EMMA
Thanks.
HOMAIS
And you, Mr. Léon?
LÉON
I thank you all the same.
(The bell, suspended from a pendulum rings ten times.)
HOMAIS
Ten o’clock. What would you say now, Doctor, to a game of dominoes in three hundreds?
CHARLES
That would revive me. When I was a medical student in Rouen, I developed a passion for dominoes. How many courses didn’t it make me fail. It was my sole fantasy.
HOMAIS
It’s necessary that youth pass.
MADAME HOMAIS
You’re getting settled in as you like?
EMMA
Many things that I wanted to keep for memory were abandoned or lost in transport.
CHARLES
It’s correct to say that two moves are as bad as a fire. And what expenses moving necessitates.
MADAME HOMAIS
If I can be useful to you, dispose of me quite freely. I need to tell you when I get provisions. Here, like everywhere, you find the same thing at the best price at different places. For example, your supply of butter—
EMMA
I will send Félicité to you for all that—if you really would. She’ll understand better than I will.
MADAME HOMAIS
Ah, as for the garden.
EMMA
I don’t concern myself with gardens.
CHARLES
That’s very regrettable, since it involves exercise. But my wife prefers to read in her room.
MADAME HOMAIS
All day long?
HOMAIS
If Madame will do me the honor of using it, I have at her disposal a library composed of the best authors, Voltaire, Delille, Pigault-Lebrun—the Echo of Feuilletons.
EMMA
I’ve read all that.
JUSTIN
(entering timidly) Madame—
CHARLES
Your play.
JUSTIN
Athalia
MADAME HOMAIS
Athalia has caught the colic again. Excuse me. Poor sweetie! I need to go to her.
HOMAIS
Two and a half ounces of farina of flax, prepared as a poultice, and watered with three drops of laudanum. (Madame Homais leaves with Justin) Double six.
LÉON
I could give you the address of a reading room in Rouen where I subscribe myself. Hivert carries the volumes back and forth. Here, far from the world, it’s my sole distraction.
CHARLES
Four.
HOMAIS
Spades.
LÉON
What could be nicer than to be next to the fireplace in an evening with a book while the wind beats at the window panes—?
EMMA
Yes.
LÉON
The hours pass. One walks motionless in the country that one thinks to see. One recognizes in the corner of a page vague ideas that one had, and one has forgotten. It’s like a dark image which comes back from a distance.
EMMA
I’ve experienced that.
LÉON
It’s especially the poets that I love. I find verse more tender than prose, and they are better at making one cry.
EMMA
Still, it’s living in the long run. Now, on the contrary, I adore long stories that introduce fear. I detest common heroes, and temperate feelings, as there are in Nature.
LÉON
No question. What’s the use of imagining if what one imagines is not better than life?
EMMA
I remember—I was twelve when I read Paul and Virginia, and I dreamed and dreamed.
A WOMAN’S VOICE
Dreamed.
(While someone breathes and causes flickering of the lamplight, invisible beings answer in a muffled way. Emma doesn’t seem to hear the voices and doesn’t interrupt her conversation with Léon; from a distance one of the real phrases of her conversation interrupts the phantasmagoric murmuring.)
VOICES
The little Bamboo hut.
The Negro Domingo.
The dog, Fido.
The good little brother who’s going to find red fruits for you in the big trees—as tall as clocks, or who runs with naked feet on the sand—to bring you a bird’s nest.
EMMA
And what emotion when I discovered Walter Scott.
VOICES
Dwellings
Guard rooms.
Minstrels.
EMMA
It was a fine time. I believed I lived those adventures, and palpitated under the costumes of characters.
VOICES
We’ve all been the young girl in a white dress who pecked at a dove through the bars of a gothic cage—
Or she who, smiling and head bowed, pulls off the painted petals of a flower.
In the darkest part of the forest, where they kill the postilions of all relays, we fainted in an abandoned pavilion. Janissaries presented us, captive and naked to Sultans who smoked narghile water pipes beneath trellises. Knights risked their lives to clasp us in their arms and we fainted.
EMMA
He has words like magic which soothe the depths of the soul with unexpected sweetness.
VOICES
Lagoons, gondoliers.
Rafts, in the moonlight.
Melancholy ruins.
Songs of dying swains.
Falling leaves.
(The clock strikes twelve. Light returns. Charles and Homais have finished their game of dominoes, and are dozing. Emma and Léon continue to speak in low voices.)
EMMA
Midnight already!
LÉON
Look, they are dozing.
EMMA
Hush!
LÉON
Hush! So then, after this morning, your father placed you in a pension with the Ursulines of Rouen. And then?
EMMA
What to say! I loved the convent.