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.