830
PARTISAN REVIEW
brow covered with cold drops, on those quivering lips, in those wild
eyes, in the strain of those arms, something vague and dreary that
seemed to
Uon
to glide between them subtly as if to separate them.
Beginning as an image associated with aroused sexuality, the serpent
eventually suggests separation, corruption, and death, concentrating
thus, with bold traditionalism, the significance of the serpent as phallus
and as inhabitant of the tomb, cult-object of love and death-deity;
and evoking the significance of the goddess of beauty and love as Kore,
daughter of Chthon, bride of death.
The final adulterous episode begins with Emma in a cab with
Leon, departing from the Rouen cathedral. Behind them is the beadle's
voice, shouting, "The Resurrection, the last Judgment, Paradise, King
David, and the Condemned in Hell-flames," and in counterpoint
against this eschatology, Leon from within the cab grunts out street–
names to the driver and tells him, "Go on! Go on!" while
The good folk opened large wonder-stricken eyes at this sight, so extra–
ordinary in the provinces, a cab with blinds drawn, and which ap–
peared thus constantly shut more closely than a tomb.
Emma had dreamed of a honeymoon "in post-chaises behind blue
silken curtains"; she makes her adulterous visits in the Hirondelle,
going between Yonville and Rouen. The good folk of Rouen might
well open large wonder-stricken eyes at the sight of the tomb-like cab,
for it is drawn by Eros and Thanatos, and it has come from Eleusis
and passed through Jerusalem.
From the beginning, Emma's sensual life has opened to her the
perspective of the abyss, the abyss of infinite feeling hardly discrim–
inable from the abyss of infinite non-feeling. "Her journey to Vaubyes–
sard had made a hole in her life, like one of those great crevasses that
a storm will sometimes make in one night in mountains."
Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and
lightnings,-a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolu–
tionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart
into the abyss.
"She wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris." Her sick-
