EMMA AND THE OTHER PHILISTINES----Episode 12

             STILL TALKING ABOUT THE OH SO WONDERFUL SCENE AT THE COUNTY FAIR


        The fourth movement begins when both Emma and Rodolphe fall silent and the words from the platform where a special prize is now being awarded are heard in full, with commentary : "Rodolphe was no longer speaking. They looked at one another. A supreme desire made their dry lips tremble, and softly, 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 !. . ."
   "Then came forward on the platform a little old woman with timid bearing, who seemed to shrink within her poor clothes . . . Something of monastic rigidity dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion weakened that pale look. In her constant proximity to cattle she had caught their dumbness and their calm . . . Thus stood before these beaming bourgeois this half-century of servitude . . . 
  'Approach ! approach!'
  " 'Are you deaf ? ' said Tuvache, jumping up in his armchair ; and he began shouting in her ear, 'Fifty-four years in service. A silver medal ! Twenty-five francs ! For you ! '
   "Then, when she had her medal she looked at it, and a smile of beautitude 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 druggist, leaning across to the notary."
   
   The apotheosis to this splendid contrapuntal chapter is Homais's account in the Rouen paper of the show and banquet. "Why these festoons , 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 meads ? ' . . . 
   "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, druggist, 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 grass-plot of Monsieur Liegeard brought together the principal personages of the festivity. 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, Ameliorations. 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 OneNights.' " 

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  "Today. . . a man and a woman, lover and mistress in one (in thought), I have been riding on horseback through a wood, on an autumn afternoon, under yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words that were exchanged and the crimson sun. . . and my two lovers." So Flaubert wrote on December 23, 1853, to Louise Colet, about the famous Chapter 9 of the second part, Rodolphe's seduction of Emma.
   Within the general frame and a scheme of the nineteenth-century novel, this kind of a scene was technically known as a woman's fall, the fall of virtue. In the course of this delightfully written scene the behavior of Emma's long blue veil --- a character in its own serpentine right --- is especially to be marked. {The scene can be said to be seen through the long blue veil of her amazon dress.} After dismounting from their horses, they walk. "Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped, and through her veil, that fell slantingly from her man's hat over her hips, he face appeared in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure waves." So, when she is daydreaming about the event in her room on their return : "Then she saw herself in the glass and wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, 'I have a lover ! a lover !' delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary existence appeared only afar off, down below in the darkness in the interspaces of these heights." And one should not forget that, later, the poisonous arsenic was in a blue jar---and the blue haze that hung about the countryside at her funeral.
   The event that gave rise to her daydreaming is briefly described but with one most significant detail :"The cloth of her habit caught against the velvet of his coat. She threw back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and faltering, in tears,with along shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself up to him.
   "The shades of night were falling ; the horizontal sun passing between the branches dazzled her eyes. Here and there around her, in the leaves or on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as if humming-birds in flight had scattered their feathers. { Hmm, not sure what Flaubert was doing here, since hummingbirds do not occur in Europe.} Silence was everywhere; a mild something seemed to come forth from the trees; she felt her heart, whose beating had begun again, and the blood coursing through her flesh like a stream of milk . Then far away, beyond the wood, on the other hills, se head a vague prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in silence she heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing nerves. Rdolphe, a cigar in his teeth, was mending with his penknife one of the bridles that had broken." 
  When Emma has returned from love's swoon, you will please mark the remote note that reaches her from somewhere beyond the quiet woods --- a musical moan in the distance --- for all its enchantment is nothing but the glorified echo of a hideous vagabond's raucous song. And presently Emma and Rodolphe come back from their ride--- with a smile on the face of the author. For that raucous song here and in Rouen will hideously mingle with Emma's death rattle less than five years later.