this joy and merry-making is Charles' mother, who is upset because "she had not been consulted about the bride's dress, nor about the feast. " The lively description of the wedding celebration is given in great detail and reflects the social status of the characters. The guests who attend are a mixed lot, ranging from the prosperous to the not- so-well-to-do. It is obvious that for many people this a special occasion calling for special clothing. The men are dressed according to their wealth, wearing dress-coats, frock-coats, waistcoats, or jackets. Many ladies are wearing new dresses, tailored to the prevailing style of the day. For many of the children, it is the first time for them to wear boots or gloves. After the wedding night, Charles appears to be a renewed man, while Emma appears just as innocent and demure as she did before the marriage. When the couple arrives in Tostes two days later, the neighbors gather in their windows to see the doctor's new wife. The maid suggests to Emma that she should look over the house once dinner is ready.

Notes Flaubert's ability to write commendable and powerful descriptions is clearly seen in this chapter. The wedding feast is described with careful detail. While contributing little to plot development, the chapter does much to further develop the characters. The resentful attitude of Charles' mother is in keeping with her desire to control everything, especially her son's life. She cannot stand it that her new daughter-in-law does not depend on her for guidance. Her animosity also foreshadows the mutual distrust with which these two women are to regard each other in future. Emma's continued "innocence" after the wedding night, in contrast to Charles' invigorated state, seems to hint that she has not found sexual relations with her husband as satisfying as he has with her. This dissatisfaction foreshadows some of Emma's future need to find sexual relationships outside of her marriage. Flaubert gives a humorous touch to the marriage celebration by describing the ways in which the simple country folk try to imitate their town cousins. But hard work is a way of life for these people, and they cannot easily leave it behind. As a result, the gentlemen arriving for the celebration do not hesitate to unharness the carriages themselves, even though they are dressed in their best finery. Flaubert also presents the traditions of the village community with the wedding itself becoming a communal event. It is important to notice Charles' neighbors who stare out the window at the newlyweds upon their return to Tostes. They seem to be a somewhat nosy group, indicating it will not be easy for Emma to be secretive about her actions or behavior.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/05.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Madame Bovary/section_4_part_0.txt

Madame Bovary.part 1.chapter 5

chapter 5

{"name": "Chapter 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary14.asp", "summary": "The house is described in great detail: the wallpaper, the curtains and the bookshelves all contribute to the \"feel\" of the place. Emma does not seem to mind that the garden is not very remarkable; it is the bedroom that she examines eagerly. When she notices Heloise's bridal bouquet, she muses morbidly about the possibility of her own death. Emma spends the next few days changing the house to suit her tastes, and Charles indulges her every whim. He buys her a second-hand carriage so that she can drive out on her own. Charles is ecstatic over his new found happiness with Emma. \" A meal together, a walk along the highroad in the evening, a way she had of putting her hand to her hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging on the window latch, and a great many things besides, in which Charles had never thought to find pleasure, now made up the even tenor of his happiness.\" He treasures every moment with Emma. While Charles luxuriates in his love for his wife, Emma quickly grows tired of her husband and married life. She had dreamed of \"bliss,\" \"passion,\" and \"ecstasy,\" a far cry from what she has found with Charles.", "analysis": "Notes This chapter masterfully contrasts Charles' joy with marriage to Emma's boredom, and Flaubert successfully captures her gloomy mood. Charles' house, with its bleak furnishings, depresses Emma. She is particularly bothered by the bedroom, where she spies Heloise's bridal bouquet and is forced to think about her own mortality; it is a clear foreshadowing of Emma's own early death. The chapter ends on a note of discord. Emma is slowly beginning to realize the difference between her fanciful expectations of marriage and the unromantic reality that it actually offers. In total contrast to his wife's boredom with marriage, Charles is delighted about everything. He obviously idolizes Emma, and every little thing about her is special to him - the way she puts her hand to hair and leaves her straw hat on the window shelf. He has never felt so happy. As a result, he does everything he can materially to please his wife. He buys her a carriage so she can go out on her own, and he allows her to redecorate the house. The alterations that she makes in their dwelling are more than an attempt to render it more pleasant in appearance; it is an effort on her put to establish her own authority over the place. Charles does not mind. In fact, he is so immersed in his own contentment with married life that he fails to notice the disillusionment that is creeping over Emma. Charles is a naive husband who thinks that a few material indulgences are enough to satisfy a wife. He makes no effort to understand Emma's need for companionship and conversation. He ignores her romanticism and does nothing to satisfy her passions. Although Emma is guilty of many sins during the course of the novel, some of the blame must be placed on Charles. He never considers whether his wife is comfortable or happy; he just assumes that she is since he is. Besides Emma's gloomy thoughts about death early in the chapter, there are other significant things to note in here that will become important later on. Emma's main concern in the house is the bedroom with its romantic and sexual connotations; throughout the book, Emma will have a preoccupation with her own sexuality. Ironically, the thing she most notices in this particular bedroom is the dead bouquet of flowers belonging to a dead wife. Also significant is the fact that Charles buys his wife a carriage, which gives her the freedom that she will need to pursue her own desires. The fact that he allows Emma to have her way about practically everything spoils her to the point that she will later borrow whatever she needs to get what she wants, causing financial disaster for the pair."}

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.

Chapter 5

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMadameBovary14.asp

The house is described in great detail: the wallpaper, the curtains and the bookshelves all contribute to the "feel" of the place. Emma does not seem to mind that the garden is not very remarkable; it is the bedroom that she examines eagerly. When she notices Heloise's bridal bouquet, she muses morbidly about the possibility of her own death. Emma spends the next few days changing the house to suit her tastes, and Charles indulges her every whim. He buys her a second-hand carriage so that she can drive out on her own. Charles is ecstatic over his new found happiness with Emma. " A meal together, a walk along the highroad in the evening, a way she had of putting her hand to her hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging on the window latch, and a great many things besides, in which Charles had never thought to find pleasure, now made up the even tenor of his happiness." He treasures every moment with Emma. While Charles luxuriates in his love for his wife, Emma quickly grows tired of her husband and married life. She had dreamed of "bliss," "passion," and "ecstasy," a far cry from what she has found with Charles.

Notes This chapter masterfully contrasts Charles' joy with marriage to Emma's boredom, and Flaubert successfully captures her gloomy mood. Charles' house, with its bleak furnishings, depresses Emma. She is particularly bothered by the bedroom, where she spies Heloise's bridal bouquet and is forced to think about her own mortality; it is a clear foreshadowing of Emma's own early death. The chapter ends on a note of discord. Emma is slowly beginning to realize the difference between her fanciful expectations of marriage and the unromantic reality that it actually offers. In total contrast to his wife's boredom with marriage, Charles is delighted about everything. He obviously idolizes Emma, and every little thing about her is special to him - the way she puts her hand to hair and leaves her straw hat on the window shelf. He has never felt so happy. As a result, he does everything he can materially to please his wife. He buys her a carriage so she can go out on her own, and he allows her to redecorate the house. The alterations that she makes in their dwelling are more than an attempt to render it more pleasant in appearance; it is an effort on her put to establish her own authority over the place. Charles does not mind. In fact, he is so immersed in his own contentment with married life that he fails to notice the disillusionment that is creeping over Emma. Charles is a naive husband who thinks that a few material indulgences are enough to satisfy a wife. He makes no effort to understand Emma's need for companionship and conversation. He ignores her romanticism and does nothing to satisfy her passions. Although Emma is guilty of many sins during the course of the novel, some of the blame must be placed on Charles. He never considers whether his wife is comfortable or happy; he just assumes that she is since he is. Besides Emma's gloomy thoughts about death early in the chapter, there are other significant things to note in here that will become important later on. Emma's main concern in the house is the bedroom with its romantic and sexual connotations; throughout the book, Emma will have a preoccupation with her own sexuality. Ironically, the thing she most notices in this particular bedroom is the dead bouquet of flowers belonging to a dead wife. Also significant is the fact that Charles buys his wife a carriage, which gives her the freedom that she will need to pursue her own desires. The fact that he allows Emma to have her way about practically everything spoils her to the point that she will later borrow whatever she needs to get what she wants, causing financial disaster for the pair.

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/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/13.txt

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/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/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.

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/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/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/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/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

all_chapterized_books/2413-chapters/33.txt

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

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/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/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

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-24

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.

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/29.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_28_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 29

chapter 29

{"name": "Chapter 29", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-29", "summary": "One day, Carol goes walking with her son Hugh along the Gopher Prairie railroad tracks and runs into Erik Valbourg. Erik takes immediate notice of Hugh and straightens his outfit. Erik and Carol chat for a while about books, and Carol calls him out for not really knowing what he's talking about. Erik apologizes and asks if Carol can recommend things for him to read. He knows he's a poser, but he has big dreams. At this point, Erik decides to throw away decorum and ask Carol if she's happy in her marriage. Carol thinks this is a bit forward, but part of her is happy that Erik has asked. When Carol and Erik get back into town, Carol sees some old women staring at her through a window. From that point on, she feels like she needs to explain to everyone why she was walking with someone like Erik. The more she thinks about him, the more she wants to support his dreams and help him escape from Gopher Prairie. Erik won't be daunted by his social status, though. For starters, he organizes a tennis tournament for the town. Unfortunately, some higher-ups decide to change the location of the tennis tournament at the last second without informing Erik. They're making it pretty clear that he doesn't belong among them. When Carol scolds the folks for changing the tennis plans, Juanita Haydock, a neighbor, notices that Carol is defending Erik a little too much and implies that Carol likes Erik. This comment immediately makes Carol back down. Carol starts making up reasons to visit the tailor shop, ordering suits that her husband Will doesn't want or need. Over time, Carol finds herself singing more often and feeling cheerful. She suddenly realizes that she might have a crush on Erik. She becomes more critical of the clothes she wears and tries to look good around Erik whenever she can.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXIX SHE had walked up the railroad track with Hugh, this Sunday afternoon. She saw Erik Valborg coming, in an ancient highwater suit, tramping sullenly and alone, striking at the rails with a stick. For a second she unreasoningly wanted to avoid him, but she kept on, and she serenely talked about God, whose voice, Hugh asserted, made the humming in the telegraph wires. Erik stared, straightened. They greeted each other with "Hello." "Hugh, say how-do-you-do to Mr. Valborg." "Oh, dear me, he's got a button unbuttoned," worried Erik, kneeling. Carol frowned, then noted the strength with which he swung the baby in the air. "May I walk along a piece with you?" "I'm tired. Let's rest on those ties. Then I must be trotting back." They sat on a heap of discarded railroad ties, oak logs spotted with cinnamon-colored dry-rot and marked with metallic brown streaks where iron plates had rested. Hugh learned that the pile was the hiding-place of Injuns; he went gunning for them while the elders talked of uninteresting things. The telegraph wires thrummed, thrummed, thrummed above them; the rails were glaring hard lines; the goldenrod smelled dusty. Across the track was a pasture of dwarf clover and sparse lawn cut by earthy cow-paths; beyond its placid narrow green, the rough immensity of new stubble, jagged with wheat-stacks like huge pineapples. Erik talked of books; flamed like a recent convert to any faith. He exhibited as many titles and authors as possible, halting only to appeal, "Have you read his last book? Don't you think he's a terribly strong writer?" She was dizzy. But when he insisted, "You've been a librarian; tell me; do I read too much fiction?" she advised him loftily, rather discursively. He had, she indicated, never studied. He had skipped from one emotion to another. Especially--she hesitated, then flung it at him--he must not guess at pronunciations; he must endure the nuisance of stopping to reach for the dictionary. "I'm talking like a cranky teacher," she sighed. "No! And I will study! Read the damned dictionary right through." He crossed his legs and bent over, clutching his ankle with both hands. "I know what you mean. I've been rushing from picture to picture, like a kid let loose in an art gallery for the first time. You see, it's so awful recent that I've found there was a world--well, a world where beautiful things counted. I was on the farm till I was nineteen. Dad is a good farmer, but nothing else. Do you know why he first sent me off to learn tailoring? I wanted to study drawing, and he had a cousin that'd made a lot of money tailoring out in Dakota, and he said tailoring was a lot like drawing, so he sent me down to a punk hole called Curlew, to work in a tailor shop. Up to that time I'd only had three months' schooling a year--walked to school two miles, through snow up to my knees--and Dad never would stand for my having a single book except schoolbooks. "I never read a novel till I got 'Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall' out of the library at Curlew. I thought it was the loveliest thing in the world! Next I read 'Barriers Burned Away' and then Pope's translation of Homer. Some combination, all right! When I went to Minneapolis, just two years ago, I guess I'd read pretty much everything in that Curlew library, but I'd never heard of Rossetti or John Sargent or Balzac or Brahms. But----Yump, I'll study. Look here! Shall I get out of this tailoring, this pressing and repairing?" "I don't see why a surgeon should spend very much time cobbling shoes." "But what if I find I can't really draw and design? After fussing around in New York or Chicago, I'd feel like a fool if I had to go back to work in a gents' furnishings store!" "Please say 'haberdashery.'" "Haberdashery? All right. I'll remember." He shrugged and spread his fingers wide. She was humbled by his humility; she put away in her mind, to take out and worry over later, a speculation as to whether it was not she who was naive. She urged, "What if you do have to go back? Most of us do! We can't all be artists--myself, for instance. We have to darn socks, and yet we're not content to think of nothing but socks and darning-cotton. I'd demand all I could get--whether I finally settled down to designing frocks or building temples or pressing pants. What if you do drop back? You'll have had the adventure. Don't be too meek toward life! Go! You're young, you're unmarried. Try everything! Don't listen to Nat Hicks and Sam Clark and be a 'steady young man'--in order to help them make money. You're still a blessed innocent. Go and play till the Good People capture you!" "But I don't just want to play. I want to make something beautiful. God! And I don't know enough. Do you get it? Do you understand? Nobody else ever has! Do you understand?" "Yes." "And so----But here's what bothers me: I like fabrics; dinky things like that; little drawings and elegant words. But look over there at those fields. Big! New! Don't it seem kind of a shame to leave this and go back to the East and Europe, and do what all those people have been doing so long? Being careful about words, when there's millions of bushels off wheat here! Reading this fellow Pater, when I've helped Dad to clear fields!" "It's good to clear fields. But it's not for you. It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose. I thought that myself, when I first came to the prairie. 'Big--new.' Oh, I don't want to deny the prairie future. It will be magnificent. But equally I'm hanged if I want to be bullied by it, go to war on behalf of Main Street, be bullied and BULLIED by the faith that the future is already here in the present, and that all of us must stay and worship wheat-stacks and insist that this is 'God's Country'--and never, of course, do anything original or gay-colored that would help to make that future! Anyway, you don't belong here. Sam Clark and Nat Hicks, that's what our big newness has produced. Go! Before it's too late, as it has been for--for some of us. Young man, go East and grow up with the revolution! Then perhaps you may come back and tell Sam and Nat and me what to do with the land we've been clearing--if we'll listen--if we don't lynch you first!" He looked at her reverently. She could hear him saying, "I've always wanted to know a woman who would talk to me like that." Her hearing was faulty. He was saying nothing of the sort. He was saying: "Why aren't you happy with your husband?" "I--you----" "He doesn't care for the 'blessed innocent' part of you, does he!" "Erik, you mustn't----" "First you tell me to go and be free, and then you say that I 'mustn't'!" "I know. But you mustn't----You must be more impersonal!" He glowered at her like a downy young owl. She wasn't sure but she thought that he muttered, "I'm damned if I will." She considered with wholesome fear the perils of meddling with other people's destinies, and she said timidly, "Hadn't we better start back now?" He mused, "You're younger than I am. Your lips are for songs about rivers in the morning and lakes at twilight. I don't see how anybody could ever hurt you. . . . Yes. We better go." He trudged beside her, his eyes averted. Hugh experimentally took his thumb. He looked down at the baby seriously. He burst out, "All right. I'll do it. I'll stay here one year. Save. Not spend so much money on clothes. And then I'll go East, to art-school. Work on the side-tailor shop, dressmaker's. I'll learn what I'm good for: designing clothes, stage-settings, illustrating, or selling collars to fat men. All settled." He peered at her, unsmiling. "Can you stand it here in town for a year?" "With you to look at?" "Please! I mean: Don't the people here think you're an odd bird? (They do me, I assure you!)" "I don't know. I never notice much. Oh, they do kid me about not being in the army--especially the old warhorses, the old men that aren't going themselves. And this Bogart boy. And Mr. Hicks's son--he's a horrible brat. But probably he's licensed to say what he thinks about his father's hired man!" "He's beastly!" They were in town. They passed Aunt Bessie's house. Aunt Bessie and Mrs. Bogart were at the window, and Carol saw that they were staring so intently that they answered her wave only with the stiffly raised hands of automatons. In the next block Mrs. Dr. Westlake was gaping from her porch. Carol said with an embarrassed quaver: "I want to run in and see Mrs. Westlake. I'll say good-by here." She avoided his eyes. Mrs. Westlake was affable. Carol felt that she was expected to explain; and while she was mentally asserting that she'd be hanged if she'd explain, she was explaining: "Hugh captured that Valborg boy up the track. They became such good friends. And I talked to him for a while. I'd heard he was eccentric, but really, I found him quite intelligent. Crude, but he reads--reads almost the way Dr. Westlake does." "That's fine. Why does he stick here in town? What's this I hear about his being interested in Myrtle Cass?" "I don't know. Is he? I'm sure he isn't! He said he was quite lonely! Besides, Myrtle is a babe in arms!" "Twenty-one if she's a day!" "Well----Is the doctor going to do any hunting this fall?" II The need of explaining Erik dragged her back into doubting. For all his ardent reading, and his ardent life, was he anything but a small-town youth bred on an illiberal farm and in cheap tailor shops? He had rough hands. She had been attracted only by hands that were fine and suave, like those of her father. Delicate hands and resolute purpose. But this boy--powerful seamed hands and flabby will. "It's not appealing weakness like his, but sane strength that will animate the Gopher Prairies. Only----Does that mean anything? Or am I echoing Vida? The world has always let 'strong' statesmen and soldiers--the men with strong voices--take control, and what have the thundering boobies done? What is 'strength'? "This classifying of people! I suppose tailors differ as much as burglars or kings. "Erik frightened me when he turned on me. Of course he didn't mean anything, but I mustn't let him be so personal. "Amazing impertinence! "But he didn't mean to be. "His hands are FIRM. I wonder if sculptors don't have thick hands, too? "Of course if there really is anything I can do to HELP the boy---- "Though I despise these people who interfere. He must be independent." III She wasn't altogether pleased, the week after, when Erik was independent and, without asking for her inspiration, planned the tennis tournament. It proved that he had learned to play in Minneapolis; that, next to Juanita Haydock, he had the best serve in town. Tennis was well spoken of in Gopher Prairie and almost never played. There were three courts: one belonging to Harry Haydock, one to the cottages at the lake, and one, a rough field on the outskirts, laid out by a defunct tennis association. Erik had been seen in flannels and an imitation panama hat, playing on the abandoned court with Willis Woodford, the clerk in Stowbody's bank. Suddenly he was going about proposing the reorganization of the tennis association, and writing names in a fifteen-cent note-book bought for the purpose at Dyer's. When he came to Carol he was so excited over being an organizer that he did not stop to talk of himself and Aubrey Beardsley for more than ten minutes. He begged, "Will you get some of the folks to come in?" and she nodded agreeably. He proposed an informal exhibition match to advertise the association; he suggested that Carol and himself, the Haydocks, the Woodfords, and the Dillons play doubles, and that the association be formed from the gathered enthusiasts. He had asked Harry Haydock to be tentative president. Harry, he reported, had promised, "All right. You bet. But you go ahead and arrange things, and I'll O.K. 'em." Erik planned that the match should be held Saturday afternoon, on the old public court at the edge of town. He was happy in being, for the first time, part of Gopher Prairie. Through the week Carol heard how select an attendance there was to be. Kennicott growled that he didn't care to go. Had he any objections to her playing with Erik? No; sure not; she needed the exercise. Carol went to the match early. The court was in a meadow out on the New Antonia road. Only Erik was there. He was dashing about with a rake, trying to make the court somewhat less like a plowed field. He admitted that he had stage fright at the thought of the coming horde. Willis and Mrs. Woodford arrived, Willis in home-made knickers and black sneakers through at the toe; then Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon, people as harmless and grateful as the Woodfords. Carol was embarrassed and excessively agreeable, like the bishop's lady trying not to feel out of place at a Baptist bazaar. They waited. The match was scheduled for three. As spectators there assembled one youthful grocery clerk, stopping his Ford delivery wagon to stare from the seat, and one solemn small boy, tugging a smaller sister who had a careless nose. "I wonder where the Haydocks are? They ought to show up, at least," said Erik. Carol smiled confidently at him, and peered down the empty road toward town. Only heat-waves and dust and dusty weeds. At half-past three no one had come, and the grocery boy reluctantly got out, cranked his Ford, glared at them in a disillusioned manner, and rattled away. The small boy and his sister ate grass and sighed. The players pretended to be exhilarated by practising service, but they startled at each dust-cloud from a motor car. None of the cars turned into the meadow-none till a quarter to four, when Kennicott drove in. Carol's heart swelled. "How loyal he is! Depend on him! He'd come, if nobody else did. Even though he doesn't care for the game. The old darling!" Kennicott did not alight. He called out, "Carrie! Harry Haydock 'phoned me that they've decided to hold the tennis matches, or whatever you call 'em, down at the cottages at the lake, instead of here. The bunch are down there now: Haydocks and Dyers and Clarks and everybody. Harry wanted to know if I'd bring you down. I guess I can take the time--come right back after supper." Before Carol could sum it all up, Erik stammered, "Why, Haydock didn't say anything to me about the change. Of course he's the president, but----" Kennicott looked at him heavily, and grunted, "I don't know a thing about it. . . . Coming, Carrie?" "I am not! The match was to be here, and it will be here! You can tell Harry Haydock that he's beastly rude!" She rallied the five who had been left out, who would always be left out. "Come on! We'll toss to see which four of us play the Only and Original First Annual Tennis Tournament of Forest Hills, Del Monte, and Gopher Prairie!" "Don't know as I blame you," said Kennicott. "Well have supper at home then?" He drove off. She hated him for his composure. He had ruined her defiance. She felt much less like Susan B. Anthony as she turned to her huddled followers. Mrs. Dillon and Willis Woodford lost the toss. The others played out the game, slowly, painfully, stumbling on the rough earth, muffing the easiest shots, watched only by the small boy and his sniveling sister. Beyond the court stretched the eternal stubble-fields. The four marionettes, awkwardly going through exercises, insignificant in the hot sweep of contemptuous land, were not heroic; their voices did not ring out in the score, but sounded apologetic; and when the game was over they glanced about as though they were waiting to be laughed at. They walked home. Carol took Erik's arm. Through her thin linen sleeve she could feel the crumply warmth of his familiar brown jersey coat. She observed that there were purple and red gold threads interwoven with the brown. She remembered the first time she had seen it. Their talk was nothing but improvisations on the theme: "I never did like this Haydock. He just considers his own convenience." Ahead of them, the Dillons and Woodfords spoke of the weather and B. J. Gougerling's new bungalow. No one referred to their tennis tournament. At her gate Carol shook hands firmly with Erik and smiled at him. Next morning, Sunday morning, when Carol was on the porch, the Haydocks drove up. "We didn't mean to be rude to you, dearie!" implored Juanita. "I wouldn't have you think that for anything. We planned that Will and you should come down and have supper at our cottage." "No. I'm sure you didn't mean to be." Carol was super-neighborly. "But I do think you ought to apologize to poor Erik Valborg. He was terribly hurt." "Oh. Valborg. I don't care so much what he thinks," objected Harry. "He's nothing but a conceited buttinsky. Juanita and I kind of figured he was trying to run this tennis thing too darn much anyway." "But you asked him to make arrangements." "I know, but I don't like him. Good Lord, you couldn't hurt his feelings! He dresses up like a chorus man--and, by golly, he looks like one!--but he's nothing but a Swede farm boy, and these foreigners, they all got hides like a covey of rhinoceroses ." "But he IS hurt!" "Well----I don't suppose I ought to have gone off half-cocked, and not jollied him along. I'll give him a cigar. He'll----" Juanita had been licking her lips and staring at Carol. She interrupted her husband, "Yes, I do think Harry ought to fix it up with him. You LIKE him, DON'T you, Carol??" Over and through Carol ran a frightened cautiousness. "Like him? I haven't an i-dea. He seems to be a very decent young man. I just felt that when he'd worked so hard on the plans for the match, it was a shame not to be nice to him." "Maybe there's something to that," mumbled Harry; then, at sight of Kennicott coming round the corner tugging the red garden hose by its brass nozzle, he roared in relief, "What d' you think you're trying to do, doc?" While Kennicott explained in detail all that he thought he was trying to do, while he rubbed his chin and gravely stated, "Struck me the grass was looking kind of brown in patches--didn't know but what I'd give it a sprinkling," and while Harry agreed that this was an excellent idea, Juanita made friendly noises and, behind the gilt screen of an affectionate smile, watched Carol's face. IV She wanted to see Erik. She wanted some one to play with! There wasn't even so dignified and sound an excuse as having Kennicott's trousers pressed; when she inspected them, all three pairs looked discouragingly neat. She probably would not have ventured on it had she not spied Nat Hicks in the pool-parlor, being witty over bottle-pool. Erik was alone! She fluttered toward the tailor shop, dashed into its slovenly heat with the comic fastidiousness of a humming bird dipping into a dry tiger-lily. It was after she had entered that she found an excuse. Erik was in the back room, cross-legged on a long table, sewing a vest. But he looked as though he were doing this eccentric thing to amuse himself. "Hello. I wonder if you couldn't plan a sports-suit for me?" she said breathlessly. He stared at her; he protested, "No, I won't! God! I'm not going to be a tailor with you!" "Why, Erik!" she said, like a mildly shocked mother. It occurred to her that she did not need a suit, and that the order might have been hard to explain to Kennicott. He swung down from the table. "I want to show you something." He rummaged in the roll-top desk on which Nat Hicks kept bills, buttons, calendars, buckles, thread-channeled wax, shotgun shells, samples of brocade for "fancy vests," fishing-reels, pornographic post-cards, shreds of buckram lining. He pulled out a blurred sheet of Bristol board and anxiously gave it to her. It was a sketch for a frock. It was not well drawn; it was too finicking; the pillars in the background were grotesquely squat. But the frock had an original back, very low, with a central triangular section from the waist to a string of jet beads at the neck. "It's stunning. But how it would shock Mrs. Clark!" "Yes, wouldn't it!" "You must let yourself go more when you're drawing." "Don't know if I can. I've started kind of late. But listen! What do you think I've done this two weeks? I've read almost clear through a Latin grammar, and about twenty pages of Caesar." "Splendid! You are lucky. You haven't a teacher to make you artificial." "You're my teacher!" There was a dangerous edge of personality to his voice. She was offended and agitated. She turned her shoulder on him, stared through the back window, studying this typical center of a typical Main Street block, a vista hidden from casual strollers. The backs of the chief establishments in town surrounded a quadrangle neglected, dirty, and incomparably dismal. From the front, Howland & Gould's grocery was smug enough, but attached to the rear was a lean-to of storm streaked pine lumber with a sanded tar roof--a staggering doubtful shed behind which was a heap of ashes, splintered packing-boxes, shreds of excelsior, crumpled straw-board, broken olive-bottles, rotten fruit, and utterly disintegrated vegetables: orange carrots turning black, and potatoes with ulcers. The rear of the Bon Ton Store was grim with blistered black-painted iron shutters, under them a pile of once glossy red shirt-boxes, now a pulp from recent rain. As seen from Main Street, Oleson & McGuire's Meat Market had a sanitary and virtuous expression with its new tile counter, fresh sawdust on the floor, and a hanging veal cut in rosettes. But she now viewed a back room with a homemade refrigerator of yellow smeared with black grease. A man in an apron spotted with dry blood was hoisting out a hard slab of meat. Behind Billy's Lunch, the cook, in an apron which must long ago have been white, smoked a pipe and spat at the pest of sticky flies. In the center of the block, by itself, was the stable for the three horses of the drayman, and beside it a pile of manure. The rear of Ezra Stowbody's bank was whitewashed, and back of it was a concrete walk and a three-foot square of grass, but the window was barred, and behind the bars she saw Willis Woodford cramped over figures in pompous books. He raised his head, jerkily rubbed his eyes, and went back to the eternity of figures. The backs of the other shops were an impressionistic picture of dirty grays, drained browns, writhing heaps of refuse. "Mine is a back-yard romance--with a journeyman tailor!" She was saved from self-pity as she began to think through Erik's mind. She turned to him with an indignant, "It's disgusting that this is all you have to look at." He considered it. "Outside there? I don't notice much. I'm learning to look inside. Not awful easy!" "Yes. . . . I must be hurrying." As she walked home--without hurrying--she remembered her father saying to a serious ten-year-old Carol, "Lady, only a fool thinks he's superior to beautiful bindings, but only a double-distilled fool reads nothing but bindings." She was startled by the return of her father, startled by a sudden conviction that in this flaxen boy she had found the gray reticent judge who was divine love, perfect under-standing. She debated it, furiously denied it, reaffirmed it, ridiculed it. Of one thing she was unhappily certain: there was nothing of the beloved father image in Will Kennicott. V She wondered why she sang so often, and why she found so many pleasant things--lamplight seen though trees on a cool evening, sunshine on brown wood, morning sparrows, black sloping roofs turned to plates of silver by moonlight. Pleasant things, small friendly things, and pleasant places--a field of goldenrod, a pasture by the creek--and suddenly a wealth of pleasant people. Vida was lenient to Carol at the surgical-dressing class; Mrs. Dave Dyer flattered her with questions about her health, baby, cook, and opinions on the war. Mrs. Dyer seemed not to share the town's prejudice against Erik. "He's a nice-looking fellow; we must have him go on one of our picnics some time." Unexpectedly, Dave Dyer also liked him. The tight-fisted little farceur had a confused reverence for anything that seemed to him refined or clever. He answered Harry Haydock's sneers, "That's all right now! Elizabeth may doll himself up too much, but he's smart, and don't you forget it! I was asking round trying to find out where this Ukraine is, and darn if he didn't tell me. What's the matter with his talking so polite? Hell's bells, Harry, no harm in being polite. There's some regular he-men that are just as polite as women, prett' near." Carol found herself going about rejoicing, "How neighborly the town is!" She drew up with a dismayed "Am I falling in love with this boy? That's ridiculous! I'm merely interested in him. I like to think of helping him to succeed." But as she dusted the living-room, mended a collar-band, bathed Hugh, she was picturing herself and a young artistan Apollo nameless and evasive--building a house in the Berkshires or in Virginia; exuberantly buying a chair with his first check; reading poetry together, and frequently being earnest over valuable statistics about labor; tumbling out of bed early for a Sunday walk, and chattering (where Kennicott would have yawned) over bread and butter by a lake. Hugh was in her pictures, and he adored the young artist, who made castles of chairs and rugs for him. Beyond these playtimes she saw the "things I could do for Erik"--and she admitted that Erik did partly make up the image of her altogether perfect artist. In panic she insisted on being attentive to Kennicott, when he wanted to be left alone to read the newspaper. VI She needed new clothes. Kennicott had promised, "We'll have a good trip down to the Cities in the fall, and take plenty of time for it, and you can get your new glad-rags then." But as she examined her wardrobe she flung her ancient black velvet frock on the floor and raged, "They're disgraceful. Everything I have is falling to pieces." There was a new dressmaker and milliner, a Mrs. Swiftwaite. It was said that she was not altogether an elevating influence in the way she glanced at men; that she would as soon take away a legally appropriated husband as not; that if there WAS any Mr. Swiftwaite, "it certainly was strange that nobody seemed to know anything about him!" But she had made for Rita Gould an organdy frock and hat to match universally admitted to be "too cunning for words," and the matrons went cautiously, with darting eyes and excessive politeness, to the rooms which Mrs. Swiftwaite had taken in the old Luke Dawson house, on Floral Avenue. With none of the spiritual preparation which normally precedes the buying of new clothes in Gopher Prairie, Carol marched into Mrs. Swiftwaite's, and demanded, "I want to see a hat, and possibly a blouse." In the dingy old front parlor which she had tried to make smart with a pier glass, covers from fashion magazines, anemic French prints, Mrs. Swiftwaite moved smoothly among the dress-dummies and hat-rests, spoke smoothly as she took up a small black and red turban. "I am sure the lady will find this extremely attractive." "It's dreadfully tabby and small-towny," thought Carol, while she soothed, "I don't believe it quite goes with me." "It's the choicest thing I have, and I'm sure you'll find it suits you beautifully. It has a great deal of chic. Please try it on," said Mrs. Swiftwaite, more smoothly than ever. Carol studied the woman. She was as imitative as a glass diamond. She was the more rustic in her effort to appear urban. She wore a severe high-collared blouse with a row of small black buttons, which was becoming to her low-breasted slim neatness, but her skirt was hysterically checkered, her cheeks were too highly rouged, her lips too sharply penciled. She was magnificently a specimen of the illiterate divorcee of forty made up to look thirty, clever, and alluring. While she was trying on the hat Carol felt very condescending. She took it off, shook her head, explained with the kind smile for inferiors, "I'm afraid it won't do, though it's unusually nice for so small a town as this." "But it's really absolutely New-Yorkish." "Well, it----" "You see, I know my New York styles. I lived in New York for years, besides almost a year in Akron!" "You did?" Carol was polite, and edged away, and went home unhappily. She was wondering whether her own airs were as laughable as Mrs. Swiftwaite's. She put on the eye-glasses which Kennicott had recently given to her for reading, and looked over a grocery bill. She went hastily up to her room, to her mirror. She was in a mood of self-depreciation. Accurately or not, this was the picture she saw in the mirror: Neat rimless eye-glasses. Black hair clumsily tucked under a mauve straw hat which would have suited a spinster. Cheeks clear, bloodless. Thin nose. Gentle mouth and chin. A modest voile blouse with an edging of lace at the neck. A virginal sweetness and timorousness--no flare of gaiety, no suggestion of cities, music, quick laughter. "I have become a small-town woman. Absolute. Typical. Modest and moral and safe. Protected from life. GENTEEL! The Village Virus--the village virtuousness. My hair--just scrambled together. What can Erik see in that wedded spinster there? He does like me! Because I'm the only woman who's decent to him! How long before he'll wake up to me? . . . I've waked up to myself. . . . Am I as old as--as old as I am? "Not really old. Become careless. Let myself look tabby. "I want to chuck every stitch I own. Black hair and pale cheeks--they'd go with a Spanish dancer's costume--rose behind my ear, scarlet mantilla over one shoulder, the other bare." She seized the rouge sponge, daubed her cheeks, scratched at her lips with the vermilion pencil until they stung, tore open her collar. She posed with her thin arms in the attitude of the fandango. She dropped them sharply. She shook her head. "My heart doesn't dance," she said. She flushed as she fastened her blouse. "At least I'm much more graceful than Fern Mullins. Heavens! When I came here from the Cities, girls imitated me. Now I'm trying to imitate a city girl."

Chapter 29

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-29

One day, Carol goes walking with her son Hugh along the Gopher Prairie railroad tracks and runs into Erik Valbourg. Erik takes immediate notice of Hugh and straightens his outfit. Erik and Carol chat for a while about books, and Carol calls him out for not really knowing what he's talking about. Erik apologizes and asks if Carol can recommend things for him to read. He knows he's a poser, but he has big dreams. At this point, Erik decides to throw away decorum and ask Carol if she's happy in her marriage. Carol thinks this is a bit forward, but part of her is happy that Erik has asked. When Carol and Erik get back into town, Carol sees some old women staring at her through a window. From that point on, she feels like she needs to explain to everyone why she was walking with someone like Erik. The more she thinks about him, the more she wants to support his dreams and help him escape from Gopher Prairie. Erik won't be daunted by his social status, though. For starters, he organizes a tennis tournament for the town. Unfortunately, some higher-ups decide to change the location of the tennis tournament at the last second without informing Erik. They're making it pretty clear that he doesn't belong among them. When Carol scolds the folks for changing the tennis plans, Juanita Haydock, a neighbor, notices that Carol is defending Erik a little too much and implies that Carol likes Erik. This comment immediately makes Carol back down. Carol starts making up reasons to visit the tailor shop, ordering suits that her husband Will doesn't want or need. Over time, Carol finds herself singing more often and feeling cheerful. She suddenly realizes that she might have a crush on Erik. She becomes more critical of the clothes she wears and tries to look good around Erik whenever she can.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/30.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_29_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 30

chapter 30

{"name": "Chapter 30", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-30", "summary": "Fern Mullins, the new schoolteacher, busts into Carol's house and asks her to come on one last picnic before the school year starts. She also wants to bring along Cy Bogart, who will soon be a student of Fern's. Carol makes sure to invite Erik Valbourg along. While on the picnic, Valbourg invites Carol to take a boat ride with him. She agrees, even though she knows it'll cause a bit of a scandal with the other picnickers. The next day, Mrs. Bogart visits Carol and brings up Erik. She's obviously fishing for some admission of guilt from Carol, but Carol keeps a straight face. She's uncomfortable on the inside, because she knows Mrs. Bogart has seen her walking alone with Erik before. A suspicious woman like that is bound to put two and two together. From this point on, Carol seems to catch Mrs. Bogart watching any time she so much as glances in Erik's direction. Carol decides that the best thing to do is get away from Erik and Mrs. Bogart altogether. She asks Will if she can have a few days to spend in Chicago by herself. Will rejects the idea, leaving Carol at the mercy of her feelings for Erik... and the more she likes him, the more she hates Gopher Prairie. One day, Erik runs up to Carol at a lawn party and basically tells her he's in love with her. He's been hanging out with another local girl, but he says that he's only doing it to take his mind off Carol. Carol tells him she's too scared of the judgment of Gopher Prairie to do anything about it. Carol walks away from Erik. Later that afternoon, Will grabs her by the arm and confronts her about how much time she's been spending around Erik. But Carol lies right to his face by saying that she's helping fix up Erik with another local girl.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXX FERN Mullins rushed into the house on a Saturday morning early in September and shrieked at Carol, "School starts next Tuesday. I've got to have one more spree before I'm arrested. Let's get up a picnic down the lake for this afternoon. Won't you come, Mrs. Kennicott, and the doctor? Cy Bogart wants to go--he's a brat but he's lively." "I don't think the doctor can go," sedately. "He said something about having to make a country call this afternoon. But I'd love to." "That's dandy! Who can we get?" "Mrs. Dyer might be chaperon. She's been so nice. And maybe Dave, if he could get away from the store." "How about Erik Valborg? I think he's got lots more style than these town boys. You like him all right, don't you?" So the picnic of Carol, Fern, Erik, Cy Bogart, and the Dyers was not only moral but inevitable. They drove to the birch grove on the south shore of Lake Minniemashie. Dave Dyer was his most clownish self. He yelped, jigged, wore Carol's hat, dropped an ant down Fern's back, and when they went swimming (the women modestly changing in the car with the side curtains up, the men undressing behind the bushes, constantly repeating, "Gee, hope we don't run into poison ivy"), Dave splashed water on them and dived to clutch his wife's ankle. He infected the others. Erik gave an imitation of the Greek dancers he had seen in vaudeville, and when they sat down to picnic supper spread on a lap-robe on the grass, Cy climbed a tree to throw acorns at them. But Carol could not frolic. She had made herself young, with parted hair, sailor blouse and large blue bow, white canvas shoes and short linen skirt. Her mirror had asserted that she looked exactly as she had in college, that her throat was smooth, her collar-bone not very noticeable. But she was under restraint. When they swam she enjoyed the freshness of the water but she was irritated by Cy's tricks, by Dave's excessive good spirits. She admired Erik's dance; he could never betray bad taste, as Cy did, and Dave. She waited for him to come to her. He did not come. By his joyousness he had apparently endeared himself to the Dyers. Maud watched him and, after supper, cried to him, "Come sit down beside me, bad boy!" Carol winced at his willingness to be a bad boy and come and sit, at his enjoyment of a not very stimulating game in which Maud, Dave, and Cy snatched slices of cold tongue from one another's plates. Maud, it seemed, was slightly dizzy from the swim. She remarked publicly, "Dr. Kennicott has helped me so much by putting me on a diet," but it was to Erik alone that she gave the complete version of her peculiarity in being so sensitive, so easily hurt by the slightest cross word, that she simply had to have nice cheery friends. Erik was nice and cheery. Carol assured herself, "Whatever faults I may have, I certainly couldn't ever be jealous. I do like Maud; she's always so pleasant. But I wonder if she isn't just a bit fond of fishing for men's sympathy? Playing with Erik, and her married----Well----But she looks at him in that languishing, swooning, mid-Victorian way. Disgusting!" Cy Bogart lay between the roots of a big birch, smoking his pipe and teasing Fern, assuring her that a week from now, when he was again a high-school boy and she his teacher, he'd wink at her in class. Maud Dyer wanted Erik to "come down to the beach to see the darling little minnies." Carol was left to Dave, who tried to entertain her with humorous accounts of Ella Stowbody's fondness for chocolate peppermints. She watched Maud Dyer put her hand on Erik's shoulder to steady herself. "Disgusting!" she thought. Cy Bogart covered Fern's nervous hand with his red paw, and when she bounced with half-anger and shrieked, "Let go, I tell you!" he grinned and waved his pipe--a gangling twenty-year-old satyr. "Disgusting!" When Maud and Erik returned and the grouping shifted, Erik muttered at Carol, "There's a boat on shore. Let's skip off and have a row." "What will they think?" she worried. She saw Maud Dyer peer at Erik with moist possessive eyes. "Yes! Let's!" she said. She cried to the party, with the canonical amount of sprightliness, "Good-by, everybody. We'll wireless you from China." As the rhythmic oars plopped and creaked, as she floated on an unreality of delicate gray over which the sunset was poured out thin, the irritation of Cy and Maud slipped away. Erik smiled at her proudly. She considered him--coatless, in white thin shirt. She was conscious of his male differentness, of his flat masculine sides, his thin thighs, his easy rowing. They talked of the library, of the movies. He hummed and she softly sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." A breeze shivered across the agate lake. The wrinkled water was like armor damascened and polished. The breeze flowed round the boat in a chill current. Carol drew the collar of her middy blouse over her bare throat. "Getting cold. Afraid we'll have to go back," she said. "Let's not go back to them yet. They'll be cutting up. Let's keep along the shore." "But you enjoy the 'cutting up!' Maud and you had a beautiful time." "Why! We just walked on the shore and talked about fishing!" She was relieved, and apologetic to her friend Maud. "Of course. I was joking." "I'll tell you! Let's land here and sit on the shore--that bunch of hazel-brush will shelter us from the wind--and watch the sunset. It's like melted lead. Just a short while! We don't want to go back and listen to them!" "No, but----" She said nothing while he sped ashore. The keel clashed on the stones. He stood on the forward seat, holding out his hand. They were alone, in the ripple-lapping silence. She rose slowly, slowly stepped over the water in the bottom of the old boat. She took his hand confidently. Unspeaking they sat on a bleached log, in a russet twilight which hinted of autumn. Linden leaves fluttered about them. "I wish----Are you cold now?" he whispered. "A little." She shivered. But it was not with cold. "I wish we could curl up in the leaves there, covered all up, and lie looking out at the dark." "I wish we could." As though it was comfortably understood that he did not mean to be taken seriously. "Like what all the poets say--brown nymph and faun." "No. I can't be a nymph any more. Too old----Erik, am I old? Am I faded and small-towny?" "Why, you're the youngest----Your eyes are like a girl's. They're so--well, I mean, like you believed everything. Even if you do teach me, I feel a thousand years older than you, instead of maybe a year younger." "Four or five years younger!" "Anyway, your eyes are so innocent and your cheeks so soft----Damn it, it makes me want to cry, somehow, you're so defenseless; and I want to protect you and----There's nothing to protect you against!" "Am I young? Am I? Honestly? Truly?" She betrayed for a moment the childish, mock-imploring tone that comes into the voice of the most serious woman when an agreeable man treats her as a girl; the childish tone and childish pursed-up lips and shy lift of the cheek. "Yes, you are!" "You're dear to believe it, Will--ERIK!" "Will you play with me? A lot?" "Perhaps." "Would you really like to curl in the leaves and watch the stars swing by overhead?" "I think it's rather better to be sitting here!" He twined his fingers with hers. "And Erik, we must go back." "Why?" "It's somewhat late to outline all the history of social custom!" "I know. We must. Are you glad we ran away though?" "Yes." She was quiet, perfectly simple. But she rose. He circled her waist with a brusque arm. She did not resist. She did not care. He was neither a peasant tailor, a potential artist, a social complication, nor a peril. He was himself, and in him, in the personality flowing from him, she was unreasoningly content. In his nearness she caught a new view of his head; the last light brought out the planes of his neck, his flat ruddied cheeks, the side of his nose, the depression of his temples. Not as coy or uneasy lovers but as companions they walked to the boat, and he lifted her up on the prow. She began to talk intently, as he rowed: "Erik, you've got to work! You ought to be a personage. You're robbed of your kingdom. Fight for it! Take one of these correspondence courses in drawing--they mayn't be any good in themselves, but they'll make you try to draw and----" As they reached the picnic ground she perceived that it was dark, that they had been gone for a long time. "What will they say?" she wondered. The others greeted them with the inevitable storm of humor and slight vexation: "Where the deuce do you think you've been?" "You're a fine pair, you are!" Erik and Carol looked self-conscious; failed in their effort to be witty. All the way home Carol was embarrassed. Once Cy winked at her. That Cy, the Peeping Tom of the garage-loft, should consider her a fellow-sinner----She was furious and frightened and exultant by turns, and in all her moods certain that Kennicott would read her adventuring in her face. She came into the house awkwardly defiant. Her husband, half asleep under the lamp, greeted her, "Well, well, have nice time?" She could not answer. He looked at her. But his look did not sharpen. He began to wind his watch, yawning the old "Welllllll, guess it's about time to turn in." That was all. Yet she was not glad. She was almost disappointed. II Mrs. Bogart called next day. She had a hen-like, crumb-pecking, diligent appearance. Her smile was too innocent. The pecking started instantly: "Cy says you had lots of fun at the picnic yesterday. Did you enjoy it?" "Oh yes. I raced Cy at swimming. He beat me badly. He's so strong, isn't he!" "Poor boy, just crazy to get into the war, too, but----This Erik Valborg was along, wa'n't he?" "Yes." "I think he's an awful handsome fellow, and they say he's smart. Do you like him?" "He seems very polite." "Cy says you and him had a lovely boat-ride. My, that must have been pleasant." "Yes, except that I couldn't get Mr. Valborg to say a word. I wanted to ask him about the suit Mr. Hicks is making for my husband. But he insisted on singing. Still, it was restful, floating around on the water and singing. So happy and innocent. Don't you think it's a shame, Mrs. Bogart, that people in this town don't do more nice clean things like that, instead of all this horrible gossiping?" "Yes. . . . Yes." Mrs. Bogart sounded vacant. Her bonnet was awry; she was incomparably dowdy. Carol stared at her, felt contemptuous, ready at last to rebel against the trap, and as the rusty goodwife fished again, "Plannin' some more picnics?" she flung out, "I haven't the slightest idea! Oh. Is that Hugh crying? I must run up to him." But up-stairs she remembered that Mrs. Bogart had seen her walking with Erik from the railroad track into town, and she was chilly with disquietude. At the Jolly Seventeen, two days after, she was effusive to Maud Dyer, to Juanita Haydock. She fancied that every one was watching her, but she could not be sure, and in rare strong moments she did not care. She could rebel against the town's prying now that she had something, however indistinct, for which to rebel. In a passionate escape there must be not only a place from which to flee but a place to which to flee. She had known that she would gladly leave Gopher Prairie, leave Main Street and all that it signified, but she had had no destination. She had one now. That destination was not Erik Valborg and the love of Erik. She continued to assure herself that she wasn't in love with him but merely "fond of him, and interested in his success." Yet in him she had discovered both her need of youth and the fact that youth would welcome her. It was not Erik to whom she must escape, but universal and joyous youth, in class-rooms, in studios, in offices, in meetings to protest against Things in General. . . . But universal and joyous youth rather resembled Erik. All week she thought of things she wished to say to him. High, improving things. She began to admit that she was lonely without him. Then she was afraid. It was at the Baptist church supper, a week after the picnic, that she saw him again. She had gone with Kennicott and Aunt Bessie to the supper, which was spread on oilcloth-covered and trestle-supported tables in the church basement. Erik was helping Myrtle Cass to fill coffee cups for the waitresses. The congregation had doffed their piety. Children tumbled under the tables, and Deacon Pierson greeted the women with a rolling, "Where's Brother Jones, sister, where's Brother Jones? Not going to be with us tonight? Well, you tell Sister Perry to hand you a plate, and make 'em give you enough oyster pie!" Erik shared in the cheerfulness. He laughed with Myrtle, jogged her elbow when she was filling cups, made deep mock bows to the waitresses as they came up for coffee. Myrtle was enchanted by his humor. From the other end of the room, a matron among matrons, Carol observed Myrtle, and hated her, and caught herself at it. "To be jealous of a wooden-faced village girl!" But she kept it up. She detested Erik; gloated over his gaucheries--his "breaks," she called them. When he was too expressive, too much like a Russian dancer, in saluting Deacon Pierson, Carol had the ecstasy of pain in seeing the deacon's sneer. When, trying to talk to three girls at once, he dropped a cup and effeminately wailed, "Oh dear!" she sympathized with--and ached over--the insulting secret glances of the girls. From meanly hating him she rose to compassion as she saw that his eyes begged every one to like him. She perceived how inaccurate her judgments could be. At the picnic she had fancied that Maud Dyer looked upon Erik too sentimentally, and she had snarled, "I hate these married women who cheapen themselves and feed on boys." But at the supper Maud was one of the waitresses; she bustled with platters of cake, she was pleasant to old women; and to Erik she gave no attention at all. Indeed, when she had her own supper, she joined the Kennicotts, and how ludicrous it was to suppose that Maud was a gourmet of emotions Carol saw in the fact that she talked not to one of the town beaux but to the safe Kennicott himself! When Carol glanced at Erik again she discovered that Mrs. Bogart had an eye on her. It was a shock to know that at last there was something which could make her afraid of Mrs. Bogart's spying. "What am I doing? Am I in love with Erik? Unfaithful? I? I want youth but I don't want him--I mean, I don't want youth--enough to break up my life. I must get out of this. Quick." She said to Kennicott on their way home, "Will! I want to run away for a few days. Wouldn't you like to skip down to Chicago?" "Still be pretty hot there. No fun in a big city till winter. What do you want to go for?" "People! To occupy my mind. I want stimulus." "Stimulus?" He spoke good-naturedly. "Who's been feeding you meat? You got that 'stimulus' out of one of these fool stories about wives that don't know when they're well off. Stimulus! Seriously, though, to cut out the jollying, I can't get away." "Then why don't I run off by myself?" "Why----'Tisn't the money, you understand. But what about Hugh?" "Leave him with Aunt Bessie. It would be just for a few days." "I don't think much of this business of leaving kids around. Bad for 'em." "So you don't think----" "I'll tell you: I think we better stay put till after the war. Then we'll have a dandy long trip. No, I don't think you better plan much about going away now." So she was thrown at Erik. III She awoke at ebb-time, at three of the morning, woke sharply and fully; and sharply and coldly as her father pronouncing sentence on a cruel swindler she gave judgment: "A pitiful and tawdry love-affair. "No splendor, no defiance. A self-deceived little woman whispering in corners with a pretentious little man. "No, he is not. He is fine. Aspiring. It's not his fault. His eyes are sweet when he looks at me. Sweet, so sweet." She pitied herself that her romance should be pitiful; she sighed that in this colorless hour, to this austere self, it should seem tawdry. Then, in a very great desire of rebellion and unleashing of all her hatreds, "The pettier and more tawdry it is, the more blame to Main Street. It shows how much I've been longing to escape. Any way out! Any humility so long as I can flee. Main Street has done this to me. I came here eager for nobilities, ready for work, and now----Any way out. "I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound. "Tawdry! Pitiful! Carol--the clean girl that used to walk so fast!--sneaking and tittering in dark corners, being sentimental and jealous at church suppers!" At breakfast-time her agonies were night-blurred, and persisted only as a nervous irresolution. IV Few of the aristocrats of the Jolly Seventeen attended the humble folk-meets of the Baptist and Methodist church suppers, where the Willis Woodfords, the Dillons, the Champ Perrys, Oleson the butcher, Brad Bemis the tinsmith, and Deacon Pierson found release from loneliness. But all of the smart set went to the lawn-festivals of the Episcopal Church, and were reprovingly polite to outsiders. The Harry Haydocks gave the last lawn-festival of the season; a splendor of Japanese lanterns and card-tables and chicken patties and Neapolitan ice-cream. Erik was no longer entirely an outsider. He was eating his ice-cream with a group of the people most solidly "in"--the Dyers, Myrtle Cass, Guy Pollock, the Jackson Elders. The Haydocks themselves kept aloof, but the others tolerated him. He would never, Carol fancied, be one of the town pillars, because he was not orthodox in hunting and motoring and poker. But he was winning approbation by his liveliness, his gaiety--the qualities least important in him. When the group summoned Carol she made several very well-taken points in regard to the weather. Myrtle cried to Erik, "Come on! We don't belong with these old folks. I want to make you 'quainted with the jolliest girl, she comes from Wakamin, she's staying with Mary Howland." Carol saw him being profuse to the guest from Wakamin. She saw him confidentially strolling with Myrtle. She burst out to Mrs. Westlake, "Valborg and Myrtle seem to have quite a crush on each other." Mrs. Westlake glanced at her curiously before she mumbled, "Yes, don't they." "I'm mad, to talk this way," Carol worried. She had regained a feeling of social virtue by telling Juanita Haydock "how darling her lawn looked with the Japanese lanterns" when she saw that Erik was stalking her. Though he was merely ambling about with his hands in his pockets, though he did not peep at her, she knew that he was calling her. She sidled away from Juanita. Erik hastened to her. She nodded coolly (she was proud of her coolness). "Carol! I've got a wonderful chance! Don't know but what some ways it might be better than going East to take art. Myrtle Cass says----I dropped in to say howdy to Myrtle last evening, and had quite a long talk with her father, and he said he was hunting for a fellow to go to work in the flour mill and learn the whole business, and maybe become general manager. I know something about wheat from my farming, and I worked a couple of months in the flour mill at Curlew when I got sick of tailoring. What do you think? You said any work was artistic if it was done by an artist. And flour is so important. What do you think?" "Wait! Wait!" This sensitive boy would be very skilfully stamped into conformity by Lyman Cass and his sallow daughter; but did she detest the plan for this reason? "I must be honest. I mustn't tamper with his future to please my vanity." But she had no sure vision. She turned on him: "How can I decide? It's up to you. Do you want to become a person like Lym Cass, or do you want to become a person like--yes, like me! Wait! Don't be flattering. Be honest. This is important." "I know. I am a person like you now! I mean, I want to rebel." "Yes. We're alike," gravely. "Only I'm not sure I can put through my schemes. I really can't draw much. I guess I have pretty fair taste in fabrics, but since I've known you I don't like to think about fussing with dress-designing. But as a miller, I'd have the means--books, piano, travel." "I'm going to be frank and beastly. Don't you realize that it isn't just because her papa needs a bright young man in the mill that Myrtle is amiable to you? Can't you understand what she'll do to you when she has you, when she sends you to church and makes you become respectable?" He glared at her. "I don't know. I suppose so." "You are thoroughly unstable!" "What if I am? Most fish out of water are! Don't talk like Mrs. Bogart! How can I be anything but 'unstable'--wandering from farm to tailor shop to books, no training, nothing but trying to make books talk to me! Probably I'll fail. Oh, I know it; probably I'm uneven. But I'm not unstable in thinking about this job in the mill--and Myrtle. I know what I want. I want you!" "Please, please, oh, please!" "I do. I'm not a schoolboy any more. I want you. If I take Myrtle, it's to forget you." "Please, please!" "It's you that are unstable! You talk at things and play at things, but you're scared. Would I mind it if you and I went off to poverty, and I had to dig ditches? I would not! But you would. I think you would come to like me, but you won't admit it. I wouldn't have said this, but when you sneer at Myrtle and the mill----If I'm not to have good sensible things like those, d' you think I'll be content with trying to become a damn dressmaker, after YOU? Are you fair? Are you?" "No, I suppose not." "Do you like me? Do you?" "Yes----No! Please! I can't talk any more." "Not here. Mrs. Haydock is looking at us." "No, nor anywhere. O Erik, I am fond of you, but I'm afraid." "What of?" "Of Them! Of my rulers--Gopher Prairie. . . . My dear boy, we are talking very foolishly. I am a normal wife and a good mother, and you are--oh, a college freshman." "You do like me! I'm going to make you love me!" She looked at him once, recklessly, and walked away with a serene gait that was a disordered flight. Kennicott grumbled on their way home, "You and this Valborg fellow seem quite chummy." "Oh, we are. He's interested in Myrtle Cass, and I was telling him how nice she is." In her room she marveled, "I have become a liar. I'm snarled with lies and foggy analyses and desires--I who was clear and sure." She hurried into Kennicott's room, sat on the edge of his bed. He flapped a drowsy welcoming hand at her from the expanse of quilt and dented pillows. "Will, I really think I ought to trot off to St. Paul or Chicago or some place." "I thought we settled all that, few nights ago! Wait till we can have a real trip." He shook himself out of his drowsiness. "You might give me a good-night kiss." She did--dutifully. He held her lips against his for an intolerable time. "Don't you like the old man any more?" he coaxed. He sat up and shyly fitted his palm about the slimness of her waist. "Of course. I like you very much indeed." Even to herself it sounded flat. She longed to be able to throw into her voice the facile passion of a light woman. She patted his cheek. He sighed, "I'm sorry you're so tired. Seems like----But of course you aren't very strong." "Yes. . . . Then you don't think--you're quite sure I ought to stay here in town?" "I told you so! I certainly do!" She crept back to her room, a small timorous figure in white. "I can't face Will down--demand the right. He'd be obstinate. And I can't even go off and earn my living again. Out of the habit of it. He's driving me----I'm afraid of what he's driving me to. Afraid. "That man in there, snoring in stale air, my husband? Could any ceremony make him my husband? "No. I don't want to hurt him. I want to love him. I can't, when I'm thinking of Erik. Am I too honest--a funny topsy-turvy honesty--the faithfulness of unfaith? I wish I had a more compartmental mind, like men. I'm too monogamous--toward Erik!--my child Erik, who needs me. "Is an illicit affair like a gambling debt--demands stricter honor than the legitimate debt of matrimony, because it's not legally enforced? "That's nonsense! I don't care in the least for Erik! Not for any man. I want to be let alone, in a woman world--a world without Main Street, or politicians, or business men, or men with that sudden beastly hungry look, that glistening unfrank expression that wives know---- "If Erik were here, if he would just sit quiet and kind and talk, I could be still, I could go to sleep. "I am so tired. If I could sleep----"

Chapter 30

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-30

Fern Mullins, the new schoolteacher, busts into Carol's house and asks her to come on one last picnic before the school year starts. She also wants to bring along Cy Bogart, who will soon be a student of Fern's. Carol makes sure to invite Erik Valbourg along. While on the picnic, Valbourg invites Carol to take a boat ride with him. She agrees, even though she knows it'll cause a bit of a scandal with the other picnickers. The next day, Mrs. Bogart visits Carol and brings up Erik. She's obviously fishing for some admission of guilt from Carol, but Carol keeps a straight face. She's uncomfortable on the inside, because she knows Mrs. Bogart has seen her walking alone with Erik before. A suspicious woman like that is bound to put two and two together. From this point on, Carol seems to catch Mrs. Bogart watching any time she so much as glances in Erik's direction. Carol decides that the best thing to do is get away from Erik and Mrs. Bogart altogether. She asks Will if she can have a few days to spend in Chicago by herself. Will rejects the idea, leaving Carol at the mercy of her feelings for Erik... and the more she likes him, the more she hates Gopher Prairie. One day, Erik runs up to Carol at a lawn party and basically tells her he's in love with her. He's been hanging out with another local girl, but he says that he's only doing it to take his mind off Carol. Carol tells him she's too scared of the judgment of Gopher Prairie to do anything about it. Carol walks away from Erik. Later that afternoon, Will grabs her by the arm and confronts her about how much time she's been spending around Erik. But Carol lies right to his face by saying that she's helping fix up Erik with another local girl.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/31.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_30_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 31

chapter 31

{"name": "Chapter 31", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-31", "summary": "Carol sits on the porch one evening while Will is out on a country house call. Erik comes marching onto the porch and touches her hand, saying that he saw Will drive out of town and decided to come over. Carol doesn't want any neighbors to see them, so she leads Erik into the house. Erik wants to see Carol's son sleeping, and she lets him... but maybe he's just trying to get her upstairs. Erik steps up to her and kisses her face. Eventually, Carol convinces Erik to leave. When he's gone, she feels completely empty. She glances out the window to see if she can see him leaving, but all she finds is her nosy neighbor standing in front of her house and inspecting it. She feels paralyzed by the thought that this neighbor saw Erik leave while Will wasn't at home. When Will gets back home, he accuses Carol of getting too chummy with the wife of his medical rival, Dr. Westlake. He's heard that Carol trash talks her in-laws with this woman, and he doesn't want to hear any more of it. The next day, Vida Sherwin visits to tell Carol that there have been rumors about her being involved with Erik Valbourg. Carol denies it outright, although it's clear that she's rattled. Carol starts to have daydreams about Will dying while she is somewhere with Erik. She awakens from the dream and runs to be in bed with Will, feeling horribly guilty. Carol goes the next two weeks without speaking to Erik. One night, Fern Mullins asks Carol to be a chaperone at a barn dance in the area, but Carol rejects her, and we find out that something bad happened after that.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXI THEIR night came unheralded. Kennicott was on a country call. It was cool but Carol huddled on the porch, rocking, meditating, rocking. The house was lonely and repellent, and though she sighed, "I ought to go in and read--so many things to read--ought to go in," she remained. Suddenly Erik was coming, turning in, swinging open the screen door, touching her hand. "Erik!" "Saw your husband driving out of town. Couldn't stand it." "Well----You mustn't stay more than five minutes." "Couldn't stand not seeing you. Every day, towards evening, felt I had to see you--pictured you so clear. I've been good though, staying away, haven't I!" "And you must go on being good." "Why must I?" "We better not stay here on the porch. The Howlands across the street are such window-peepers, and Mrs. Bogart----" She did not look at him but she could divine his tremulousness as he stumbled indoors. A moment ago the night had been coldly empty; now it was incalculable, hot, treacherous. But it is women who are the calm realists once they discard the fetishes of the premarital hunt. Carol was serene as she murmured, "Hungry? I have some little honey-colored cakes. You may have two, and then you must skip home." "Take me up and let me see Hugh asleep." "I don't believe----" "Just a glimpse!" "Well----" She doubtfully led the way to the hallroom-nursery. Their heads close, Erik's curls pleasant as they touched her cheek, they looked in at the baby. Hugh was pink with slumber. He had burrowed into his pillow with such energy that it was almost smothering him. Beside it was a celluloid rhinoceros; tight in his hand a torn picture of Old King Cole. "Shhh!" said Carol, quite automatically. She tiptoed in to pat the pillow. As she returned to Erik she had a friendly sense of his waiting for her. They smiled at each other. She did not think of Kennicott, the baby's father. What she did think was that some one rather like Erik, an older and surer Erik, ought to be Hugh's father. The three of them would play--incredible imaginative games. "Carol! You've told me about your own room. Let me peep in at it." "But you mustn't stay, not a second. We must go downstairs." "Yes." "Will you be good?" "R-reasonably!" He was pale, large-eyed, serious. "You've got to be more than reasonably good!" She felt sensible and superior; she was energetic about pushing open the door. Kennicott had always seemed out of place there but Erik surprisingly harmonized with the spirit of the room as he stroked the books, glanced at the prints. He held out his hands. He came toward her. She was weak, betrayed to a warm softness. Her head was tilted back. Her eyes were closed. Her thoughts were formless but many-colored. She felt his kiss, diffident and reverent, on her eyelid. Then she knew that it was impossible. She shook herself. She sprang from him. "Please!" she said sharply. He looked at her unyielding. "I am fond of you," she said. "Don't spoil everything. Be my friend." "How many thousands and millions of women must have said that! And now you! And it doesn't spoil everything. It glorifies everything." "Dear, I do think there's a tiny streak of fairy in you--whatever you do with it. Perhaps I'd have loved that once. But I won't. It's too late. But I'll keep a fondness for you. Impersonal--I will be impersonal! It needn't be just a thin talky fondness. You do need me, don't you? Only you and my son need me. I've wanted so to be wanted! Once I wanted love to be given to me. Now I'll be content if I can give. . . . Almost content! "We women, we like to do things for men. Poor men! We swoop on you when you're defenseless and fuss over you and insist on reforming you. But it's so pitifully deep in us. You'll be the one thing in which I haven't failed. Do something definite! Even if it's just selling cottons. Sell beautiful cottons--caravans from China----" "Carol! Stop! You do love me!" "I do not! It's just----Can't you understand? Everything crushes in on me so, all the gaping dull people, and I look for a way out----Please go. I can't stand any more. Please!" He was gone. And she was not relieved by the quiet of the house. She was empty and the house was empty and she needed him. She wanted to go on talking, to get this threshed out, to build a sane friendship. She wavered down to the living-room, looked out of the bay-window. He was not to be seen. But Mrs. Westlake was. She was walking past, and in the light from the corner arc-lamp she quickly inspected the porch, the windows. Carol dropped the curtain, stood with movement and reflection paralyzed. Automatically, without reasoning, she mumbled, "I will see him again soon and make him understand we must be friends. But----The house is so empty. It echoes so." II Kennicott had seemed nervous and absent-minded through that supper-hour, two evenings after. He prowled about the living-room, then growled: "What the dickens have you been saying to Ma Westlake?" Carol's book rattled. "What do you mean?" "I told you that Westlake and his wife were jealous of us, and here you been chumming up to them and----From what Dave tells me, Ma Westlake has been going around town saying you told her that you hate Aunt Bessie, and that you fixed up your own room because I snore, and you said Bjornstam was too good for Bea, and then, just recent, that you were sore on the town because we don't all go down on our knees and beg this Valborg fellow to come take supper with us. God only knows what else she says you said." "It's not true, any of it! I did like Mrs. Westlake, and I've called on her, and apparently she's gone and twisted everything I've said----" "Sure. Of course she would. Didn't I tell you she would? She's an old cat, like her pussyfooting, hand-holding husband. Lord, if I was sick, I'd rather have a faith-healer than Westlake, and she's another slice off the same bacon. What I can't understand though----" She waited, taut. "----is whatever possessed you to let her pump you, bright a girl as you are. I don't care what you told her--we all get peeved sometimes and want to blow off steam, that's natural--but if you wanted to keep it dark, why didn't you advertise it in the Dauntless, or get a megaphone and stand on top of the hotel and holler, or do anything besides spill it to her!" "I know. You told me. But she was so motherly. And I didn't have any woman----Vida 's become so married and proprietary." "Well, next time you'll have better sense." He patted her head, flumped down behind his newspaper, said nothing more. Enemies leered through the windows, stole on her from the hall. She had no one save Erik. This kind good man Kennicott--he was an elder brother. It was Erik, her fellow outcast, to whom she wanted to run for sanctuary. Through her storm she was, to the eye, sitting quietly with her fingers between the pages of a baby-blue book on home-dressmaking. But her dismay at Mrs. Westlake's treachery had risen to active dread. What had the woman said of her and Erik? What did she know? What had she seen? Who else would join in the baying hunt? Who else had seen her with Erik? What had she to fear from the Dyers, Cy Bogart, Juanita, Aunt Bessie? What precisely had she answered to Mrs. Bogart's questioning? All next day she was too restless to stay home, yet as she walked the streets on fictitious errands she was afraid of every person she met. She waited for them to speak; waited with foreboding. She repeated, "I mustn't ever see Erik again." But the words did not register. She had no ecstatic indulgence in the sense of guilt which is, to the women of Main Street, the surest escape from blank tediousness. At five, crumpled in a chair in the living-room, she started at the sound of the bell. Some one opened the door. She waited, uneasy. Vida Sherwin charged into the room. "Here's the one person I can trust!" Carol rejoiced. Vida was serious but affectionate. She bustled at Carol with, "Oh, there you are, dearie, so glad t' find you in, sit down, want to talk to you." Carol sat, obedient. Vida fussily tugged over a large chair and launched out: "I've been hearing vague rumors you were interested in this Erik Valborg. I knew you couldn't be guilty, and I'm surer than ever of it now. Here we are, as blooming as a daisy." "How does a respectable matron look when she feels guilty?" Carol sounded resentful. "Why----Oh, it would show! Besides! I know that you, of all people, are the one that can appreciate Dr. Will." "What have you been hearing?" "Nothing, really. I just heard Mrs. Bogart say she'd seen you and Valborg walking together a lot." Vida's chirping slackened. She looked at her nails. "But----I suspect you do like Valborg. Oh, I don't mean in any wrong way. But you're young; you don't know what an innocent liking might drift into. You always pretend to be so sophisticated and all, but you're a baby. Just because you are so innocent, you don't know what evil thoughts may lurk in that fellow's brain." "You don't suppose Valborg could actually think about making love to me?" Her rather cheap sport ended abruptly as Vida cried, with contorted face, "What do you know about the thoughts in hearts? You just play at reforming the world. You don't know what it means to suffer." There are two insults which no human being will endure: the assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble. Carol said furiously, "You think I don't suffer? You think I've always had an easy----" "No, you don't. I'm going to tell you something I've never told a living soul, not even Ray." The dam of repressed imagination which Vida had builded for years, which now, with Raymie off at the wars, she was building again, gave way. "I was--I liked Will terribly well. One time at a party--oh, before he met you, of course--but we held hands, and we were so happy. But I didn't feel I was really suited to him. I let him go. Please don't think I still love him! I see now that Ray was predestined to be my mate. But because I liked him, I know how sincere and pure and noble Will is, and his thoughts never straying from the path of rectitude, and----If I gave him up to you, at least you've got to appreciate him! We danced together and laughed so, and I gave him up, but----This IS my affair! I'm NOT intruding! I see the whole thing as he does, because of all I've told you. Maybe it's shameless to bare my heart this way, but I do it for him--for him and you!" Carol understood that Vida believed herself to have recited minutely and brazenly a story of intimate love; understood that, in alarm, she was trying to cover her shame as she struggled on, "Liked him in the most honorable way--simply can't help it if I still see things through his eyes----If I gave him up, I certainly am not beyond my rights in demanding that you take care to avoid even the appearance of evil and----" She was weeping; an insignificant, flushed, ungracefully weeping woman. Carol could not endure it. She ran to Vida, kissed her forehead, comforted her with a murmur of dove-like sounds, sought to reassure her with worn and hastily assembled gifts of words: "Oh, I appreciate it so much," and "You are so fine and splendid," and "Let me assure you there isn't a thing to what you've heard," and "Oh, indeed, I do know how sincere Will is, and as you say, so--so sincere." Vida believed that she had explained many deep and devious matters. She came out of her hysteria like a sparrow shaking off rain-drops. She sat up, and took advantage of her victory: "I don't want to rub it in, but you can see for yourself now, this is all a result of your being so discontented and not appreciating the dear good people here. And another thing: People like you and me, who want to reform things, have to be particularly careful about appearances. Think how much better you can criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously. Then people can't say you're attacking them to excuse your own infractions." To Carol was given a sudden great philosophical understanding, an explanation of half the cautious reforms in history. "Yes. I've heard that plea. It's a good one. It sets revolts aside to cool. It keeps strays in the flock. To word it differently: 'You must live up to the popular code if you believe in it; but if you don't believe in it, then you MUST live up to it!'" "I don't think so at all," said Vida vaguely. She began to look hurt, and Carol let her be oracular. III Vida had done her a service; had made all agonizing seem so fatuous that she ceased writhing and saw that her whole problem was simple as mutton: she was interested in Erik's aspiration; interest gave her a hesitating fondness for him; and the future would take care of the event. . . . But at night, thinking in bed, she protested, "I'm not a falsely accused innocent, though! If it were some one more resolute than Erik, a fighter, an artist with bearded surly lips----They're only in books. Is that the real tragedy, that I never shall know tragedy, never find anything but blustery complications that turn out to be a farce? "No one big enough or pitiful enough to sacrifice for. Tragedy in neat blouses; the eternal flame all nice and safe in a kerosene stove. Neither heroic faith nor heroic guilt. Peeping at love from behind lace curtains--on Main Street!" Aunt Bessie crept in next day, tried to pump her, tried to prime the pump by again hinting that Kennicott might have his own affairs. Carol snapped, "Whatever I may do, I'll have you to understand that Will is only too safe!" She wished afterward that she had not been so lofty. How much would Aunt Bessie make of "Whatever I may do?" When Kennicott came home he poked at things, and hemmed, and brought out, "Saw aunty, this afternoon. She said you weren't very polite to her." Carol laughed. He looked at her in a puzzled way and fled to his newspaper. IV She lay sleepless. She alternately considered ways of leaving Kennicott, and remembered his virtues, pitied his bewilderment in face of the subtle corroding sicknesses which he could not dose nor cut out. Didn't he perhaps need her more than did the book-solaced Erik? Suppose Will were to die, suddenly. Suppose she never again saw him at breakfast, silent but amiable, listening to her chatter. Suppose he never again played elephant for Hugh. Suppose----A country call, a slippery road, his motor skidding, the edge of the road crumbling, the car turning turtle, Will pinned beneath, suffering, brought home maimed, looking at her with spaniel eyes--or waiting for her, calling for her, while she was in Chicago, knowing nothing of it. Suppose he were sued by some vicious shrieking woman for malpractice. He tried to get witnesses; Westlake spread lies; his friends doubted him; his self-confidence was so broken that it was horrible to see the indecision of the decisive man; he was convicted, handcuffed, taken on a train---- She ran to his room. At her nervous push the door swung sharply in, struck a chair. He awoke, gasped, then in a steady voice: "What is it, dear? Anything wrong?" She darted to him, fumbled for the familiar harsh bristly cheek. How well she knew it, every seam, and hardness of bone, and roll of fat! Yet when he sighed, "This is a nice visit," and dropped his hand on her thin-covered shoulder, she said, too cheerily, "I thought I heard you moaning. So silly of me. Good night, dear." V She did not see Erik for a fortnight, save once at church and once when she went to the tailor shop to talk over the plans, contingencies, and strategy of Kennicott's annual campaign for getting a new suit. Nat Hicks was there, and he was not so deferential as he had been. With unnecessary jauntiness he chuckled, "Some nice flannels, them samples, heh?" Needlessly he touched her arm to call attention to the fashion-plates, and humorously he glanced from her to Erik. At home she wondered if the little beast might not be suggesting himself as a rival to Erik, but that abysmal bedragglement she would not consider. She saw Juanita Haydock slowly walking past the house--as Mrs. Westlake had once walked past. She met Mrs. Westlake in Uncle Whittier's store, and before that alert stare forgot her determination to be rude, and was shakily cordial. She was sure that all the men on the street, even Guy Pollock and Sam Clark, leered at her in an interested hopeful way, as though she were a notorious divorcee. She felt as insecure as a shadowed criminal. She wished to see Erik, and wished that she had never seen him. She fancied that Kennicott was the only person in town who did not know all--know incomparably more than there was to know--about herself and Erik. She crouched in her chair as she imagined men talking of her, thick-voiced, obscene, in barber shops and the tobacco-stinking pool parlor. Through early autumn Fern Mullins was the only person who broke the suspense. The frivolous teacher had come to accept Carol as of her own youth, and though school had begun she rushed in daily to suggest dances, welsh-rabbit parties. Fern begged her to go as chaperon to a barn-dance in the country, on a Saturday evening. Carol could not go. The next day, the storm crashed.

Chapter 31

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-31

Carol sits on the porch one evening while Will is out on a country house call. Erik comes marching onto the porch and touches her hand, saying that he saw Will drive out of town and decided to come over. Carol doesn't want any neighbors to see them, so she leads Erik into the house. Erik wants to see Carol's son sleeping, and she lets him... but maybe he's just trying to get her upstairs. Erik steps up to her and kisses her face. Eventually, Carol convinces Erik to leave. When he's gone, she feels completely empty. She glances out the window to see if she can see him leaving, but all she finds is her nosy neighbor standing in front of her house and inspecting it. She feels paralyzed by the thought that this neighbor saw Erik leave while Will wasn't at home. When Will gets back home, he accuses Carol of getting too chummy with the wife of his medical rival, Dr. Westlake. He's heard that Carol trash talks her in-laws with this woman, and he doesn't want to hear any more of it. The next day, Vida Sherwin visits to tell Carol that there have been rumors about her being involved with Erik Valbourg. Carol denies it outright, although it's clear that she's rattled. Carol starts to have daydreams about Will dying while she is somewhere with Erik. She awakens from the dream and runs to be in bed with Will, feeling horribly guilty. Carol goes the next two weeks without speaking to Erik. One night, Fern Mullins asks Carol to be a chaperone at a barn dance in the area, but Carol rejects her, and we find out that something bad happened after that.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/32.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_31_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 32

chapter 32

{"name": "Chapter 32", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-32", "summary": "Carol is outside doing some work when she overhears Mrs. Bogart from next door throwing Fern Mullins out of her house. Fern has been boarding with Mrs. Bogart until now, but Mrs. Bogart calls her an immoral harlot and kicks her into the street. When Carol asks what's going on, Bogart tells her that Fern took her poor, innocent son Cy to a barn dance and got him drunk. And she's his teacher, for crying out loud! Carol immediately knows the whole story is a lie, because Cy is the most dishonest kid in town. But Mrs. Bogart refuses to believe her son is anything other than a total angel. Carol knows she needs to protect Fern. If Fern gets fired by the local school board, she'll never find a job anywhere, because word about why she got fired will spread quickly. Carol visits the school board president, Sam Clark, to straighten things out. Sam Clark knows that the story didn't happen and that Cy Bogart is a liar, but he still thinks Fern will be fired because of the scandal the story has caused. Carol can't believe Sam is willing to ruin a young woman's career so easily, but he says his hands are tied because there are some mighty conservative people on the school board. Fern ends up leaving the town in disgrace. She later sends a letter to Carol thanking her for being the only person in Gopher Prairie who believed in her.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXII I CAROL was on the back porch, tightening a bolt on the baby's go-cart, this Sunday afternoon. Through an open window of the Bogart house she heard a screeching, heard Mrs. Bogart's haggish voice: " . . . did too, and there's no use your denying it no you don't, you march yourself right straight out of the house . . . never in my life heard of such . . . never had nobody talk to me like . . . walk in the ways of sin and nastiness . . . leave your clothes here, and heaven knows that's more than you deserve . . . any of your lip or I'll call the policeman." The voice of the other interlocutor Carol did not catch, nor, though Mrs. Bogart was proclaiming that he was her confidant and present assistant, did she catch the voice of Mrs. Bogart's God. "Another row with Cy," Carol inferred. She trundled the go-cart down the back steps and tentatively wheeled it across the yard, proud of her repairs. She heard steps on the sidewalk. She saw not Cy Bogart but Fern Mullins, carrying a suit-case, hurrying up the street with her head low. The widow, standing on the porch with buttery arms akimbo, yammered after the fleeing girl: "And don't you dare show your face on this block again. You can send the drayman for your trunk. My house has been contaminated long enough. Why the Lord should afflict me----" Fern was gone. The righteous widow glared, banged into the house, came out poking at her bonnet, marched away. By this time Carol was staring in a manner not visibly to be distinguished from the window-peeping of the rest of Gopher Prairie. She saw Mrs. Bogart enter the Howland house, then the Casses'. Not till suppertime did she reach the Kennicotts. The doctor answered her ring, and greeted her, "Well, well? how's the good neighbor?" The good neighbor charged into the living-room, waving the most unctuous of black kid gloves and delightedly sputtering: "You may well ask how I am! I really do wonder how I could go through the awful scenes of this day--and the impudence I took from that woman's tongue, that ought to be cut out----" "Whoa! Whoa! Hold up!" roared Kennicott. "Who's the hussy, Sister Bogart? Sit down and take it cool and tell us about it." "I can't sit down, I must hurry home, but I couldn't devote myself to my own selfish cares till I'd warned you, and heaven knows I don't expect any thanks for trying to warn the town against her, there's always so much evil in the world that folks simply won't see or appreciate your trying to safeguard them----And forcing herself in here to get in with you and Carrie, many 's the time I've seen her doing it, and, thank heaven, she was found out in time before she could do any more harm, it simply breaks my heart and prostrates me to think what she may have done already, even if some of us that understand and know about things----" "Whoa-up! Who are you talking about?" "She's talking about Fern Mullins," Carol put in, not pleasantly. "Huh?" Kennicott was incredulous. "I certainly am!" flourished Mrs. Bogart, "and good and thankful you may be that I found her out in time, before she could get YOU into something, Carol, because even if you are my neighbor and Will's wife and a cultured lady, let me tell you right now, Carol Kennicott, that you ain't always as respectful to--you ain't as reverent--you don't stick by the good old ways like they was laid down for us by God in the Bible, and while of course there ain't a bit of harm in having a good laugh, and I know there ain't any real wickedness in you, yet just the same you don't fear God and hate the transgressors of his commandments like you ought to, and you may be thankful I found out this serpent I nourished in my bosom--and oh yes! oh yes indeed! my lady must have two eggs every morning for breakfast, and eggs sixty cents a dozen, and wa'n't satisfied with one, like most folks--what did she care how much they cost or if a person couldn't make hardly nothing on her board and room, in fact I just took her in out of charity and I might have known from the kind of stockings and clothes that she sneaked into my house in her trunk----" Before they got her story she had five more minutes of obscene wallowing. The gutter comedy turned into high tragedy, with Nemesis in black kid gloves. The actual story was simple, depressing, and unimportant. As to details Mrs. Bogart was indefinite, and angry that she should be questioned. Fern Mullins and Cy had, the evening before, driven alone to a barn-dance in the country. (Carol brought out the admission that Fern had tried to get a chaperon.) At the dance Cy had kissed Fern--she confessed that. Cy had obtained a pint of whisky; he said that he didn't remember where he had got it; Mrs. Bogart implied that Fern had given it to him; Fern herself insisted that he had stolen it from a farmer's overcoat--which, Mrs. Bogart raged, was obviously a lie. He had become soggily drunk. Fern had driven him home; deposited him, retching and wabbling, on the Bogart porch. Never before had her boy been drunk, shrieked Mrs. Bogart. When Kennicott grunted, she owned, "Well, maybe once or twice I've smelled licker on his breath." She also, with an air of being only too scrupulously exact, granted that sometimes he did not come home till morning. But he couldn't ever have been drunk, for he always had the best excuses: the other boys had tempted him to go down the lake spearing pickerel by torchlight, or he had been out in a "machine that ran out of gas." Anyway, never before had her boy fallen into the hands of a "designing woman." "What do you suppose Miss Mullins could design to do with him?" insisted Carol. Mrs. Bogart was puzzled, gave it up, went on. This morning, when she had faced both of them, Cy had manfully confessed that all of the blame was on Fern, because the teacher--his own teacher--had dared him to take a drink. Fern had tried to deny it. "Then," gabbled Mrs. Bogart, "then that woman had the impudence to say to me, 'What purpose could I have in wanting the filthy pup to get drunk?' That's just what she called him--pup. 'I'll have no such nasty language in my house,' I says, 'and you pretending and pulling the wool over people's eyes and making them think you're educated and fit to be a teacher and look out for young people's morals--you're worse 'n any street-walker!' I says. I let her have it good. I wa'n't going to flinch from my bounden duty and let her think that decent folks had to stand for her vile talk. 'Purpose?' I says, 'Purpose? I'll tell you what purpose you had! Ain't I seen you making up to everything in pants that'd waste time and pay attention to your impert'nence? Ain't I seen you showing off your legs with them short skirts of yours, trying to make out like you was so girlish and la-de-da, running along the street?'" Carol was very sick at this version of Fern's eager youth, but she was sicker as Mrs. Bogart hinted that no one could tell what had happened between Fern and Cy before the drive home. Without exactly describing the scene, by her power of lustful imagination the woman suggested dark country places apart from the lanterns and rude fiddling and banging dance-steps in the barn, then madness and harsh hateful conquest. Carol was too sick to interrupt. It was Kennicott who cried, "Oh, for God's sake quit it! You haven't any idea what happened. You haven't given us a single proof yet that Fern is anything but a rattle-brained youngster." "I haven't, eh? Well, what do you say to this? I come straight out and I says to her, 'Did you or did you not taste the whisky Cy had?' and she says, 'I think I did take one sip--Cy made me,' she said. She owned up to that much, so you can imagine----" "Does that prove her a prostitute?" asked Carol. "Carrie! Don't you never use a word like that again!" wailed the outraged Puritan. "Well, does it prove her to be a bad woman, that she took a taste of whisky? I've done it myself!" "That's different. Not that I approve your doing it. What do the Scriptures tell us? 'Strong drink is a mocker'! But that's entirely different from a teacher drinking with one of her own pupils." "Yes, it does sound bad. Fern was silly, undoubtedly. But as a matter of fact she's only a year or two older than Cy and probably a good many years younger in experience of vice." "That's--not--true! She is plenty old enough to corrupt him! "The job of corrupting Cy was done by your sinless town, five years ago!" Mrs. Bogart did not rage in return. Suddenly she was hopeless. Her head drooped. She patted her black kid gloves, picked at a thread of her faded brown skirt, and sighed, "He's a good boy, and awful affectionate if you treat him right. Some thinks he's terrible wild, but that's because he's young. And he's so brave and truthful--why, he was one of the first in town that wanted to enlist for the war, and I had to speak real sharp to him to keep him from running away. I didn't want him to get into no bad influences round these camps--and then," Mrs. Bogart rose from her pitifulness, recovered her pace, "then I go and bring into my own house a woman that's worse, when all's said and done, than any bad woman he could have met. You say this Mullins woman is too young and inexperienced to corrupt Cy. Well then, she's too young and inexperienced to teach him, too, one or t'other, you can't have your cake and eat it! So it don't make no difference which reason they fire her for, and that's practically almost what I said to the school-board." "Have you been telling this story to the members of the school-board?" "I certainly have! Every one of 'em! And their wives I says to them, ''Tain't my affair to decide what you should or should not do with your teachers,' I says, 'and I ain't presuming to dictate in any way, shape, manner, or form. I just want to know,' I says, 'whether you're going to go on record as keeping here in our schools, among a lot of innocent boys and girls, a woman that drinks, smokes, curses, uses bad language, and does such dreadful things as I wouldn't lay tongue to but you know what I mean,' I says, 'and if so, I'll just see to it that the town learns about it.' And that's what I told Professor Mott, too, being superintendent--and he's a righteous man, not going autoing on the Sabbath like the school-board members. And the professor as much as admitted he was suspicious of the Mullins woman himself." II Kennicott was less shocked and much less frightened than Carol, and more articulate in his description of Mrs. Bogart, when she had gone. Maud Dyer telephoned to Carol and, after a rather improbable question about cooking lima beans with bacon, demanded, "Have you heard the scandal about this Miss Mullins and Cy Bogart?" "I'm sure it's a lie." "Oh, probably is." Maud's manner indicated that the falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general delightfulness. Carol crept to her room, sat with hands curled tight together as she listened to a plague of voices. She could hear the town yelping with it, every soul of them, gleeful at new details, panting to win importance by having details of their own to add. How well they would make up for what they had been afraid to do by imagining it in another! They who had not been entirely afraid (but merely careful and sneaky), all the barber-shop roues and millinery-parlor mondaines, how archly they were giggling (this second--she could hear them at it); with what self-commendation they were cackling their suavest wit: "You can't tell ME she ain't a gay bird; I'm wise!" And not one man in town to carry out their pioneer tradition of superb and contemptuous cursing, not one to verify the myth that their "rough chivalry" and "rugged virtues" were more generous than the petty scandal-picking of older lands, not one dramatic frontiersman to thunder, with fantastic and fictional oaths, "What are you hinting at? What are you snickering at? What facts have you? What are these unheard-of sins you condemn so much--and like so well?" No one to say it. Not Kennicott nor Guy Pollock nor Champ Perry. Erik? Possibly. He would sputter uneasy protest. She suddenly wondered what subterranean connection her interest in Erik had with this affair. Wasn't it because they had been prevented by her caste from bounding on her own trail that they were howling at Fern? III Before supper she found, by half a dozen telephone calls, that Fern had fled to the Minniemashie House. She hastened there, trying not to be self-conscious about the people who looked at her on the street. The clerk said indifferently that he "guessed" Miss Mullins was up in Room 37, and left Carol to find the way. She hunted along the stale-smelling corridors with their wallpaper of cerise daisies and poison-green rosettes, streaked in white spots from spilled water, their frayed red and yellow matting, and rows of pine doors painted a sickly blue. She could not find the number. In the darkness at the end of a corridor she had to feel the aluminum figures on the door-panels. She was startled once by a man's voice: "Yep? Whadyuh want?" and fled. When she reached the right door she stood listening. She made out a long sobbing. There was no answer till her third knock; then an alarmed "Who is it? Go away!" Her hatred of the town turned resolute as she pushed open the door. Yesterday she had seen Fern Mullins in boots and tweed skirt and canary-yellow sweater, fleet and self-possessed. Now she lay across the bed, in crumpled lavender cotton and shabby pumps, very feminine, utterly cowed. She lifted her head in stupid terror. Her hair was in tousled strings and her face was sallow, creased. Her eyes were a blur from weeping. "I didn't! I didn't!" was all she would say at first, and she repeated it while Carol kissed her cheek, stroked her hair, bathed her forehead. She rested then, while Carol looked about the room--the welcome to strangers, the sanctuary of hospitable Main Street, the lucrative property of Kennicott's friend, Jackson Elder. It smelled of old linen and decaying carpet and ancient tobacco smoke. The bed was rickety, with a thin knotty mattress; the sand-colored walls were scratched and gouged; in every corner, under everything, were fluffy dust and cigar ashes; on the tilted wash-stand was a nicked and squatty pitcher; the only chair was a grim straight object of spotty varnish; but there was an altogether splendid gilt and rose cuspidor. She did not try to draw out Fern's story; Fern insisted on telling it. She had gone to the party, not quite liking Cy but willing to endure him for the sake of dancing, of escaping from Mrs. Bogart's flow of moral comments, of relaxing after the first strained weeks of teaching. Cy "promised to be good." He was, on the way out. There were a few workmen from Gopher Prairie at the dance, with many young farm-people. Half a dozen squatters from a degenerate colony in a brush-hidden hollow, planters of potatoes, suspected thieves, came in noisily drunk. They all pounded the floor of the barn in old-fashioned square dances, swinging their partners, skipping, laughing, under the incantations of Del Snafflin the barber, who fiddled and called the figures. Cy had two drinks from pocket-flasks. Fern saw him fumbling among the overcoats piled on the feedbox at the far end of the barn; soon after she heard a farmer declaring that some one had stolen his bottle. She taxed Cy with the theft; he chuckled, "Oh, it's just a joke; I'm going to give it back." He demanded that she take a drink. Unless she did, he wouldn't return the bottle. "I just brushed my lips with it, and gave it back to him," moaned Fern. She sat up, glared at Carol. "Did you ever take a drink?" "I have. A few. I'd love to have one right now! This contact with righteousness has about done me up!" Fern could laugh then. "So would I! I don't suppose I've had five drinks in my life, but if I meet just one more Bogart and Son----Well, I didn't really touch that bottle--horrible raw whisky--though I'd have loved some wine. I felt so jolly. The barn was almost like a stage scene--the high rafters, and the dark stalls, and tin lanterns swinging, and a silage-cutter up at the end like some mysterious kind of machine. And I'd been having lots of fun dancing with the nicest young farmer, so strong and nice, and awfully intelligent. But I got uneasy when I saw how Cy was. So I doubt if I touched two drops of the beastly stuff. Do you suppose God is punishing me for even wanting wine?" "My dear, Mrs. Bogart's god may be--Main Street's god. But all the courageous intelligent people are fighting him . . . though he slay us." Fern danced again with the young farmer; she forgot Cy while she was talking with a girl who had taken the University agricultural course. Cy could not have returned the bottle; he came staggering toward her--taking time to make himself offensive to every girl on the way and to dance a jig. She insisted on their returning. Cy went with her, chuckling and jigging. He kissed her, outside the door. . . . "And to think I used to think it was interesting to have men kiss you at a dance!". . . She ignored the kiss, in the need of getting him home before he started a fight. A farmer helped her harness the buggy, while Cy snored in the seat. He awoke before they set out; all the way home he alternately slept and tried to make love to her. "I'm almost as strong as he is. I managed to keep him away while I drove--such a rickety buggy. I didn't feel like a girl; I felt like a scrubwoman--no, I guess I was too scared to have any feelings at all. It was terribly dark. I got home, somehow. But it was hard, the time I had to get out, and it was quite muddy, to read a sign-post--I lit matches that I took from Cy's coat pocket, and he followed me--he fell off the buggy step into the mud, and got up and tried to make love to me, and----I was scared. But I hit him. Quite hard. And got in, and so he ran after the buggy, crying like a baby, and I let him in again, and right away again he was trying----But no matter. I got him home. Up on the porch. Mrs. Bogart was waiting up. . . . "You know, it was funny; all the time she was--oh, talking to me--and Cy was being terribly sick--I just kept thinking, 'I've still got to drive the buggy down to the livery stable. I wonder if the livery man will be awake?' But I got through somehow. I took the buggy down to the stable, and got to my room. I locked my door, but Mrs. Bogart kept saying things, outside the door. Stood out there saying things about me, dreadful things, and rattling the knob. And all the while I could hear Cy in the back yard-being sick. I don't think I'll ever marry any man. And then today---- "She drove me right out of the house. She wouldn't listen to me, all morning. Just to Cy. I suppose he's over his headache now. Even at breakfast he thought the whole thing was a grand joke. I suppose right this minute he's going around town boasting about his 'conquest.' You understand--oh, DON'T you understand? I DID keep him away! But I don't see how I can face my school. They say country towns are fine for bringing up boys in, but----I can't believe this is me, lying here and saying this. I don't BELIEVE what happened last night. "Oh. This was curious: When I took off my dress last night--it was a darling dress, I loved it so, but of course the mud had spoiled it. I cried over it and----No matter. But my white silk stockings were all torn, and the strange thing is, I don't know whether I caught my legs in the briers when I got out to look at the sign-post, or whether Cy scratched me when I was fighting him off." IV Sam Clark was president of the school-board. When Carol told him Fern's story Sam looked sympathetic and neighborly, and Mrs. Clark sat by cooing, "Oh, isn't that too bad." Carol was interrupted only when Mrs. Clark begged, "Dear, don't speak so bitter about 'pious' people. There's lots of sincere practising Christians that are real tolerant. Like the Champ Perrys." "Yes. I know. Unfortunately there are enough kindly people in the churches to keep them going." When Carol had finished, Mrs. Clark breathed, "Poor girl; I don't doubt her story a bit," and Sam rumbled, "Yuh, sure. Miss Mullins is young and reckless, but everybody in town, except Ma Bogart, knows what Cy is. But Miss Mullins was a fool to go with him." "But not wicked enough to pay for it with disgrace?" "N-no, but----" Sam avoided verdicts, clung to the entrancing horrors of the story. "Ma Bogart cussed her out all morning, did she? Jumped her neck, eh? Ma certainly is one hell-cat." "Yes, you know how she is; so vicious." "Oh no, her best style ain't her viciousness. What she pulls in our store is to come in smiling with Christian Fortitude and keep a clerk busy for one hour while she picks out half a dozen fourpenny nails. I remember one time----" "Sam!" Carol was uneasy. "You'll fight for Fern, won't you? When Mrs. Bogart came to see you did she make definite charges?" "Well, yes, you might say she did." "But the school-board won't act on them?" "Guess we'll more or less have to." "But you'll exonerate Fern?" "I'll do what I can for the girl personally, but you know what the board is. There's Reverend Zitterel; Sister Bogart about half runs his church, so of course he'll take her say-so; and Ezra Stowbody, as a banker he has to be all hell for morality and purity. Might 's well admit it, Carrie; I'm afraid there'll be a majority of the board against her. Not that any of us would believe a word Cy said, not if he swore it on a stack of Bibles, but still, after all this gossip, Miss Mullins wouldn't hardly be the party to chaperon our basket-ball team when it went out of town to play other high schools, would she!" "Perhaps not, but couldn't some one else?" "Why, that's one of the things she was hired for." Sam sounded stubborn. "Do you realize that this isn't just a matter of a job, and hiring and firing; that it's actually sending a splendid girl out with a beastly stain on her, giving all the other Bogarts in the world a chance at her? That's what will happen if you discharge her." Sam moved uncomfortably, looked at his wife, scratched his head, sighed, said nothing. "Won't you fight for her on the board? If you lose, won't you, and whoever agrees with you, make a minority report?" "No reports made in a case like this. Our rule is to just decide the thing and announce the final decision, whether it's unanimous or not." "Rules! Against a girl's future! Dear God! Rules of a school-board! Sam! Won't you stand by Fern, and threaten to resign from the board if they try to discharge her?" Rather testy, tired of so many subtleties, he complained, "Well, I'll do what I can, but I'll have to wait till the board meets." And "I'll do what I can," together with the secret admission "Of course you and I know what Ma Bogart is," was all Carol could get from Superintendent George Edwin Mott, Ezra Stowbody, the Reverend Mr. Zitterel or any other member of the school-board. Afterward she wondered whether Mr. Zitterel could have been referring to herself when he observed, "There's too much license in high places in this town, though, and the wages of sin is death--or anyway, bein' fired." The holy leer with which the priest said it remained in her mind. She was at the hotel before eight next morning. Fern longed to go to school, to face the tittering, but she was too shaky. Carol read to her all day and, by reassuring her, convinced her own self that the school-board would be just. She was less sure of it that evening when, at the motion pictures, she heard Mrs. Gougerling exclaim to Mrs. Howland, "She may be so innocent and all, and I suppose she probably is, but still, if she drank a whole bottle of whisky at that dance, the way everybody says she did, she may have forgotten she was so innocent! Hee, hee, hee!" Maud Dyer, leaning back from her seat, put in, "That's what I've said all along. I don't want to roast anybody, but have you noticed the way she looks at men?" "When will they have me on the scaffold?" Carol speculated. Nat Hicks stopped the Kennicotts on their way home. Carol hated him for his manner of assuming that they two had a mysterious understanding. Without quite winking he seemed to wink at her as he gurgled, "What do you folks think about this Mullins woman? I'm not strait-laced, but I tell you we got to have decent women in our schools. D' you know what I heard? They say whatever she may of done afterwards, this Mullins dame took two quarts of whisky to the dance with her, and got stewed before Cy did! Some tank, that wren! Ha, ha, ha!" "Rats, I don't believe it," Kennicott muttered. He got Carol away before she was able to speak. She saw Erik passing the house, late, alone, and she stared after him, longing for the lively bitterness of the things he would say about the town. Kennicott had nothing for her but "Oh, course, ev'body likes a juicy story, but they don't intend to be mean." She went up to bed proving to herself that the members of the school-board were superior men. It was Tuesday afternoon before she learned that the board had met at ten in the morning and voted to "accept Miss Fern Mullins's resignation." Sam Clark telephoned the news to her. "We're not making any charges. We're just letting her resign. Would you like to drop over to the hotel and ask her to write the resignation, now we've accepted it? Glad I could get the board to put it that way. It's thanks to you." "But can't you see that the town will take this as proof of the charges?" "We're--not--making--no--charges--whatever!" Sam was obviously finding it hard to be patient. Fern left town that evening. Carol went with her to the train. The two girls elbowed through a silent lip-licking crowd. Carol tried to stare them down but in face of the impishness of the boys and the bovine gaping of the men, she was embarrassed. Fern did not glance at them. Carol felt her arm tremble, though she was tearless, listless, plodding. She squeezed Carol's hand, said something unintelligible, stumbled up into the vestibule. Carol remembered that Miles Bjornstam had also taken a train. What would be the scene at the station when she herself took departure? She walked up-town behind two strangers. One of them was giggling, "See that good-looking wench that got on here? The swell kid with the small black hat? She's some charmer! I was here yesterday, before my jump to Ojibway Falls, and I heard all about her. Seems she was a teacher, but she certainly was a high-roller--O boy!--high, wide, and fancy! Her and couple of other skirts bought a whole case of whisky and went on a tear, and one night, darned if this bunch of cradle-robbers didn't get hold of some young kids, just small boys, and they all got lit up like a White Way, and went out to a roughneck dance, and they say----" The narrator turned, saw a woman near and, not being a common person nor a coarse workman but a clever salesman and a householder, lowered his voice for the rest of the tale. During it the other man laughed hoarsely. Carol turned off on a side-street. She passed Cy Bogart. He was humorously narrating some achievement to a group which included Nat Hicks, Del Snafflin, Bert Tybee the bartender, and A. Tennyson O'Hearn the shyster lawyer. They were men far older than Cy but they accepted him as one of their own, and encouraged him to go on. It was a week before she received from Fern a letter of which this was a part: . . . & of course my family did not really believe the story but as they were sure I must have done something wrong they just lectured me generally, in fact jawed me till I have gone to live at a boarding house. The teachers' agencies must know the story, man at one almost slammed the door in my face when I went to ask about a job, & at another the woman in charge was beastly. Don't know what I will do. Don't seem to feel very well. May marry a fellow that's in love with me but he's so stupid that he makes me SCREAM. Dear Mrs. Kennicott you were the only one that believed me. I guess it's a joke on me, I was such a simp, I felt quite heroic while I was driving the buggy back that night & keeping Cy away from me. I guess I expected the people in Gopher Prairie to admire me. I did use to be admired for my athletics at the U.--just five months ago.

Chapter 32

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-32

Carol is outside doing some work when she overhears Mrs. Bogart from next door throwing Fern Mullins out of her house. Fern has been boarding with Mrs. Bogart until now, but Mrs. Bogart calls her an immoral harlot and kicks her into the street. When Carol asks what's going on, Bogart tells her that Fern took her poor, innocent son Cy to a barn dance and got him drunk. And she's his teacher, for crying out loud! Carol immediately knows the whole story is a lie, because Cy is the most dishonest kid in town. But Mrs. Bogart refuses to believe her son is anything other than a total angel. Carol knows she needs to protect Fern. If Fern gets fired by the local school board, she'll never find a job anywhere, because word about why she got fired will spread quickly. Carol visits the school board president, Sam Clark, to straighten things out. Sam Clark knows that the story didn't happen and that Cy Bogart is a liar, but he still thinks Fern will be fired because of the scandal the story has caused. Carol can't believe Sam is willing to ruin a young woman's career so easily, but he says his hands are tied because there are some mighty conservative people on the school board. Fern ends up leaving the town in disgrace. She later sends a letter to Carol thanking her for being the only person in Gopher Prairie who believed in her.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/33.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_32_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 33

chapter 33

{"name": "Chapter 33", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-33", "summary": "Carol goes another month only seeing Erik Valbourg in casual situations, but he shows up on her doorstep the next time he sees Will heading into the country. He says he can't take it anymore and that he needs to see her. He wants her to come for a walk with him. Erik and Carol head deep enough into nature for no one to find them. Erik recites a little poem he wrote for Carol, and she realizes that it's terrible. She then thinks about sitting with him and kissing him. But as they walk, some headlights come down the road... and who is it but Carol's husband Will, not looking too impressed. He orders them into the car and drives Erik back into town. Once Erik is gone, Will tells Carol he knows all about her crush on Erik, and he wants things between them to stop immediately. He calls Erik a loser, which makes Carol really mad. She defends Erik and says she admires his ambition. Will fights back by saying that Erik is a no-talent hack who likes to talk a big game. Some sad part of Carol realizes that Will is right. Erik will probably never be able to make good on his dreams. Eventually, Carol feels awful about what she's done. She realizes that she doesn't appreciate Will enough and begs his forgiveness. For a guy who's been cheated on, Will seems pretty willing to forget the whole affair ever happened. Not long after, Erik Valbourg gets on a train and leaves Gopher Prairie to pursue his dreams. Shortly after that, Erik's father shows up at Carol's house and demands to know where Erik is. He wants Erik to come home to work on the family farm, and he blames Carol for putting all kinds of crazy ideas in the boy's head. Carol tells him to get lost, and he basically calls her a loose woman. Now everyone in town knows about Carol's little affair with Erik. She can feel their judgment everywhere she goes. So she decides to take off for California, and Will comes with her.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXIII FOR a month which was one suspended moment of doubt she saw Erik only casually, at an Eastern Star dance, at the shop, where, in the presence of Nat Hicks, they conferred with immense particularity on the significance of having one or two buttons on the cuff of Kennicott's New Suit. For the benefit of beholders they were respectably vacuous. Thus barred from him, depressed in the thought of Fern, Carol was suddenly and for the first time convinced that she loved Erik. She told herself a thousand inspiriting things which he would say if he had the opportunity; for them she admired him, loved him. But she was afraid to summon him. He understood, he did not come. She forgot her every doubt of him, and her discomfort in his background. Each day it seemed impossible to get through the desolation of not seeing him. Each morning, each afternoon, each evening was a compartment divided from all other units of time, distinguished by a sudden "Oh! I want to see Erik!" which was as devastating as though she had never said it before. There were wretched periods when she could not picture him. Usually he stood out in her mind in some little moment--glancing up from his preposterous pressing-iron, or running on the beach with Dave Dyer. But sometimes he had vanished; he was only an opinion. She worried then about his appearance: Weren't his wrists too large and red? Wasn't his nose a snub, like so many Scandinavians? Was he at all the graceful thing she had fancied? When she encountered him on the street she was as much reassuring herself as rejoicing in his presence. More disturbing than being unable to visualize him was the darting remembrance of some intimate aspect: his face as they had walked to the boat together at the picnic; the ruddy light on his temples, neck-cords, flat cheeks. On a November evening when Kennicott was in the country she answered the bell and was confused to find Erik at the door, stooped, imploring, his hands in the pockets of his topcoat. As though he had been rehearsing his speech he instantly besought: "Saw your husband driving away. I've got to see you. I can't stand it. Come for a walk. I know! People might see us. But they won't if we hike into the country. I'll wait for you by the elevator. Take as long as you want to--oh, come quick!" "In a few minutes," she promised. She murmured, "I'll just talk to him for a quarter of an hour and come home." She put an her tweed coat and rubber overshoes, considering how honest and hopeless are rubbers, how clearly their chaperonage proved that she wasn't going to a lovers' tryst. She found him in the shadow of the grain-elevator, sulkily kicking at a rail of the side-track. As she came toward him she fancied that his whole body expanded. But he said nothing, nor she; he patted her sleeve, she returned the pat, and they crossed the railroad tracks, found a road, clumped toward open country. "Chilly night, but I like this melancholy gray," he said. "Yes." They passed a moaning clump of trees and splashed along the wet road. He tucked her hand into the side-pocket of his overcoat. She caught his thumb and, sighing, held it exactly as Hugh held hers when they went walking. She thought about Hugh. The current maid was in for the evening, but was it safe to leave the baby with her? The thought was distant and elusive. Erik began to talk, slowly, revealingly. He made for her a picture of his work in a large tailor shop in Minneapolis: the steam and heat, and the drudgery; the men in darned vests and crumpled trousers, men who "rushed growlers of beer" and were cynical about women, who laughed at him and played jokes on him. "But I didn't mind, because I could keep away from them outside. I used to go to the Art Institute and the Walker Gallery, and tramp clear around Lake Harriet, or hike out to the Gates house and imagine it was a chateau in Italy and I lived in it. I was a marquis and collected tapestries--that was after I was wounded in Padua. The only really bad time was when a tailor named Finkelfarb found a diary I was trying to keep and he read it aloud in the shop--it was a bad fight." He laughed. "I got fined five dollars. But that's all gone now. Seems as though you stand between me and the gas stoves--the long flames with mauve edges, licking up around the irons and making that sneering sound all day--aaaaah!" Her fingers tightened about his thumb as she perceived the hot low room, the pounding of pressing-irons, the reek of scorched cloth, and Erik among giggling gnomes. His fingertip crept through the opening of her glove and smoothed her palm. She snatched her hand away, stripped off her glove, tucked her hand back into his. He was saying something about a "wonderful person." In her tranquillity she let the words blow by and heeded only the beating wings of his voice. She was conscious that he was fumbling for impressive speech. "Say, uh--Carol, I've written a poem about you." "That's nice. Let's hear it." "Damn it, don't be so casual about it! Can't you take me seriously?" "My dear boy, if I took you seriously----! I don't want us to be hurt more than--more than we will be. Tell me the poem. I've never had a poem written about me!" "It isn't really a poem. It's just some words that I love because it seems to me they catch what you are. Of course probably they won't seem so to anybody else, but----Well---- Little and tender and merry and wise With eyes that meet my eyes. Do you get the idea the way I do?" "Yes! I'm terribly grateful!" And she was grateful--while she impersonally noted how bad a verse it was. She was aware of the haggard beauty in the lowering night. Monstrous tattered clouds sprawled round a forlorn moon; puddles and rocks glistened with inner light. They were passing a grove of scrub poplars, feeble by day but looming now like a menacing wall. She stopped. They heard the branches dripping, the wet leaves sullenly plumping on the soggy earth. "Waiting--waiting--everything is waiting," she whispered. She drew her hand from his, pressed her clenched fingers against her lips. She was lost in the somberness. "I am happy--so we must go home, before we have time to become unhappy. But can't we sit on a log for a minute and just listen?" "No. Too wet. But I wish we could build a fire, and you could sit on my overcoat beside it. I'm a grand fire-builder! My cousin Lars and me spent a week one time in a cabin way up in the Big Woods, snowed in. The fireplace was filled with a dome of ice when we got there, but we chopped it out, and jammed the thing full of pine-boughs. Couldn't we build a fire back here in the woods and sit by it for a while?" She pondered, half-way between yielding and refusal. Her head ached faintly. She was in abeyance. Everything, the night, his silhouette, the cautious-treading future, was as undistinguishable as though she were drifting bodiless in a Fourth Dimension. While her mind groped, the lights of a motor car swooped round a bend in the road, and they stood farther apart. "What ought I to do?" she mused. "I think----Oh, I won't be robbed! I AM good! If I'm so enslaved that I can't sit by the fire with a man and talk, then I'd better be dead!" The lights of the thrumming car grew magically; were upon them; abruptly stopped. From behind the dimness of the windshield a voice, annoyed, sharp: "Hello there!" She realized that it was Kennicott. The irritation in his voice smoothed out. "Having a walk?" They made schoolboyish sounds of assent. "Pretty wet, isn't it? Better ride back. Jump up in front here, Valborg." His manner of swinging open the door was a command. Carol was conscious that Erik was climbing in, that she was apparently to sit in the back, and that she had been left to open the rear door for herself. Instantly the wonder which had flamed to the gusty skies was quenched, and she was Mrs. W. P. Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, riding in a squeaking old car, and likely to be lectured by her husband. She feared what Kennicott would say to Erik. She bent toward them. Kennicott was observing, "Going to have some rain before the night 's over, all right." "Yes," said Erik. "Been funny season this year, anyway. Never saw it with such a cold October and such a nice November. 'Member we had a snow way back on October ninth! But it certainly was nice up to the twenty-first, this month--as I remember it, not a flake of snow in November so far, has there been? But I shouldn't wonder if we'd be having some snow 'most any time now." "Yes, good chance of it," said Erik. "Wish I'd had more time to go after the ducks this fall. By golly, what do you think?" Kennicott sounded appealing. "Fellow wrote me from Man Trap Lake that he shot seven mallards and couple of canvas-back in one hour!" "That must have been fine," said Erik. Carol was ignored. But Kennicott was blustrously cheerful. He shouted to a farmer, as he slowed up to pass the frightened team, "There we are--schon gut!" She sat back, neglected, frozen, unheroic heroine in a drama insanely undramatic. She made a decision resolute and enduring. She would tell Kennicott----What would she tell him? She could not say that she loved Erik. DID she love him? But she would have it out. She was not sure whether it was pity for Kennicott's blindness, or irritation at his assumption that he was enough to fill any woman's life, which prompted her, but she knew that she was out of the trap, that she could be frank; and she was exhilarated with the adventure of it . . . while in front he was entertaining Erik: "Nothing like an hour on a duck-pass to make you relish your victuals and----Gosh, this machine hasn't got the power of a fountain pen. Guess the cylinders are jam-cram-full of carbon again. Don't know but what maybe I'll have to put in another set of piston-rings." He stopped on Main Street and clucked hospitably, "There, that'll give you just a block to walk. G' night." Carol was in suspense. Would Erik sneak away? He stolidly moved to the back of the car, thrust in his hand, muttered, "Good night--Carol. I'm glad we had our walk." She pressed his hand. The car was flapping on. He was hidden from her--by a corner drug store on Main Street! Kennicott did not recognize her till he drew up before the house. Then he condescended, "Better jump out here and I'll take the boat around back. Say, see if the back door is unlocked, will you?" She unlatched the door for him. She realized that she still carried the damp glove she had stripped off for Erik. She drew it on. She stood in the center of the living-room, unmoving, in damp coat and muddy rubbers. Kennicott was as opaque as ever. Her task wouldn't be anything so lively as having to endure a scolding, but only an exasperating effort to command his attention so that he would understand the nebulous things she had to tell him, instead of interrupting her by yawning, winding the clock, and going up to bed. She heard him shoveling coal into the furnace. He came through the kitchen energetically, but before he spoke to her he did stop in the hall, did wind the clock. He sauntered into the living-room and his glance passed from her drenched hat to her smeared rubbers. She could hear--she could hear, see, taste, smell, touch--his "Better take your coat off, Carrie; looks kind of wet." Yes, there it was: "Well, Carrie, you better----" He chucked his own coat on a chair, stalked to her, went on with a rising tingling voice, "----you better cut it out now. I'm not going to do the out-raged husband stunt. I like you and I respect you, and I'd probably look like a boob if I tried to be dramatic. But I think it's about time for you and Valborg to call a halt before you get in Dutch, like Fern Mullins did." "Do you----" "Course. I know all about it. What d' you expect in a town that's as filled with busybodies, that have plenty of time to stick their noses into other folks' business, as this is? Not that they've had the nerve to do much tattling to me, but they've hinted around a lot, and anyway, I could see for myself that you liked him. But of course I knew how cold you were, I knew you wouldn't stand it even if Valborg did try to hold your hand or kiss you, so I didn't worry. But same time, I hope you don't suppose this husky young Swede farmer is as innocent and Platonic and all that stuff as you are! Wait now, don't get sore! I'm not knocking him. He isn't a bad sort. And he's young and likes to gas about books. Course you like him. That isn't the real rub. But haven't you just seen what this town can do, once it goes and gets moral on you, like it did with Fern? You probably think that two young folks making love are alone if anybody ever is, but there's nothing in this town that you don't do in company with a whole lot of uninvited but awful interested guests. Don't you realize that if Ma Westlake and a few others got started they'd drive you up a tree, and you'd find yourself so well advertised as being in love with this Valborg fellow that you'd HAVE to be, just to spite 'em!" "Let me sit down," was all Carol could say. She drooped on the couch, wearily, without elasticity. He yawned, "Gimme your coat and rubbers," and while she stripped them off he twiddled his watch-chain, felt the radiator, peered at the thermometer. He shook out her wraps in the hall, hung them up with exactly his usual care. He pushed a chair near to her and sat bolt up. He looked like a physician about to give sound and undesired advice. Before he could launch into his heavy discourse she desperately got in, "Please! I want you to know that I was going to tell you everything, tonight." "Well, I don't suppose there's really much to tell." "But there is. I'm fond of Erik. He appeals to something in here." She touched her breast. "And I admire him. He isn't just a 'young Swede farmer.' He's an artist----" "Wait now! He's had a chance all evening to tell you what a whale of a fine fellow he is. Now it's my turn. I can't talk artistic, but----Carrie, do you understand my work?" He leaned forward, thick capable hands on thick sturdy thighs, mature and slow, yet beseeching. "No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes. You're all the things that I see in a sunset when I'm driving in from the country, the things that I like but can't make poetry of. Do you realize what my job is? I go round twenty-four hours a day, in mud and blizzard, trying my damnedest to heal everybody, rich or poor. You--that 're always spieling about how scientists ought to rule the world, instead of a bunch of spread-eagle politicians--can't you see that I'm all the science there is here? And I can stand the cold and the bumpy roads and the lonely rides at night. All I need is to have you here at home to welcome me. I don't expect you to be passionate--not any more I don't--but I do expect you to appreciate my work. I bring babies into the world, and save lives, and make cranky husbands quit being mean to their wives. And then you go and moon over a Swede tailor because he can talk about how to put ruchings on a skirt! Hell of a thing for a man to fuss over!" She flew out at him: "You make your side clear. Let me give mine. I admit all you say--except about Erik. But is it only you, and the baby, that want me to back you up, that demand things from me? They're all on me, the whole town! I can feel their hot breaths on my neck! Aunt Bessie and that horrible slavering old Uncle Whittier and Juanita and Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. Bogart and all of them. And you welcome them, you encourage them to drag me down into their cave! I won't stand it! Do you hear? Now, right now, I'm done. And it's Erik who gives me the courage. You say he just thinks about ruches (which do not usually go on skirts, by the way!). I tell you he thinks about God, the God that Mrs. Bogart covers up with greasy gingham wrappers! Erik will be a great man some day, and if I could contribute one tiny bit to his success----" "Wait, wait, wait now! Hold up! You're assuming that your Erik will make good. As a matter of fact, at my age he'll be running a one-man tailor shop in some burg about the size of Schoenstrom." "He will not!" "That's what he's headed for now all right, and he's twenty-five or -six and----What's he done to make you think he'll ever be anything but a pants-presser?" "He has sensitiveness and talent----" "Wait now! What has he actually done in the art line? Has he done one first-class picture or--sketch, d' you call it? Or one poem, or played the piano, or anything except gas about what he's going to do?" She looked thoughtful. "Then it's a hundred to one shot that he never will. Way I understand it, even these fellows that do something pretty good at home and get to go to art school, there ain't more than one out of ten of 'em, maybe one out of a hundred, that ever get above grinding out a bum living--about as artistic as plumbing. And when it comes down to this tailor, why, can't you see--you that take on so about psychology--can't you see that it's just by contrast with folks like Doc McGanum or Lym Cass that this fellow seems artistic? Suppose you'd met up with him first in one of these reg'lar New York studios! You wouldn't notice him any more 'n a rabbit!" She huddled over folded hands like a temple virgin shivering on her knees before the thin warmth of a brazier. She could not answer. Kennicott rose quickly, sat on the couch, took both her hands. "Suppose he fails--as he will! Suppose he goes back to tailoring, and you're his wife. Is that going to be this artistic life you've been thinking about? He's in some bum shack, pressing pants all day, or stooped over sewing, and having to be polite to any grouch that blows in and jams a dirty stinking old suit in his face and says, 'Here you, fix this, and be blame quick about it.' He won't even have enough savvy to get him a big shop. He'll pike along doing his own work--unless you, his wife, go help him, go help him in the shop, and stand over a table all day, pushing a big heavy iron. Your complexion will look fine after about fifteen years of baking that way, won't it! And you'll be humped over like an old hag. And probably you'll live in one room back of the shop. And then at night--oh, you'll have your artist--sure! He'll come in stinking of gasoline, and cranky from hard work, and hinting around that if it hadn't been for you, he'd of gone East and been a great artist. Sure! And you'll be entertaining his relatives----Talk about Uncle Whit! You'll be having some old Axel Axelberg coming in with manure on his boots and sitting down to supper in his socks and yelling at you, 'Hurry up now, you vimmin make me sick!' Yes, and you'll have a squalling brat every year, tugging at you while you press clothes, and you won't love 'em like you do Hugh up-stairs, all downy and asleep----" "Please! Not any more!" Her face was on his knee. He bent to kiss her neck. "I don't want to be unfair. I guess love is a great thing, all right. But think it would stand much of that kind of stuff? Oh, honey, am I so bad? Can't you like me at all? I've--I've been so fond of you!" She snatched up his hand, she kissed it. Presently she sobbed, "I won't ever see him again. I can't, now. The hot living-room behind the tailor shop----I don't love him enough for that. And you are----Even if I were sure of him, sure he was the real thing, I don't think I could actually leave you. This marriage, it weaves people together. It's not easy to break, even when it ought to be broken." "And do you want to break it?" "No!" He lifted her, carried her up-stairs, laid her on her bed, turned to the door. "Come kiss me," she whimpered. He kissed her lightly and slipped away. For an hour she heard him moving about his room, lighting a cigar, drumming with his knuckles on a chair. She felt that he was a bulwark between her and the darkness that grew thicker as the delayed storm came down in sleet. II He was cheery and more casual than ever at breakfast. All day she tried to devise a way of giving Erik up. Telephone? The village central would unquestionably "listen in." A letter? It might be found. Go to see him? Impossible. That evening Kennicott gave her, without comment, an envelope. The letter was signed "E. V." I know I can't do anything but make trouble for you, I think. I am going to Minneapolis tonight and from there as soon as I can either to New York or Chicago. I will do as big things as I can. I--I can't write I love you too much--God keep you. Until she heard the whistle which told her that the Minneapolis train was leaving town, she kept herself from thinking, from moving. Then it was all over. She had no plan nor desire for anything. When she caught Kennicott looking at her over his newspaper she fled to his arms, thrusting the paper aside, and for the first time in years they were lovers. But she knew that she still had no plan in life, save always to go along the same streets, past the same people, to the same shops. III A week after Erik's going the maid startled her by announcing, "There's a Mr. Valborg down-stairs say he vant to see you." She was conscious of the maid's interested stare, angry at this shattering of the calm in which she had hidden. She crept down, peeped into the living-room. It was not Erik Valborg who stood there; it was a small, gray-bearded, yellow-faced man in mucky boots, canvas jacket, and red mittens. He glowered at her with shrewd red eyes. "You de doc's wife?" "Yes." "I'm Adolph Valborg, from up by Jefferson. I'm Erik's father." "Oh!" He was a monkey-faced little man, and not gentle. "What you done wit' my son?" "I don't think I understand you." "I t'ink you're going to understand before I get t'rough! Where is he?" "Why, really----I presume that he's in Minneapolis." "You presume!" He looked through her with a contemptuousness such as she could not have imagined. Only an insane contortion of spelling could portray his lyric whine, his mangled consonants. He clamored, "Presume! Dot's a fine word! I don't want no fine words and I don't want no more lies! I want to know what you KNOW!" "See here, Mr. Valborg, you may stop this bullying right now. I'm not one of your farmwomen. I don't know where your son is, and there's no reason why I should know." Her defiance ran out in face of his immense flaxen stolidity. He raised his fist, worked up his anger with the gesture, and sneered: "You dirty city women wit' your fine ways and fine dresses! A father come here trying to save his boy from wickedness, and you call him a bully! By God, I don't have to take nothin' off you nor your husband! I ain't one of your hired men. For one time a woman like you is going to hear de trut' about what you are, and no fine city words to it, needer." "Really, Mr. Valborg----" "What you done wit' him? Heh? I'll yoost tell you what you done! He was a good boy, even if he was a damn fool. I want him back on de farm. He don't make enough money tailoring. And I can't get me no hired man! I want to take him back on de farm. And you butt in and fool wit' him and make love wit' him, and get him to run away!" "You are lying! It's not true that----It's not true, and if it were, you would have no right to speak like this." "Don't talk foolish. I know. Ain't I heard from a fellow dot live right here in town how you been acting wit' de boy? I know what you done! Walking wit' him in de country! Hiding in de woods wit' him! Yes and I guess you talk about religion in de woods! Sure! Women like you--you're worse dan street-walkers! Rich women like you, wit' fine husbands and no decent work to do--and me, look at my hands, look how I work, look at those hands! But you, oh God no, you mustn't work, you're too fine to do decent work. You got to play wit' young fellows, younger as you are, laughing and rolling around and acting like de animals! You let my son alone, d' you hear?" He was shaking his fist in her face. She could smell the manure and sweat. "It ain't no use talkin' to women like you. Get no trut' out of you. But next time I go by your husband!" He was marching into the hall. Carol flung herself on him, her clenching hand on his hayseed-dusty shoulder. "You horrible old man, you've always tried to turn Erik into a slave, to fatten your pocketbook! You've sneered at him, and overworked him, and probably you've succeeded in preventing his ever rising above your muck-heap! And now because you can't drag him back, you come here to vent----Go tell my husband, go tell him, and don't blame me when he kills you, when my husband kills you--he will kill you----" The man grunted, looked at her impassively, said one word, and walked out. She heard the word very plainly. She did not quite reach the couch. Her knees gave way, she pitched forward. She heard her mind saying, "You haven't fainted. This is ridiculous. You're simply dramatizing yourself. Get up." But she could not move. When Kennicott arrived she was lying on the couch. His step quickened. "What's happened, Carrie? You haven't got a bit of blood in your face." She clutched his arm. "You've got to be sweet to me, and kind! I'm going to California--mountains, sea. Please don't argue about it, because I'm going." Quietly, "All right. We'll go. You and I. Leave the kid here with Aunt Bessie." "Now!" "Well yes, just as soon as we can get away. Now don't talk any more. Just imagine you've already started." He smoothed her hair, and not till after supper did he continue: "I meant it about California. But I think we better wait three weeks or so, till I get hold of some young fellow released from the medical corps to take my practice. And if people are gossiping, you don't want to give them a chance by running away. Can you stand it and face 'em for three weeks or so?" "Yes," she said emptily. IV People covertly stared at her on the street. Aunt Bessie tried to catechize her about Erik's disappearance, and it was Kennicott who silenced the woman with a savage, "Say, are you hinting that Carrie had anything to do with that fellow's beating it? Then let me tell you, and you can go right out and tell the whole bloomin' town, that Carrie and I took Val--took Erik riding, and he asked me about getting a better job in Minneapolis, and I advised him to go to it. . . . Getting much sugar in at the store now?" Guy Pollock crossed the street to be pleasant apropos of California and new novels. Vida Sherwin dragged her to the Jolly Seventeen. There, with every one rigidly listening, Maud Dyer shot at Carol, "I hear Erik has left town." Carol was amiable. "Yes, so I hear. In fact, he called me up--told me he had been offered a lovely job in the city. So sorry he's gone. He would have been valuable if we'd tried to start the dramatic association again. Still, I wouldn't be here for the association myself, because Will is all in from work, and I'm thinking of taking him to California. Juanita--you know the Coast so well--tell me: would you start in at Los Angeles or San Francisco, and what are the best hotels?" The Jolly Seventeen looked disappointed, but the Jolly Seventeen liked to give advice, the Jolly Seventeen liked to mention the expensive hotels at which they had stayed. (A meal counted as a stay.) Before they could question her again Carol escorted in with drum and fife the topic of Raymie Wutherspoon. Vida had news from her husband. He had been gassed in the trenches, had been in a hospital for two weeks, had been promoted to major, was learning French. She left Hugh with Aunt Bessie. But for Kennicott she would have taken him. She hoped that in some miraculous way yet unrevealed she might find it possible to remain in California. She did not want to see Gopher Prairie again. The Smails were to occupy the Kennicott house, and quite the hardest thing to endure in the month of waiting was the series of conferences between Kennicott and Uncle Whittier in regard to heating the garage and having the furnace flues cleaned. Did Carol, Kennicott inquired, wish to stop in Minneapolis to buy new clothes? "No! I want to get as far away as I can as soon as I can. Let's wait till Los Angeles." "Sure, sure! Just as you like. Cheer up! We're going to have a large wide time, and everything 'll be different when we come back." VI Dusk on a snowy December afternoon. The sleeper which would connect at Kansas City with the California train rolled out of St. Paul with a chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick as it crossed the other tracks. It bumped through the factory belt, gained speed. Carol could see nothing but gray fields, which had closed in on her all the way from Gopher Prairie. Ahead was darkness. "For an hour, in Minneapolis, I must have been near Erik. He's still there, somewhere. He'll be gone when I come back. I'll never know where he has gone." As Kennicott switched on the seat-light she turned drearily to the illustrations in a motion-picture magazine.

Chapter 33

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-33

Carol goes another month only seeing Erik Valbourg in casual situations, but he shows up on her doorstep the next time he sees Will heading into the country. He says he can't take it anymore and that he needs to see her. He wants her to come for a walk with him. Erik and Carol head deep enough into nature for no one to find them. Erik recites a little poem he wrote for Carol, and she realizes that it's terrible. She then thinks about sitting with him and kissing him. But as they walk, some headlights come down the road... and who is it but Carol's husband Will, not looking too impressed. He orders them into the car and drives Erik back into town. Once Erik is gone, Will tells Carol he knows all about her crush on Erik, and he wants things between them to stop immediately. He calls Erik a loser, which makes Carol really mad. She defends Erik and says she admires his ambition. Will fights back by saying that Erik is a no-talent hack who likes to talk a big game. Some sad part of Carol realizes that Will is right. Erik will probably never be able to make good on his dreams. Eventually, Carol feels awful about what she's done. She realizes that she doesn't appreciate Will enough and begs his forgiveness. For a guy who's been cheated on, Will seems pretty willing to forget the whole affair ever happened. Not long after, Erik Valbourg gets on a train and leaves Gopher Prairie to pursue his dreams. Shortly after that, Erik's father shows up at Carol's house and demands to know where Erik is. He wants Erik to come home to work on the family farm, and he blames Carol for putting all kinds of crazy ideas in the boy's head. Carol tells him to get lost, and he basically calls her a loose woman. Now everyone in town knows about Carol's little affair with Erik. She can feel their judgment everywhere she goes. So she decides to take off for California, and Will comes with her.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/34.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_33_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 34

chapter 34

{"name": "Chapter 34", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-34", "summary": "The trip to California is a good one, although Carol still has a tough time compromising on the stuff she likes for the sake of what Will likes. All Will wants to do is talk to other travellers who are from his part of the world. Will and Carol's homecoming to Gopher Prairie is every bit as depressing as Carol thinks it'll be, though Will loves being back home. He makes note of all the tiny things people have changed. For example, there are new chicken-wire fences. Carol's aunt in-law scolds her for always being so dissatisfied and remarks that she hopes the trip to California got the ants out of her pants.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXIV THEY journeyed for three and a half months. They saw the Grand Canyon, the adobe walls of Sante Fe and, in a drive from El Paso into Mexico, their first foreign land. They jogged from San Diego and La Jolla to Los Angeles, Pasadena, Riverside, through towns with bell-towered missions and orange-groves; they viewed Monterey and San Francisco and a forest of sequoias. They bathed in the surf and climbed foothills and danced, they saw a polo game and the making of motion-pictures, they sent one hundred and seventeen souvenir post-cards to Gopher Prairie, and once, on a dune by a foggy sea when she was walking alone, Carol found an artist, and he looked up at her and said, "Too damned wet to paint; sit down and talk," and so for ten minutes she lived in a romantic novel. Her only struggle was in coaxing Kennicott not to spend all his time with the tourists from the ten thousand other Gopher Prairies. In winter, California is full of people from Iowa and Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma, who, having traveled thousands of miles from their familiar villages, hasten to secure an illusion of not having left them. They hunt for people from their own states to stand between them and the shame of naked mountains; they talk steadily, in Pullmans, on hotel porches, at cafeterias and motion-picture shows, about the motors and crops and county politics back home. Kennicott discussed land-prices with them, he went into the merits of the several sorts of motor cars with them, he was intimate with train porters, and he insisted on seeing the Luke Dawsons at their flimsy bungalow in Pasadena, where Luke sat and yearned to go back and make some more money. But Kennicott gave promise of learning to play. He shouted in the pool at the Coronado, and he spoke of (though he did nothing more radical than speak of) buying evening-clothes. Carol was touched by his efforts to enjoy picture galleries, and the dogged way in which he accumulated dates and dimensions when they followed monkish guides through missions. She felt strong. Whenever she was restless she dodged her thoughts by the familiar vagabond fallacy of running away from them, of moving on to a new place, and thus she persuaded herself that she was tranquil. In March she willingly agreed with Kennicott that it was time to go home. She was longing for Hugh. They left Monterey on April first, on a day of high blue skies and poppies and a summer sea. As the train struck in among the hills she resolved, "I'm going to love the fine Will Kennicott quality that there is in Gopher Prairie. The nobility of good sense. It will be sweet to see Vida and Guy and the Clarks. And I'm going to see my baby! All the words he'll be able to say now! It's a new start. Everything will be different!" Thus on April first, among dappled hills and the bronze of scrub oaks, while Kennicott seesawed on his toes and chuckled, "Wonder what Hugh'll say when he sees us?" Three days later they reached Gopher Prairie in a sleet storm. II No one knew that they were coming; no one met them; and because of the icy roads, the only conveyance at the station was the hotel 'bus, which they missed while Kennicott was giving his trunk-check to the station agent--the only person to welcome them. Carol waited for him in the station, among huddled German women with shawls and umbrellas, and ragged-bearded farmers in corduroy coats; peasants mute as oxen, in a room thick with the steam of wet coats, the reek of the red-hot stove, the stench of sawdust boxes which served as cuspidors. The afternoon light was as reluctant as a winter dawn. "This is a useful market-center, an interesting pioneer post, but it is not a home for me," meditated the stranger Carol. Kennicott suggested, "I'd 'phone for a flivver but it'd take quite a while for it to get here. Let's walk." They stepped uncomfortably from the safety of the plank platform and, balancing on their toes, taking cautious strides, ventured along the road. The sleety rain was turning to snow. The air was stealthily cold. Beneath an inch of water was a layer of ice, so that as they wavered with their suit-cases they slid and almost fell. The wet snow drenched their gloves; the water underfoot splashed their itching ankles. They scuffled inch by inch for three blocks. In front of Harry Haydock's Kennicott sighed: "We better stop in here and 'phone for a machine." She followed him like a wet kitten. The Haydocks saw them laboring up the slippery concrete walk, up the perilous front steps, and came to the door chanting: "Well, well, well, back again, eh? Say, this is fine! Have a fine trip? My, you look like a rose, Carol. How did you like the coast, doc? Well, well, well! Where-all did you go?" But as Kennicott began to proclaim the list of places achieved, Harry interrupted with an account of how much he himself had seen, two years ago. When Kennicott boasted, "We went through the mission at Santa Barbara," Harry broke in, "Yeh, that's an interesting old mission. Say, I'll never forget that hotel there, doc. It was swell. Why, the rooms were made just like these old monasteries. Juanita and I went from Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo. You folks go to San Luis Obispo?" "No, but----" "Well you ought to gone to San Luis Obispo. And then we went from there to a ranch, least they called it a ranch----" Kennicott got in only one considerable narrative, which began: "Say, I never knew--did you, Harry?--that in the Chicago district the Kutz Kar sells as well as the Overland? I never thought much of the Kutz. But I met a gentleman on the train--it was when we were pulling out of Albuquerque, and I was sitting on the back platform of the observation car, and this man was next to me and he asked me for a light, and we got to talking, and come to find out, he came from Aurora, and when he found out I came from Minnesota he asked me if I knew Dr. Clemworth of Red Wing, and of course, while I've never met him, I've heard of Clemworth lots of times, and seems he's this man's brother! Quite a coincidence! Well, we got to talking, and we called the porter--that was a pretty good porter on that car--and we had a couple bottles of ginger ale, and I happened to mention the Kutz Kar, and this man--seems he's driven a lot of different kinds of cars--he's got a Franklin now--and he said that he'd tried the Kutz and liked it first-rate. Well, when we got into a station--I don't remember the name of it--Carrie, what the deuce was the name of that first stop we made the other side of Albuquerque?--well, anyway, I guess we must have stopped there to take on water, and this man and I got out to stretch our legs, and darned if there wasn't a Kutz drawn right up at the depot platform, and he pointed out something I'd never noticed, and I was glad to learn about it: seems that the gear lever in the Kutz is an inch longer----" Even this chronicle of voyages Harry interrupted, with remarks on the advantages of the ball-gear-shift. Kennicott gave up hope of adequate credit for being a traveled man, and telephoned to a garage for a Ford taxicab, while Juanita kissed Carol and made sure of being the first to tell the latest, which included seven distinct and proven scandals about Mrs. Swiftwaite, and one considerable doubt as to the chastity of Cy Bogart. They saw the Ford sedan making its way over the water-lined ice, through the snow-storm, like a tug-boat in a fog. The driver stopped at a corner. The car skidded, it turned about with comic reluctance, crashed into a tree, and stood tilted on a broken wheel. The Kennicotts refused Harry Haydock's not too urgent offer to take them home in his car "if I can manage to get it out of the garage--terrible day--stayed home from the store--but if you say so, I'll take a shot at it." Carol gurgled, "No, I think we'd better walk; probably make better time, and I'm just crazy to see my baby." With their suit-cases they waddled on. Their coats were soaked through. Carol had forgotten her facile hopes. She looked about with impersonal eyes. But Kennicott, through rain-blurred lashes, caught the glory that was Back Home. She noted bare tree-trunks, black branches, the spongy brown earth between patches of decayed snow on the lawns. The vacant lots were full of tall dead weeds. Stripped of summer leaves the houses were hopeless--temporary shelters. Kennicott chuckled, "By golly, look down there! Jack Elder must have painted his garage. And look! Martin Mahoney has put up a new fence around his chicken yard. Say, that's a good fence, eh? Chicken-tight and dog-tight. That's certainly a dandy fence. Wonder how much it cost a yard? Yes, sir, they been building right along, even in winter. Got more enterprise than these Californians. Pretty good to be home, eh?" She noted that all winter long the citizens had been throwing garbage into their back yards, to be cleaned up in spring. The recent thaw had disclosed heaps of ashes, dog-bones, torn bedding, clotted paint-cans, all half covered by the icy pools which filled the hollows of the yards. The refuse had stained the water to vile colors of waste: thin red, sour yellow, streaky brown. Kennicott chuckled, "Look over there on Main Street! They got the feed store all fixed up, and a new sign on it, black and gold. That'll improve the appearance of the block a lot." She noted that the few people whom they passed wore their raggedest coats for the evil day. They were scarecrows in a shanty town. . . . "To think," she marveled, "of coming two thousand miles, past mountains and cities, to get off here, and to plan to stay here! What conceivable reason for choosing this particular place?" She noted a figure in a rusty coat and a cloth cap. Kennicott chuckled, "Look who's coming! It's Sam Clark! Gosh, all rigged out for the weather." The two men shook hands a dozen times and, in the Western fashion, bumbled, "Well, well, well, well, you old hell-hound, you old devil, how are you, anyway? You old horse-thief, maybe it ain't good to see you again!" While Sam nodded at her over Kennicott's shoulder, she was embarrassed. "Perhaps I should never have gone away. I'm out of practise in lying. I wish they would get it over! Just a block more and--my baby!" They were home. She brushed past the welcoming Aunt Bessie and knelt by Hugh. As he stammered, "O mummy, mummy, don't go away! Stay with me, mummy!" she cried, "No, I'll never leave you again!" He volunteered, "That's daddy." "By golly, he knows us just as if we'd never been away!" said Kennicott. "You don't find any of these California kids as bright as he is, at his age!" When the trunk came they piled about Hugh the bewhiskered little wooden men fitting one inside another, the miniature junk, and the Oriental drum, from San Francisco Chinatown; the blocks carved by the old Frenchman in San Diego; the lariat from San Antonio. "Will you forgive mummy for going away? Will you?" she whispered. Absorbed in Hugh, asking a hundred questions about him--had he had any colds? did he still dawdle over his oatmeal? what about unfortunate morning incidents? she viewed Aunt Bessie only as a source of information, and was able to ignore her hint, pointed by a coyly shaken finger, "Now that you've had such a fine long trip and spent so much money and all, I hope you're going to settle down and be satisfied and not----" "Does he like carrots yet?" replied Carol. She was cheerful as the snow began to conceal the slatternly yards. She assured herself that the streets of New York and Chicago were as ugly as Gopher Prairie in such weather; she dismissed the thought, "But they do have charming interiors for refuge." She sang as she energetically looked over Hugh's clothes. The afternoon grew old and dark. Aunt Bessie went home. Carol took the baby into her own room. The maid came in complaining, "I can't get no extra milk to make chipped beef for supper." Hugh was sleepy, and he had been spoiled by Aunt Bessie. Even to a returned mother, his whining and his trick of seven times snatching her silver brush were fatiguing. As a background, behind the noises of Hugh and the kitchen, the house reeked with a colorless stillness. From the window she heard Kennicott greeting the Widow Bogart as he had always done, always, every snowy evening: "Guess this 'll keep up all night." She waited. There they were, the furnace sounds, unalterable, eternal: removing ashes, shoveling coal. Yes. She was back home! Nothing had changed. She had never been away. California? Had she seen it? Had she for one minute left this scraping sound of the small shovel in the ash-pit of the furnace? But Kennicott preposterously supposed that she had. Never had she been quite so far from going away as now when he believed she had just come back. She felt oozing through the walls the spirit of small houses and righteous people. At that instant she knew that in running away she had merely hidden her doubts behind the officious stir of travel. "Dear God, don't let me begin agonizing again!" she sobbed. Hugh wept with her. "Wait for mummy a second!" She hastened down to the cellar, to Kennicott. He was standing before the furnace. However inadequate the rest of the house, he had seen to it that the fundamental cellar should be large and clean, the square pillars whitewashed, and the bins for coal and potatoes and trunks convenient. A glow from the drafts fell on the smooth gray cement floor at his feet. He was whistling tenderly, staring at the furnace with eyes which saw the black-domed monster as a symbol of home and of the beloved routine to which he had returned--his gipsying decently accomplished, his duty of viewing "sights" and "curios" performed with thoroughness. Unconscious of her, he stooped and peered in at the blue flames among the coals. He closed the door briskly, and made a whirling gesture with his right hand, out of pure bliss. He saw her. "Why, hello, old lady! Pretty darn good to be back, eh?" "Yes," she lied, while she quaked, "Not now. I can't face the job of explaining now. He's been so good. He trusts me. And I'm going to break his heart!" She smiled at him. She tidied his sacred cellar by throwing an empty bluing bottle into the trash bin. She mourned, "It's only the baby that holds me. If Hugh died----" She fled upstairs in panic and made sure that nothing had happened to Hugh in these four minutes. She saw a pencil-mark on a window-sill. She had made it on a September day when she had been planning a picnic for Fern Mullins and Erik. Fern and she had been hysterical with nonsense, had invented mad parties for all the coming winter. She glanced across the alley at the room which Fern had occupied. A rag of a gray curtain masked the still window. She tried to think of some one to whom she wanted to telephone. There was no one. The Sam Clarks called that evening and encouraged her to describe the missions. A dozen times they told her how glad they were to have her back. "It is good to be wanted," she thought. "It will drug me. But----Oh, is all life, always, an unresolved But?"

Chapter 34

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-34

The trip to California is a good one, although Carol still has a tough time compromising on the stuff she likes for the sake of what Will likes. All Will wants to do is talk to other travellers who are from his part of the world. Will and Carol's homecoming to Gopher Prairie is every bit as depressing as Carol thinks it'll be, though Will loves being back home. He makes note of all the tiny things people have changed. For example, there are new chicken-wire fences. Carol's aunt in-law scolds her for always being so dissatisfied and remarks that she hopes the trip to California got the ants out of her pants.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/35.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_34_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 35

chapter 35

{"name": "Chapter 35", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-35", "summary": "Carol tries to keep herself as busy as possible in order to avoid thinking too much about her crummy life. She's happy when Vida Sherwin's husband Raymie finally comes back from the war. Gopher Prairie is booming because the price of wheat has been crazy high during the war. Still, all the money ends up funneling into the pockets of the rich people in town. The farmers and laborers are no better off. A dude named James Blausser comes to Gopher Prairie to help turn the town into a modern American city. He starts a whole advertising campaign around how great Gopher Prairie is. Everyone gets into the new sense of town pride except Carol, and Will gets really annoyed with her for it. He thinks that she's just a stick in the mud determined never to be happy. Carol is amazed that a town could be so successful and not introduce a single scrap of high culture.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXV SHE tried to be content, which was a contradiction in terms. She fanatically cleaned house all April. She knitted a sweater for Hugh. She was diligent at Red Cross work. She was silent when Vida raved that though America hated war as much as ever, we must invade Germany and wipe out every man, because it was now proven that there was no soldier in the German army who was not crucifying prisoners and cutting off babies' hands. Carol was volunteer nurse when Mrs. Champ Perry suddenly died of pneumonia. In her funeral procession were the eleven people left out of the Grand Army and the Territorial Pioneers, old men and women, very old and weak, who a few decades ago had been boys and girls of the frontier, riding broncos through the rank windy grass of this prairie. They hobbled behind a band made up of business men and high-school boys, who straggled along without uniforms or ranks or leader, trying to play Chopin's Funeral March--a shabby group of neighbors with grave eyes, stumbling through the slush under a solemnity of faltering music. Champ was broken. His rheumatism was worse. The rooms over the store were silent. He could not do his work as buyer at the elevator. Farmers coming in with sled-loads of wheat complained that Champ could not read the scale, that he seemed always to be watching some one back in the darkness of the bins. He was seen slipping through alleys, talking to himself, trying to avoid observation, creeping at last to the cemetery. Once Carol followed him and found the coarse, tobacco-stained, unimaginative old man lying on the snow of the grave, his thick arms spread out across the raw mound as if to protect her from the cold, her whom he had carefully covered up every night for sixty years, who was alone there now, uncared for. The elevator company, Ezra Stowbody president, let him go. The company, Ezra explained to Carol, had no funds for giving pensions. She tried to have him appointed to the postmastership, which, since all the work was done by assistants, was the one sinecure in town, the one reward for political purity. But it proved that Mr. Bert Tybee, the former bartender, desired the postmastership. At her solicitation Lyman Cass gave Champ a warm berth as night watchman. Small boys played a good many tricks on Champ when he fell asleep at the mill. II She had vicarious happiness in the return of Major Raymond Wutherspoon. He was well, but still weak from having been gassed; he had been discharged and he came home as the first of the war veterans. It was rumored that he surprised Vida by coming unannounced, that Vida fainted when she saw him, and for a night and day would not share him with the town. When Carol saw them Vida was hazy about everything except Raymie, and never went so far from him that she could not slip her hand under his. Without understanding why Carol was troubled by this intensity. And Raymie--surely this was not Raymie, but a sterner brother of his, this man with the tight blouse, the shoulder emblems, the trim legs in boots. His face seemed different, his lips more tight. He was not Raymie; he was Major Wutherspoon; and Kennicott and Carol were grateful when he divulged that Paris wasn't half as pretty as Minneapolis, that all of the American soldiers had been distinguished by their morality when on leave. Kennicott was respectful as he inquired whether the Germans had good aeroplanes, and what a salient was, and a cootie, and Going West. In a week Major Wutherspoon was made full manager of the Bon Ton. Harry Haydock was going to devote himself to the half-dozen branch stores which he was establishing at crossroads hamlets. Harry would be the town's rich man in the coming generation, and Major Wutherspoon would rise with him, and Vida was jubilant, though she was regretful at having to give up most of her Red Cross work. Ray still needed nursing, she explained. When Carol saw him with his uniform off, in a pepper-and salt suit and a new gray felt hat, she was disappointed. He was not Major Wutherspoon; he was Raymie. For a month small boys followed him down the street, and everybody called him Major, but that was presently shortened to Maje, and the small boys did not look up from their marbles as he went by. III The town was booming, as a result of the war price of wheat. The wheat money did not remain in the pockets of the farmers; the towns existed to take care of all that. Iowa farmers were selling their land at four hundred dollars an acre and coming into Minnesota. But whoever bought or sold or mortgaged, the townsmen invited themselves to the feast--millers, real-estate men, lawyers, merchants, and Dr. Will Kennicott. They bought land at a hundred and fifty, sold it next day at a hundred and seventy, and bought again. In three months Kennicott made seven thousand dollars, which was rather more than four times as much as society paid him for healing the sick. In early summer began a "campaign of boosting." The Commercial Club decided that Gopher Prairie was not only a wheat-center but also the perfect site for factories, summer cottages, and state institutions. In charge of the campaign was Mr. James Blausser, who had recently come to town to speculate in land. Mr. Blausser was known as a Hustler. He liked to be called Honest Jim. He was a bulky, gauche, noisy, humorous man, with narrow eyes, a rustic complexion, large red hands, and brilliant clothes. He was attentive to all women. He was the first man in town who had not been sensitive enough to feel Carol's aloofness. He put his arm about her shoulder while he condescended to Kennicott, "Nice lil wifey, I'll say, doc," and when she answered, not warmly, "Thank you very much for the imprimatur," he blew on her neck, and did not know that he had been insulted. He was a layer-on of hands. He never came to the house without trying to paw her. He touched her arm, let his fist brush her side. She hated the man, and she was afraid of him. She wondered if he had heard of Erik, and was taking advantage. She spoke ill of him at home and in public places, but Kennicott and the other powers insisted, "Maybe he is kind of a roughneck, but you got to hand it to him; he's got more git-up-and-git than any fellow that ever hit this burg. And he's pretty cute, too. Hear what he said to old Ezra? Chucked him in the ribs and said, 'Say, boy, what do you want to go to Denver for? Wait 'll I get time and I'll move the mountains here. Any mountain will be tickled to death to locate here once we get the White Way in!'" The town welcomed Mr. Blausser as fully as Carol snubbed him. He was the guest of honor at the Commercial Club Banquet at the Minniemashie House, an occasion for menus printed in gold (but injudiciously proof-read), for free cigars, soft damp slabs of Lake Superior whitefish served as fillet of sole, drenched cigar-ashes gradually filling the saucers of coffee cups, and oratorical references to Pep, Punch, Go, Vigor, Enterprise, Red Blood, He-Men, Fair Women, God's Country, James J. Hill, the Blue Sky, the Green Fields, the Bountiful Harvest, Increasing Population, Fair Return on Investments, Alien Agitators Who Threaten the Security of Our Institutions, the Hearthstone the Foundation of the State, Senator Knute Nelson, One Hundred Per Cent. Americanism, and Pointing with Pride. Harry Haydock, as chairman, introduced Honest Jim Blausser. "And I am proud to say, my fellow citizens, that in his brief stay here Mr. Blausser has become my warm personal friend as well as my fellow booster, and I advise you all to very carefully attend to the hints of a man who knows how to achieve." Mr. Blausser reared up like an elephant with a camel's neck--red faced, red eyed, heavy fisted, slightly belching--a born leader, divinely intended to be a congressman but deflected to the more lucrative honors of real-estate. He smiled on his warm personal friends and fellow boosters, and boomed: "I certainly was astonished in the streets of our lovely little city, the other day. I met the meanest kind of critter that God ever made--meaner than the horned toad or the Texas lallapaluza! (Laughter.) And do you know what the animile was? He was a knocker! (Laughter and applause.) "I want to tell you good people, and it's just as sure as God made little apples, the thing that distinguishes our American commonwealth from the pikers and tin-horns in other countries is our Punch. You take a genuwine, honest-to-God homo Americanibus and there ain't anything he's afraid to tackle. Snap and speed are his middle name! He'll put her across if he has to ride from hell to breakfast, and believe me, I'm mighty good and sorry for the boob that's so unlucky as to get in his way, because that poor slob is going to wonder where he was at when Old Mr. Cyclone hit town! (Laughter.) "Now, frien's, there's some folks so yellow and small and so few in the pod that they go to work and claim that those of us that have the big vision are off our trolleys. They say we can't make Gopher Prairie, God bless her! just as big as Minneapolis or St. Paul or Duluth. But lemme tell you right here and now that there ain't a town under the blue canopy of heaven that's got a better chance to take a running jump and go scooting right up into the two-hundred-thousand class than little old G. P.! And if there's anybody that's got such cold kismets that he's afraid to tag after Jim Blausser on the Big Going Up, then we don't want him here! Way I figger it, you folks are just patriotic enough so that you ain't going to stand for any guy sneering and knocking his own town, no matter how much of a smart Aleck he is--and just on the side I want to add that this Farmers' Nonpartisan League and the whole bunch of socialists are right in the same category, or, as the fellow says, in the same scategory, meaning This Way Out, Exit, Beat It While the Going's Good, This Means You, for all knockers of prosperity and the rights of property! "Fellow citizens, there's a lot of folks, even right here in this fair state, fairest and richest of all the glorious union, that stand up on their hind legs and claim that the East and Europe put it all over the golden Northwestland. Now let me nail that lie right here and now. 'Ah-ha,' says they, 'so Jim Blausser is claiming that Gopher Prairie is as good a place to live in as London and Rome and--and all the rest of the Big Burgs, is he? How does the poor fish know?' says they. Well I'll tell you how I know! I've seen 'em! I've done Europe from soup to nuts! They can't spring that stuff on Jim Blausser and get away with it! And let me tell you that the only live thing in Europe is our boys that are fighting there now! London--I spent three days, sixteen straight hours a day, giving London the once-over, and let me tell you that it's nothing but a bunch of fog and out-of-date buildings that no live American burg would stand for one minute. You may not believe it, but there ain't one first-class skyscraper in the whole works. And the same thing goes for that crowd of crabs and snobs Down East, and next time you hear some zob from Yahooville-on-the-Hudson chewing the rag and bulling and trying to get your goat, you tell him that no two-fisted enterprising Westerner would have New York for a gift! "Now the point of this is: I'm not only insisting that Gopher Prairie is going to be Minnesota's pride, the brightest ray in the glory of the North Star State, but also and furthermore that it is right now, and still more shall be, as good a place to live in, and love in, and bring up the Little Ones in, and it's got as much refinement and culture, as any burg on the whole bloomin' expanse of God's Green Footstool, and that goes, get me, that goes!" Half an hour later Chairman Haydock moved a vote of thanks to Mr. Blausser. The boosters' campaign was on. The town sought that efficient and modern variety of fame which is known as "publicity." The band was reorganized, and provided by the Commercial Club with uniforms of purple and gold. The amateur baseball-team hired a semi-professional pitcher from Des Moines, and made a schedule of games with every town for fifty miles about. The citizens accompanied it as "rooters," in a special car, with banners lettered "Watch Gopher Prairie Grow," and with the band playing "Smile, Smile, Smile." Whether the team won or lost the Dauntless loyally shrieked, "Boost, Boys, and Boost Together--Put Gopher Prairie on the Map--Brilliant Record of Our Matchless Team." Then, glory of glories, the town put in a White Way. White Ways were in fashion in the Middlewest. They were composed of ornamented posts with clusters of high-powered electric lights along two or three blocks on Main Street. The Dauntless confessed: "White Way Is Installed--Town Lit Up Like Broadway--Speech by Hon. James Blausser--Come On You Twin Cities--Our Hat Is In the Ring." The Commercial Club issued a booklet prepared by a great and expensive literary person from a Minneapolis advertising agency, a red-headed young man who smoked cigarettes in a long amber holder. Carol read the booklet with a certain wonder. She learned that Plover and Minniemashie Lakes were world-famed for their beauteous wooded shores and gamey pike and bass not to be equalled elsewhere in the entire country; that the residences of Gopher Prairie were models of dignity, comfort, and culture, with lawns and gardens known far and wide; that the Gopher Prairie schools and public library, in its neat and commodious building, were celebrated throughout the state; that the Gopher Prairie mills made the best flour in the country; that the surrounding farm lands were renowned, where'er men ate bread and butter, for their incomparable No. 1 Hard Wheat and Holstein-Friesian cattle; and that the stores in Gopher Prairie compared favorably with Minneapolis and Chicago in their abundance of luxuries and necessities and the ever-courteous attention of the skilled clerks. She learned, in brief, that this was the one Logical Location for factories and wholesale houses. "THERE'S where I want to go; to that model town Gopher Prairie," said Carol. Kennicott was triumphant when the Commercial Club did capture one small shy factory which planned to make wooden automobile-wheels, but when Carol saw the promoter she could not feel that his coming much mattered--and a year after, when he failed, she could not be very sorrowful. Retired farmers were moving into town. The price of lots had increased a third. But Carol could discover no more pictures nor interesting food nor gracious voices nor amusing conversation nor questing minds. She could, she asserted, endure a shabby but modest town; the town shabby and egomaniac she could not endure. She could nurse Champ Perry, and warm to the neighborliness of Sam Clark, but she could not sit applauding Honest Jim Blausser. Kennicott had begged her, in courtship days, to convert the town to beauty. If it was now as beautiful as Mr. Blausser and the Dauntless said, then her work was over, and she could go.

Chapter 35

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-35

Carol tries to keep herself as busy as possible in order to avoid thinking too much about her crummy life. She's happy when Vida Sherwin's husband Raymie finally comes back from the war. Gopher Prairie is booming because the price of wheat has been crazy high during the war. Still, all the money ends up funneling into the pockets of the rich people in town. The farmers and laborers are no better off. A dude named James Blausser comes to Gopher Prairie to help turn the town into a modern American city. He starts a whole advertising campaign around how great Gopher Prairie is. Everyone gets into the new sense of town pride except Carol, and Will gets really annoyed with her for it. He thinks that she's just a stick in the mud determined never to be happy. Carol is amazed that a town could be so successful and not introduce a single scrap of high culture.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/36.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_35_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 36

chapter 36

{"name": "Chapter 36", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-36", "summary": "As Gopher Prairie gets more successful, it gets more and more intolerant of people who don't like it. Carol starts hearing stories about labor organizers being arrested. Will thinks it's all a great idea because he's drunk the pro-capitalist Kool-Aid. He and Carol continue to fight constantly, only now Will doesn't back down like he used to. He just calls Carol a crank whenever she expresses dissatisfaction. Carol finally decides to leave Gopher Prairie and to take Hugh with her. Will doesn't put up much of a fight. Carol leaves town, and the Gopher Prairie newspaper makes up a story about how she has gone to Washington to help in the war effort like a great patriot.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXVI KENNICOTT was not so inhumanly patient that he could continue to forgive Carol's heresies, to woo her as he had on the venture to California. She tried to be inconspicuous, but she was betrayed by her failure to glow over the boosting. Kennicott believed in it; demanded that she say patriotic things about the White Way and the new factory. He snorted, "By golly, I've done all I could, and now I expect you to play the game. Here you been complaining for years about us being so poky, and now when Blausser comes along and does stir up excitement and beautify the town like you've always wanted somebody to, why, you say he's a roughneck, and you won't jump on the band-wagon." Once, when Kennicott announced at noon-dinner, "What do you know about this! They say there's a chance we may get another factory--cream-separator works!" he added, "You might try to look interested, even if you ain't!" The baby was frightened by the Jovian roar; ran wailing to hide his face in Carol's lap; and Kennicott had to make himself humble and court both mother and child. The dim injustice of not being understood even by his son left him irritable. He felt injured. An event which did not directly touch them brought down his wrath. In the early autumn, news came from Wakamin that the sheriff had forbidden an organizer for the National Nonpartisan League to speak anywhere in the county. The organizer had defied the sheriff, and announced that in a few days he would address a farmers' political meeting. That night, the news ran, a mob of a hundred business men led by the sheriff--the tame village street and the smug village faces ruddled by the light of bobbing lanterns, the mob flowing between the squatty rows of shops--had taken the organizer from his hotel, ridden him on a fence-rail, put him on a freight train, and warned him not to return. The story was threshed out in Dave Dyer's drug store, with Sam Clark, Kennicott, and Carol present. "That's the way to treat those fellows--only they ought to have lynched him!" declared Sam, and Kennicott and Dave Dyer joined in a proud "You bet!" Carol walked out hastily, Kennicott observing her. Through supper-time she knew that he was bubbling and would soon boil over. When the baby was abed, and they sat composedly in canvas chairs on the porch, he experimented; "I had a hunch you thought Sam was kind of hard on that fellow they kicked out of Wakamin." "Wasn't Sam rather needlessly heroic?" "All these organizers, yes, and a whole lot of the German and Squarehead farmers themselves, they're seditious as the devil--disloyal, non-patriotic, pro-German pacifists, that's what they are!" "Did this organizer say anything pro-German?" "Not on your life! They didn't give him a chance!" His laugh was stagey. "So the whole thing was illegal--and led by the sheriff! Precisely how do you expect these aliens to obey your law if the officer of the law teaches them to break it? Is it a new kind of logic?" "Maybe it wasn't exactly regular, but what's the odds? They knew this fellow would try to stir up trouble. Whenever it comes right down to a question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it's justifiable to set aside ordinary procedure." "What editorial did he get that from?" she wondered, as she protested, "See here, my beloved, why can't you Tories declare war honestly? You don't oppose this organizer because you think he's seditious but because you're afraid that the farmers he is organizing will deprive you townsmen of the money you make out of mortgages and wheat and shops. Of course, since we're at war with Germany, anything that any one of us doesn't like is 'pro-German,' whether it's business competition or bad music. If we were fighting England, you'd call the radicals 'pro-English.' When this war is over, I suppose you'll be calling them 'red anarchists.' What an eternal art it is--such a glittery delightful art--finding hard names for our opponents! How we do sanctify our efforts to keep them from getting the holy dollars we want for ourselves! The churches have always done it, and the political orators--and I suppose I do it when I call Mrs. Bogart a 'Puritan' and Mr. Stowbody a 'capitalist.' But you business men are going to beat all the rest of us at it, with your simple-hearted, energetic, pompous----" She got so far only because Kennicott was slow in shaking off respect for her. Now he bayed: "That'll be about all from you! I've stood for your sneering at this town, and saying how ugly and dull it is. I've stood for your refusing to appreciate good fellows like Sam. I've even stood for your ridiculing our Watch Gopher Prairie Grow campaign. But one thing I'm not going to stand: I'm not going to stand my own wife being seditious. You can camouflage all you want to, but you know darn well that these radicals, as you call 'em, are opposed to the war, and let me tell you right here and now, and you and all these long-haired men and short-haired women can beef all you want to, but we're going to take these fellows, and if they ain't patriotic, we're going to make them be patriotic. And--Lord knows I never thought I'd have to say this to my own wife--but if you go defending these fellows, then the same thing applies to you! Next thing, I suppose you'll be yapping about free speech. Free speech! There's too much free speech and free gas and free beer and free love and all the rest of your damned mouthy freedom, and if I had my way I'd make you folks live up to the established rules of decency even if I had to take you----" "Will!" She was not timorous now. "Am I pro-German if I fail to throb to Honest Jim Blausser, too? Let's have my whole duty as a wife!" He was grumbling, "The whole thing's right in line with the criticism you've always been making. Might have known you'd oppose any decent constructive work for the town or for----" "You're right. All I've done has been in line. I don't belong to Gopher Prairie. That isn't meant as a condemnation of Gopher Prairie, and it may be a condemnation of me. All right! I don't care! I don't belong here, and I'm going. I'm not asking permission any more. I'm simply going." He grunted. "Do you mind telling me, if it isn't too much trouble, how long you're going for?" "I don't know. Perhaps for a year. Perhaps for a lifetime." "I see. Well, of course, I'll be tickled to death to sell out my practise and go anywhere you say. Would you like to have me go with you to Paris and study art, maybe, and wear velveteen pants and a woman's bonnet, and live on spaghetti?" "No, I think we can save you that trouble. You don't quite understand. I am going--I really am--and alone! I've got to find out what my work is----" "Work? Work? Sure! That's the whole trouble with you! You haven't got enough work to do. If you had five kids and no hired girl, and had to help with the chores and separate the cream, like these farmers' wives, then you wouldn't be so discontented." "I know. That's what most men--and women--like you WOULD say. That's how they would explain all I am and all I want. And I shouldn't argue with them. These business men, from their crushing labors of sitting in an office seven hours a day, would calmly recommend that I have a dozen children. As it happens, I've done that sort of thing. There've been a good many times when we hadn't a maid, and I did all the housework, and cared for Hugh, and went to Red Cross, and did it all very efficiently. I'm a good cook and a good sweeper, and you don't dare say I'm not!" "N-no, you're----" "But was I more happy when I was drudging? I was not. I was just bedraggled and unhappy. It's work--but not my work. I could run an office or a library, or nurse and teach children. But solitary dish-washing isn't enough to satisfy me--or many other women. We're going to chuck it. We're going to wash 'em by machinery, and come out and play with you men in the offices and clubs and politics you've cleverly kept for yourselves! Oh, we're hopeless, we dissatisfied women! Then why do you want to have us about the place, to fret you? So it's for your sake that I'm going!" "Of course a little thing like Hugh makes no difference!" "Yes, all the difference. That's why I'm going to take him with me." "Suppose I refuse?" "You won't!" Forlornly, "Uh----Carrie, what the devil is it you want, anyway?" "Oh, conversation! No, it's much more than that. I think it's a greatness of life--a refusal to be content with even the healthiest mud." "Don't you know that nobody ever solved a problem by running away from it?" "Perhaps. Only I choose to make my own definition of 'running away' I don't call----Do you realize how big a world there is beyond this Gopher Prairie where you'd keep me all my life? It may be that some day I'll come back, but not till I can bring something more than I have now. And even if I am cowardly and run away--all right, call it cowardly, call me anything you want to! I've been ruled too long by fear of being called things. I'm going away to be quiet and think. I'm--I'm going! I have a right to my own life." "So have I to mine!" "Well?" "I have a right to my life--and you're it, you're my life! You've made yourself so. I'm damned if I'll agree to all your freak notions, but I will say I've got to depend on you. Never thought of that complication, did you, in this 'off to Bohemia, and express yourself, and free love, and live your own life' stuff!" "You have a right to me if you can keep me. Can you?" He moved uneasily. II For a month they discussed it. They hurt each other very much, and sometimes they were close to weeping, and invariably he used banal phrases about her duties and she used phrases quite as banal about freedom, and through it all, her discovery that she really could get away from Main Street was as sweet as the discovery of love. Kennicott never consented definitely. At most he agreed to a public theory that she was "going to take a short trip and see what the East was like in wartime." She set out for Washington in October--just before the war ended. She had determined on Washington because it was less intimidating than the obvious New York, because she hoped to find streets in which Hugh could play, and because in the stress of war-work, with its demand for thousands of temporary clerks, she could be initiated into the world of offices. Hugh was to go with her, despite the wails and rather extensive comments of Aunt Bessie. She wondered if she might not encounter Erik in the East but it was a chance thought, soon forgotten. III The last thing she saw on the station platform was Kennicott, faithfully waving his hand, his face so full of uncomprehending loneliness that he could not smile but only twitch up his lips. She waved to him as long as she could, and when he was lost she wanted to leap from the vestibule and run back to him. She thought of a hundred tendernesses she had neglected. She had her freedom, and it was empty. The moment was not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb. She sighed, "I couldn't do this if it weren't for Will's kindness, his giving me money." But a second after: "I wonder how many women would always stay home if they had the money?" Hugh complained, "Notice me, mummy!" He was beside her on the red plush seat of the day-coach; a boy of three and a half. "I'm tired of playing train. Let's play something else. Let's go see Auntie Bogart." "Oh, NO! Do you really like Mrs. Bogart?" "Yes. She gives me cookies and she tells me about the Dear Lord. You never tell me about the Dear Lord. Why don't you tell me about the Dear Lord? Auntie Bogart says I'm going to be a preacher. Can I be a preacher? Can I preach about the Dear Lord?" "Oh, please wait till my generation has stopped rebelling before yours starts in!" "What's a generation?" "It's a ray in the illumination of the spirit." "That's foolish." He was a serious and literal person, and rather humorless. She kissed his frown, and marveled: "I am running away from my husband, after liking a Swedish ne'er-do-well and expressing immoral opinions, just as in a romantic story. And my own son reproves me because I haven't given him religious instruction. But the story doesn't go right. I'm neither groaning nor being dramatically saved. I keep on running away, and I enjoy it. I'm mad with joy over it. Gopher Prairie is lost back there in the dust and stubble, and I look forward----" She continued it to Hugh: "Darling, do you know what mother and you are going to find beyond the blue horizon rim?" "What?" flatly. "We're going to find elephants with golden howdahs from which peep young maharanees with necklaces of rubies, and a dawn sea colored like the breast of a dove, and a white and green house filled with books and silver tea-sets." "And cookies?" "Cookies? Oh, most decidedly cookies. We've had enough of bread and porridge. We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all." "That's foolish." "It is, O male Kennicott!" "Huh!" said Kennicott II, and went to sleep on her shoulder. IV The theory of the Dauntless regarding Carol's absence: Mrs. Will Kennicott and son Hugh left on No. 24 on Saturday last for a stay of some months in Minneapolis, Chicago, New York and Washington. Mrs. Kennicott confided to _Ye Scribe_ that she will be connected with one of the multifarious war activities now centering in the Nation's Capital for a brief period before returning. Her countless friends who appreciate her splendid labors with the local Red Cross realize how valuable she will be to any war board with which she chooses to become connected. Gopher Prairie thus adds another shining star to its service flag and without wishing to knock any neighboring communities, we would like to know any town of anywheres near our size in the state that has such a sterling war record. Another reason why you'd better Watch Gopher Prairie Grow. * * * Mr. and Mrs. David Dyer, Mrs. Dyer's sister, Mrs. Jennie Dayborn of Jackrabbit, and Dr. Will Kennicott drove to Minniemashie on Tuesday for a delightful picnic.

Chapter 36

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-36

As Gopher Prairie gets more successful, it gets more and more intolerant of people who don't like it. Carol starts hearing stories about labor organizers being arrested. Will thinks it's all a great idea because he's drunk the pro-capitalist Kool-Aid. He and Carol continue to fight constantly, only now Will doesn't back down like he used to. He just calls Carol a crank whenever she expresses dissatisfaction. Carol finally decides to leave Gopher Prairie and to take Hugh with her. Will doesn't put up much of a fight. Carol leaves town, and the Gopher Prairie newspaper makes up a story about how she has gone to Washington to help in the war effort like a great patriot.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/37.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_36_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 37

chapter 37

{"name": "Chapter 37", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-37", "summary": "Carol moves to Washington and finds a job in the War Risk Insurance bureau. It ain't all that interesting, but Carol loves having a job and being in the public sphere of a big city. The truth is that she really doesn't miss Gopher Prairie. Carol is also surprised to find that she's actually a little too conservative for some parts of big-city life. She realizes that Gopher Prairie has changed her since she first moved to it. Still, she loves the way that people in the city don't care what people think of them. Everyone's reputation seems to be stable and assured in a way that's not the case in Gopher Prairie. Carol also finds lots of like-minded people who think Gopher Prairie is just a hickish backwater. She feels a little bad when she hears other people making fun of the place, though. She realizes that she doesn't dislike individuals but only the institutions that grind individuals into dull conformists.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXVII I SHE found employment in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. Though the armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks after her coming to Washington, the work of the bureau continued. She filed correspondence all day; then she dictated answers to letters of inquiry. It was an endurance of monotonous details, yet she asserted that she had found "real work." Disillusions she did have. She discovered that in the afternoon, office routine stretches to the grave. She discovered that an office is as full of cliques and scandals as a Gopher Prairie. She discovered that most of the women in the government bureaus lived unhealthfully, dining on snatches in their crammed apartments. But she also discovered that business women may have friendships and enmities as frankly as men and may revel in a bliss which no housewife attains--a free Sunday. It did not appear that the Great World needed her inspiration, but she felt that her letters, her contact with the anxieties of men and women all over the country, were a part of vast affairs, not confined to Main Street and a kitchen but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid. She perceived that she could do office work without losing any of the putative feminine virtue of domesticity; that cooking and cleaning, when divested of the fussing of an Aunt Bessie, take but a tenth of the time which, in a Gopher Prairie, it is but decent to devote to them. Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly Seventeen, not to have to report to Kennicott at the end of the day all that she had done or might do, was a relief which made up for the office weariness. She felt that she was no longer one-half of a marriage but the whole of a human being. II Washington gave her all the graciousness in which she had had faith: white columns seen across leafy parks, spacious avenues, twisty alleys. Daily she passed a dark square house with a hint of magnolias and a courtyard behind it, and a tall curtained second-story window through which a woman was always peering. The woman was mystery, romance, a story which told itself differently every day; now she was a murderess, now the neglected wife of an ambassador. It was mystery which Carol had most lacked in Gopher Prairie, where every house was open to view, where every person was but too easy to meet, where there were no secret gates opening upon moors over which one might walk by moss-deadened paths to strange high adventures in an ancient garden. As she flitted up Sixteenth Street after a Kreisler recital, given late in the afternoon for the government clerks, as the lamps kindled in spheres of soft fire, as the breeze flowed into the street, fresh as prairie winds and kindlier, as she glanced up the elm alley of Massachusetts Avenue, as she was rested by the integrity of the Scottish Rite Temple, she loved the city as she loved no one save Hugh. She encountered negro shanties turned into studios, with orange curtains and pots of mignonette; marble houses on New Hampshire Avenue, with butlers and limousines; and men who looked like fictional explorers and aviators. Her days were swift, and she knew that in her folly of running away she had found the courage to be wise. She had a dispiriting first month of hunting lodgings in the crowded city. She had to roost in a hall-room in a moldy mansion conducted by an indignant decayed gentlewoman, and leave Hugh to the care of a doubtful nurse. But later she made a home. III Her first acquaintances were the members of the Tincomb Methodist Church, a vast red-brick tabernacle. Vida Sherwin had given her a letter to an earnest woman with eye-glasses, plaid silk waist, and a belief in Bible Classes, who introduced her to the Pastor and the Nicer Members of Tincomb. Carol recognized in Washington as she had in California a transplanted and guarded Main Street. Two-thirds of the church-members had come from Gopher Prairies. The church was their society and their standard; they went to Sunday service, Sunday School, Christian Endeavor, missionary lectures, church suppers, precisely as they had at home; they agreed that ambassadors and flippant newspapermen and infidel scientists of the bureaus were equally wicked and to be avoided; and by cleaving to Tincomb Church they kept their ideals from all contamination. They welcomed Carol, asked about her husband, gave her advice regarding colic in babies, passed her the gingerbread and scalloped potatoes at church suppers, and in general made her very unhappy and lonely, so that she wondered if she might not enlist in the militant suffrage organization and be allowed to go to jail. Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she would have perceived in New York or London) a thick streak of Main Street. The cautious dullness of a Gopher Prairie appeared in boarding-houses where ladylike bureau-clerks gossiped to polite young army officers about the movies; a thousand Sam Clarks and a few Widow Bogarts were to be identified in the Sunday motor procession, in theater parties, and at the dinners of State Societies, to which the emigres from Texas or Michigan surged that they might confirm themselves in the faith that their several Gopher Prairies were notoriously "a whole lot peppier and chummier than this stuck-up East." But she found a Washington which did not cleave to Main Street. Guy Pollock wrote to a cousin, a temporary army captain, a confiding and buoyant lad who took Carol to tea-dances, and laughed, as she had always wanted some one to laugh, about nothing in particular. The captain introduced her to the secretary of a congressman, a cynical young widow with many acquaintances in the navy. Through her Carol met commanders and majors, newspapermen, chemists and geographers and fiscal experts from the bureaus, and a teacher who was a familiar of the militant suffrage headquarters. The teacher took her to headquarters. Carol never became a prominent suffragist. Indeed her only recognized position was as an able addresser of envelopes. But she was casually adopted by this family of friendly women who, when they were not being mobbed or arrested, took dancing lessons or went picnicking up the Chesapeake Canal or talked about the politics of the American Federation of Labor. With the congressman's secretary and the teacher Carol leased a small flat. Here she found home, her own place and her own people. She had, though it absorbed most of her salary, an excellent nurse for Hugh. She herself put him to bed and played with him on holidays. There were walks with him, there were motionless evenings of reading, but chiefly Washington was associated with people, scores of them, sitting about the flat, talking, talking, talking, not always wisely but always excitedly. It was not at all the "artist's studio" of which, because of its persistence in fiction, she had dreamed. Most of them were in offices all day, and thought more in card-catalogues or statistics than in mass and color. But they played, very simply, and they saw no reason why anything which exists cannot also be acknowledged. She was sometimes shocked quite as she had shocked Gopher Prairie by these girls with their cigarettes and elfish knowledge. When they were most eager about soviets or canoeing, she listened, longed to have some special learning which would distinguish her, and sighed that her adventure had come so late. Kennicott and Main Street had drained her self-reliance; the presence of Hugh made her feel temporary. Some day--oh, she'd have to take him back to open fields and the right to climb about hay-lofts. But the fact that she could never be eminent among these scoffing enthusiasts did not keep her from being proud of them, from defending them in imaginary conversations with Kennicott, who grunted (she could hear his voice), "They're simply a bunch of wild impractical theorists sittin' round chewing the rag," and "I haven't got the time to chase after a lot of these fool fads; I'm too busy putting aside a stake for our old age." Most of the men who came to the flat, whether they were army officers or radicals who hated the army, had the easy gentleness, the acceptance of women without embarrassed banter, for which she had longed in Gopher Prairie. Yet they seemed to be as efficient as the Sam Clarks. She concluded that it was because they were of secure reputation, not hemmed in by the fire of provincial jealousies. Kennicott had asserted that the villager's lack of courtesy is due to his poverty. "We're no millionaire dudes," he boasted. Yet these army and navy men, these bureau experts, and organizers of multitudinous leagues, were cheerful on three or four thousand a year, while Kennicott had, outside of his land speculations, six thousand or more, and Sam had eight. Nor could she upon inquiry learn that many of this reckless race died in the poorhouse. That institution is reserved for men like Kennicott who, after devoting fifty years to "putting aside a stake," incontinently invest the stake in spurious oil-stocks. IV She was encouraged to believe that she had not been abnormal in viewing Gopher Prairie as unduly tedious and slatternly. She found the same faith not only in girls escaped from domesticity but also in demure old ladies who, tragically deprived of esteemed husbands and huge old houses, yet managed to make a very comfortable thing of it by living in small flats and having time to read. But she also learned that by comparison Gopher Prairie was a model of daring color, clever planning, and frenzied intellectuality. From her teacher-housemate she had a sardonic description of a Middlewestern railroad-division town, of the same size as Gopher Prairie but devoid of lawns and trees, a town where the tracks sprawled along the cinder-scabbed Main Street, and the railroad shops, dripping soot from eaves and doorway, rolled out smoke in greasy coils. Other towns she came to know by anecdote: a prairie village where the wind blew all day long, and the mud was two feet thick in spring, and in summer the flying sand scarred new-painted houses and dust covered the few flowers set out in pots. New England mill-towns with the hands living in rows of cottages like blocks of lava. A rich farming-center in New Jersey, off the railroad, furiously pious, ruled by old men, unbelievably ignorant old men, sitting about the grocery talking of James G. Blaine. A Southern town, full of the magnolias and white columns which Carol had accepted as proof of romance, but hating the negroes, obsequious to the Old Families. A Western mining-settlement like a tumor. A booming semi-city with parks and clever architects, visited by famous pianists and unctuous lecturers, but irritable from a struggle between union labor and the manufacturers' association, so that in even the gayest of the new houses there was a ceaseless and intimidating heresy-hunt. V The chart which plots Carol's progress is not easy to read. The lines are broken and uncertain of direction; often instead of rising they sink in wavering scrawls; and the colors are watery blue and pink and the dim gray of rubbed pencil marks. A few lines are traceable. Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness. Carol had hidden in none of these refuges from reality, but she, who was tender and merry, had been made timorous by Gopher Prairie. Even her flight had been but the temporary courage of panic. The thing she gained in Washington was not information about office-systems and labor unions but renewed courage, that amiable contempt called poise. Her glimpse of tasks involving millions of people and a score of nations reduced Main Street from bloated importance to its actual pettiness. She could never again be quite so awed by the power with which she herself had endowed the Vidas and Blaussers and Bogarts. From her work and from her association with women who had organized suffrage associations in hostile cities, or had defended political prisoners, she caught something of an impersonal attitude; saw that she had been as touchily personal as Maud Dyer. And why, she began to ask, did she rage at individuals? Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unembittered laughter.

Chapter 37

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-37

Carol moves to Washington and finds a job in the War Risk Insurance bureau. It ain't all that interesting, but Carol loves having a job and being in the public sphere of a big city. The truth is that she really doesn't miss Gopher Prairie. Carol is also surprised to find that she's actually a little too conservative for some parts of big-city life. She realizes that Gopher Prairie has changed her since she first moved to it. Still, she loves the way that people in the city don't care what people think of them. Everyone's reputation seems to be stable and assured in a way that's not the case in Gopher Prairie. Carol also finds lots of like-minded people who think Gopher Prairie is just a hickish backwater. She feels a little bad when she hears other people making fun of the place, though. She realizes that she doesn't dislike individuals but only the institutions that grind individuals into dull conformists.

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/38.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_37_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 38

chapter 38

{"name": "Chapter 38", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-38", "summary": "After a year in Washington, Carol starts craving more adventure than her office work allows her. She goes for a walk and sees two people she knows from Gopher Prairie. She's surprised at how happy she is to see them. Thirteen months after her move to Washington, Will comes to see her. The visit goes pretty well, but when it's all over, Carol still doesn't want to move back to Gopher Prairie with Will. He's clearly disappointed, but like a patient partner, he says he'll continue to wait for her. In fact, he agrees that it's a good idea that she doesn't come home just yet. Over time, Carol's hatred of Gopher Prairie melts away. She doesn't see it as a boring town but as a prairie settlement struggling to create civilization. After nearly two years in Washington, Carol decides to head back to Gopher Prairie. We also find out that she's pregnant with her second child. And the dates might not add up for the child to be Will's...", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXVIII SHE had lived in Washington for a year. She was tired of the office. It was tolerable, far more tolerable than housework, but it was not adventurous. She was having tea and cinnamon toast, alone at a small round table on the balcony of Rauscher's Confiserie. Four debutantes clattered in. She had felt young and dissipated, had thought rather well of her black and leaf-green suit, but as she watched them, thin of ankle, soft under the chin, seventeen or eighteen at most, smoking cigarettes with the correct ennui and talking of "bedroom farces" and their desire to "run up to New York and see something racy," she became old and rustic and plain, and desirous of retreating from these hard brilliant children to a life easier and more sympathetic. When they flickered out and one child gave orders to a chauffeur, Carol was not a defiant philosopher but a faded government clerk from Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. She started dejectedly up Connecticut Avenue. She stopped, her heart stopped. Coming toward her were Harry and Juanita Haydock. She ran to them, she kissed Juanita, while Harry confided, "Hadn't expected to come to Washington--had to go to New York for some buying--didn't have your address along--just got in this morning--wondered how in the world we could get hold of you." She was definitely sorry to hear that they were to leave at nine that evening, and she clung to them as long as she could. She took them to St. Mark's for dinner. Stooped, her elbows on the table, she heard with excitement that "Cy Bogart had the 'flu, but of course he was too gol-darn mean to die of it." "Will wrote me that Mr. Blausser has gone away. How did he get on?" "Fine! Fine! Great loss to the town. There was a real public-spirited fellow, all right!" She discovered that she now had no opinions whatever about Mr. Blausser, and she said sympathetically, "Will you keep up the town-boosting campaign?" Harry fumbled, "Well, we've dropped it just temporarily, but--sure you bet! Say, did the doc write you about the luck B. J. Gougerling had hunting ducks down in Texas?" When the news had been told and their enthusiasm had slackened she looked about and was proud to be able to point out a senator, to explain the cleverness of the canopied garden. She fancied that a man with dinner-coat and waxed mustache glanced superciliously at Harry's highly form-fitting bright-brown suit and Juanita's tan silk frock, which was doubtful at the seams. She glared back, defending her own, daring the world not to appreciate them. Then, waving to them, she lost them down the long train shed. She stood reading the list of stations: Harrisburg, Pittsburg, Chicago. Beyond Chicago----? She saw the lakes and stubble fields, heard the rhythm of insects and the creak of a buggy, was greeted by Sam Clark's "Well, well, how's the little lady?" Nobody in Washington cared enough for her to fret about her sins as Sam did. But that night they had at the flat a man just back from Finland. II She was on the Powhatan roof with the captain. At a table, somewhat vociferously buying improbable "soft drinks" for two fluffy girls, was a man with a large familiar back. "Oh! I think I know him," she murmured. "Who? There? Oh, Bresnahan, Percy Bresnahan." "Yes. You've met him? What sort of a man is he?" "He's a good-hearted idiot. I rather like him, and I believe that as a salesman of motors he's a wonder. But he's a nuisance in the aeronautic section. Tries so hard to be useful but he doesn't know anything--he doesn't know anything. Rather pathetic: rich man poking around and trying to be useful. Do you want to speak to him?" "No--no--I don't think so." III She was at a motion-picture show. The film was a highly advertised and abysmal thing smacking of simpering hair-dressers, cheap perfume, red-plush suites on the back streets of tenderloins, and complacent fat women chewing gum. It pretended to deal with the life of studios. The leading man did a portrait which was a masterpiece. He also saw visions in pipe-smoke, and was very brave and poor and pure. He had ringlets, and his masterpiece was strangely like an enlarged photograph. Carol prepared to leave. On the screen, in the role of a composer, appeared an actor called Eric Valour. She was startled, incredulous, then wretched. Looking straight out at her, wearing a beret and a velvet jacket, was Erik Valborg. He had a pale part, which he played neither well nor badly. She speculated, "I could have made so much of him----" She did not finish her speculation. She went home and read Kennicott's letters. They had seemed stiff and undetailed, but now there strode from them a personality, a personality unlike that of the languishing young man in the velvet jacket playing a dummy piano in a canvas room. IV Kennicott first came to see her in November, thirteen months after her arrival in Washington. When he announced that he was coming she was not at all sure that she wished to see him. She was glad that he had made the decision himself. She had leave from the office for two days. She watched him marching from the train, solid, assured, carrying his heavy suit-case, and she was diffident--he was such a bulky person to handle. They kissed each other questioningly, and said at the same time, "You're looking fine; how's the baby?" and "You're looking awfully well, dear; how is everything?" He grumbled, "I don't want to butt in on any plans you've made or your friends or anything, but if you've got time for it, I'd like to chase around Washington, and take in some restaurants and shows and stuff, and forget work for a while." She realized, in the taxicab, that he was wearing a soft gray suit, a soft easy hat, a flippant tie. "Like the new outfit? Got 'em in Chicago. Gosh, I hope they're the kind you like." They spent half an hour at the flat, with Hugh. She was flustered, but he gave no sign of kissing her again. As he moved about the small rooms she realized that he had had his new tan shoes polished to a brassy luster. There was a recent cut on his chin. He must have shaved on the train just before coming into Washington. It was pleasant to feel how important she was, how many people she recognized, as she took him to the Capitol, as she told him (he asked and she obligingly guessed) how many feet it was to the top of the dome, as she pointed out Senator LaFollette and the vice-president, and at lunch-time showed herself an habitue by leading him through the catacombs to the senate restaurant. She realized that he was slightly more bald. The familiar way in which his hair was parted on the left side agitated her. She looked down at his hands, and the fact that his nails were as ill-treated as ever touched her more than his pleading shoe-shine. "You'd like to motor down to Mount Vernon this afternoon, wouldn't you?" she said. It was the one thing he had planned. He was delighted that it seemed to be a perfectly well bred and Washingtonian thing to do. He shyly held her hand on the way, and told her the news: they were excavating the basement for the new schoolbuilding, Vida "made him tired the way she always looked at the Maje," poor Chet Dashaway had been killed in a motor accident out on the Coast. He did not coax her to like him. At Mount Vernon he admired the paneled library and Washington's dental tools. She knew that he would want oysters, that he would have heard of Harvey's apropos of Grant and Blaine, and she took him there. At dinner his hearty voice, his holiday enjoyment of everything, turned into nervousness in his desire to know a number of interesting matters, such as whether they still were married. But he did not ask questions, and he said nothing about her returning. He cleared his throat and observed, "Oh say, been trying out the old camera. Don't you think these are pretty good?" He tossed over to her thirty prints of Gopher Prairie and the country about. Without defense, she was thrown into it. She remembered that he had lured her with photographs in courtship days; she made a note of his sameness, his satisfaction with the tactics which had proved good before; but she forgot it in the familiar places. She was seeing the sun-speckled ferns among birches on the shore of Minniemashie, wind-rippled miles of wheat, the porch of their own house where Hugh had played, Main Street where she knew every window and every face. She handed them back, with praise for his photography, and he talked of lenses and time-exposures. Dinner was over and they were gossiping of her friends at the flat, but an intruder was with them, sitting back, persistent, inescapable. She could not endure it. She stammered: "I had you check your bag at the station because I wasn't quite sure where you'd stay. I'm dreadfully sorry we haven't room to put you up at the flat. We ought to have seen about a room for you before. Don't you think you better call up the Willard or the Washington now?" He peered at her cloudily. Without words he asked, without speech she answered, whether she was also going to the Willard or the Washington. But she tried to look as though she did not know that they were debating anything of the sort. She would have hated him had he been meek about it. But he was neither meek nor angry. However impatient he may have been with her blandness he said readily: "Yes, guess I better do that. Excuse me a second. Then how about grabbing a taxi (Gosh, isn't it the limit the way these taxi shuffers skin around a corner? Got more nerve driving than I have!) and going up to your flat for a while? Like to meet your friends--must be fine women--and I might take a look and see how Hugh sleeps. Like to know how he breathes. Don't think he has adenoids, but I better make sure, eh?" He patted her shoulder. At the flat they found her two housemates and a girl who had been to jail for suffrage. Kennicott fitted in surprisingly. He laughed at the girl's story of the humors of a hunger-strike; he told the secretary what to do when her eyes were tired from typing; and the teacher asked him--not as the husband of a friend but as a physician--whether there was "anything to this inoculation for colds." His colloquialisms seemed to Carol no more lax than their habitual slang. Like an older brother he kissed her good-night in the midst of the company. "He's terribly nice," said her housemates, and waited for confidences. They got none, nor did her own heart. She could find nothing definite to agonize about. She felt that she was no longer analyzing and controlling forces, but swept on by them. He came to the flat for breakfast, and washed the dishes. That was her only occasion for spite. Back home he never thought of washing dishes! She took him to the obvious "sights"--the Treasury, the Monument, the Corcoran Gallery, the Pan-American Building, the Lincoln Memorial, with the Potomac beyond it and the Arlington hills and the columns of the Lee Mansion. For all his willingness to play there was over him a melancholy which piqued her. His normally expressionless eyes had depths to them now, and strangeness. As they walked through Lafayette Square, looking past the Jackson statue at the lovely tranquil facade of the White House, he sighed, "I wish I'd had a shot at places like this. When I was in the U., I had to earn part of my way, and when I wasn't doing that or studying, I guess I was roughhousing. My gang were a great bunch for bumming around and raising Cain. Maybe if I'd been caught early and sent to concerts and all that----Would I have been what you call intelligent?" "Oh, my dear, don't be humble! You are intelligent! For instance, you're the most thorough doctor----" He was edging about something he wished to say. He pounced on it: "You did like those pictures of G. P. pretty well, after all, didn't you!" "Yes, of course." "Wouldn't be so bad to have a glimpse of the old town, would it!" "No, it wouldn't. Just as I was terribly glad to see the Haydocks. But please understand me! That doesn't mean that I withdraw all my criticisms. The fact that I might like a glimpse of old friends hasn't any particular relation to the question of whether Gopher Prairie oughtn't to have festivals and lamb chops." Hastily, "No, no! Sure not. I und'stand." "But I know it must have been pretty tiresome to have to live with anybody as perfect as I was." He grinned. She liked his grin. V He was thrilled by old negro coachmen, admirals, aeroplanes, the building to which his income tax would eventually go, a Rolls-Royce, Lynnhaven oysters, the Supreme Court Room, a New York theatrical manager down for the try-out of a play, the house where Lincoln died, the cloaks of Italian officers, the barrows at which clerks buy their box-lunches at noon, the barges on the Chesapeake Canal, and the fact that District of Columbia cars had both District and Maryland licenses. She resolutely took him to her favorite white and green cottages and Georgian houses. He admitted that fanlights, and white shutters against rosy brick, were more homelike than a painty wooden box. He volunteered, "I see how you mean. They make me think of these pictures of an old-fashioned Christmas. Oh, if you keep at it long enough you'll have Sam and me reading poetry and everything. Oh say, d' I tell you about this fierce green Jack Elder's had his machine painted?" VI They were at dinner. He hinted, "Before you showed me those places today, I'd already made up my mind that when I built the new house we used to talk about, I'd fix it the way you wanted it. I'm pretty practical about foundations and radiation and stuff like that, but I guess I don't know a whole lot about architecture." "My dear, it occurs to me with a sudden shock that I don't either!" "Well--anyway--you let me plan the garage and the plumbing, and you do the rest, if you ever--I mean--if you ever want to." Doubtfully, "That's sweet of you." "Look here, Carrie; you think I'm going to ask you to love me. I'm not. And I'm not going to ask you to come back to Gopher Prairie!" She gaped. "It's been a whale of a fight. But I guess I've got myself to see that you won't ever stand G. P. unless you WANT to come back to it. I needn't say I'm crazy to have you. But I won't ask you. I just want you to know how I wait for you. Every mail I look for a letter, and when I get one I'm kind of scared to open it, I'm hoping so much that you're coming back. Evenings----You know I didn't open the cottage down at the lake at all, this past summer. Simply couldn't stand all the others laughing and swimming, and you not there. I used to sit on the porch, in town, and I--I couldn't get over the feeling that you'd simply run up to the drug store and would be right back, and till after it got dark I'd catch myself watching, looking up the street, and you never came, and the house was so empty and still that I didn't like to go in. And sometimes I fell asleep there, in my chair, and didn't wake up till after midnight, and the house----Oh, the devil! Please get me, Carrie. I just want you to know how welcome you'll be if you ever do come. But I'm not asking you to." "You're----It's awfully----" "'Nother thing. I'm going to be frank. I haven't always been absolutely, uh, absolutely, proper. I've always loved you more than anything else in the world, you and the kid. But sometimes when you were chilly to me I'd get lonely and sore, and pike out and----Never intended----" She rescued him with a pitying, "It's all right. Let's forget it." "But before we were married you said if your husband ever did anything wrong, you'd want him to tell you." "Did I? I can't remember. And I can't seem to think. Oh, my dear, I do know how generously you're trying to make me happy. The only thing is----I can't think. I don't know what I think." "Then listen! Don't think! Here's what I want you to do! Get a two-weeks leave from your office. Weather's beginning to get chilly here. Let's run down to Charleston and Savannah and maybe Florida. "A second honeymoon?" indecisively. "No. Don't even call it that. Call it a second wooing. I won't ask anything. I just want the chance to chase around with you. I guess I never appreciated how lucky I was to have a girl with imagination and lively feet to play with. So----Could you maybe run away and see the South with me? If you wanted to, you could just--you could just pretend you were my sister and----I'll get an extra nurse for Hugh! I'll get the best dog-gone nurse in Washington!" VII It was in the Villa Margherita, by the palms of the Charleston Battery and the metallic harbor, that her aloofness melted. When they sat on the upper balcony, enchanted by the moon glitter, she cried, "Shall I go back to Gopher Prairie with you? Decide for me. I'm tired of deciding and undeciding." "No. You've got to do your own deciding. As a matter of fact, in spite of this honeymoon, I don't think I want you to come home. Not yet." She could only stare. "I want you to be satisfied when you get there. I'll do everything I can to keep you happy, but I'll make lots of breaks, so I want you to take time and think it over." She was relieved. She still had a chance to seize splendid indefinite freedoms. She might go--oh, she'd see Europe, somehow, before she was recaptured. But she also had a firmer respect for Kennicott. She had fancied that her life might make a story. She knew that there was nothing heroic or obviously dramatic in it, no magic of rare hours, nor valiant challenge, but it seemed to her that she was of some significance because she was commonplaceness, the ordinary life of the age, made articulate and protesting. It had not occurred to her that there was also a story of Will Kennicott, into which she entered only so much as he entered into hers; that he had bewilderments and concealments as intricate as her own, and soft treacherous desires for sympathy. Thus she brooded, looking at the amazing sea, holding his hand. VIII She was in Washington; Kennicott was in Gopher Prairie, writing as dryly as ever about water-pipes and goose-hunting and Mrs. Fageros's mastoid. She was talking at dinner to a generalissima of suffrage. Should she return? The leader spoke wearily: "My dear, I'm perfectly selfish. I can't quite visualize the needs of your husband, and it seems to me that your baby will do quite as well in the schools here as in your barracks at home." "Then you think I'd better not go back?" Carol sounded disappointed. "It's more difficult than that. When I say that I'm selfish I mean that the only thing I consider about women is whether they're likely to prove useful in building up real political power for women. And you? Shall I be frank? Remember when I say 'you' I don't mean you alone. I'm thinking of thousands of women who come to Washington and New York and Chicago every year, dissatisfied at home and seeking a sign in the heavens--women of all sorts, from timid mothers of fifty in cotton gloves, to girls just out of Vassar who organize strikes in their own fathers' factories! All of you are more or less useful to me, but only a few of you can take my place, because I have one virtue (only one): I have given up father and mother and children for the love of God. "Here's the test for you: Do you come to 'conquer the East,' as people say, or do you come to conquer yourself? "It's so much more complicated than any of you know--so much more complicated than I knew when I put on Ground Grippers and started out to reform the world. The final complication in 'conquering Washington' or 'conquering New York' is that the conquerors must beyond all things not conquer! It must have been so easy in the good old days when authors dreamed only of selling a hundred thousand volumes, and sculptors of being feted in big houses, and even the Uplifters like me had a simple-hearted ambition to be elected to important offices and invited to go round lecturing. But we meddlers have upset everything. Now the one thing that is disgraceful to any of us is obvious success. The Uplifter who is very popular with wealthy patrons can be pretty sure that he has softened his philosophy to please them, and the author who is making lots of money--poor things, I've heard 'em apologizing for it to the shabby bitter-enders; I've seen 'em ashamed of the sleek luggage they got from movie rights. "Do you want to sacrifice yourself in such a topsy-turvy world, where popularity makes you unpopular with the people you love, and the only failure is cheap success, and the only individualist is the person who gives up all his individualism to serve a jolly ungrateful proletariat which thumbs its nose at him?" Carol smiled ingratiatingly, to indicate that she was indeed one who desired to sacrifice, but she sighed, "I don't know; I'm afraid I'm not heroic. I certainly wasn't out home. Why didn't I do big effective----" "Not a matter of heroism. Matter of endurance. Your Middlewest is double-Puritan--prairie Puritan on top of New England Puritan; bluff frontiersman on the surface, but in its heart it still has the ideal of Plymouth Rock in a sleet-storm. There's one attack you can make on it, perhaps the only kind that accomplishes much anywhere: you can keep on looking at one thing after another in your home and church and bank, and ask why it is, and who first laid down the law that it had to be that way. If enough of us do this impolitely enough, then we'll become civilized in merely twenty thousand years or so, instead of having to wait the two hundred thousand years that my cynical anthropologist friends allow. . . . Easy, pleasant, lucrative home-work for wives: asking people to define their jobs. That's the most dangerous doctrine I know!" Carol was mediating, "I will go back! I will go on asking questions. I've always done it, and always failed at it, and it's all I can do. I'm going to ask Ezra Stowbody why he's opposed to the nationalization of railroads, and ask Dave Dyer why a druggist always is pleased when he's called 'doctor,' and maybe ask Mrs. Bogart why she wears a widow's veil that looks like a dead crow." The woman leader straightened. "And you have one thing. You have a baby to hug. That's my temptation. I dream of babies--of a baby--and I sneak around parks to see them playing. (The children in Dupont Circle are like a poppy-garden.) And the antis call me 'unsexed'!" Carol was thinking, in panic, "Oughtn't Hugh to have country air? I won't let him become a yokel. I can guide him away from street-corner loafing. . . . I think I can." On her way home: "Now that I've made a precedent, joined the union and gone out on one strike and learned personal solidarity, I won't be so afraid. Will won't always be resisting my running away. Some day I really will go to Europe with him . . . or without him. "I've lived with people who are not afraid to go to jail. I could invite a Miles Bjornstam to dinner without being afraid of the Haydocks . . . I think I could. "I'll take back the sound of Yvette Guilbert's songs and Elman's violin. They'll be only the lovelier against the thrumming of crickets in the stubble on an autumn day. "I can laugh now and be serene . . . I think I can." Though she should return, she said, she would not be utterly defeated. She was glad of her rebellion. The prairie was no longer empty land in the sun-glare; it was the living tawny beast which she had fought and made beautiful by fighting; and in the village streets were shadows of her desires and the sound of her marching and the seeds of mystery and greatness. IX Her active hatred of Gopher Prairie had run out. She saw it now as a toiling new settlement. With sympathy she remembered Kennicott's defense of its citizens as "a lot of pretty good folks, working hard and trying to bring up their families the best they can." She recalled tenderly the young awkwardness of Main Street and the makeshifts of the little brown cottages; she pitied their shabbiness and isolation; had compassion for their assertion of culture, even as expressed in Thanatopsis papers, for their pretense of greatness, even as trumpeted in "boosting." She saw Main Street in the dusty prairie sunset, a line of frontier shanties with solemn lonely people waiting for her, solemn and lonely as an old man who has outlived his friends. She remembered that Kennicott and Sam Clark had listened to her songs, and she wanted to run to them and sing. "At last," she rejoiced, "I've come to a fairer attitude toward the town. I can love it, now." She was, perhaps, rather proud of herself for having acquired so much tolerance. She awoke at three in the morning, after a dream of being tortured by Ella Stowbody and the Widow Bogart. "I've been making the town a myth. This is how people keep up the tradition of the perfect home-town, the happy boyhood, the brilliant college friends. We forget so. I've been forgetting that Main Street doesn't think it's in the least lonely and pitiful. It thinks it's God's Own Country. It isn't waiting for me. It doesn't care." But the next evening she again saw Gopher Prairie as her home, waiting for her in the sunset, rimmed round with splendor. She did not return for five months more; five months crammed with greedy accumulation of sounds and colors to take back for the long still days. She had spent nearly two years in Washington. When she departed for Gopher Prairie, in June, her second baby was stirring within her.

Chapter 38

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-38

After a year in Washington, Carol starts craving more adventure than her office work allows her. She goes for a walk and sees two people she knows from Gopher Prairie. She's surprised at how happy she is to see them. Thirteen months after her move to Washington, Will comes to see her. The visit goes pretty well, but when it's all over, Carol still doesn't want to move back to Gopher Prairie with Will. He's clearly disappointed, but like a patient partner, he says he'll continue to wait for her. In fact, he agrees that it's a good idea that she doesn't come home just yet. Over time, Carol's hatred of Gopher Prairie melts away. She doesn't see it as a boring town but as a prairie settlement struggling to create civilization. After nearly two years in Washington, Carol decides to head back to Gopher Prairie. We also find out that she's pregnant with her second child. And the dates might not add up for the child to be Will's...

shmoop

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/39.txt

finished_summaries/shmoop/Main Street/section_38_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 39

chapter 39

{"name": "Chapter 39", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-39", "summary": "Carol moves back to Gopher Prairie and gives birth to a baby girl. Immediately, Carol starts making plans for her daughter's life, assuming that the future will give young women many more options than it has given her. Carol gets back into the routines of Gopher Prairie, but she refuses to ever accept the town the way it is. She might not be able to change it, but she'll never give in to the popular opinion that the town is fine the way it is and that there's no need for improvement. Carol wants to help create a world that'll give more possibilities to her daughter, and she finds hope in thinking about the distant future.", "analysis": ""}

CHAPTER XXXIX SHE wondered all the way home what her sensations would be. She wondered about it so much that she had every sensation she had imagined. She was excited by each familiar porch, each hearty "Well, well!" and flattered to be, for a day, the most important news of the community. She bustled about, making calls. Juanita Haydock bubbled over their Washington encounter, and took Carol to her social bosom. This ancient opponent seemed likely to be her most intimate friend, for Vida Sherwin, though she was cordial, stood back and watched for imported heresies. In the evening Carol went to the mill. The mystical Om-Om-Om of the dynamos in the electric-light plant behind the mill was louder in the darkness. Outside sat the night watchman, Champ Perry. He held up his stringy hands and squeaked, "We've all missed you terrible." Who in Washington would miss her? Who in Washington could be depended upon like Guy Pollock? When she saw him on the street, smiling as always, he seemed an eternal thing, a part of her own self. After a week she decided that she was neither glad nor sorry to be back. She entered each day with the matter-of-fact attitude with which she had gone to her office in Washington. It was her task; there would be mechanical details and meaningless talk; what of it? The only problem which she had approached with emotion proved insignificant. She had, on the train, worked herself up to such devotion that she was willing to give up her own room, to try to share all of her life with Kennicott. He mumbled, ten minutes after she had entered the house, "Say, I've kept your room for you like it was. I've kind of come round to your way of thinking. Don't see why folks need to get on each other's nerves just because they're friendly. Darned if I haven't got so I like a little privacy and mulling things over by myself." II She had left a city which sat up nights to talk of universal transition; of European revolution, guild socialism, free verse. She had fancied that all the world was changing. She found that it was not. In Gopher Prairie the only ardent new topics were prohibition, the place in Minneapolis where you could get whisky at thirteen dollars a quart, recipes for home-made beer, the "high cost of living," the presidential election, Clark's new car, and not very novel foibles of Cy Bogart. Their problems were exactly what they had been two years ago, what they had been twenty years ago, and what they would be for twenty years to come. With the world a possible volcano, the husbandmen were plowing at the base of the mountain. A volcano does occasionally drop a river of lava on even the best of agriculturists, to their astonishment and considerable injury, but their cousins inherit the farms and a year or two later go back to the plowing. She was unable to rhapsodize much over the seven new bungalows and the two garages which Kennicott had made to seem so important. Her intensest thought about them was, "Oh yes, they're all right I suppose." The change which she did heed was the erection of the schoolbuilding, with its cheerful brick walls, broad windows, gymnasium, classrooms for agriculture and cooking. It indicated Vida's triumph, and it stirred her to activity--any activity. She went to Vida with a jaunty, "I think I shall work for you. And I'll begin at the bottom." She did. She relieved the attendant at the rest-room for an hour a day. Her only innovation was painting the pine table a black and orange rather shocking to the Thanatopsis. She talked to the farmwives and soothed their babies and was happy. Thinking of them she did not think of the ugliness of Main Street as she hurried along it to the chatter of the Jolly Seventeen. She wore her eye-glasses on the street now. She was beginning to ask Kennicott and Juanita if she didn't look young, much younger than thirty-three. The eye-glasses pinched her nose. She considered spectacles. They would make her seem older, and hopelessly settled. No! She would not wear spectacles yet. But she tried on a pair at Kennicott's office. They really were much more comfortable. III Dr. Westlake, Sam Clark, Nat Hicks, and Del Snafflin were talking in Del's barber shop. "Well, I see Kennicott's wife is taking a whirl at the rest-room, now," said Dr. Westlake. He emphasized the "now." Del interrupted the shaving of Sam and, with his brush dripping lather, he observed jocularly: "What'll she be up to next? They say she used to claim this burg wasn't swell enough for a city girl like her, and would we please tax ourselves about thirty-seven point nine and fix it all up pretty, with tidies on the hydrants and statoos on the lawns----" Sam irritably blew the lather from his lips, with milky small bubbles, and snorted, "Be a good thing for most of us roughnecks if we did have a smart woman to tell us how to fix up the town. Just as much to her kicking as there was to Jim Blausser's gassing about factories. And you can bet Mrs. Kennicott is smart, even if she is skittish. Glad to see her back." Dr. Westlake hastened to play safe. "So was I! So was I! She's got a nice way about her, and she knows a good deal about books, or fiction anyway. Of course she's like all the rest of these women--not solidly founded--not scholarly--doesn't know anything about political economy--falls for every new idea that some windjamming crank puts out. But she's a nice woman. She'll probably fix up the rest-room, and the rest-room is a fine thing, brings a lot of business to town. And now that Mrs. Kennicott's been away, maybe she's got over some of her fool ideas. Maybe she realizes that folks simply laugh at her when she tries to tell us how to run everything." "Sure. She'll take a tumble to herself," said Nat Hicks, sucking in his lips judicially. "As far as I'm concerned, I'll say she's as nice a looking skirt as there is in town. But yow!" His tone electrified them. "Guess she'll miss that Swede Valborg that used to work for me! They was a pair! Talking poetry and moonshine! If they could of got away with it, they'd of been so darn lovey-dovey----" Sam Clark interrupted, "Rats, they never even thought about making love, Just talking books and all that junk. I tell you, Carrie Kennicott's a smart woman, and these smart educated women all get funny ideas, but they get over 'em after they've had three or four kids. You'll see her settled down one of these days, and teaching Sunday School and helping at sociables and behaving herself, and not trying to butt into business and politics. Sure!" After only fifteen minutes of conference on her stockings, her son, her separate bedroom, her music, her ancient interest in Guy Pollock, her probable salary in Washington, and every remark which she was known to have made since her return, the supreme council decided that they would permit Carol Kennicott to live, and they passed on to a consideration of Nat Hicks's New One about the traveling salesman and the old maid. IV For some reason which was totally mysterious to Carol, Maud Dyer seemed to resent her return. At the Jolly Seventeen Maud giggled nervously, "Well, I suppose you found war-work a good excuse to stay away and have a swell time. Juanita! Don't you think we ought to make Carrie tell us about the officers she met in Washington?" They rustled and stared. Carol looked at them. Their curiosity seemed natural and unimportant. "Oh yes, yes indeed, have to do that some day," she yawned. She no longer took Aunt Bessie Smail seriously enough to struggle for independence. She saw that Aunt Bessie did not mean to intrude; that she wanted to do things for all the Kennicotts. Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness, so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected with laughter. She divined that when Aunt Bessie came in with a jar of wild-grape jelly she was waiting in hope of being asked for the recipe. After that she could be irritated but she could not be depressed by Aunt Bessie's simoom of questioning. She wasn't depressed even when she heard Mrs. Bogart observe, "Now we've got prohibition it seems to me that the next problem of the country ain't so much abolishing cigarettes as it is to make folks observe the Sabbath and arrest these law-breakers that play baseball and go to the movies and all on the Lord's Day." Only one thing bruised Carol's vanity. Few people asked her about Washington. They who had most admiringly begged Percy Bresnahan for his opinions were least interested in her facts. She laughed at herself when she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as much as ever. Her baby, born in August, was a girl. Carol could not decide whether she was to become a feminist leader or marry a scientist or both, but did settle on Vassar and a tricolette suit with a small black hat for her Freshman year. VI Hugh was loquacious at breakfast. He desired to give his impressions of owls and F Street. "Don't make so much noise. You talk too much," growled Kennicott. Carol flared. "Don't speak to him that way! Why don't you listen to him? He has some very interesting things to tell." "What's the idea? Mean to say you expect me to spend all my time listening to his chatter?" "Why not?" "For one thing, he's got to learn a little discipline. Time for him to start getting educated." "I've learned much more discipline, I've had much more education, from him than he has from me." "What's this? Some new-fangled idea of raising kids you got in Washington?" "Perhaps. Did you ever realize that children are people?" "That's all right. I'm not going to have him monopolizing the conversation." "No, of course. We have our rights, too. But I'm going to bring him up as a human being. He has just as many thoughts as we have, and I want him to develop them, not take Gopher Prairie's version of them. That's my biggest work now--keeping myself, keeping you, from 'educating' him." "Well, let's not scrap about it. But I'm not going to have him spoiled." Kennicott had forgotten it in ten minutes; and she forgot it--this time. VII The Kennicotts and the Sam Clarks had driven north to a duck-pass between two lakes, on an autumn day of blue and copper. Kennicott had given her a light twenty-gauge shotgun. She had a first lesson in shooting, in keeping her eyes open, not wincing, understanding that the bead at the end of the barrel really had something to do with pointing the gun. She was radiant; she almost believed Sam when he insisted that it was she who had shot the mallard at which they had fired together. She sat on the bank of the reedy lake and found rest in Mrs. Clark's drawling comments on nothing. The brown dusk was still. Behind them were dark marshes. The plowed acres smelled fresh. The lake was garnet and silver. The voices of the men, waiting for the last flight, were clear in the cool air. "Mark left!" sang Kennicott, in a long-drawn call. Three ducks were swooping down in a swift line. The guns banged, and a duck fluttered. The men pushed their light boat out on the burnished lake, disappeared beyond the reeds. Their cheerful voices and the slow splash and clank of oars came back to Carol from the dimness. In the sky a fiery plain sloped down to a serene harbor. It dissolved; the lake was white marble; and Kennicott was crying, "Well, old lady, how about hiking out for home? Supper taste pretty good, eh?" "I'll sit back with Ethel," she said, at the car. It was the first time she had called Mrs. Clark by her given name; the first time she had willingly sat back, a woman of Main Street. "I'm hungry. It's good to be hungry," she reflected, as they drove away. She looked across the silent fields to the west. She was conscious of an unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska, a dominion which will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile. Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire and go down in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the humdrum inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia. "Let's all go to the movies tomorrow night. Awfully exciting film," said Ethel Clark. "Well, I was going to read a new book but----All right, let's go," said Carol. VIII "They're too much for me," Carol sighed to Kennicott. "I've been thinking about getting up an annual Community Day, when the whole town would forget feuds and go out and have sports and a picnic and a dance. But Bert Tybee (why did you ever elect him mayor?)--he's kidnapped my idea. He wants the Community Day, but he wants to have some politician 'give an address.' That's just the stilted sort of thing I've tried to avoid. He asked Vida, and of course she agreed with him." Kennicott considered the matter while he wound the clock and they tramped up-stairs. "Yes, it would jar you to have Bert butting in," he said amiably. "Are you going to do much fussing over this Community stunt? Don't you ever get tired of fretting and stewing and experimenting?" "I haven't even started. Look!" She led him to the nursery door, pointed at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. "Do you see that object on the pillow? Do you know what it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were wise, you wouldn't arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these children while they're asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to Mars." "Yump, probably be changes all right," yawned Kennicott. She sat on the edge of his bed while he hunted through his bureau for a collar which ought to be there and persistently wasn't. "I'll go on, always. And I am happy. But this Community Day makes me see how thoroughly I'm beaten." "That darn collar certainly is gone for keeps," muttered Kennicott and, louder, "Yes, I guess you----I didn't quite catch what you said, dear." She patted his pillows, turned down his sheets, as she reflected: "But I have won in this: I've never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith." "Sure. You bet you have," said Kennicott. "Well, good night. Sort of feels to me like it might snow tomorrow. Have to be thinking about putting up the storm-windows pretty soon. Say, did you notice whether the girl put that screwdriver back?"

Chapter 39

https://web.archive.org/web/20210115164553/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/main-street/summary/chapter-39

Carol moves back to Gopher Prairie and gives birth to a baby girl. Immediately, Carol starts making plans for her daughter's life, assuming that the future will give young women many more options than it has given her. Carol gets back into the routines of Gopher Prairie, but she refuses to ever accept the town the way it is. She might not be able to change it, but she'll never give in to the popular opinion that the town is fine the way it is and that there's no need for improvement. Carol wants to help create a world that'll give more possibilities to her daughter, and she finds hope in thinking about the distant future.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/chapters_33_to_34.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Main Street/section_11_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapters 33-34

chapters 33-34

{"name": "Chapters 33-34", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-3334", "summary": "Carol becomes conscious that her infatuation for Erik is deepening into love. He calls on her one evening in Will's absence, and they take a walk in the country. The doctor overtakes them in his car and orders them to ride home, Erik in the front seat and Carol, ignored, in the back. Once home, her husband tells Carol that it is about time for her and Valborg to \"call a halt,\" describing in detail the crude life she would lead should she become the wife of a Swedish farmer. Carol promises never to see Erik again and next morning receives a note saying that the young man is leaving town. Soon she hears the whistle of the Minneapolis-bound train. A week later Erik's father appears at the Kennicott home and demands to know what Carol has done with his son. His attitude is so hostile and threatening that Carol is ill after he leaves. When her husband returns, she makes him promise to take her to California for several months. Gossip is curbed by both Kennicotts, and when questions become too personal, attention is deflected to the proposed trip. The Smails are to keep the Kennicott house and Hugh during the trip. As the train passes through Minneapolis, Carol wonders vaguely about Erik. The grand tour of the west occupies three and a half months. On the first of April, the Kennicotts return to Gopher Prairie in a sleet storm. No one meets them at the station, and they have difficulty getting home because of the bad weather. Harry Haydock relates his experiences in California two years ago instead of listening to Dr. Kennicott's more recent ones. Dr. Kennicott is delighted to be at home again and notes every small improvement in Gopher Prairie. Carol, except for the reunion with little Hugh, feels more depressed than ever.", "analysis": "The storm breaks over Carol's head but with less force than in the case of Fern. Dr. Kennicott's wisdom is notable in hushing up the whole affair. Sinclair Lewis' denunciation of small-town gossip is again in evidence, as well as his portrayal, in detail, of the mode of living of the Swedish farmers of the area. The Minneapolis train is again used as a symbol of escape from an unsatisfactory environment. Sinclair Lewis, again the cynic and minute observer, brings in another human characteristic often overlooked: the desire to talk about one's own experiences instead of listening to those of others. Every returned traveler has had friends to pick out and concentrate on one spot which he did not see, as Harry Haydock did on San Luis Obispo. Lewis also makes it plain that there is no real escape for Carol from Gopher Prairie."}

CHAPTER XXXIII FOR a month which was one suspended moment of doubt she saw Erik only casually, at an Eastern Star dance, at the shop, where, in the presence of Nat Hicks, they conferred with immense particularity on the significance of having one or two buttons on the cuff of Kennicott's New Suit. For the benefit of beholders they were respectably vacuous. Thus barred from him, depressed in the thought of Fern, Carol was suddenly and for the first time convinced that she loved Erik. She told herself a thousand inspiriting things which he would say if he had the opportunity; for them she admired him, loved him. But she was afraid to summon him. He understood, he did not come. She forgot her every doubt of him, and her discomfort in his background. Each day it seemed impossible to get through the desolation of not seeing him. Each morning, each afternoon, each evening was a compartment divided from all other units of time, distinguished by a sudden "Oh! I want to see Erik!" which was as devastating as though she had never said it before. There were wretched periods when she could not picture him. Usually he stood out in her mind in some little moment--glancing up from his preposterous pressing-iron, or running on the beach with Dave Dyer. But sometimes he had vanished; he was only an opinion. She worried then about his appearance: Weren't his wrists too large and red? Wasn't his nose a snub, like so many Scandinavians? Was he at all the graceful thing she had fancied? When she encountered him on the street she was as much reassuring herself as rejoicing in his presence. More disturbing than being unable to visualize him was the darting remembrance of some intimate aspect: his face as they had walked to the boat together at the picnic; the ruddy light on his temples, neck-cords, flat cheeks. On a November evening when Kennicott was in the country she answered the bell and was confused to find Erik at the door, stooped, imploring, his hands in the pockets of his topcoat. As though he had been rehearsing his speech he instantly besought: "Saw your husband driving away. I've got to see you. I can't stand it. Come for a walk. I know! People might see us. But they won't if we hike into the country. I'll wait for you by the elevator. Take as long as you want to--oh, come quick!" "In a few minutes," she promised. She murmured, "I'll just talk to him for a quarter of an hour and come home." She put an her tweed coat and rubber overshoes, considering how honest and hopeless are rubbers, how clearly their chaperonage proved that she wasn't going to a lovers' tryst. She found him in the shadow of the grain-elevator, sulkily kicking at a rail of the side-track. As she came toward him she fancied that his whole body expanded. But he said nothing, nor she; he patted her sleeve, she returned the pat, and they crossed the railroad tracks, found a road, clumped toward open country. "Chilly night, but I like this melancholy gray," he said. "Yes." They passed a moaning clump of trees and splashed along the wet road. He tucked her hand into the side-pocket of his overcoat. She caught his thumb and, sighing, held it exactly as Hugh held hers when they went walking. She thought about Hugh. The current maid was in for the evening, but was it safe to leave the baby with her? The thought was distant and elusive. Erik began to talk, slowly, revealingly. He made for her a picture of his work in a large tailor shop in Minneapolis: the steam and heat, and the drudgery; the men in darned vests and crumpled trousers, men who "rushed growlers of beer" and were cynical about women, who laughed at him and played jokes on him. "But I didn't mind, because I could keep away from them outside. I used to go to the Art Institute and the Walker Gallery, and tramp clear around Lake Harriet, or hike out to the Gates house and imagine it was a chateau in Italy and I lived in it. I was a marquis and collected tapestries--that was after I was wounded in Padua. The only really bad time was when a tailor named Finkelfarb found a diary I was trying to keep and he read it aloud in the shop--it was a bad fight." He laughed. "I got fined five dollars. But that's all gone now. Seems as though you stand between me and the gas stoves--the long flames with mauve edges, licking up around the irons and making that sneering sound all day--aaaaah!" Her fingers tightened about his thumb as she perceived the hot low room, the pounding of pressing-irons, the reek of scorched cloth, and Erik among giggling gnomes. His fingertip crept through the opening of her glove and smoothed her palm. She snatched her hand away, stripped off her glove, tucked her hand back into his. He was saying something about a "wonderful person." In her tranquillity she let the words blow by and heeded only the beating wings of his voice. She was conscious that he was fumbling for impressive speech. "Say, uh--Carol, I've written a poem about you." "That's nice. Let's hear it." "Damn it, don't be so casual about it! Can't you take me seriously?" "My dear boy, if I took you seriously----! I don't want us to be hurt more than--more than we will be. Tell me the poem. I've never had a poem written about me!" "It isn't really a poem. It's just some words that I love because it seems to me they catch what you are. Of course probably they won't seem so to anybody else, but----Well---- Little and tender and merry and wise With eyes that meet my eyes. Do you get the idea the way I do?" "Yes! I'm terribly grateful!" And she was grateful--while she impersonally noted how bad a verse it was. She was aware of the haggard beauty in the lowering night. Monstrous tattered clouds sprawled round a forlorn moon; puddles and rocks glistened with inner light. They were passing a grove of scrub poplars, feeble by day but looming now like a menacing wall. She stopped. They heard the branches dripping, the wet leaves sullenly plumping on the soggy earth. "Waiting--waiting--everything is waiting," she whispered. She drew her hand from his, pressed her clenched fingers against her lips. She was lost in the somberness. "I am happy--so we must go home, before we have time to become unhappy. But can't we sit on a log for a minute and just listen?" "No. Too wet. But I wish we could build a fire, and you could sit on my overcoat beside it. I'm a grand fire-builder! My cousin Lars and me spent a week one time in a cabin way up in the Big Woods, snowed in. The fireplace was filled with a dome of ice when we got there, but we chopped it out, and jammed the thing full of pine-boughs. Couldn't we build a fire back here in the woods and sit by it for a while?" She pondered, half-way between yielding and refusal. Her head ached faintly. She was in abeyance. Everything, the night, his silhouette, the cautious-treading future, was as undistinguishable as though she were drifting bodiless in a Fourth Dimension. While her mind groped, the lights of a motor car swooped round a bend in the road, and they stood farther apart. "What ought I to do?" she mused. "I think----Oh, I won't be robbed! I AM good! If I'm so enslaved that I can't sit by the fire with a man and talk, then I'd better be dead!" The lights of the thrumming car grew magically; were upon them; abruptly stopped. From behind the dimness of the windshield a voice, annoyed, sharp: "Hello there!" She realized that it was Kennicott. The irritation in his voice smoothed out. "Having a walk?" They made schoolboyish sounds of assent. "Pretty wet, isn't it? Better ride back. Jump up in front here, Valborg." His manner of swinging open the door was a command. Carol was conscious that Erik was climbing in, that she was apparently to sit in the back, and that she had been left to open the rear door for herself. Instantly the wonder which had flamed to the gusty skies was quenched, and she was Mrs. W. P. Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, riding in a squeaking old car, and likely to be lectured by her husband. She feared what Kennicott would say to Erik. She bent toward them. Kennicott was observing, "Going to have some rain before the night 's over, all right." "Yes," said Erik. "Been funny season this year, anyway. Never saw it with such a cold October and such a nice November. 'Member we had a snow way back on October ninth! But it certainly was nice up to the twenty-first, this month--as I remember it, not a flake of snow in November so far, has there been? But I shouldn't wonder if we'd be having some snow 'most any time now." "Yes, good chance of it," said Erik. "Wish I'd had more time to go after the ducks this fall. By golly, what do you think?" Kennicott sounded appealing. "Fellow wrote me from Man Trap Lake that he shot seven mallards and couple of canvas-back in one hour!" "That must have been fine," said Erik. Carol was ignored. But Kennicott was blustrously cheerful. He shouted to a farmer, as he slowed up to pass the frightened team, "There we are--schon gut!" She sat back, neglected, frozen, unheroic heroine in a drama insanely undramatic. She made a decision resolute and enduring. She would tell Kennicott----What would she tell him? She could not say that she loved Erik. DID she love him? But she would have it out. She was not sure whether it was pity for Kennicott's blindness, or irritation at his assumption that he was enough to fill any woman's life, which prompted her, but she knew that she was out of the trap, that she could be frank; and she was exhilarated with the adventure of it . . . while in front he was entertaining Erik: "Nothing like an hour on a duck-pass to make you relish your victuals and----Gosh, this machine hasn't got the power of a fountain pen. Guess the cylinders are jam-cram-full of carbon again. Don't know but what maybe I'll have to put in another set of piston-rings." He stopped on Main Street and clucked hospitably, "There, that'll give you just a block to walk. G' night." Carol was in suspense. Would Erik sneak away? He stolidly moved to the back of the car, thrust in his hand, muttered, "Good night--Carol. I'm glad we had our walk." She pressed his hand. The car was flapping on. He was hidden from her--by a corner drug store on Main Street! Kennicott did not recognize her till he drew up before the house. Then he condescended, "Better jump out here and I'll take the boat around back. Say, see if the back door is unlocked, will you?" She unlatched the door for him. She realized that she still carried the damp glove she had stripped off for Erik. She drew it on. She stood in the center of the living-room, unmoving, in damp coat and muddy rubbers. Kennicott was as opaque as ever. Her task wouldn't be anything so lively as having to endure a scolding, but only an exasperating effort to command his attention so that he would understand the nebulous things she had to tell him, instead of interrupting her by yawning, winding the clock, and going up to bed. She heard him shoveling coal into the furnace. He came through the kitchen energetically, but before he spoke to her he did stop in the hall, did wind the clock. He sauntered into the living-room and his glance passed from her drenched hat to her smeared rubbers. She could hear--she could hear, see, taste, smell, touch--his "Better take your coat off, Carrie; looks kind of wet." Yes, there it was: "Well, Carrie, you better----" He chucked his own coat on a chair, stalked to her, went on with a rising tingling voice, "----you better cut it out now. I'm not going to do the out-raged husband stunt. I like you and I respect you, and I'd probably look like a boob if I tried to be dramatic. But I think it's about time for you and Valborg to call a halt before you get in Dutch, like Fern Mullins did." "Do you----" "Course. I know all about it. What d' you expect in a town that's as filled with busybodies, that have plenty of time to stick their noses into other folks' business, as this is? Not that they've had the nerve to do much tattling to me, but they've hinted around a lot, and anyway, I could see for myself that you liked him. But of course I knew how cold you were, I knew you wouldn't stand it even if Valborg did try to hold your hand or kiss you, so I didn't worry. But same time, I hope you don't suppose this husky young Swede farmer is as innocent and Platonic and all that stuff as you are! Wait now, don't get sore! I'm not knocking him. He isn't a bad sort. And he's young and likes to gas about books. Course you like him. That isn't the real rub. But haven't you just seen what this town can do, once it goes and gets moral on you, like it did with Fern? You probably think that two young folks making love are alone if anybody ever is, but there's nothing in this town that you don't do in company with a whole lot of uninvited but awful interested guests. Don't you realize that if Ma Westlake and a few others got started they'd drive you up a tree, and you'd find yourself so well advertised as being in love with this Valborg fellow that you'd HAVE to be, just to spite 'em!" "Let me sit down," was all Carol could say. She drooped on the couch, wearily, without elasticity. He yawned, "Gimme your coat and rubbers," and while she stripped them off he twiddled his watch-chain, felt the radiator, peered at the thermometer. He shook out her wraps in the hall, hung them up with exactly his usual care. He pushed a chair near to her and sat bolt up. He looked like a physician about to give sound and undesired advice. Before he could launch into his heavy discourse she desperately got in, "Please! I want you to know that I was going to tell you everything, tonight." "Well, I don't suppose there's really much to tell." "But there is. I'm fond of Erik. He appeals to something in here." She touched her breast. "And I admire him. He isn't just a 'young Swede farmer.' He's an artist----" "Wait now! He's had a chance all evening to tell you what a whale of a fine fellow he is. Now it's my turn. I can't talk artistic, but----Carrie, do you understand my work?" He leaned forward, thick capable hands on thick sturdy thighs, mature and slow, yet beseeching. "No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes. You're all the things that I see in a sunset when I'm driving in from the country, the things that I like but can't make poetry of. Do you realize what my job is? I go round twenty-four hours a day, in mud and blizzard, trying my damnedest to heal everybody, rich or poor. You--that 're always spieling about how scientists ought to rule the world, instead of a bunch of spread-eagle politicians--can't you see that I'm all the science there is here? And I can stand the cold and the bumpy roads and the lonely rides at night. All I need is to have you here at home to welcome me. I don't expect you to be passionate--not any more I don't--but I do expect you to appreciate my work. I bring babies into the world, and save lives, and make cranky husbands quit being mean to their wives. And then you go and moon over a Swede tailor because he can talk about how to put ruchings on a skirt! Hell of a thing for a man to fuss over!" She flew out at him: "You make your side clear. Let me give mine. I admit all you say--except about Erik. But is it only you, and the baby, that want me to back you up, that demand things from me? They're all on me, the whole town! I can feel their hot breaths on my neck! Aunt Bessie and that horrible slavering old Uncle Whittier and Juanita and Mrs. Westlake and Mrs. Bogart and all of them. And you welcome them, you encourage them to drag me down into their cave! I won't stand it! Do you hear? Now, right now, I'm done. And it's Erik who gives me the courage. You say he just thinks about ruches (which do not usually go on skirts, by the way!). I tell you he thinks about God, the God that Mrs. Bogart covers up with greasy gingham wrappers! Erik will be a great man some day, and if I could contribute one tiny bit to his success----" "Wait, wait, wait now! Hold up! You're assuming that your Erik will make good. As a matter of fact, at my age he'll be running a one-man tailor shop in some burg about the size of Schoenstrom." "He will not!" "That's what he's headed for now all right, and he's twenty-five or -six and----What's he done to make you think he'll ever be anything but a pants-presser?" "He has sensitiveness and talent----" "Wait now! What has he actually done in the art line? Has he done one first-class picture or--sketch, d' you call it? Or one poem, or played the piano, or anything except gas about what he's going to do?" She looked thoughtful. "Then it's a hundred to one shot that he never will. Way I understand it, even these fellows that do something pretty good at home and get to go to art school, there ain't more than one out of ten of 'em, maybe one out of a hundred, that ever get above grinding out a bum living--about as artistic as plumbing. And when it comes down to this tailor, why, can't you see--you that take on so about psychology--can't you see that it's just by contrast with folks like Doc McGanum or Lym Cass that this fellow seems artistic? Suppose you'd met up with him first in one of these reg'lar New York studios! You wouldn't notice him any more 'n a rabbit!" She huddled over folded hands like a temple virgin shivering on her knees before the thin warmth of a brazier. She could not answer. Kennicott rose quickly, sat on the couch, took both her hands. "Suppose he fails--as he will! Suppose he goes back to tailoring, and you're his wife. Is that going to be this artistic life you've been thinking about? He's in some bum shack, pressing pants all day, or stooped over sewing, and having to be polite to any grouch that blows in and jams a dirty stinking old suit in his face and says, 'Here you, fix this, and be blame quick about it.' He won't even have enough savvy to get him a big shop. He'll pike along doing his own work--unless you, his wife, go help him, go help him in the shop, and stand over a table all day, pushing a big heavy iron. Your complexion will look fine after about fifteen years of baking that way, won't it! And you'll be humped over like an old hag. And probably you'll live in one room back of the shop. And then at night--oh, you'll have your artist--sure! He'll come in stinking of gasoline, and cranky from hard work, and hinting around that if it hadn't been for you, he'd of gone East and been a great artist. Sure! And you'll be entertaining his relatives----Talk about Uncle Whit! You'll be having some old Axel Axelberg coming in with manure on his boots and sitting down to supper in his socks and yelling at you, 'Hurry up now, you vimmin make me sick!' Yes, and you'll have a squalling brat every year, tugging at you while you press clothes, and you won't love 'em like you do Hugh up-stairs, all downy and asleep----" "Please! Not any more!" Her face was on his knee. He bent to kiss her neck. "I don't want to be unfair. I guess love is a great thing, all right. But think it would stand much of that kind of stuff? Oh, honey, am I so bad? Can't you like me at all? I've--I've been so fond of you!" She snatched up his hand, she kissed it. Presently she sobbed, "I won't ever see him again. I can't, now. The hot living-room behind the tailor shop----I don't love him enough for that. And you are----Even if I were sure of him, sure he was the real thing, I don't think I could actually leave you. This marriage, it weaves people together. It's not easy to break, even when it ought to be broken." "And do you want to break it?" "No!" He lifted her, carried her up-stairs, laid her on her bed, turned to the door. "Come kiss me," she whimpered. He kissed her lightly and slipped away. For an hour she heard him moving about his room, lighting a cigar, drumming with his knuckles on a chair. She felt that he was a bulwark between her and the darkness that grew thicker as the delayed storm came down in sleet. II He was cheery and more casual than ever at breakfast. All day she tried to devise a way of giving Erik up. Telephone? The village central would unquestionably "listen in." A letter? It might be found. Go to see him? Impossible. That evening Kennicott gave her, without comment, an envelope. The letter was signed "E. V." I know I can't do anything but make trouble for you, I think. I am going to Minneapolis tonight and from there as soon as I can either to New York or Chicago. I will do as big things as I can. I--I can't write I love you too much--God keep you. Until she heard the whistle which told her that the Minneapolis train was leaving town, she kept herself from thinking, from moving. Then it was all over. She had no plan nor desire for anything. When she caught Kennicott looking at her over his newspaper she fled to his arms, thrusting the paper aside, and for the first time in years they were lovers. But she knew that she still had no plan in life, save always to go along the same streets, past the same people, to the same shops. III A week after Erik's going the maid startled her by announcing, "There's a Mr. Valborg down-stairs say he vant to see you." She was conscious of the maid's interested stare, angry at this shattering of the calm in which she had hidden. She crept down, peeped into the living-room. It was not Erik Valborg who stood there; it was a small, gray-bearded, yellow-faced man in mucky boots, canvas jacket, and red mittens. He glowered at her with shrewd red eyes. "You de doc's wife?" "Yes." "I'm Adolph Valborg, from up by Jefferson. I'm Erik's father." "Oh!" He was a monkey-faced little man, and not gentle. "What you done wit' my son?" "I don't think I understand you." "I t'ink you're going to understand before I get t'rough! Where is he?" "Why, really----I presume that he's in Minneapolis." "You presume!" He looked through her with a contemptuousness such as she could not have imagined. Only an insane contortion of spelling could portray his lyric whine, his mangled consonants. He clamored, "Presume! Dot's a fine word! I don't want no fine words and I don't want no more lies! I want to know what you KNOW!" "See here, Mr. Valborg, you may stop this bullying right now. I'm not one of your farmwomen. I don't know where your son is, and there's no reason why I should know." Her defiance ran out in face of his immense flaxen stolidity. He raised his fist, worked up his anger with the gesture, and sneered: "You dirty city women wit' your fine ways and fine dresses! A father come here trying to save his boy from wickedness, and you call him a bully! By God, I don't have to take nothin' off you nor your husband! I ain't one of your hired men. For one time a woman like you is going to hear de trut' about what you are, and no fine city words to it, needer." "Really, Mr. Valborg----" "What you done wit' him? Heh? I'll yoost tell you what you done! He was a good boy, even if he was a damn fool. I want him back on de farm. He don't make enough money tailoring. And I can't get me no hired man! I want to take him back on de farm. And you butt in and fool wit' him and make love wit' him, and get him to run away!" "You are lying! It's not true that----It's not true, and if it were, you would have no right to speak like this." "Don't talk foolish. I know. Ain't I heard from a fellow dot live right here in town how you been acting wit' de boy? I know what you done! Walking wit' him in de country! Hiding in de woods wit' him! Yes and I guess you talk about religion in de woods! Sure! Women like you--you're worse dan street-walkers! Rich women like you, wit' fine husbands and no decent work to do--and me, look at my hands, look how I work, look at those hands! But you, oh God no, you mustn't work, you're too fine to do decent work. You got to play wit' young fellows, younger as you are, laughing and rolling around and acting like de animals! You let my son alone, d' you hear?" He was shaking his fist in her face. She could smell the manure and sweat. "It ain't no use talkin' to women like you. Get no trut' out of you. But next time I go by your husband!" He was marching into the hall. Carol flung herself on him, her clenching hand on his hayseed-dusty shoulder. "You horrible old man, you've always tried to turn Erik into a slave, to fatten your pocketbook! You've sneered at him, and overworked him, and probably you've succeeded in preventing his ever rising above your muck-heap! And now because you can't drag him back, you come here to vent----Go tell my husband, go tell him, and don't blame me when he kills you, when my husband kills you--he will kill you----" The man grunted, looked at her impassively, said one word, and walked out. She heard the word very plainly. She did not quite reach the couch. Her knees gave way, she pitched forward. She heard her mind saying, "You haven't fainted. This is ridiculous. You're simply dramatizing yourself. Get up." But she could not move. When Kennicott arrived she was lying on the couch. His step quickened. "What's happened, Carrie? You haven't got a bit of blood in your face." She clutched his arm. "You've got to be sweet to me, and kind! I'm going to California--mountains, sea. Please don't argue about it, because I'm going." Quietly, "All right. We'll go. You and I. Leave the kid here with Aunt Bessie." "Now!" "Well yes, just as soon as we can get away. Now don't talk any more. Just imagine you've already started." He smoothed her hair, and not till after supper did he continue: "I meant it about California. But I think we better wait three weeks or so, till I get hold of some young fellow released from the medical corps to take my practice. And if people are gossiping, you don't want to give them a chance by running away. Can you stand it and face 'em for three weeks or so?" "Yes," she said emptily. IV People covertly stared at her on the street. Aunt Bessie tried to catechize her about Erik's disappearance, and it was Kennicott who silenced the woman with a savage, "Say, are you hinting that Carrie had anything to do with that fellow's beating it? Then let me tell you, and you can go right out and tell the whole bloomin' town, that Carrie and I took Val--took Erik riding, and he asked me about getting a better job in Minneapolis, and I advised him to go to it. . . . Getting much sugar in at the store now?" Guy Pollock crossed the street to be pleasant apropos of California and new novels. Vida Sherwin dragged her to the Jolly Seventeen. There, with every one rigidly listening, Maud Dyer shot at Carol, "I hear Erik has left town." Carol was amiable. "Yes, so I hear. In fact, he called me up--told me he had been offered a lovely job in the city. So sorry he's gone. He would have been valuable if we'd tried to start the dramatic association again. Still, I wouldn't be here for the association myself, because Will is all in from work, and I'm thinking of taking him to California. Juanita--you know the Coast so well--tell me: would you start in at Los Angeles or San Francisco, and what are the best hotels?" The Jolly Seventeen looked disappointed, but the Jolly Seventeen liked to give advice, the Jolly Seventeen liked to mention the expensive hotels at which they had stayed. (A meal counted as a stay.) Before they could question her again Carol escorted in with drum and fife the topic of Raymie Wutherspoon. Vida had news from her husband. He had been gassed in the trenches, had been in a hospital for two weeks, had been promoted to major, was learning French. She left Hugh with Aunt Bessie. But for Kennicott she would have taken him. She hoped that in some miraculous way yet unrevealed she might find it possible to remain in California. She did not want to see Gopher Prairie again. The Smails were to occupy the Kennicott house, and quite the hardest thing to endure in the month of waiting was the series of conferences between Kennicott and Uncle Whittier in regard to heating the garage and having the furnace flues cleaned. Did Carol, Kennicott inquired, wish to stop in Minneapolis to buy new clothes? "No! I want to get as far away as I can as soon as I can. Let's wait till Los Angeles." "Sure, sure! Just as you like. Cheer up! We're going to have a large wide time, and everything 'll be different when we come back." VI Dusk on a snowy December afternoon. The sleeper which would connect at Kansas City with the California train rolled out of St. Paul with a chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick as it crossed the other tracks. It bumped through the factory belt, gained speed. Carol could see nothing but gray fields, which had closed in on her all the way from Gopher Prairie. Ahead was darkness. "For an hour, in Minneapolis, I must have been near Erik. He's still there, somewhere. He'll be gone when I come back. I'll never know where he has gone." As Kennicott switched on the seat-light she turned drearily to the illustrations in a motion-picture magazine. CHAPTER XXXIV THEY journeyed for three and a half months. They saw the Grand Canyon, the adobe walls of Sante Fe and, in a drive from El Paso into Mexico, their first foreign land. They jogged from San Diego and La Jolla to Los Angeles, Pasadena, Riverside, through towns with bell-towered missions and orange-groves; they viewed Monterey and San Francisco and a forest of sequoias. They bathed in the surf and climbed foothills and danced, they saw a polo game and the making of motion-pictures, they sent one hundred and seventeen souvenir post-cards to Gopher Prairie, and once, on a dune by a foggy sea when she was walking alone, Carol found an artist, and he looked up at her and said, "Too damned wet to paint; sit down and talk," and so for ten minutes she lived in a romantic novel. Her only struggle was in coaxing Kennicott not to spend all his time with the tourists from the ten thousand other Gopher Prairies. In winter, California is full of people from Iowa and Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma, who, having traveled thousands of miles from their familiar villages, hasten to secure an illusion of not having left them. They hunt for people from their own states to stand between them and the shame of naked mountains; they talk steadily, in Pullmans, on hotel porches, at cafeterias and motion-picture shows, about the motors and crops and county politics back home. Kennicott discussed land-prices with them, he went into the merits of the several sorts of motor cars with them, he was intimate with train porters, and he insisted on seeing the Luke Dawsons at their flimsy bungalow in Pasadena, where Luke sat and yearned to go back and make some more money. But Kennicott gave promise of learning to play. He shouted in the pool at the Coronado, and he spoke of (though he did nothing more radical than speak of) buying evening-clothes. Carol was touched by his efforts to enjoy picture galleries, and the dogged way in which he accumulated dates and dimensions when they followed monkish guides through missions. She felt strong. Whenever she was restless she dodged her thoughts by the familiar vagabond fallacy of running away from them, of moving on to a new place, and thus she persuaded herself that she was tranquil. In March she willingly agreed with Kennicott that it was time to go home. She was longing for Hugh. They left Monterey on April first, on a day of high blue skies and poppies and a summer sea. As the train struck in among the hills she resolved, "I'm going to love the fine Will Kennicott quality that there is in Gopher Prairie. The nobility of good sense. It will be sweet to see Vida and Guy and the Clarks. And I'm going to see my baby! All the words he'll be able to say now! It's a new start. Everything will be different!" Thus on April first, among dappled hills and the bronze of scrub oaks, while Kennicott seesawed on his toes and chuckled, "Wonder what Hugh'll say when he sees us?" Three days later they reached Gopher Prairie in a sleet storm. II No one knew that they were coming; no one met them; and because of the icy roads, the only conveyance at the station was the hotel 'bus, which they missed while Kennicott was giving his trunk-check to the station agent--the only person to welcome them. Carol waited for him in the station, among huddled German women with shawls and umbrellas, and ragged-bearded farmers in corduroy coats; peasants mute as oxen, in a room thick with the steam of wet coats, the reek of the red-hot stove, the stench of sawdust boxes which served as cuspidors. The afternoon light was as reluctant as a winter dawn. "This is a useful market-center, an interesting pioneer post, but it is not a home for me," meditated the stranger Carol. Kennicott suggested, "I'd 'phone for a flivver but it'd take quite a while for it to get here. Let's walk." They stepped uncomfortably from the safety of the plank platform and, balancing on their toes, taking cautious strides, ventured along the road. The sleety rain was turning to snow. The air was stealthily cold. Beneath an inch of water was a layer of ice, so that as they wavered with their suit-cases they slid and almost fell. The wet snow drenched their gloves; the water underfoot splashed their itching ankles. They scuffled inch by inch for three blocks. In front of Harry Haydock's Kennicott sighed: "We better stop in here and 'phone for a machine." She followed him like a wet kitten. The Haydocks saw them laboring up the slippery concrete walk, up the perilous front steps, and came to the door chanting: "Well, well, well, back again, eh? Say, this is fine! Have a fine trip? My, you look like a rose, Carol. How did you like the coast, doc? Well, well, well! Where-all did you go?" But as Kennicott began to proclaim the list of places achieved, Harry interrupted with an account of how much he himself had seen, two years ago. When Kennicott boasted, "We went through the mission at Santa Barbara," Harry broke in, "Yeh, that's an interesting old mission. Say, I'll never forget that hotel there, doc. It was swell. Why, the rooms were made just like these old monasteries. Juanita and I went from Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo. You folks go to San Luis Obispo?" "No, but----" "Well you ought to gone to San Luis Obispo. And then we went from there to a ranch, least they called it a ranch----" Kennicott got in only one considerable narrative, which began: "Say, I never knew--did you, Harry?--that in the Chicago district the Kutz Kar sells as well as the Overland? I never thought much of the Kutz. But I met a gentleman on the train--it was when we were pulling out of Albuquerque, and I was sitting on the back platform of the observation car, and this man was next to me and he asked me for a light, and we got to talking, and come to find out, he came from Aurora, and when he found out I came from Minnesota he asked me if I knew Dr. Clemworth of Red Wing, and of course, while I've never met him, I've heard of Clemworth lots of times, and seems he's this man's brother! Quite a coincidence! Well, we got to talking, and we called the porter--that was a pretty good porter on that car--and we had a couple bottles of ginger ale, and I happened to mention the Kutz Kar, and this man--seems he's driven a lot of different kinds of cars--he's got a Franklin now--and he said that he'd tried the Kutz and liked it first-rate. Well, when we got into a station--I don't remember the name of it--Carrie, what the deuce was the name of that first stop we made the other side of Albuquerque?--well, anyway, I guess we must have stopped there to take on water, and this man and I got out to stretch our legs, and darned if there wasn't a Kutz drawn right up at the depot platform, and he pointed out something I'd never noticed, and I was glad to learn about it: seems that the gear lever in the Kutz is an inch longer----" Even this chronicle of voyages Harry interrupted, with remarks on the advantages of the ball-gear-shift. Kennicott gave up hope of adequate credit for being a traveled man, and telephoned to a garage for a Ford taxicab, while Juanita kissed Carol and made sure of being the first to tell the latest, which included seven distinct and proven scandals about Mrs. Swiftwaite, and one considerable doubt as to the chastity of Cy Bogart. They saw the Ford sedan making its way over the water-lined ice, through the snow-storm, like a tug-boat in a fog. The driver stopped at a corner. The car skidded, it turned about with comic reluctance, crashed into a tree, and stood tilted on a broken wheel. The Kennicotts refused Harry Haydock's not too urgent offer to take them home in his car "if I can manage to get it out of the garage--terrible day--stayed home from the store--but if you say so, I'll take a shot at it." Carol gurgled, "No, I think we'd better walk; probably make better time, and I'm just crazy to see my baby." With their suit-cases they waddled on. Their coats were soaked through. Carol had forgotten her facile hopes. She looked about with impersonal eyes. But Kennicott, through rain-blurred lashes, caught the glory that was Back Home. She noted bare tree-trunks, black branches, the spongy brown earth between patches of decayed snow on the lawns. The vacant lots were full of tall dead weeds. Stripped of summer leaves the houses were hopeless--temporary shelters. Kennicott chuckled, "By golly, look down there! Jack Elder must have painted his garage. And look! Martin Mahoney has put up a new fence around his chicken yard. Say, that's a good fence, eh? Chicken-tight and dog-tight. That's certainly a dandy fence. Wonder how much it cost a yard? Yes, sir, they been building right along, even in winter. Got more enterprise than these Californians. Pretty good to be home, eh?" She noted that all winter long the citizens had been throwing garbage into their back yards, to be cleaned up in spring. The recent thaw had disclosed heaps of ashes, dog-bones, torn bedding, clotted paint-cans, all half covered by the icy pools which filled the hollows of the yards. The refuse had stained the water to vile colors of waste: thin red, sour yellow, streaky brown. Kennicott chuckled, "Look over there on Main Street! They got the feed store all fixed up, and a new sign on it, black and gold. That'll improve the appearance of the block a lot." She noted that the few people whom they passed wore their raggedest coats for the evil day. They were scarecrows in a shanty town. . . . "To think," she marveled, "of coming two thousand miles, past mountains and cities, to get off here, and to plan to stay here! What conceivable reason for choosing this particular place?" She noted a figure in a rusty coat and a cloth cap. Kennicott chuckled, "Look who's coming! It's Sam Clark! Gosh, all rigged out for the weather." The two men shook hands a dozen times and, in the Western fashion, bumbled, "Well, well, well, well, you old hell-hound, you old devil, how are you, anyway? You old horse-thief, maybe it ain't good to see you again!" While Sam nodded at her over Kennicott's shoulder, she was embarrassed. "Perhaps I should never have gone away. I'm out of practise in lying. I wish they would get it over! Just a block more and--my baby!" They were home. She brushed past the welcoming Aunt Bessie and knelt by Hugh. As he stammered, "O mummy, mummy, don't go away! Stay with me, mummy!" she cried, "No, I'll never leave you again!" He volunteered, "That's daddy." "By golly, he knows us just as if we'd never been away!" said Kennicott. "You don't find any of these California kids as bright as he is, at his age!" When the trunk came they piled about Hugh the bewhiskered little wooden men fitting one inside another, the miniature junk, and the Oriental drum, from San Francisco Chinatown; the blocks carved by the old Frenchman in San Diego; the lariat from San Antonio. "Will you forgive mummy for going away? Will you?" she whispered. Absorbed in Hugh, asking a hundred questions about him--had he had any colds? did he still dawdle over his oatmeal? what about unfortunate morning incidents? she viewed Aunt Bessie only as a source of information, and was able to ignore her hint, pointed by a coyly shaken finger, "Now that you've had such a fine long trip and spent so much money and all, I hope you're going to settle down and be satisfied and not----" "Does he like carrots yet?" replied Carol. She was cheerful as the snow began to conceal the slatternly yards. She assured herself that the streets of New York and Chicago were as ugly as Gopher Prairie in such weather; she dismissed the thought, "But they do have charming interiors for refuge." She sang as she energetically looked over Hugh's clothes. The afternoon grew old and dark. Aunt Bessie went home. Carol took the baby into her own room. The maid came in complaining, "I can't get no extra milk to make chipped beef for supper." Hugh was sleepy, and he had been spoiled by Aunt Bessie. Even to a returned mother, his whining and his trick of seven times snatching her silver brush were fatiguing. As a background, behind the noises of Hugh and the kitchen, the house reeked with a colorless stillness. From the window she heard Kennicott greeting the Widow Bogart as he had always done, always, every snowy evening: "Guess this 'll keep up all night." She waited. There they were, the furnace sounds, unalterable, eternal: removing ashes, shoveling coal. Yes. She was back home! Nothing had changed. She had never been away. California? Had she seen it? Had she for one minute left this scraping sound of the small shovel in the ash-pit of the furnace? But Kennicott preposterously supposed that she had. Never had she been quite so far from going away as now when he believed she had just come back. She felt oozing through the walls the spirit of small houses and righteous people. At that instant she knew that in running away she had merely hidden her doubts behind the officious stir of travel. "Dear God, don't let me begin agonizing again!" she sobbed. Hugh wept with her. "Wait for mummy a second!" She hastened down to the cellar, to Kennicott. He was standing before the furnace. However inadequate the rest of the house, he had seen to it that the fundamental cellar should be large and clean, the square pillars whitewashed, and the bins for coal and potatoes and trunks convenient. A glow from the drafts fell on the smooth gray cement floor at his feet. He was whistling tenderly, staring at the furnace with eyes which saw the black-domed monster as a symbol of home and of the beloved routine to which he had returned--his gipsying decently accomplished, his duty of viewing "sights" and "curios" performed with thoroughness. Unconscious of her, he stooped and peered in at the blue flames among the coals. He closed the door briskly, and made a whirling gesture with his right hand, out of pure bliss. He saw her. "Why, hello, old lady! Pretty darn good to be back, eh?" "Yes," she lied, while she quaked, "Not now. I can't face the job of explaining now. He's been so good. He trusts me. And I'm going to break his heart!" She smiled at him. She tidied his sacred cellar by throwing an empty bluing bottle into the trash bin. She mourned, "It's only the baby that holds me. If Hugh died----" She fled upstairs in panic and made sure that nothing had happened to Hugh in these four minutes. She saw a pencil-mark on a window-sill. She had made it on a September day when she had been planning a picnic for Fern Mullins and Erik. Fern and she had been hysterical with nonsense, had invented mad parties for all the coming winter. She glanced across the alley at the room which Fern had occupied. A rag of a gray curtain masked the still window. She tried to think of some one to whom she wanted to telephone. There was no one. The Sam Clarks called that evening and encouraged her to describe the missions. A dozen times they told her how glad they were to have her back. "It is good to be wanted," she thought. "It will drug me. But----Oh, is all life, always, an unresolved But?"

Chapters 33-34

https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapters-3334

Carol becomes conscious that her infatuation for Erik is deepening into love. He calls on her one evening in Will's absence, and they take a walk in the country. The doctor overtakes them in his car and orders them to ride home, Erik in the front seat and Carol, ignored, in the back. Once home, her husband tells Carol that it is about time for her and Valborg to "call a halt," describing in detail the crude life she would lead should she become the wife of a Swedish farmer. Carol promises never to see Erik again and next morning receives a note saying that the young man is leaving town. Soon she hears the whistle of the Minneapolis-bound train. A week later Erik's father appears at the Kennicott home and demands to know what Carol has done with his son. His attitude is so hostile and threatening that Carol is ill after he leaves. When her husband returns, she makes him promise to take her to California for several months. Gossip is curbed by both Kennicotts, and when questions become too personal, attention is deflected to the proposed trip. The Smails are to keep the Kennicott house and Hugh during the trip. As the train passes through Minneapolis, Carol wonders vaguely about Erik. The grand tour of the west occupies three and a half months. On the first of April, the Kennicotts return to Gopher Prairie in a sleet storm. No one meets them at the station, and they have difficulty getting home because of the bad weather. Harry Haydock relates his experiences in California two years ago instead of listening to Dr. Kennicott's more recent ones. Dr. Kennicott is delighted to be at home again and notes every small improvement in Gopher Prairie. Carol, except for the reunion with little Hugh, feels more depressed than ever.

The storm breaks over Carol's head but with less force than in the case of Fern. Dr. Kennicott's wisdom is notable in hushing up the whole affair. Sinclair Lewis' denunciation of small-town gossip is again in evidence, as well as his portrayal, in detail, of the mode of living of the Swedish farmers of the area. The Minneapolis train is again used as a symbol of escape from an unsatisfactory environment. Sinclair Lewis, again the cynic and minute observer, brings in another human characteristic often overlooked: the desire to talk about one's own experiences instead of listening to those of others. Every returned traveler has had friends to pick out and concentrate on one spot which he did not see, as Harry Haydock did on San Luis Obispo. Lewis also makes it plain that there is no real escape for Carol from Gopher Prairie.

cliffnotes

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/39.txt

finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Main Street/section_13_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 39

chapter 39

{"name": "Chapter 39", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapter-39", "summary": "Returning to Gopher Prairie of her own volition, Carol finds that some of her old acquaintances have missed her, something that would not occur in Washington. The town has not changed, however, except for the new school building, seven new bungalows, and two garages. The men, including Dr. Westlake and Sam Clark, talk over her intimate problems in a barber shop conference and decide to let her live. Curiously, Maud Dyer seems to resent Carol's return. Few people ask about Carol's experiences in Washington. In August, the second Kennicott baby is born, a girl. Dr. Kennicott and Carol are beginning to disagree in regard to discipline for little Hugh. The Kennicotts and the Clarks go duck hunting together one autumn day. For the first time, Carol willingly sits on the back seat of the car with Mrs. Clark and agrees to go to the movies the next night instead of reading a book. When a Community Day is to be planned, Carol disagrees with the Mayor, an ex-bartender, about the program, but she finally gives in. She predicts a world of many changes for her infant daughter. Carol feels that she may not have won the battle against mediocrity but that she has at least kept fighting. Her husband is occupied with storm windows and the coming snowstorm as the narrative comes to a close.", "analysis": "The long, episodic, and almost plotless story of Carol Kennicott and her struggles with Gopher Prairie finally ends, with Sinclair Lewis solving hardly any of the problems which still confront his heroine. Her child, however, will see great changes if she were alive today, for the problems of today are not those of a single generation."}

CHAPTER XXXIX SHE wondered all the way home what her sensations would be. She wondered about it so much that she had every sensation she had imagined. She was excited by each familiar porch, each hearty "Well, well!" and flattered to be, for a day, the most important news of the community. She bustled about, making calls. Juanita Haydock bubbled over their Washington encounter, and took Carol to her social bosom. This ancient opponent seemed likely to be her most intimate friend, for Vida Sherwin, though she was cordial, stood back and watched for imported heresies. In the evening Carol went to the mill. The mystical Om-Om-Om of the dynamos in the electric-light plant behind the mill was louder in the darkness. Outside sat the night watchman, Champ Perry. He held up his stringy hands and squeaked, "We've all missed you terrible." Who in Washington would miss her? Who in Washington could be depended upon like Guy Pollock? When she saw him on the street, smiling as always, he seemed an eternal thing, a part of her own self. After a week she decided that she was neither glad nor sorry to be back. She entered each day with the matter-of-fact attitude with which she had gone to her office in Washington. It was her task; there would be mechanical details and meaningless talk; what of it? The only problem which she had approached with emotion proved insignificant. She had, on the train, worked herself up to such devotion that she was willing to give up her own room, to try to share all of her life with Kennicott. He mumbled, ten minutes after she had entered the house, "Say, I've kept your room for you like it was. I've kind of come round to your way of thinking. Don't see why folks need to get on each other's nerves just because they're friendly. Darned if I haven't got so I like a little privacy and mulling things over by myself." II She had left a city which sat up nights to talk of universal transition; of European revolution, guild socialism, free verse. She had fancied that all the world was changing. She found that it was not. In Gopher Prairie the only ardent new topics were prohibition, the place in Minneapolis where you could get whisky at thirteen dollars a quart, recipes for home-made beer, the "high cost of living," the presidential election, Clark's new car, and not very novel foibles of Cy Bogart. Their problems were exactly what they had been two years ago, what they had been twenty years ago, and what they would be for twenty years to come. With the world a possible volcano, the husbandmen were plowing at the base of the mountain. A volcano does occasionally drop a river of lava on even the best of agriculturists, to their astonishment and considerable injury, but their cousins inherit the farms and a year or two later go back to the plowing. She was unable to rhapsodize much over the seven new bungalows and the two garages which Kennicott had made to seem so important. Her intensest thought about them was, "Oh yes, they're all right I suppose." The change which she did heed was the erection of the schoolbuilding, with its cheerful brick walls, broad windows, gymnasium, classrooms for agriculture and cooking. It indicated Vida's triumph, and it stirred her to activity--any activity. She went to Vida with a jaunty, "I think I shall work for you. And I'll begin at the bottom." She did. She relieved the attendant at the rest-room for an hour a day. Her only innovation was painting the pine table a black and orange rather shocking to the Thanatopsis. She talked to the farmwives and soothed their babies and was happy. Thinking of them she did not think of the ugliness of Main Street as she hurried along it to the chatter of the Jolly Seventeen. She wore her eye-glasses on the street now. She was beginning to ask Kennicott and Juanita if she didn't look young, much younger than thirty-three. The eye-glasses pinched her nose. She considered spectacles. They would make her seem older, and hopelessly settled. No! She would not wear spectacles yet. But she tried on a pair at Kennicott's office. They really were much more comfortable. III Dr. Westlake, Sam Clark, Nat Hicks, and Del Snafflin were talking in Del's barber shop. "Well, I see Kennicott's wife is taking a whirl at the rest-room, now," said Dr. Westlake. He emphasized the "now." Del interrupted the shaving of Sam and, with his brush dripping lather, he observed jocularly: "What'll she be up to next? They say she used to claim this burg wasn't swell enough for a city girl like her, and would we please tax ourselves about thirty-seven point nine and fix it all up pretty, with tidies on the hydrants and statoos on the lawns----" Sam irritably blew the lather from his lips, with milky small bubbles, and snorted, "Be a good thing for most of us roughnecks if we did have a smart woman to tell us how to fix up the town. Just as much to her kicking as there was to Jim Blausser's gassing about factories. And you can bet Mrs. Kennicott is smart, even if she is skittish. Glad to see her back." Dr. Westlake hastened to play safe. "So was I! So was I! She's got a nice way about her, and she knows a good deal about books, or fiction anyway. Of course she's like all the rest of these women--not solidly founded--not scholarly--doesn't know anything about political economy--falls for every new idea that some windjamming crank puts out. But she's a nice woman. She'll probably fix up the rest-room, and the rest-room is a fine thing, brings a lot of business to town. And now that Mrs. Kennicott's been away, maybe she's got over some of her fool ideas. Maybe she realizes that folks simply laugh at her when she tries to tell us how to run everything." "Sure. She'll take a tumble to herself," said Nat Hicks, sucking in his lips judicially. "As far as I'm concerned, I'll say she's as nice a looking skirt as there is in town. But yow!" His tone electrified them. "Guess she'll miss that Swede Valborg that used to work for me! They was a pair! Talking poetry and moonshine! If they could of got away with it, they'd of been so darn lovey-dovey----" Sam Clark interrupted, "Rats, they never even thought about making love, Just talking books and all that junk. I tell you, Carrie Kennicott's a smart woman, and these smart educated women all get funny ideas, but they get over 'em after they've had three or four kids. You'll see her settled down one of these days, and teaching Sunday School and helping at sociables and behaving herself, and not trying to butt into business and politics. Sure!" After only fifteen minutes of conference on her stockings, her son, her separate bedroom, her music, her ancient interest in Guy Pollock, her probable salary in Washington, and every remark which she was known to have made since her return, the supreme council decided that they would permit Carol Kennicott to live, and they passed on to a consideration of Nat Hicks's New One about the traveling salesman and the old maid. IV For some reason which was totally mysterious to Carol, Maud Dyer seemed to resent her return. At the Jolly Seventeen Maud giggled nervously, "Well, I suppose you found war-work a good excuse to stay away and have a swell time. Juanita! Don't you think we ought to make Carrie tell us about the officers she met in Washington?" They rustled and stared. Carol looked at them. Their curiosity seemed natural and unimportant. "Oh yes, yes indeed, have to do that some day," she yawned. She no longer took Aunt Bessie Smail seriously enough to struggle for independence. She saw that Aunt Bessie did not mean to intrude; that she wanted to do things for all the Kennicotts. Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness, so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected with laughter. She divined that when Aunt Bessie came in with a jar of wild-grape jelly she was waiting in hope of being asked for the recipe. After that she could be irritated but she could not be depressed by Aunt Bessie's simoom of questioning. She wasn't depressed even when she heard Mrs. Bogart observe, "Now we've got prohibition it seems to me that the next problem of the country ain't so much abolishing cigarettes as it is to make folks observe the Sabbath and arrest these law-breakers that play baseball and go to the movies and all on the Lord's Day." Only one thing bruised Carol's vanity. Few people asked her about Washington. They who had most admiringly begged Percy Bresnahan for his opinions were least interested in her facts. She laughed at herself when she saw that she had expected to be at once a heretic and a returned hero; she was very reasonable and merry about it; and it hurt just as much as ever. Her baby, born in August, was a girl. Carol could not decide whether she was to become a feminist leader or marry a scientist or both, but did settle on Vassar and a tricolette suit with a small black hat for her Freshman year. VI Hugh was loquacious at breakfast. He desired to give his impressions of owls and F Street. "Don't make so much noise. You talk too much," growled Kennicott. Carol flared. "Don't speak to him that way! Why don't you listen to him? He has some very interesting things to tell." "What's the idea? Mean to say you expect me to spend all my time listening to his chatter?" "Why not?" "For one thing, he's got to learn a little discipline. Time for him to start getting educated." "I've learned much more discipline, I've had much more education, from him than he has from me." "What's this? Some new-fangled idea of raising kids you got in Washington?" "Perhaps. Did you ever realize that children are people?" "That's all right. I'm not going to have him monopolizing the conversation." "No, of course. We have our rights, too. But I'm going to bring him up as a human being. He has just as many thoughts as we have, and I want him to develop them, not take Gopher Prairie's version of them. That's my biggest work now--keeping myself, keeping you, from 'educating' him." "Well, let's not scrap about it. But I'm not going to have him spoiled." Kennicott had forgotten it in ten minutes; and she forgot it--this time. VII The Kennicotts and the Sam Clarks had driven north to a duck-pass between two lakes, on an autumn day of blue and copper. Kennicott had given her a light twenty-gauge shotgun. She had a first lesson in shooting, in keeping her eyes open, not wincing, understanding that the bead at the end of the barrel really had something to do with pointing the gun. She was radiant; she almost believed Sam when he insisted that it was she who had shot the mallard at which they had fired together. She sat on the bank of the reedy lake and found rest in Mrs. Clark's drawling comments on nothing. The brown dusk was still. Behind them were dark marshes. The plowed acres smelled fresh. The lake was garnet and silver. The voices of the men, waiting for the last flight, were clear in the cool air. "Mark left!" sang Kennicott, in a long-drawn call. Three ducks were swooping down in a swift line. The guns banged, and a duck fluttered. The men pushed their light boat out on the burnished lake, disappeared beyond the reeds. Their cheerful voices and the slow splash and clank of oars came back to Carol from the dimness. In the sky a fiery plain sloped down to a serene harbor. It dissolved; the lake was white marble; and Kennicott was crying, "Well, old lady, how about hiking out for home? Supper taste pretty good, eh?" "I'll sit back with Ethel," she said, at the car. It was the first time she had called Mrs. Clark by her given name; the first time she had willingly sat back, a woman of Main Street. "I'm hungry. It's good to be hungry," she reflected, as they drove away. She looked across the silent fields to the west. She was conscious of an unbroken sweep of land to the Rockies, to Alaska, a dominion which will rise to unexampled greatness when other empires have grown senile. Before that time, she knew, a hundred generations of Carols will aspire and go down in tragedy devoid of palls and solemn chanting, the humdrum inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia. "Let's all go to the movies tomorrow night. Awfully exciting film," said Ethel Clark. "Well, I was going to read a new book but----All right, let's go," said Carol. VIII "They're too much for me," Carol sighed to Kennicott. "I've been thinking about getting up an annual Community Day, when the whole town would forget feuds and go out and have sports and a picnic and a dance. But Bert Tybee (why did you ever elect him mayor?)--he's kidnapped my idea. He wants the Community Day, but he wants to have some politician 'give an address.' That's just the stilted sort of thing I've tried to avoid. He asked Vida, and of course she agreed with him." Kennicott considered the matter while he wound the clock and they tramped up-stairs. "Yes, it would jar you to have Bert butting in," he said amiably. "Are you going to do much fussing over this Community stunt? Don't you ever get tired of fretting and stewing and experimenting?" "I haven't even started. Look!" She led him to the nursery door, pointed at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. "Do you see that object on the pillow? Do you know what it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were wise, you wouldn't arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these children while they're asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to Mars." "Yump, probably be changes all right," yawned Kennicott. She sat on the edge of his bed while he hunted through his bureau for a collar which ought to be there and persistently wasn't. "I'll go on, always. And I am happy. But this Community Day makes me see how thoroughly I'm beaten." "That darn collar certainly is gone for keeps," muttered Kennicott and, louder, "Yes, I guess you----I didn't quite catch what you said, dear." She patted his pillows, turned down his sheets, as she reflected: "But I have won in this: I've never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them. I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women! I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith." "Sure. You bet you have," said Kennicott. "Well, good night. Sort of feels to me like it might snow tomorrow. Have to be thinking about putting up the storm-windows pretty soon. Say, did you notice whether the girl put that screwdriver back?"

Chapter 39

https://web.archive.org/web/20201102002234/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/main-street/summary-and-analysis/chapter-39

Returning to Gopher Prairie of her own volition, Carol finds that some of her old acquaintances have missed her, something that would not occur in Washington. The town has not changed, however, except for the new school building, seven new bungalows, and two garages. The men, including Dr. Westlake and Sam Clark, talk over her intimate problems in a barber shop conference and decide to let her live. Curiously, Maud Dyer seems to resent Carol's return. Few people ask about Carol's experiences in Washington. In August, the second Kennicott baby is born, a girl. Dr. Kennicott and Carol are beginning to disagree in regard to discipline for little Hugh. The Kennicotts and the Clarks go duck hunting together one autumn day. For the first time, Carol willingly sits on the back seat of the car with Mrs. Clark and agrees to go to the movies the next night instead of reading a book. When a Community Day is to be planned, Carol disagrees with the Mayor, an ex-bartender, about the program, but she finally gives in. She predicts a world of many changes for her infant daughter. Carol feels that she may not have won the battle against mediocrity but that she has at least kept fighting. Her husband is occupied with storm windows and the coming snowstorm as the narrative comes to a close.

The long, episodic, and almost plotless story of Carol Kennicott and her struggles with Gopher Prairie finally ends, with Sinclair Lewis solving hardly any of the problems which still confront his heroine. Her child, however, will see great changes if she were alive today, for the problems of today are not those of a single generation.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/2.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Main Street/section_1_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 2

chapter 2

{"name": "Chapter 2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMainStreet14.asp", "summary": "Carol is a regular invitee in the house of the Marburys who are her sister's friends. Mr. Marbury is a travelling insurance agent. They have mutual admiration for one another. On one of her visits, she meets Dr.Will Kenicott who does all the insurance examining for Mr. Marbury in the countryside. He belongs to Gopher Prairie, a wheat-producing town of Minnesota. He is very proud of his town and its people. Carol and Kennicott are attracted to each other. Carol believes that his profession would give him lots of scope for sympathy. Therefore she is shocked to hear him declare that the Dutch farmers need only salt and regular baths. The doctor hastens to clarify that the farmers are hardy and they do not need any sympathy. He, however admits that he is so accustomed to the broken legs and typhoid that he had become insensitive. He feels that a woman like her is what Gopher Prairie needs to change all the people like him. Carol admits that she once had such a dream. Kennicott then questions Carol about herself, and Carol starts liking him. Dr. Will Kennicott courts Carol. She finds him to be materialistic but appreciates his honesty and believes that he would never lie to his patients. She also finds out that he keeps up with the medical magazines. They go for long walks. She discovers his boyishness when they go tramping. They walk through the Old World of the pioneering days and the stone house built by General Sibley in 1835. They grow more trusting. All those historical places viewed in the company of Carol moves Kennicott to declare that they should make America what the pioneers dreamed about. He then proposes to Carol. But Carol is not sure that she would like to marry him. He then shows her photographs of Gopher Prairie, which touch a cord in her heart and slowly Carol falls in love with Kennicott.", "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/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMainStreet14.asp

Carol is a regular invitee in the house of the Marburys who are her sister's friends. Mr. Marbury is a travelling insurance agent. They have mutual admiration for one another. On one of her visits, she meets Dr.Will Kenicott who does all the insurance examining for Mr. Marbury in the countryside. He belongs to Gopher Prairie, a wheat-producing town of Minnesota. He is very proud of his town and its people. Carol and Kennicott are attracted to each other. Carol believes that his profession would give him lots of scope for sympathy. Therefore she is shocked to hear him declare that the Dutch farmers need only salt and regular baths. The doctor hastens to clarify that the farmers are hardy and they do not need any sympathy. He, however admits that he is so accustomed to the broken legs and typhoid that he had become insensitive. He feels that a woman like her is what Gopher Prairie needs to change all the people like him. Carol admits that she once had such a dream. Kennicott then questions Carol about herself, and Carol starts liking him. Dr. Will Kennicott courts Carol. She finds him to be materialistic but appreciates his honesty and believes that he would never lie to his patients. She also finds out that he keeps up with the medical magazines. They go for long walks. She discovers his boyishness when they go tramping. They walk through the Old World of the pioneering days and the stone house built by General Sibley in 1835. They grow more trusting. All those historical places viewed in the company of Carol moves Kennicott to declare that they should make America what the pioneers dreamed about. He then proposes to Carol. But Carol is not sure that she would like to marry him. He then shows her photographs of Gopher Prairie, which touch a cord in her heart and slowly Carol falls in love with Kennicott.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/27.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Main Street/section_26_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 27

chapter 27

{"name": "Chapter 27", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMainStreet76.asp", "summary": "Raymie Wutherspoon is promoted to the rank of a captain. Bjornstam sells his farm and leaves Gopher Prairie to settle in North Alberta. Many people opine that Bjornstam should have been sent to the prison. Even Kennicott believes that Bjornstam was bad. Mrs. Westlake talks sweetly and Carol tells the old Matron Bea's story. One day Mrs. Flickerbaugh invites her for tea. Carol listens with surprise that the lawyer's wife hated the town. She wanted to be a businesswoman. But her husband did not allow her to start her own business. So Mrs. Flickerbaugh had turned eccentric and this frightens Carol because she fears the same fate for herself. She sits alone on the porch because Kennicott had gone to make a professional call on Maud Dyer. She watches Cy Bogart and Myrtle Cass walk down the road hand in hand. She gets the sensation that something ardent is going on around her, which she is unable to see.", "analysis": "Notes This brief chapter describes Carol's state of mind after Bea's death. She is shocked into silence. Bjornstam's going away is pathetic. Carol feels that his gait has lost its spring and that his shoulders slumped. She remains silent when people, even Kennicott, speak ill of him. She pours out her innermost sorrow at Bea's death only into the sympathetic ears of Mrs. Westlake because she believes that she is the only dependable friend she has. How wrong Carol is in trusting the pussyfooted Mrs. Westlake is revealed in the chapters to follow. Her meeting with Mrs. Flickerbaugh starts a new line of thinking in her mind. She finds her dressed in a very odd manner. She finds that Mrs. Flickerbaugh feels as restless as she herself does and feels uneasy to think that she might become as eccentric as Mrs. Flickerbaugh is. She trusts Kennicott so much that she does not suspect Kennicott when he goes off to call on Maud Dyer. The writer uses dramatic irony very effectively when he says that she felt everywhere in the darkness 'panted an ardent quest' which she did not understand."}

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/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMainStreet76.asp

Raymie Wutherspoon is promoted to the rank of a captain. Bjornstam sells his farm and leaves Gopher Prairie to settle in North Alberta. Many people opine that Bjornstam should have been sent to the prison. Even Kennicott believes that Bjornstam was bad. Mrs. Westlake talks sweetly and Carol tells the old Matron Bea's story. One day Mrs. Flickerbaugh invites her for tea. Carol listens with surprise that the lawyer's wife hated the town. She wanted to be a businesswoman. But her husband did not allow her to start her own business. So Mrs. Flickerbaugh had turned eccentric and this frightens Carol because she fears the same fate for herself. She sits alone on the porch because Kennicott had gone to make a professional call on Maud Dyer. She watches Cy Bogart and Myrtle Cass walk down the road hand in hand. She gets the sensation that something ardent is going on around her, which she is unable to see.

Notes This brief chapter describes Carol's state of mind after Bea's death. She is shocked into silence. Bjornstam's going away is pathetic. Carol feels that his gait has lost its spring and that his shoulders slumped. She remains silent when people, even Kennicott, speak ill of him. She pours out her innermost sorrow at Bea's death only into the sympathetic ears of Mrs. Westlake because she believes that she is the only dependable friend she has. How wrong Carol is in trusting the pussyfooted Mrs. Westlake is revealed in the chapters to follow. Her meeting with Mrs. Flickerbaugh starts a new line of thinking in her mind. She finds her dressed in a very odd manner. She finds that Mrs. Flickerbaugh feels as restless as she herself does and feels uneasy to think that she might become as eccentric as Mrs. Flickerbaugh is. She trusts Kennicott so much that she does not suspect Kennicott when he goes off to call on Maud Dyer. The writer uses dramatic irony very effectively when he says that she felt everywhere in the darkness 'panted an ardent quest' which she did not understand.

pinkmonkey

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/34.txt

finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Main Street/section_33_part_0.txt

Main Street.chapter 34

chapter 34

{"name": "Chapter 34", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMainStreet91.asp", "summary": "The Kennicotts travel for three and a half months and visit the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, Pasadena and many other places. They meet the Dawsons who have settled in a bungalow at Pasadena. They return to Gopher Prairie in the first week of April. Since they had not informed anyone of their arrival and it is icy, nobody meets them at the station. Having missed the bus they decide to walk. They find it difficult to walk on the cold icy road with their suitcases. They stop at Haydock's house and talk about their vacation. Kennicott phones for a taxicab but before reaching them it skids and crashes into a tree. The Haydocks reluctantly offer to take out their car but the Kennicotts firmly refuse and start for home. Kennicott is delighted to be back home but Carol is not very enthusiastic. They meet Sam Clarke and he greets them very enthusiastically. Carol feels that she has lost the habit of lying. She can't display as much affection as Sam Clarke does. In her love for Hugh she forgets everything else. She is even able to ignore Aunt Bessie's comments. She promises Hugh that she would never go away from him. She finds him spoilt by Aunt Bessie. She listens to the familiar conversation between Kennicott and Mrs. Bogart about the weather and the other familiar noises of the house. She cannot remember that she had ever been away from home. She finds it unbearable to live in the house. When she seeks Kennicott to tell him she finds him examining the furnace. He appears to be happy to be back. She finds it difficult to break his heart. She looks at the pencil mark she made while planning picnics with Fern. She feels very lonely. When the Clarks call on them and tell them how happy they are to see them, she feels nice to be needed.", "analysis": "Notes Carol has a wonderful holiday. They jog, bathe in the surf, climb foothills and dance. They watch a polo game and the making of a motion picture. She meets an artist and talks to him. She feels touched when Kennicott takes her to an art gallery and tries to enjoy looking at the pictures. But she feels dismayed at the way people belonging to small towns like Gopher Prairie seek each other to talk about the same old things. Kennicott too seeks out his kind and revels in talking about motorcars and crops and politics. When they return home Carol finds it even more difficult to whip up any enthusiasm for the town or for their friends. Her homecoming is as full of misgivings as was her first homecoming as a bride. It is indeed surprising that all the years and friendships and her child fail to create any attachment for the town. Characteristically Kennicott observes all the additions-the new fences and the new signboards, when Carol notices how they have let the refuse accumulate behind their houses. She fails to find any attraction in the town. The only attachment she finds in the place is, her son Hugh. Kennicott too enjoys every minute of their holiday and is happier to be back home. The way the Haydocks interrupt the Kennicotts to talk about their own holidays is universal behavior."}

CHAPTER XXXIV THEY journeyed for three and a half months. They saw the Grand Canyon, the adobe walls of Sante Fe and, in a drive from El Paso into Mexico, their first foreign land. They jogged from San Diego and La Jolla to Los Angeles, Pasadena, Riverside, through towns with bell-towered missions and orange-groves; they viewed Monterey and San Francisco and a forest of sequoias. They bathed in the surf and climbed foothills and danced, they saw a polo game and the making of motion-pictures, they sent one hundred and seventeen souvenir post-cards to Gopher Prairie, and once, on a dune by a foggy sea when she was walking alone, Carol found an artist, and he looked up at her and said, "Too damned wet to paint; sit down and talk," and so for ten minutes she lived in a romantic novel. Her only struggle was in coaxing Kennicott not to spend all his time with the tourists from the ten thousand other Gopher Prairies. In winter, California is full of people from Iowa and Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma, who, having traveled thousands of miles from their familiar villages, hasten to secure an illusion of not having left them. They hunt for people from their own states to stand between them and the shame of naked mountains; they talk steadily, in Pullmans, on hotel porches, at cafeterias and motion-picture shows, about the motors and crops and county politics back home. Kennicott discussed land-prices with them, he went into the merits of the several sorts of motor cars with them, he was intimate with train porters, and he insisted on seeing the Luke Dawsons at their flimsy bungalow in Pasadena, where Luke sat and yearned to go back and make some more money. But Kennicott gave promise of learning to play. He shouted in the pool at the Coronado, and he spoke of (though he did nothing more radical than speak of) buying evening-clothes. Carol was touched by his efforts to enjoy picture galleries, and the dogged way in which he accumulated dates and dimensions when they followed monkish guides through missions. She felt strong. Whenever she was restless she dodged her thoughts by the familiar vagabond fallacy of running away from them, of moving on to a new place, and thus she persuaded herself that she was tranquil. In March she willingly agreed with Kennicott that it was time to go home. She was longing for Hugh. They left Monterey on April first, on a day of high blue skies and poppies and a summer sea. As the train struck in among the hills she resolved, "I'm going to love the fine Will Kennicott quality that there is in Gopher Prairie. The nobility of good sense. It will be sweet to see Vida and Guy and the Clarks. And I'm going to see my baby! All the words he'll be able to say now! It's a new start. Everything will be different!" Thus on April first, among dappled hills and the bronze of scrub oaks, while Kennicott seesawed on his toes and chuckled, "Wonder what Hugh'll say when he sees us?" Three days later they reached Gopher Prairie in a sleet storm. II No one knew that they were coming; no one met them; and because of the icy roads, the only conveyance at the station was the hotel 'bus, which they missed while Kennicott was giving his trunk-check to the station agent--the only person to welcome them. Carol waited for him in the station, among huddled German women with shawls and umbrellas, and ragged-bearded farmers in corduroy coats; peasants mute as oxen, in a room thick with the steam of wet coats, the reek of the red-hot stove, the stench of sawdust boxes which served as cuspidors. The afternoon light was as reluctant as a winter dawn. "This is a useful market-center, an interesting pioneer post, but it is not a home for me," meditated the stranger Carol. Kennicott suggested, "I'd 'phone for a flivver but it'd take quite a while for it to get here. Let's walk." They stepped uncomfortably from the safety of the plank platform and, balancing on their toes, taking cautious strides, ventured along the road. The sleety rain was turning to snow. The air was stealthily cold. Beneath an inch of water was a layer of ice, so that as they wavered with their suit-cases they slid and almost fell. The wet snow drenched their gloves; the water underfoot splashed their itching ankles. They scuffled inch by inch for three blocks. In front of Harry Haydock's Kennicott sighed: "We better stop in here and 'phone for a machine." She followed him like a wet kitten. The Haydocks saw them laboring up the slippery concrete walk, up the perilous front steps, and came to the door chanting: "Well, well, well, back again, eh? Say, this is fine! Have a fine trip? My, you look like a rose, Carol. How did you like the coast, doc? Well, well, well! Where-all did you go?" But as Kennicott began to proclaim the list of places achieved, Harry interrupted with an account of how much he himself had seen, two years ago. When Kennicott boasted, "We went through the mission at Santa Barbara," Harry broke in, "Yeh, that's an interesting old mission. Say, I'll never forget that hotel there, doc. It was swell. Why, the rooms were made just like these old monasteries. Juanita and I went from Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo. You folks go to San Luis Obispo?" "No, but----" "Well you ought to gone to San Luis Obispo. And then we went from there to a ranch, least they called it a ranch----" Kennicott got in only one considerable narrative, which began: "Say, I never knew--did you, Harry?--that in the Chicago district the Kutz Kar sells as well as the Overland? I never thought much of the Kutz. But I met a gentleman on the train--it was when we were pulling out of Albuquerque, and I was sitting on the back platform of the observation car, and this man was next to me and he asked me for a light, and we got to talking, and come to find out, he came from Aurora, and when he found out I came from Minnesota he asked me if I knew Dr. Clemworth of Red Wing, and of course, while I've never met him, I've heard of Clemworth lots of times, and seems he's this man's brother! Quite a coincidence! Well, we got to talking, and we called the porter--that was a pretty good porter on that car--and we had a couple bottles of ginger ale, and I happened to mention the Kutz Kar, and this man--seems he's driven a lot of different kinds of cars--he's got a Franklin now--and he said that he'd tried the Kutz and liked it first-rate. Well, when we got into a station--I don't remember the name of it--Carrie, what the deuce was the name of that first stop we made the other side of Albuquerque?--well, anyway, I guess we must have stopped there to take on water, and this man and I got out to stretch our legs, and darned if there wasn't a Kutz drawn right up at the depot platform, and he pointed out something I'd never noticed, and I was glad to learn about it: seems that the gear lever in the Kutz is an inch longer----" Even this chronicle of voyages Harry interrupted, with remarks on the advantages of the ball-gear-shift. Kennicott gave up hope of adequate credit for being a traveled man, and telephoned to a garage for a Ford taxicab, while Juanita kissed Carol and made sure of being the first to tell the latest, which included seven distinct and proven scandals about Mrs. Swiftwaite, and one considerable doubt as to the chastity of Cy Bogart. They saw the Ford sedan making its way over the water-lined ice, through the snow-storm, like a tug-boat in a fog. The driver stopped at a corner. The car skidded, it turned about with comic reluctance, crashed into a tree, and stood tilted on a broken wheel. The Kennicotts refused Harry Haydock's not too urgent offer to take them home in his car "if I can manage to get it out of the garage--terrible day--stayed home from the store--but if you say so, I'll take a shot at it." Carol gurgled, "No, I think we'd better walk; probably make better time, and I'm just crazy to see my baby." With their suit-cases they waddled on. Their coats were soaked through. Carol had forgotten her facile hopes. She looked about with impersonal eyes. But Kennicott, through rain-blurred lashes, caught the glory that was Back Home. She noted bare tree-trunks, black branches, the spongy brown earth between patches of decayed snow on the lawns. The vacant lots were full of tall dead weeds. Stripped of summer leaves the houses were hopeless--temporary shelters. Kennicott chuckled, "By golly, look down there! Jack Elder must have painted his garage. And look! Martin Mahoney has put up a new fence around his chicken yard. Say, that's a good fence, eh? Chicken-tight and dog-tight. That's certainly a dandy fence. Wonder how much it cost a yard? Yes, sir, they been building right along, even in winter. Got more enterprise than these Californians. Pretty good to be home, eh?" She noted that all winter long the citizens had been throwing garbage into their back yards, to be cleaned up in spring. The recent thaw had disclosed heaps of ashes, dog-bones, torn bedding, clotted paint-cans, all half covered by the icy pools which filled the hollows of the yards. The refuse had stained the water to vile colors of waste: thin red, sour yellow, streaky brown. Kennicott chuckled, "Look over there on Main Street! They got the feed store all fixed up, and a new sign on it, black and gold. That'll improve the appearance of the block a lot." She noted that the few people whom they passed wore their raggedest coats for the evil day. They were scarecrows in a shanty town. . . . "To think," she marveled, "of coming two thousand miles, past mountains and cities, to get off here, and to plan to stay here! What conceivable reason for choosing this particular place?" She noted a figure in a rusty coat and a cloth cap. Kennicott chuckled, "Look who's coming! It's Sam Clark! Gosh, all rigged out for the weather." The two men shook hands a dozen times and, in the Western fashion, bumbled, "Well, well, well, well, you old hell-hound, you old devil, how are you, anyway? You old horse-thief, maybe it ain't good to see you again!" While Sam nodded at her over Kennicott's shoulder, she was embarrassed. "Perhaps I should never have gone away. I'm out of practise in lying. I wish they would get it over! Just a block more and--my baby!" They were home. She brushed past the welcoming Aunt Bessie and knelt by Hugh. As he stammered, "O mummy, mummy, don't go away! Stay with me, mummy!" she cried, "No, I'll never leave you again!" He volunteered, "That's daddy." "By golly, he knows us just as if we'd never been away!" said Kennicott. "You don't find any of these California kids as bright as he is, at his age!" When the trunk came they piled about Hugh the bewhiskered little wooden men fitting one inside another, the miniature junk, and the Oriental drum, from San Francisco Chinatown; the blocks carved by the old Frenchman in San Diego; the lariat from San Antonio. "Will you forgive mummy for going away? Will you?" she whispered. Absorbed in Hugh, asking a hundred questions about him--had he had any colds? did he still dawdle over his oatmeal? what about unfortunate morning incidents? she viewed Aunt Bessie only as a source of information, and was able to ignore her hint, pointed by a coyly shaken finger, "Now that you've had such a fine long trip and spent so much money and all, I hope you're going to settle down and be satisfied and not----" "Does he like carrots yet?" replied Carol. She was cheerful as the snow began to conceal the slatternly yards. She assured herself that the streets of New York and Chicago were as ugly as Gopher Prairie in such weather; she dismissed the thought, "But they do have charming interiors for refuge." She sang as she energetically looked over Hugh's clothes. The afternoon grew old and dark. Aunt Bessie went home. Carol took the baby into her own room. The maid came in complaining, "I can't get no extra milk to make chipped beef for supper." Hugh was sleepy, and he had been spoiled by Aunt Bessie. Even to a returned mother, his whining and his trick of seven times snatching her silver brush were fatiguing. As a background, behind the noises of Hugh and the kitchen, the house reeked with a colorless stillness. From the window she heard Kennicott greeting the Widow Bogart as he had always done, always, every snowy evening: "Guess this 'll keep up all night." She waited. There they were, the furnace sounds, unalterable, eternal: removing ashes, shoveling coal. Yes. She was back home! Nothing had changed. She had never been away. California? Had she seen it? Had she for one minute left this scraping sound of the small shovel in the ash-pit of the furnace? But Kennicott preposterously supposed that she had. Never had she been quite so far from going away as now when he believed she had just come back. She felt oozing through the walls the spirit of small houses and righteous people. At that instant she knew that in running away she had merely hidden her doubts behind the officious stir of travel. "Dear God, don't let me begin agonizing again!" she sobbed. Hugh wept with her. "Wait for mummy a second!" She hastened down to the cellar, to Kennicott. He was standing before the furnace. However inadequate the rest of the house, he had seen to it that the fundamental cellar should be large and clean, the square pillars whitewashed, and the bins for coal and potatoes and trunks convenient. A glow from the drafts fell on the smooth gray cement floor at his feet. He was whistling tenderly, staring at the furnace with eyes which saw the black-domed monster as a symbol of home and of the beloved routine to which he had returned--his gipsying decently accomplished, his duty of viewing "sights" and "curios" performed with thoroughness. Unconscious of her, he stooped and peered in at the blue flames among the coals. He closed the door briskly, and made a whirling gesture with his right hand, out of pure bliss. He saw her. "Why, hello, old lady! Pretty darn good to be back, eh?" "Yes," she lied, while she quaked, "Not now. I can't face the job of explaining now. He's been so good. He trusts me. And I'm going to break his heart!" She smiled at him. She tidied his sacred cellar by throwing an empty bluing bottle into the trash bin. She mourned, "It's only the baby that holds me. If Hugh died----" She fled upstairs in panic and made sure that nothing had happened to Hugh in these four minutes. She saw a pencil-mark on a window-sill. She had made it on a September day when she had been planning a picnic for Fern Mullins and Erik. Fern and she had been hysterical with nonsense, had invented mad parties for all the coming winter. She glanced across the alley at the room which Fern had occupied. A rag of a gray curtain masked the still window. She tried to think of some one to whom she wanted to telephone. There was no one. The Sam Clarks called that evening and encouraged her to describe the missions. A dozen times they told her how glad they were to have her back. "It is good to be wanted," she thought. "It will drug me. But----Oh, is all life, always, an unresolved But?"

Chapter 34

https://web.archive.org/web/20180820035130/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmMainStreet91.asp

The Kennicotts travel for three and a half months and visit the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, Pasadena and many other places. They meet the Dawsons who have settled in a bungalow at Pasadena. They return to Gopher Prairie in the first week of April. Since they had not informed anyone of their arrival and it is icy, nobody meets them at the station. Having missed the bus they decide to walk. They find it difficult to walk on the cold icy road with their suitcases. They stop at Haydock's house and talk about their vacation. Kennicott phones for a taxicab but before reaching them it skids and crashes into a tree. The Haydocks reluctantly offer to take out their car but the Kennicotts firmly refuse and start for home. Kennicott is delighted to be back home but Carol is not very enthusiastic. They meet Sam Clarke and he greets them very enthusiastically. Carol feels that she has lost the habit of lying. She can't display as much affection as Sam Clarke does. In her love for Hugh she forgets everything else. She is even able to ignore Aunt Bessie's comments. She promises Hugh that she would never go away from him. She finds him spoilt by Aunt Bessie. She listens to the familiar conversation between Kennicott and Mrs. Bogart about the weather and the other familiar noises of the house. She cannot remember that she had ever been away from home. She finds it unbearable to live in the house. When she seeks Kennicott to tell him she finds him examining the furnace. He appears to be happy to be back. She finds it difficult to break his heart. She looks at the pencil mark she made while planning picnics with Fern. She feels very lonely. When the Clarks call on them and tell them how happy they are to see them, she feels nice to be needed.

Notes Carol has a wonderful holiday. They jog, bathe in the surf, climb foothills and dance. They watch a polo game and the making of a motion picture. She meets an artist and talks to him. She feels touched when Kennicott takes her to an art gallery and tries to enjoy looking at the pictures. But she feels dismayed at the way people belonging to small towns like Gopher Prairie seek each other to talk about the same old things. Kennicott too seeks out his kind and revels in talking about motorcars and crops and politics. When they return home Carol finds it even more difficult to whip up any enthusiasm for the town or for their friends. Her homecoming is as full of misgivings as was her first homecoming as a bride. It is indeed surprising that all the years and friendships and her child fail to create any attachment for the town. Characteristically Kennicott observes all the additions-the new fences and the new signboards, when Carol notices how they have let the refuse accumulate behind their houses. She fails to find any attraction in the town. The only attachment she finds in the place is, her son Hugh. Kennicott too enjoys every minute of their holiday and is happier to be back home. The way the Haydocks interrupt the Kennicotts to talk about their own holidays is universal behavior.

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/2.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Main Street/section_1_part_2.txt

Main Street.chapter 2

chapter 2

{"name": "Chapter 2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters1-6", "summary": "Carol meets Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, a solid man in his mid-thirties, at an informal dinner party given by a friend of her sister's. He admits that though he studied in the Twin Cities and has visited New York he prefers life in a small town where he can hold some sway and know the people. He encourages her to express herself and asks about her life. Before they part he asks permission to see her again and she assents. During their courtship, Carol finds his boyishness attractive. On a trip to Mendota, the old mansion of General Sibley, they discover their common American past and vow to make the country everything past generations had dreamed. He extols the values of Gopher Prairie and its residents and beseeches her to come to the town and give it some culture. We're ready for you to boss us,\" he states. He pulls her close and proclaims his love for her. He shows her some photographs of Gopher Prairie - a lucid lake that impresses her and another of a poor farmer's wife holding a baby. He embraces her", "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/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters1-6

Carol meets Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, a solid man in his mid-thirties, at an informal dinner party given by a friend of her sister's. He admits that though he studied in the Twin Cities and has visited New York he prefers life in a small town where he can hold some sway and know the people. He encourages her to express herself and asks about her life. Before they part he asks permission to see her again and she assents. During their courtship, Carol finds his boyishness attractive. On a trip to Mendota, the old mansion of General Sibley, they discover their common American past and vow to make the country everything past generations had dreamed. He extols the values of Gopher Prairie and its residents and beseeches her to come to the town and give it some culture. We're ready for you to boss us," he states. He pulls her close and proclaims his love for her. He shows her some photographs of Gopher Prairie - a lucid lake that impresses her and another of a poor farmer's wife holding a baby. He embraces her

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/3.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Main Street/section_1_part_3.txt

Main Street.chapter 3

chapter 3

{"name": "Chapter 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters1-6", "summary": "Carol and Will Kennicott marry and, after a honeymoon camping in the mountains of Colorado, take a train to Gopher Prairie. On the way Carol notices the tired and uninspired people - farm families, salesmen, workmen - who ride in the unfurnished cars. She despairs that these people are peasants with no inclination toward culture or beauty; Will counters that the advances of the age - the auto, the railway, the cinema - are bringing the country together. Carol wonders if the prairie will always be a land of uncouth pioneers but, looking at the landscape, she decides that there is hope. Carol becomes apprehensive as the train draws near her new home. She reminds herself that Will is a good man and Gopher Prairie, with a population of three thousand, must be better than the smaller towns they've passed. When the town comes into view, however, she realizes that it is merely a larger version - low wooden houses, a red grain elevator and some church spires are the only things that separate it from the vast prairie. She is seized by a sudden urge to flee. A large group of Will's friends are at the station to meet them and overwhelm Carol with their clamor. One of the men, Sam Clark the hardware dealer, gives them a ride home. As they drive Carol looks at the ugly little town and Will, catching her thoughts, assures her that life is free in Gopher Prairie is free and the people are wonderful. She thanks him for understanding. The house is simple and sad and crudely furnished. Neither one of them remembers that he intended to carry her over the threshold. She resolves to improve the house and takes comfort in her husband's strength and confidence", "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/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters1-6

Carol and Will Kennicott marry and, after a honeymoon camping in the mountains of Colorado, take a train to Gopher Prairie. On the way Carol notices the tired and uninspired people - farm families, salesmen, workmen - who ride in the unfurnished cars. She despairs that these people are peasants with no inclination toward culture or beauty; Will counters that the advances of the age - the auto, the railway, the cinema - are bringing the country together. Carol wonders if the prairie will always be a land of uncouth pioneers but, looking at the landscape, she decides that there is hope. Carol becomes apprehensive as the train draws near her new home. She reminds herself that Will is a good man and Gopher Prairie, with a population of three thousand, must be better than the smaller towns they've passed. When the town comes into view, however, she realizes that it is merely a larger version - low wooden houses, a red grain elevator and some church spires are the only things that separate it from the vast prairie. She is seized by a sudden urge to flee. A large group of Will's friends are at the station to meet them and overwhelm Carol with their clamor. One of the men, Sam Clark the hardware dealer, gives them a ride home. As they drive Carol looks at the ugly little town and Will, catching her thoughts, assures her that life is free in Gopher Prairie is free and the people are wonderful. She thanks him for understanding. The house is simple and sad and crudely furnished. Neither one of them remembers that he intended to carry her over the threshold. She resolves to improve the house and takes comfort in her husband's strength and confidence

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/7.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Main Street/section_2_part_1.txt

Main Street.chapter 7

chapter 7

{"name": "Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters7-12", "summary": "Winter comes and the town digs in for the season. Miles Bjornstam, the jack-of-all-trades handyman, hires himself out to anyone who needed help. Most people in town either laugh at Miles or hate him; he is a true democrat who calls everyone by their first names. He is known as \"The Red Swede\" due to his suspected communist leanings. Although many of the inhabitants eschewed winter sports as \"old fashioned\" in the age of autos, Carol manages to organize a mid-November skating party but a bobsled expedition proves less successful. A skiing party also fails to inspire a follow-up. Still, she enjoys tramping through the countryside with Will on his hunting trips and she glories in the pristine beauty of the season. One night while Will is out on a house call and Bea is off she discovers that she has nothing really to do. It is taboo for a doctor's wife to have a job, but Carol is a woman with a working brain and nothing to do with it. She had three choices: children, reform the town, or become part of the town by joining a church and all the societies. She wants children someday but not yet, the reforms are on hold but she vows to renew her efforts and, as for becoming part of the town, she isn't sure if the people really like her. She resolves to attend a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen - the female social center of Gopher Prairie - bridge once a week, supper and bridge with husbands once a month, a dance twice a year. She attends a bridge game at Juanita Haydock's but, unable to play the game, she is marginalized. When she proffers her opinion that the Swede farmers are hard working and brave people the icy derision of the group is immediate. They are shocked to learn that she pays Bea six-dollars a week. Carol meets the town librarian whom she realizes is more interested in preserving the books than lending them. At home she runs to the bedroom and weeps in terror of the matrons", "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/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters7-12

Winter comes and the town digs in for the season. Miles Bjornstam, the jack-of-all-trades handyman, hires himself out to anyone who needed help. Most people in town either laugh at Miles or hate him; he is a true democrat who calls everyone by their first names. He is known as "The Red Swede" due to his suspected communist leanings. Although many of the inhabitants eschewed winter sports as "old fashioned" in the age of autos, Carol manages to organize a mid-November skating party but a bobsled expedition proves less successful. A skiing party also fails to inspire a follow-up. Still, she enjoys tramping through the countryside with Will on his hunting trips and she glories in the pristine beauty of the season. One night while Will is out on a house call and Bea is off she discovers that she has nothing really to do. It is taboo for a doctor's wife to have a job, but Carol is a woman with a working brain and nothing to do with it. She had three choices: children, reform the town, or become part of the town by joining a church and all the societies. She wants children someday but not yet, the reforms are on hold but she vows to renew her efforts and, as for becoming part of the town, she isn't sure if the people really like her. She resolves to attend a meeting of the Jolly Seventeen - the female social center of Gopher Prairie - bridge once a week, supper and bridge with husbands once a month, a dance twice a year. She attends a bridge game at Juanita Haydock's but, unable to play the game, she is marginalized. When she proffers her opinion that the Swede farmers are hard working and brave people the icy derision of the group is immediate. They are shocked to learn that she pays Bea six-dollars a week. Carol meets the town librarian whom she realizes is more interested in preserving the books than lending them. At home she runs to the bedroom and weeps in terror of the matrons

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/8.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Main Street/section_2_part_2.txt

Main Street.chapter 8

chapter 8

{"name": "Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters7-12", "summary": "Carol decides to take an interest in her husband's business, but when she questions him at dinner she finds him uncommunicative and uninspired by his cases. Several days later Vida Sherwin explains, with good intentions, that the town perceives Carol as patronizing and showy. Carol is deeply affected and offended by the realization and barely appreciates Vida's assertion that the town would react the same way to anyone new. That evening Carol cautiously questions her husband as to whether or not she is accepted and he suggests that she should temper her critiques. Also, after proclaiming that in a small town a person is free to do what they want suggests, he suggests that she concentrate her business on his clients", "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/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters7-12

Carol decides to take an interest in her husband's business, but when she questions him at dinner she finds him uncommunicative and uninspired by his cases. Several days later Vida Sherwin explains, with good intentions, that the town perceives Carol as patronizing and showy. Carol is deeply affected and offended by the realization and barely appreciates Vida's assertion that the town would react the same way to anyone new. That evening Carol cautiously questions her husband as to whether or not she is accepted and he suggests that she should temper her critiques. Also, after proclaiming that in a small town a person is free to do what they want suggests, he suggests that she concentrate her business on his clients

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/12.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Main Street/section_2_part_5.txt

Main Street.chapter 12

chapter 12

{"name": "Chapter 12", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters7-12", "summary": "One pleasant day Carol walks into the countryside and encounters Miles Bjornstam cooking over a fire at a gipsy camp. Miles and his partner Pete are leaving for a summer of horse trading to the west and Miles humorously extends an invitation for her to join them. She says goodbye and returns to town. The summer arrives with stifling heat and Carol and Will escape to their newly purchased summer cottage by the lake. Carol swims and gossips with the ladies by day and in the evenings their husband's motor out from the town. Carol is happy that summer but in September the families return to the drab town. Carol develops an enthusiasm for the spirit of the pioneers and decides that if she can't push the town into the future perhaps she can resurrect some of its noble past. She calls on the two pioneers that she knows - Mr. and Mrs. Champ Perry. She is initially charmed but their opinionated proselytizing about society's problems wears thin. Miles Bjornstam returns from Montana.", "analysis": ". These chapters alternatively chronicle Carol's failed attempts to change Gopher Prairie - whether trying to convince her husband to like poetry, erecting a new city hall, uplifting the women's study group or trying to convince the matrons to engage in winter sport - which backfire when Vida Sherwin exposes the town's disdain for her impulsiveness. Her subsequent attempt to adopt the personae of the Nice Married Woman backfires when she realizes that her views are at loggerheads with those of the town's matrons. Her attempt to retreat from the town leaves her feeling lonely. She interviews the Perry's hoping to reinvigorate her passion by discovering the town's past but finds their perspective as biased and petty as the rest of the town. Though Carol is unable to commit to the radicalism of Miles Bjornstam's socialism she recognizes in him a true, unbiased friendship. During this section the narrator lambasts the denizens of Gopher Prairie for the abhorrence of change as expressed through a thinly veiled cynicism of civic improvement, the working class and aesthetic improvement. advertisement Ironically, the town folk readily embrace technology such as the telephone and practically enshrine the automobile even as they eschew \"old fashioned\" pursuits like skiing and ice skating. During the course of these chapters Carol begins to feel isolated and recognizes the dreadful presence of death in the moral poverty of the small town. Here too are the her first allusions to escape, particularly when Miles Bjornstam facetiously invites her to travel with him that summer and she replies that one day she just might do it"}

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/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters7-12

One pleasant day Carol walks into the countryside and encounters Miles Bjornstam cooking over a fire at a gipsy camp. Miles and his partner Pete are leaving for a summer of horse trading to the west and Miles humorously extends an invitation for her to join them. She says goodbye and returns to town. The summer arrives with stifling heat and Carol and Will escape to their newly purchased summer cottage by the lake. Carol swims and gossips with the ladies by day and in the evenings their husband's motor out from the town. Carol is happy that summer but in September the families return to the drab town. Carol develops an enthusiasm for the spirit of the pioneers and decides that if she can't push the town into the future perhaps she can resurrect some of its noble past. She calls on the two pioneers that she knows - Mr. and Mrs. Champ Perry. She is initially charmed but their opinionated proselytizing about society's problems wears thin. Miles Bjornstam returns from Montana.

. These chapters alternatively chronicle Carol's failed attempts to change Gopher Prairie - whether trying to convince her husband to like poetry, erecting a new city hall, uplifting the women's study group or trying to convince the matrons to engage in winter sport - which backfire when Vida Sherwin exposes the town's disdain for her impulsiveness. Her subsequent attempt to adopt the personae of the Nice Married Woman backfires when she realizes that her views are at loggerheads with those of the town's matrons. Her attempt to retreat from the town leaves her feeling lonely. She interviews the Perry's hoping to reinvigorate her passion by discovering the town's past but finds their perspective as biased and petty as the rest of the town. Though Carol is unable to commit to the radicalism of Miles Bjornstam's socialism she recognizes in him a true, unbiased friendship. During this section the narrator lambasts the denizens of Gopher Prairie for the abhorrence of change as expressed through a thinly veiled cynicism of civic improvement, the working class and aesthetic improvement. advertisement Ironically, the town folk readily embrace technology such as the telephone and practically enshrine the automobile even as they eschew "old fashioned" pursuits like skiing and ice skating. During the course of these chapters Carol begins to feel isolated and recognizes the dreadful presence of death in the moral poverty of the small town. Here too are the her first allusions to escape, particularly when Miles Bjornstam facetiously invites her to travel with him that summer and she replies that one day she just might do it

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/19.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Main Street/section_4_part_1.txt

Main Street.chapter 19

chapter 19

{"name": "Chapter 19", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters19-21", "summary": "Time passes: Miles Bjornstam gets a job at the mill and marries Bea. Carol organizes their small wedding but none of the town's matriarchs attend or call on the new couple. An older woman named Oscarina replaces Bea and soon becomes a mother figure to Carol. Carol becomes a member of the library board and though she is surprised to find that the other members are well-read she soon discerns that they have no interest in making the library more vital; she placidly serves for two years. Kennicott makes some money on a land deal and hints that they can now afford to have a child. Carol hesitantly agrees, but they take no action. That summer at the cottage she dreams of exotic places. Living at the lake she finds that she misses the sound of the trains which are the town's link to the outside world. She dreams of the day when she can escape on a train. The Chautauqua comes to town and Carol is disappointed to find that instead of being a traveling University it is more of a vaudeville-styled entertainment spectacle. Only one of the many lecturers suggests that Gopher Prairie's appearance could use some improvement. That summer Gopher Prairie is briefly excited by news of war in Europe but the distant events fail to hold the town's attention. Carol visits Bea and Miles and finds that they are happy though the town treats them as pariahs. That autumn Carol realizes she is 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/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters19-21

Time passes: Miles Bjornstam gets a job at the mill and marries Bea. Carol organizes their small wedding but none of the town's matriarchs attend or call on the new couple. An older woman named Oscarina replaces Bea and soon becomes a mother figure to Carol. Carol becomes a member of the library board and though she is surprised to find that the other members are well-read she soon discerns that they have no interest in making the library more vital; she placidly serves for two years. Kennicott makes some money on a land deal and hints that they can now afford to have a child. Carol hesitantly agrees, but they take no action. That summer at the cottage she dreams of exotic places. Living at the lake she finds that she misses the sound of the trains which are the town's link to the outside world. She dreams of the day when she can escape on a train. The Chautauqua comes to town and Carol is disappointed to find that instead of being a traveling University it is more of a vaudeville-styled entertainment spectacle. Only one of the many lecturers suggests that Gopher Prairie's appearance could use some improvement. That summer Gopher Prairie is briefly excited by news of war in Europe but the distant events fail to hold the town's attention. Carol visits Bea and Miles and finds that they are happy though the town treats them as pariahs. That autumn Carol realizes she is pregnant

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/20.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Main Street/section_4_part_2.txt

Main Street.chapter 20

chapter 20

{"name": "Chapter 20", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters19-21", "summary": "Carol dislikes being pregnant and when the baby is born she initially hates it. The next day, however, she finds that she loves it with all her heart. It is a boy and they name him Hugh. For two years Carol devotes herself entirely to being a mother. During the later stages of her pregnancy, Will's relatives - Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie - sold their creamery in North Dakota and came to Gopher Prairie for a visit of indeterminate length. They moved into the Kennicott house, were fussy, intrusive and mocking but they were family and Carol had to bear them. Eventually they purchased a grocery store in Gopher Prairie and moved into their own house but thereafter they visit often and without warning. The Jolly Seventeen's gossip proves to be a viable outlet for Carol's frustrations. Kennicott organizes a child-welfare week and for a brief period everyone in town feels community spirit and pride. This good feeling ends, however, when Miles and Bea's son Olaf wins the prize for healthiest baby. Carol takes Hugh to play with Olaf often even though the town looks down upon Miles and his former servant girl wife. One day, two years after Hugh's birth, Vida Sherwin resigns from the school and gets married", "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/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters19-21

Carol dislikes being pregnant and when the baby is born she initially hates it. The next day, however, she finds that she loves it with all her heart. It is a boy and they name him Hugh. For two years Carol devotes herself entirely to being a mother. During the later stages of her pregnancy, Will's relatives - Uncle Whittier and Aunt Bessie - sold their creamery in North Dakota and came to Gopher Prairie for a visit of indeterminate length. They moved into the Kennicott house, were fussy, intrusive and mocking but they were family and Carol had to bear them. Eventually they purchased a grocery store in Gopher Prairie and moved into their own house but thereafter they visit often and without warning. The Jolly Seventeen's gossip proves to be a viable outlet for Carol's frustrations. Kennicott organizes a child-welfare week and for a brief period everyone in town feels community spirit and pride. This good feeling ends, however, when Miles and Bea's son Olaf wins the prize for healthiest baby. Carol takes Hugh to play with Olaf often even though the town looks down upon Miles and his former servant girl wife. One day, two years after Hugh's birth, Vida Sherwin resigns from the school and gets married

novelguide

all_chapterized_books/543-chapters/21.txt

finished_summaries/novelguide/Main Street/section_4_part_3.txt

Main Street.chapter 21

chapter 21

{"name": "Chapter 21", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters19-21", "summary": "At the age of thirty-six, Vida Sherwin had given up ever being married. Will Kennicott had flirted with her before he met Carol, but she had suspected his motives and dissuaded him, though she secretly hoped that he would renew his advances. After Will married Carol, Vida loved her as a sister and hated her as a rival. She found felt that Carol took Will for granted. When Vida moves into the boarding house she and Raymie Wutherspoon develop a close friendship that develops into a halting and unspoken romance. Vida encourages Raymie to stand up for himself and to demand more responsibility and respect from Harry Haydock, his manager at the Bon Ton. They are married in June. Afterward, Vida bullies Harry Haydock who makes Ray a partner. Vida is secretly upset when she sees Ray and Will together and suspects that people suppose Will superior to her husband.", "analysis": ". This middle trio of chapters centers around Carol's pregnancy and the birth of Hugh who arrives at the exact middle of the novel in chapter 20. Through the activities of motherhood Carol persists in her attempts to improve Gopher Prairie but she is ready to concede to defeat much more readily than before. advertisement Instead, she begins to daydream of escape, exemplified by her long afternoons at the lake, her desire to one day take a train away from the town and her conviction that change, even if it meant simply moving to another Main Street in another small town, would be an improvement. These chapters are also noteworthy in that they provide a glimpse of Vida Sherwin's psyche and sexual frustrations which explain her critical yet loving attitude toward Carol. With a war raging in Europe and a new baby at home, Carol fights to maintain her sense of self"}

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/20210211232013/https://www.novelguide.com/main-street/summaries/chapters19-21

At the age of thirty-six, Vida Sherwin had given up ever being married. Will Kennicott had flirted with her before he met Carol, but she had suspected his motives and dissuaded him, though she secretly hoped that he would renew his advances. After Will married Carol, Vida loved her as a sister and hated her as a rival. She found felt that Carol took Will for granted. When Vida moves into the boarding house she and Raymie Wutherspoon develop a close friendship that develops into a halting and unspoken romance. Vida encourages Raymie to stand up for himself and to demand more responsibility and respect from Harry Haydock, his manager at the Bon Ton. They are married in June. Afterward, Vida bullies Harry Haydock who makes Ray a partner. Vida is secretly upset when she sees Ray and Will together and suspects that people suppose Will superior to her husband.

. This middle trio of chapters centers around Carol's pregnancy and the birth of Hugh who arrives at the exact middle of the novel in chapter 20. Through the activities of motherhood Carol persists in her attempts to improve Gopher Prairie but she is ready to concede to defeat much more readily than before. advertisement Instead, she begins to daydream of escape, exemplified by her long afternoons at the lake, her desire to one day take a train away from the town and her conviction that change, even if it meant simply moving to another Main Street in another small town, would be an improvement. These chapters are also noteworthy in that they provide a glimpse of Vida Sherwin's psyche and sexual frustrations which explain her critical yet loving attitude toward Carol. With a war raging in Europe and a new baby at home, Carol fights to maintain her sense of self