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.