CLARISSA AND EMMA AS PHEDRE
831
ness,
amour-maladie>
is of her nature; that is, it is of the senses as
such, meaning life and therefore meaning death, and it is not "con–
ditioned" by her special social lot. Even before her first expedition
in adultery, "she was lost in the terrible cold that pierced her"; "no
help came, no sun rose, there was night on all sides." Charles vaguely
feels "something fatal and incomprehensible whirling round him,"
and Rodolphe does not understand "what was all this worry about
so simple an affair as love." Lheureux understands. He is already trail–
ing Rodolphe and Emma at the fair, drawn by the death-smell, and
he arrives instantly after the arrangement for the assignations with
Leon. Hippolyte, too, is close. His cries, "sharp spasms like the far-off
howling of some beast being slaughtered," traverse the scene of
Emma's illumination, when she sees Charles as irrescuably ineffectual,
repents of "her past virtue as of a crime," and revels "in all the evil
ironies of triumphant adultery." Against this abyss that smells of sperm
and decomposition, and Grchestrated with the cries of Hippolyte, there
sounds, on Sundays, the monotonous humming of Binet's lathe, turn–
ing out napkin-rings: the idiotic concentration of the artisan, sunlit
against the cold shadow of the sensual ages. Binet's senseless work is an
extreme version of the environing social abstractness, and because it
is insane it enters into more profound context with Emma's doom.
When she goes up to the attic to read Rodolphe's jilt-letter, she hears
Binet's lathe in the street below:
The luminous ray that came straight up from below drew the weight
of her body towards the abyss ... she had but to yield, to let herself
be taken; and the humming of the lathe never ceased, like an angry
voice calling her.
The insanity of an abstract world is for a moment identified with the
insanity of the abyss: the two deaths for a savage moment identified–
that of the living-dying and that of the dead-living.
On her return from her last trip to Rouen, she is with Homais
in the Hirondelle. "All within her and around her was abandoning
her. She felt lost, sinking at random into indefinable abysses." And
immediately the counterpointed detail of the bourgeois routine is
offered, ironically accentuating, like the humming of Binet's lathe,
the hysteria and doom of the abyss: Homais has purchased six
che-
