The Archeology of Montaillou by Emmanuel La Roy Ladurie

Man not only had a soul, which most people believed to be immortal, but also a spirit.  When someone was asleep or dreaming, the spirit might escape from his body.  The people of Montaillou in general, and Pierre Maury in particular, were fascinated by the problem of dreams and by the exemplum of the lizard. Variations of this exemplum had been circulating for centuries.

 Once upon a time, said Philippe d’Alayrac of Coustaussa, two believers found themselves close to a river.  One of them fell asleep. The other stayed awake, and from the mouth of the sleeper he saw emerge a creature like a lizard.  Suddenly the lizard, using a plank, (or was it a straw?) which stretched from one bank to the other, crossed over the river.  On the other bank there was the fleshless skull of an ass. And the lizard ran in and out of the openings of the skull.  Then it came back over the plank and re-entered the sleeper’s mouth.  It did that once or twice.  Seeing which, the man who was awake thought of a trick: he waited until the lizard was on the other side of the river and approaching the ass’s skull. And then he took away the plank!  The lizard left the ass’s head and returned to the bank. But he could not get across! The plank was gone! Then the body of the sleeper began to thrash about, but it was unable to wake, despite the efforts of the watcher to arouse it from its sleep.  Finally the watcher put the plank back across the river. Then the lizard was able to get back and re-enter the body of the sleeper through the mouth. The sleeper immediately awoke; and he told his friend the dream he had just had.

‘I dreamed’, he said, ’that I was crossing a river on a plank; then I went into a great palace with many towers and rooms, and when I wanted to come back to the place from which I had set out, there was no plank! I could not get across: I would have been drowned in the river.  That was why I thrashed about (in my sleep). Until the plank was put back again and I could return.’

The two believers wondered greatly at this adventure, and went and told it to a parfait, who gave them the key to the mystery: the soul, he told them, remains in a man’s body all the time; but a man’s spirit or mind goes in and out, just like the lizard which went from, the sleeper’s mouth to the Ass’s head and vice versa.

Every self-respecting Montaillou shepherd, whether in Sabarthes or in Catalonia, told the Cathar myth of the Fall over and over again.

At the beginning of the story the spirits, seduced by the Evil One, fell straight through the hole in Heaven down to earth. Around the fire in the evening, the peasants went over the details.  At first God did not notice what was happening, then he was surprised and did not understand, finally he grew angry and hastily put his foot over the hole in Heaven.  But it was late, and many of the spirits had already fallen to earth, where they became victims of the feminine wiles and of the tunics of human flesh prepared for them by the Devil.  Then began the lower part of the mythic cycle –metempsychosis [the supposed transmigration at death of the soul of a human being or animal into a new body]. After various incarnations, both in the bodies of animals and in those of human beings, some souls would succeed in coming full circle.  Having been the souls of parfaits , or of believers who received the consolamentum  [the most significant ceremony in Cathar theology, marking the transition from ordinary believer  to a Parfait, one of the elect] , they ascended after death into the Heaven from which they had originally fallen.

When all the good souls had left the earth and gone back to their home in Paradise, there would be no just man left on earth and it would be of no further interest.  Then the end of the world became possible.  The four elements would merge. Then, said the shepherds of Montaillou, echoing the brothers Authie, the sky would fall down on the earth, the sun and the moon would go out, the sea would be consumed by fire and fire would be consumed by the sea.  The earth would be a lake of pitch and sulphur: Hell.

Believers, who had been ‘consoled’ now united in the great confraternity of those villagers of Montaillou who had attained salvation, and danced on the Last Day, trampling underfoot all unbelievers, as the lambs dance on the grass in the meadows, or on the stubble of the fields when they have been harvested.

What did the happiness of the souls of the just consist in, when they lived in Paradise?  According to Pierre Authie, there every soul will have as much wealthy and happiness as every other; and all will be as one. And all the souls will love one another as if they loved the soul of their father or of their children. One again, the sacred is only the social, transfigured.  Not a word about any beatific vision.  For the people of Montaillou, Heaven would be one huge domus.  .  .

More generally, the case of Montaillou corresponds to the models put forward by the Russian economist A.V. Chayanov in his Theory of Peasant Economy, and applying to rural life almost everywhere in the West before the time of Adam Smith. In this kind of society every homo oeconomicus is the organizer of one family economic unit in which employees play only a small or occasional part, and in which the overall economy is made up of the interrelations between the family units. The general features of the domus in the Pays d’Aillon correspond to those of this ‘domestic system’, with division of labor according to sex.  The women are in charge of the fire, housekeeping, cooking, gardening, green-stuff for the animals and for the family and the fetching of water.  The men look after the fields and woods and flocks, with occasional female help which may be seasonal and migrant, or local and supplied by the family. In such a system the woman deals with ‘indoor’ details’ and the man with ‘outdoor matters’. Production for the market is not neglected (mostly sheep, with poultry and eggs as a subsidiary contribution), but the main effort is directed towards the more or less satisfactory subsistence of the family itself rather than towards ‘the creation of accumulated surpluses’.

The aim is not so much ‘the extended reproduction of agricultural capital’ as ‘the production of usable values’ such as food and clothing. Abundance is not asked for, but want can be avoided and dealt with.   People are not necessarily lazy, but without the blandishments of surplus or the ever-increasing accumulation of capital there are no inordinate incentives to work.  The peasant family, when it is large enough, with sons and daughters old enough to work, as well as adults, functions below its capacity.  It thus exemplifies Chayanov’s law that ‘in a system of domestic production for use, labor intensity varies inversely with labor capacity in relation to the unit of production’.  This refusal to over-exert oneself is reflected in all the naps taken, the time spent sitting in the sun and the many allusions to days off and saints’ days.  Childhood, which will eventually produce the labor that makes leisure possible, is the center of this domestic system, which therefore surrounds young children with love.

The absence of increasing surpluses makes usury and the infliction of heavy tithes difficult. In a society where almost everyone is poor without being too afflicted by about it, and where no one aspires to ever-growing wealth, the real poor and the landless proletariat show little aggression,.  In Montaillou, lads whose probable lot is poverty simply go away with the migrating flocks to the masculine, bachelor civilization of the shepherds, and thus to a true market economy.  The producer’s ownership of the means of production is a rule of the system fairly closely obeyed in Montaillou itself; the men of the domus, even if they are not particularly well off, own a piece of land as well as their house; and when the poor shepherds grow older and return to the village they usually possess a few dozen sheep.

With the shepherds we emerge from the cellular universe of the domus.  The young bachelors go off to the mountain pastures and Catalonia.  As freelance employees they are more modern and emancipated than their fathers and brothers who stay at home.  The shepherds, obliged but not unwilling to be the lovers of Dame Poverty, sometimes manage to give their exacting mistress the slip. The Inquisition, detaching this wandering group from its base, confers a fascinating independence on Pierre Maury. The Cathar pastor’s cabin contrasts with the villager’s domus, just as true masculine friendship contrasts with parochial propinquity and all its rancor.

The harsh repression which fell on the village between 1308 and 1325 grew lighter afterwards, and finally disappeared. The Black Death struck in 1348, though its impact may have been comparatively light in upper Ariege.  Then there were other plagues, and the ravages of different armies.  By 1390, there were only twenty-three hearths in Montaillou, half or less than half than what there had been between 1300-20.  But even though they were decimated, the leading families were still there, despite the Inquisition, despite epidemics, despite wars. The inhabitants of Montaillou in 1390 were called Benet, Clergue, Maurs, Ferrier, Baille, Fort, Azema, Pourcel, Rives, Authie, Argelliers. There is only one name which may be new. The domus held out. They were not adulterated by immigration; the mountains were too forbidding.  Montaillou continued much as it was throughout the following centuries – in the 1970s there was still a Clergue in the local telephone directory.  Now its people are abandoning the fields up in the mountains, and so threatening the stability of an ancient habitat which neither repression nor contagion was able to destroy.

  Montaillou culture was directed towards mere reproduction, self-preservation and the perpetuation of the domus in the world below. The only element of ‘growth’ which happened to manifest itself in the fourteenth century had little to do with economics.  It was concerned with the after-life and with a kind of spiritual transcendence, locally centered on the Albigensian idea of Heaven.

Jacque Fournier took it upon himself to remedy all that. Today Catharism is no more than a dead star, whose cold fascinating light reaches us now after an eclipse of more than half a millennium.  But Montaillou itself is much more than a courageous but fleeting deviation.  It is the factual history of ordinary people.  It is Pierre and Beatrice and their love; it is Pierre Maury and his flock; it is the breath of life restored through a repressive Latin register that is a monument of Occitan literature.  Montaillou is the physical warmth of the ostal, together with the ever-recurring promise of peasant heaven. The one within the other, the one supporting the other.

Preface to Montaillou, a Langue d'Oc Village from 1294 to 1324 by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

Small subjects make great books. Didn’t the great French poet write a superb text on “Lice-Hunters”? And doesn’t Boileau’s  Lutrin, one of the best comic epyllions in the French language, spoof some of the scuffles in a Parisian church over the position of a podium from which sacred texts were read? I write these lines to forestall the objections of my American readers who might well be skeptical when confronted by the notion that a work of mine might be of interest to a limited public, even one with a population of three hundred million souls.

It can be argued that a drop of water, among an infinity of apparently similar drops, offers no particular interest.  But if such a drop is regarded through a microscope, it may reveal, being sufficiently impure, an entire collection of enthralling microbes, bacteria, and viruses. A drop of water and a microscope? Or perhaps a village and the Inquisition:  Montaillou’s misfortune was, in fact, to be examined, shaken up, forced to confess, to “spit out the truth” by the implacable inquisitors.  One of them revealed an extraordinary talent for interrogation: Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamier was head of a local Inquisition “Service” and, further, was quite familiar with the dialect ( d’oc) of the village he administered. The merits of this exalted bishop, equivocal as they might have been, were later rewarded by his election to the papacy.  In 1334, Jacques Fournier became the illustrious sovereign pontiff known as Benedict XII, a specialist in theological discourse about the Christian soul’s survival after death.  Thus, through Fournier, the obscure village of Montaillou, long forgotten in the remote Pyrenees, became connected to the highest office of the Roman Catholic Church.

I did not invent or even discover Fournier’s inquisitorial documents. Produced, no doubt, in cruel collaboration with the villagers of Montaillou.  These old parchments were discovered by the German Catholic priest and theologian Johan Dollinger, who would elsewhere reveal himself during his long and energetic crusade against papal infallibility.  But his most inspired action was to publish parts of the inquisitorial records of Benedict XII.  Later, Monseigneur Vidal, a connoisseur of the Montaillou dossiers, published his work on the village. (Vidal also served as a priest in Moscow during the Russian Revolution of 1917. He offers accounts of his harrowing experience in various  publications.) Lastly, Jean Duvernoy, a jurist and advocate for Electricite de France, provided a 20^th century Latin edition of Jacques Fournier’s original text about Montaillou. The works of Dollinger, Vidal, and Duvernoy have inspired me to enter the arena myself and to produce, I hope, an original and valuable work.

Starting with the initial document, I have sought to reveal all the factors that gave form and figure to the life of the “Montalionais” community at the beginning of the fourteenth century. I noted, first of all, the major and minor powers present: agents of the King of France, a “national” monarch if we mat use the word “nation;” and the representatives of the Count de Foix, who was, in fact, the authentic regional ruler.

Secondly, I have tried to discover and reveal the basic entity at the heart of village life, the peasant family, or, more precisely, the agricultural and rural family-household, not very different at Montaillou from other villages in the Pyrenees.  This family household is called domus by the Latin scribes or ushers of the Inquisition. It is called ostal in the southern French, Occitan, dialect spoken byy the peasants of this region. The “domus-ostal” dictates relations between men and women, parents and children, and the domestic employees that comprise the household; at the same time the “domus-ostal” controls the relationships of villagers to agricultural and grazing lands in mountains or on the plains.  Within this domiciliary context, I have envisioned one dominant family, the Clergues, who were in a position to influence decisively, and sometimes oppressively, village community life and regulate its contacts with the outside world.

More than twenty years ago, I had the honor of discussing this Clergue family with President Francois Mitterand, then leader of the opposition to Valery Giscard d’Estaing.  At that time, Monsieur Mitterand had approvingly read my book about Montaillou. We quite agreed that the Cure Clergue, an avowed fornicator, self-assured and overbearing, was the typical type of the collaborateur. Certainly we had known this sort of man in France during World War II, but the people of Montaillou had already encountered his like in the early fourteenth century. 

What was required of Cure Pierre Clergue, a member of a powerful local familia, was to serve his French masters, who occupied the surrounding Languedoc.  They controlled the territory of the Count de Foix, who had become a satellite of Capetian power, and ran the Inquisition of Carcasonne, which terrorized the villagers.  Additionally, the collaborator Pierre Clergue was responsible for protecting the interests of his local subordinates as well as his parishioners at Montaillou, who were threatened and oppressed by the French occupants of the surrounding region.  Hence, Clergue had to hold fast to both ends of the chain, preserving the link with France while protecting the indigenous population.

The local community was not isolated; it had potentially dangerous links with the outside world.  But Montaillou also sustained other relations, relations more exalted, more enriching, and dangerous in their way. The Montaillou sheep grazed on the lowland plains in winter; but they climbed higher during the summers, where the melting snow freed the grazing grounds.  This made shepherding work easier in mountainous areas and allowed shepherds to have contact with remote areas such as Catalonia to the south, far from the lands of Count de Foix. In other words, the shepherds of Montaillou, for example, could break the yoke of limiting and even stifling provincialism.

Montaillou was also a passionate and romantic community: high amorous passions, or sometimes even ordinary ones, could break forth and have free reign, a fact clearly expressed by Inquisition scribes always eager to get their teeth into gauloiseries.  The theories of Denis de Rougemont and Philippe Aries – according to which love-as-passion and the sentiment attached to childhood were of recent invention – were challenged by Inquisition dossiers (bias and implacable, true, yet objective in their own way). Death, of course, was interpreted in Montaillou according to Christian tenets, hardly tarnished or contested by the Catharist heresy.  As a rule, one believed in new life of body or soul after death, in Paradise or in Hell, or even in Purgatory, according to one’s behavior while alive.  It is a fact, however, that other points of view were known in Montaillou. For example, adherents of the Catharist or Albigensian doctrines believed not so much in Paradise or in Hell as in the possibility of reincarnation.  One sees in Fournier’s dossier that, fairly widespread in Montaillou was the belief in transmigration of the souls of the dead into the living.  This belief in reincarnation derives not from China, perhaps from India, but in any case from the East. Indeed the old folkloric notions about ghosts and phantoms appearing after death strike us as inherited from paganism, even from prehistoric times, yet these notions concerning revenants were still alive in Montaillou.

 One might say that the “ways of believing” of this community were pluralistic, formed by the amalgamation of ideas dating from several ancient periods. Think of those great sedimentary “blending bowls” constituted of superimposed geological strata: the Aquitain Basin, the Parisian Basin .  .  .  or think of the Grand Canyon of Colorado, similarly stratified all along the lengths of its cliffs.  In relation to these great structures, some geographical, other conceptual, Montaillou, violently illuminated by the raw and sometimes suspect lights of the Inquisition, serves as a searchlight or a powerful reflector, shining its luminous beams into the consciousness and even the very existence of our brothers who lived long ago.

Doctor's Report on Madame Bovary by Avital Ronell

E. Bovary’s downfall was neither gradual nor unmotivated.  There was even a professor from Berkeley, California, who claims to have discovered the double source of her death drive: the two-chambered crypt built around the lost mother and brother of Emma Bovary. While we do not care to dispute this conclusion, neither are we inclined to take into consideration fanciful arguments construed by literature professors.  It is our task only to confirm that Ms. Bovary suffered incalculable damage as the result of her husband’s egregious admittance to the field of medicine  There is no doubt in our minds that Charles Bovary carried the stain of his father’s irresponsible professional engagement.

As Dr. Lacan has noted, every subject belongs to a circuit that transmits error and secrecy from one generation to the next. Like Faust before him, Charles Bovary was the beneficiary of a history of corruption in medical practice.  Our records show that his father Monsieur Charles-Denis-Bartholome Bovary had once been an assistant surgeon in the army.  He was “forced to leave the service in 1812 for corrupt practices with regard to conscription”(3). Charles Bovary, however, was no Faust.  He was filled to satisfaction with the knowledge he felt himself to have attained.  So ignorant was he that his wife, asking for the meaning of a word she had come across in one of her many novels, was obliged to realize that “this man taught nothing” (135).  In our estimation, and after lengthy deliberation, this complacency of the mediocre in itself may have sufficed to charge him with willfully introducing the destruction of his legal companion.

Faced with the  beance of a non-teaching, a full blockage in the transmission of knowledge, a distension of transferential activity upon which all healthy contact is founded, Ms. Bovary had nowhere to turn.  It is clear to us that she was an exceptionally talented woman who experienced difficulty, due primary identificatory processes, in distinguishing between the Innen and Aussenwelt (Dr. Freud).  We dispute recent reports of her regression to oral cannibalistic libido while it is evident to us that she sought the phallus in the desire of the Other. However, the Other had the indecency of disappearing, which led Ms. B. to endless attempts at restoring it to the function of an object of imaginary incorporation.

Ms. B.’s  psyche was disposed to drug dependency at an early age.  It was made clear to her from the start, however, that she would have to wait until the next century in order to properly shoot up.  The crucial catastrophe that led her to assume a full posture of substance dependency occurred when Gustave Flaubert laced the novel with a fatal autobiographical injection.  Mr. Flaubert was not himself in control of the substance he administered; however, it dealt the fatal blow to Emma B.  Discharging his poison upon her, Mr. Flaubert was henceforth free to indulge in hallucinatory trances that he habitually termed “writing.”  It might be added, for the sake of scientific objectivity, that Flaubert frequented notoriously dubious characters: a Baudelaire, a Gautier, and not the least of all, his own mistress, a woman whose loose and reprobate character, a poet, and at one time the lover of the philosopher and statesman Victor Cousin.  Her child, Henrietta, was not fathered by her legal husband.  Additionally, we have noted Mr. Flaubert’s addictive intimacies with Alfred Le Poittevin, whom he incorporated, and subsequently with Louis Bouilhet who virtually dictated the particulars of Flaubert’s oeuvre.

It was the moment when Mr. Flaubert was performing in the novel a double oedipal bypass that all Ms. B.’s hopes were dashed. The operation was a complete success for Mr. Flaubert;  it destroyed the heroine definitively.  As the result of the absolute infighting of medicine and pharmacy, when everything was staked on the resurrection of a third leg, the heroine was made to enter a strategic zone that declared her loser.

We owe thanks here to professor Harry Levin, formerly of Harvard University, for signaling “the parallel lives of the author and the heroine daily, weekly, monthly, yearly”.  .  . Flaubert’s dependency upon his brother at the moment he develops toxicological theories (narcissistic self-hallucination induced by over-reading) will prove fatal .  .  .

The entire scene originates in a scheme concocted by the neighboring apothecary, Mr. Homalis.  Exposed as the drama of the signifier par excellence, the critical operation comes down to a young man’s clubfoot. The oedipal showdown commences with the instigating utterance, offered by the apothecary, “Are you a man or not? (151) Equally obnoxious was the provocation, “After all, what’s there to lose?” (150)  Indeed, the answer to the second question obtains in the stakes mounted by the first question.  All the loose ends, the bruises and errors converge in the place of a botched operation. This was Emma B.’s  last chance for scoring on sublimation, displacement, and pride,.  Ever looking “to have something more solid than love to lean on” (150), Emma is willing to invest the future of her husband’s career psychically.  But the future for Emma arrives as a modified form of the concealed past. The crypt formation, concretized and exteriorized, is prepared on the model of “a kind of box weighing about eight pounds’ (151) that was fitted to the leg of a young man, a certain Hippolyte.  The crypt-effect attending the operation is intensified further by the materiality of the bandages, “a whole pyramid of bandages – the apothecary’s entire stock “(152). The intense cooperation of medicine, crypt, and pharmacy held out the last hope, it was meant to give Emma something more solid than love to lean on.  .  .

It was quite an event in the village, that leg amputation.(157)

Against the pain of this impossible operation the mind begins to alter. Charles, for his part, goes quickly. The drunk arises as a defense against medicine. “Charles looked at her with the clouded eyes of a drunken man as he listened to the amputee’s last screams; they came in a succession of long, varied tones  interspersed with short, fitful shrieks, like the howling of some animal being slaughtered far away” (160).

In sum, our commission has found the operating theater to generate the exciting cause, the event of no return for Emma B. Where Flaubert has thought to exorcise his private Achilles’ phantoms, he has in truth reinserted the call of the phantom in the house of Bovary.  Henceforth she would be reincorporating the loosened Other according to the exigencies of “intoxication.” Faced with the event of no return [her husband’s professional reputation ruined], her mind is about to alter according to the semantic bifurcation that adultery convenes.  Emma B. turns to painkillers. Flaubert’s interjections are precise and to the point:

Her dreams fallen into the mud like wounded swallows .  .  . Collapsing under the furious onslaughts of her pride. She reveled in all the malicious ironies  of triumphant adultery. The memory of her lover came back to her with intoxicating charm .  .  .  and Charles seemed detached from her life, as permanently departed, as impossible and annihilated as though he were on the point of death, gasping his last before her eyes. (159-60)

The wound precedes everything; or, at least the theater of impossible operations stages the turn towards the external supplement. Emma B. buys the prosthesis for Hippolyte, ending the drama of the oedipal operation with a wooden leg. From this point onward she became a supplier and user of the artificial prosthesis.

Emma B. continued limply to live on, soon discovering the rush of capital from the local junkie, Mlheureux: “Emma abandoned herself to this easy way of satisfying all her whims” (163). She ‘remained under the influence of a kind of idiotic infatuation .  .  .  a blissful torpor; and her soul, sinking into that intoxication, shriveled and drowned like the Duke of Clarence in his butt of malmsey.”  Her everyday behavior changed; she even had the audacity to talk with Rodolphe in public with a cigarette in her mouth.” (165)

For his part, “Charles had not followed [his mother’s] advice about forbidding Emma to read novels’ (166) She goes into convulsions because of an apricot basket.

NURSE’S REPORT: Somehow they had stopped feeding her. Each time,  their departure seemed sudden. Demanding satisfaction from her life was her big mistake. “Naïve”, as Mr. Flaubert would say, and temporarily misleading. We’d known this disposition since Faust and all the megarock stars beginning with Goethe. There was nothing that would intervene to institute distance or superego; the law of the father was out of working order, which is why she could not abide deferral or denial.  In a way, she took the route of every belle ame in the ward.  Living the fusional desire, she was exposed to the toxic maternal, en route to dust and dissolution.  But where the belle ame strengthens on the ineffable, transcending even the rude materiality of books, Emma B. madly demanded that the ineffable satisfy her, that it go to the encounter with life.

Crack Wars; Literature Addiction Mania by Avital Ronell, University of Illinois Press, 2004

The Wedding by Gustave Flaubert

The guests arrived early in their vehicles: one-horse carts, two-wheeled charabancs, old cabriolets lacking hoods, and delivery vans with leather curtains.  The young people from the nearest villages came in wagons in which they were standing in rows, holding on to the rails to keep from falling, moving at a trot and jolted about. They came from twenty-five miles off, from Goderville, Normanville, and Cany.  All the relatives from each side had been invited; they made up with estranged friends; they had written to long-lost acquaintances.

From time to time whiplashes could be heard from behind the hedge. Soon the gate would open and a cart would come in.  Galloping up to the foot of the steps, it would stop short and pour out its passengers, who would exit from each side rubbing their knees and stretching their arms.  The ladies, in bonnets, wore city-style dresses, gold watch chain capes with the ends tucked into their belts, or small colored scarves attached in back with a pin and revealing the napes of their necks.  The boys, dressed like their fathers, seemed uncomfortable in their new suits (many of them were wearing boots for the first time in their lives). At their sides you could see, not breathing a word, in the white dress of her first communion, some cousin or older sister, ruddy faced, bewildered, hair greases with rose pomade, and terribly frightened of soiling her gloves.

Since there weren’t enough stableboys to unhitch all the horses, the gentlemen rolled up their sleeves and attended to it themselves.  They wore, according to their social position, suits, frock coats, jackets, or waistcoats: good suits, which received all the care of the family and left the closet only for solemn occasions; frock coats with large tails floating in the wind, cylindrical collars, and pockets as big as sacks; jackets of coarse cloth, usually worn with caps that had copper rims on their visors; very short waistcoats, with two buttons in the back as close together as eyes and tails that looked as if they were carved from one piece of wood by a carpenter’s ax.  Still others (but these people, obviously, would eating at the lower end of the table) wore holiday blouses, with collars turned down over the shoulders, backs gathered in tiny pleats, and a very low waistline marked with a sewn-on belt.

And the shirts bulged over the chests like breastplates.  Everyone was freshly shorn, ears sticking out of heads. All were close shaven; some, having risen before dawn, and not seeing clearly how to shave, had diagonal gashes under their noses or, along the jaws, skinned-off areas the size of three-franc pieces, which had been inflamed by the open air on the way and which, with their pink patches, gave a marbled effect to all those fat, white, shiny faces.

The mayor’s chambers being a mile or so from the farm, they went there on foot and came back the same way after the ceremony at the church. The procession, at first holding together like a colored scarf waving in the countryside, all along the narrow path winding through the fields of unripe corn, soon grew longer and separated into different groups, many lagging behind to chat.  The fiddler led the way with his violin decorated with ribbon rosettes; the bride and the groom followed, then relatives and friends in no special order, and the children stayed in the rear, enjoying themselves by plucking the ears of young oat shoots of by playing games and hiding.  Emma’s dress, too long, was dragging a little at the bottom; she would stop once in a while to pick it up, and then, delicately, with her gloved fingers, she would pull off the blades of grass and thistle burrs while Charles would wait with empty hands until she had finished.

Old Rouault, a new silk hat on his head and the cuffs of his black suit covering his hands up to his fingernails, offered his arm to Madame Bovary senior. As for Monsieur Bovary senior, feeling contempt for all these people, he had come dressed simply in a single-breasted frock coat of a military cut and was telling off-color jokes to a fair-haired young farm girl.  She curtseyed and blushed and didn’t know what to answer.  The other wedding guests talked about business matters or played little pranks on one another, anticipating the gaiety in advance. By listening carefully one could still hear the fiddler scraping away as he continued to play along the road. When he noticed that they were far behind him, he stopped to catch his breath, waxed his bow thoroughly with resin so that the strings would respond better, and then began to walk again, raising and lowering the neck of his fiddle in order to keep good time for himself.  The noise of the instrument frightened the little birds away.

The table was set in the cart shed. On it there were four sirloins, six chicken fricassees, some stewed veal, three legs of lamb, and, in the middle, a fine roast suckling pig, flanked by four pork sausages and cooked with sorrel. In the corners there were decanters filled with brandy.  The bottled sweet cider was frothing thickly around the corks, and all the glasses had already been filled to the brim with wine.  Huge platters of yellow custard that quivered at the slightest movement of the table had the initials of the new couple traced on their smooth surface in arabesques of sugared almonds.

They had gone to Yvetot to find a baker for the pastry and the nougats. As he was a newcomer to the area, he had taken special pains; and he brought for desert with his own hands a layered cake that elicited loud  hurrahs. The base was a square of blue cardboard representing a temple with porticos and colonnades, and there were stucco statuettes all around it in niches papered with gilded stars. Then, on the second tier there was a turret of Savoy cake, surrounded by tiny fortifications in angelica, almonds, raisins, and orange segments; and finally, on the top layer, which was a green meadow on which there were rocks with candied lakes and boats of hazelnut shells, you could see a small Cupid, poised on a chocolate swing whose two posts ended in two real rosebuds, representing finials, at the summit.

They ate until evening. When they grew tired of sitting, they went for walks in the yard or played a game of quoits in the barn, then came back to the table. Toward the end, a few fell asleep and snored.  But everyone revived during coffee; the sang, performed feats of strength, lifted weights, played a game called “went under your thumbs,” tried to lift carts on their shoulders, made coarse jokes, kissed the women.  The horses, gorged to the nostrils with oats, could barely be squeezed into their shafts when it was time to leave late in the evening; they kicked and reared and broke their harnesses, while their masters swore or laughed; and all night long in the moonlight there were runaway carriages galloping along the roads, plunging into ditches, jolting over tall piles of stones, and bumping into the embankments, with women leaning out of the doors to grasp the reins.

Those who remained at Les Bertaux spent the night drinking in the kitchen.  The children had fallen asleep under the benches.

The bride begged her father to be spared the customary wedding-night jokes.  Nevertheless, a fishmonger cousin of theirs (the same who had brought a pair of soles as a wedding gift) was about to spit water through the keyhole when old Rouault arrived just in time to stop him, and explained to him that his son-in-law’s dignified position did not permit such impertinences.  The cousin gave in only reluctantly to these arguments.  Inwardly he accused Rouault of being conceited, and we went to join in a corner four or five other guests who, having by chance received the end cuts of meat several times in a row while at the table, had also decided that they had been badly treated and were whispering guardedly against their host and wishing him evil.

Madame Bovary senior had not unclenched her teeth all day long.  She had not been consulted about her daughter-in-law’s dress, nor about the wedding arrangements. She went to bed early.  Her husband, instead of following her, sent off to Saint-Victor for some cigars and smoked until daybreak, all the while drinking grogs of kirsch, a mixture unknown to the company, which raised him even higher in their esteem.

Charles was humorless; he did not shine during the evening. He replied stolidly to the witty remarks, puns, double entendre jokes, compliments, and broad remarks that they seemed to feel called upon to direct at him from the soup coarse on.

The next day, however, he seemed to be a new man.  It was he who could have been taken for the virgin of the night before, rather than the bride, whose self-control gave no opportunity for conjecture.  Even the most daring jokesters were silenced, and they looked at her with bewilderment when she passed near them.

But Charles hid nothing.  He called her “my wife,” spoke to her in familiar terms, asked everyone where she was, sought her everywhere, and frequently drew her into the yard, where he could be seen from afar, between the trees, putting his arm around her waist, leaning towards her as e walked, and burying his face in the tucker of her bodice.  .  .

Madame Bovary