pg200-300

 

See Sources for some of my sources of info on the Charabanc and Chaise.

 

 

Vocabulary:

• barouche
• Hirondelle
• coach
• stagecoach
• overnight bay
• gig
• carriage
• tilbury
• coachman
• nag
• cab
• gallop
• trot
• canter

 

Selected passages with some mention of travel:

 

Part 2, Ch 13:

  Suddenly a blue tilbury crossed the square at a smart

    trot.  Emma gave a cry, fell abruptly backwards and lay on

    the floor.

 

         Rodolphe had decided, after a good deal of thought, to

    leave for Rouen.  Since the Yonville road was the only route

    from La Huchette to Buchy, he had to pass through the village,

    and Emma had recognized him in the glow of his carriage

    lights as they flashed in the gathering dusk like a streak of

    lightning.

 

 

Part 2 Ch 11:

 It was quite an event in the village, that mid-thigh

    amputation by Doctor Canivet!  All the citizens rose early

    that morning, and the Grande-Rue, thronged though it was, had

    something sinister about it, as though it were execution day.

    At the grocer's, Hippolyte's case was discussed from every

    angle.  None of the stores did any business.  And Madame

    Tuvache, the mayor's wife, didn't budge form her window, so

    eager was she not to miss the surgeon's arrival. 

 

         He drove up in his gig, holding the reins himself.  Over

    the years the right-hand spring had given way under the weight

    of his corpulence, so that the carriage sagged a little to one

    side as it rolled along.  Beside him, on the higher half of

    the seat cushion, could be seen a huge red leather case, its

    three brass clasps gleaming magisterially.

 

         The doctor drew up in the hotel yard with a flourish and

    called loudly for someone to unharness his mare, and then went

    to the stable to see whether she was really being given oats

    as he had ordered.  His first concern, whenever he arrived at

    a patient's, was always for his mare and his gig.  "That

    Canivet, he's a character!" people said of him.  And they

    thought the more of him for his unshakable self-assurance. 

    The universe might have perished to the last man, and he

    wouldn't have altered his habits a jot.

 

 

Part 2, Ch 12:

         A team of four horses, galloping every day for a week, had

    been whirling her and Rodolphe toward a new land from which

    they would never return.  On and on the carriage bore them, and

    they sat there, arms entwined, saying not a word.  Often from

    a mountain top they would espy some splendid city, with domes,

    bridges, ships, forests of lemon trees, and white marble cathe-

    drals whose pointed steeples were crowned with storks' nests.

    Here the horses slowed, picking their way over the great paving-

    stones, and the ground was strewn with bouquets of flowers

    tossed at them by women laced in red bodices.  The ringing of

    bells and the braying of mules mingled with the murmur of gui-

    tars and the sound of gushing fountains.  Pyramids of fruit

    piled at the foot of pale statues were cooled by the flying

    spray, and the statues themselves seemed to smile through the

    streaming water.  And then one night they arrived in a fishing

    village, where brown nets were drying in the wind along the

    cliff and the line of cottages.  Here they stopped, this would

    be their dwelling place.  They would live in a low flat roofed

    house in the shade of a palm tree, on a bay beside the sea.

    They would ride in gondolas, swing in hammocks.  And their lives

    would be easy and ample like the silk clothes they wore, warm

    like the soft nights that enveloped them, starry like the skies

    they gazed upon.  Nothing specific stood out against the vast

    background of the future that she thus envoked.  The days were

    all of them splendid, and as alike as the waves of the sea.  And

    the whole thing hovered on the horizon, infinite, harmonious,

    blue and sparkling in the sun.  But then the baby would cough in

    the cradle, or Bovary would give a snore louder than the rest,

    and Emma wouldn't fall asleep till morning, when dawn was whiten-

    ing the windowpanes and Justin was already opening the shutters

    of the pharmacy.

 

What sort of fantastic carriage would this have been? 

 

 

 

         She had sent for Monsieur Lheureux and told him she would

    be needing a cloak.  "A long cloak with a deep collar and a

    lining."

 

         "You're going on a trip?" he asked.

 

         "No!  But . . . Anyway, I can count on you to get it, can't

    I?  Soon?"

 

         He bowed.     

 

         "I'll want a trunk, too.  Not too heavy, roomy."

 

         "I know the kind you mean.  About three feet by a foot and

    a half, the sort they're making now."

 

         "And an overnight bay." (?)

 

         "A little too much smoke not to mean fire," Lheureux said

    to himself.

 

         "And here," said Madame Bovary, unfastening her watch

    from her belt.  "Take this, you can pay for the things out of

    what you get for it."

 

         But the shopkeeper protested.  She was wrong to suggest

    such a thing, he said.  They were well acquainted, he trusted

    her completely.  She mustn't be childish.  But she insisted

    that he take at least the chain, and Lheureux had put it in

    his pocket and was on his way out when she called him back.

 

         "Hold the luggage for me," she said.  "As for the cloak"

    she pretended to ponder the question, "don't bring that to me,

    either.  But give me the address of the shop and tell them to

    have it ready for me when I come."

 

         They were to elope the following month.  She would leave

    Yonville as though to go shopping in Rouen.  Rodolphe was to

    arrange for their reservations and their passports, and would

    write to Paris to make sure that they would have the coach to

    themselves as far as Marseilles.  There they would buy a

    barouche and continue straight on toward Genoa.  She would

    send her things to Lheureux's whence they would be loaded

    directly onto the Hirondelle, thus arousing no one's suspi-

    cions.  In all these plans there was never a mention of little

    Berthe.  Rodolphe avoided speaking of her, perhaps Emma had

    forgotten her.

 

That's general information about Emma's planning to make a big trip out of town with Rodolphe. Mentions some details of what's needed.

 

 

Part 3, Ch 1:

         It was the verger, holding about twenty thick paper-

    bound volumes against his stomach.  They were "books about

    the cathedral."

 

         "Fool!" muttered Leon, hurrying out of the church.

 

         An urchin was playing in the square.

 

         "Go get me a cab!"

 

         The youngster vanished like a shot up the Rue des Quatre-

    Vents, and for a few minutes they were left alone, face to

    face and a little constrained.

 

         "Oh, Leon!  Really . . . I don't know whether I should!"

    she simpered.  Then, in a serious tone, "It's very improper,

    you know."

 

         "What's improper about it?' retorted the clerk.  "Every-

    body does it in Paris!"

 

         It was an irresistible and clinching argument.

 

         But there was no sign of a cab.  Leon was terrified lest

    she retreat into the church.  Finally the cab appeared.

 

         "Drive past the north door, at least!" cried the verger,

    from the entrance.  "Take a look at the Resurrection, the Last

    Judgment, Paradise, King David, and the souls of the damned in

    the flames of hell!"

 

         "Where does Monsieur wish to go?" asked the driver.

 

         "Anywhere!" said Leon, pushing Emma into the carriage.

 

         And the lumbering contraption rolled away.

 

         It went down the Rue Grand-Pont, crossed the Place des

    Arts, the Quai Napoleon and the Pont Neuf, and stopped in

    front of the statue of Pierre Corneille.

 

         "Keep going!" called a voice from within.

 

         It started off again, and gathering speed on the down-

    grade beyond the Carrefour Lafayette it came galloping up to

    the railway station.

 

         "No!  Straight on!" cried the same voice.

 

         Rattling out through the station gates, the cab soon

    turned into the Boulevard, where it proceeded at a gentl trot

    between the double row of tall elms.  The coachman wiped his

    brow, stowed his leather hat between his legs, and veered the

    cab off beyond the side lanes to the grass strip along the

    river front.

 

         It continued along the river on the cobbled towing path

    for a long time in the direction of Oyssel, leaving the is-

    lands behind.

 

         But suddenly it rushed off through Quatre-Mares, Sotte-

    ville, the Grande-Chaussee, the Rue d'Elbeuf, and made its

    third stop, this time at the Jardin des Plantes.

 

         "Drive on!" cried the voice, more furiously.

 

         And abruptly starting off again it went through Saint-

    Sever, along the Quai des Curandiers and the Quai aux Meules,

    recrossed the bridge, crossed the Place du Champ-de-Mars and

    continued on behind the garden of the hospital, where old men

    in black jackets were strolling in the sun on a terrace green

    with ivy.  It went up the Boulevard Bouvreuil, along the

    Boulevard Cauchoise, and traversed Mont-Riboudet as far as

    the hill at Deville.

 

         There it turned back, and from then on it wandered at

    random, without apparent goal.  It was seen at Saint-Pol, at

    Lescure, at Mont-Gargan, at Rouge-Mare and the Place du Gail-

    lardbois.  In the Rue Maladrerie, the Rue Dinanderie, and in

    front of one church after another, Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien,

    Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise.  In front of the customs house,

    at the Basse Vieille-Tour, at Trois-Pipes, and at the Cimeti-

    ere Monumental.  From his seat the coachman now and again cast

    a desperate glance at a cafe.  He couldn't conceive what loco-

    motive frenzy was making these people persist in refusing to

    stop.  He tried a few times, only to hear immediate angry ex-

    clamations from behind.  So he lashed the more furiously at

    his two sweating nags, and paid no attention whatever to bumps

    in the road.  He hooked into things right and left.  He was

    past caring, demoralized, and almost weeping from thirst,

    fatigue, and despair.

 

         Along the river front amidst the trucks and the barrels,

    along the streets from the shelter of the guard posts, the

    bourgeois stared wide-eyed at this spectacle unheard of in the

    provinces.  A carriage with drawn shades that kept appearing

    and reappearing, sealed tighter than a tomb and tossing like

    a ship.

 

         At a certain moment in the early afternoon, when the sun

    was blazing down most fiercely on the old silver-plated lamps,

    a bare hand appeared from under the little yellow cloth cur-

    tains and threw out some torn scraps of paper.  The wind caught

    them and scattered them, and they alighted at a distance, like

    white butterflies, on a field of flowering red clover.

 

         Then, about six o'clock, the carriage stopped in a side

    street near the Place Beauvoisine.  A woman alighted from it

    and walked off, her veil down, without a backward glance.

 

Leon's long ride with Emma in a stage coach, gettin it on.