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noise with every spoonful; and, as he was getting fatter,

the puffed-out cheeks seemed to push the eyes, always

small, up to the temples.

Sometimes Emma tucked the red borders of his under-

vest unto his waistcoat, rearranged his cravat, and threw

away the dirty gloves he was going to put on; and this was

not, as he fancied, for himself; it was for herself, by a

diffusion of egotism, of nervous irritation. Sometimes, too,

she told him of what she had read, such as a passage in a

novel, of a new play, or an anecdote of the ‘upper ten’

that she had seen in a feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was

something, an ever-open ear, and ever-ready approbation.

She confided many a thing to her greyhound. She would

have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to the

pendulum of the clock.

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At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting

for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she

turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life,

seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon.

She did not know what this chance would be, what wind

would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her,

if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with

anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning,

as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she

listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered

that it did not come; then at sunset, always more

saddened, she longed for the morrow.

Spring came round. With the first warm weather, when

the pear trees began to blossom, she suffered from

dyspnoea.

From the beginning of July she counted how many

weeks there were to October, thinking that perhaps the

Marquis d’Andervilliers would give another ball at

Vaubyessard. But all September passed without letters or

visits.

After the ennui of this disappointment her heart once

more remained empty, and then the same series of days

recommenced. So now they would thus follow one

another, always the same, immovable, and bringing

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nothing. Other lives, however flat, had at least the chance

of some event. One adventure sometimes brought with it

infinite consequences and the scene changed. But nothing

happened to her; God had willed it so! The future was a

dark corridor, with its door at the end shut fast.

She gave up music. What was the good of playing?

Who would hear her? Since she could never, in a velvet

gown with short sleeves, striking with her light fingers the

ivory keys of an Erard at a concert, feel the murmur of

ecstasy envelop her like a breeze, it was not worth while

boring herself with practicing. Her drawing cardboard and

her embroidery she left in the cupboard. What was the

good? What was the good? Sewing irritated her. ‘I have

read everything,’ she said to herself. And she sat there

making the tongs red-hot, or looked at the rain falling.

How sad she was on Sundays when vespers sounded!

She listened with dull attention to each stroke of the

cracked bell. A cat slowly walking over some roof put up

his back in the pale rays of the sum. The wind on the

highroad blew up clouds of dust. Afar off a dog sometimes

howled; and the bell, keeping time, continued its

monotonous ringing that died away over the fields.

But the people came out from church. The women in

waxed clogs, the peasants in new blouses, the little bare

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headed children skipping along in front of them, all were

going home. And till nightfall, five or six men, always the

same, stayed playing at corks in front of the large door of

the inn.

The winter was severe. The windows every morning

were covered with rime, and the light shining through

them, dim as through ground-glass, sometimes did not

change the whole day long. At four o’clock the lamp had

to be lighted.

On fine days she went down into the garden. The dew

had left on the cabbages a silver lace with long transparent

threads spreading from one to the other. No birds were to

be heard; everything seemed asleep, the espalier covered

with straw, and the vine, like a great sick serpent under

the coping of the wall, along which, on drawing hear, one

saw the many-footed woodlice crawling. Under the

spruce by the hedgerow, the curie in the three-cornered

hat reading his breviary had lost his right foot, and the

very plaster, scaling off with the frost, had left white scabs

on his face.

Then she went up again, shut her door, put on coals,

and fainting with the heat of the hearth, felt her boredom

weigh more heavily than ever. She would have like to go

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down and talk to the servant, but a sense of shame

restrained her.

Every day at the same time the schoolmaster in a black

skullcap opened the shutters of his house, and the rural

policeman, wearing his sabre over his blouse, passed by.

Night and morning the post-horses, three by three,

crossed the street to water at the pond. From time to time

the bell of a public house door rang, and when it was

windy one could hear the little brass basins that served as

signs for the hairdresser’s shop creaking on their two rods.

This shop had as decoration an old engraving of a fashion-

plate stuck against a windowpane and the wax bust of a

woman with yellow hair. He, too, the hairdresser,

lamented his wasted calling, his hopeless future, and

dreaming of some shop in a big town—at Rouen, for

example, overlooking the harbour, near the theatre—he

walked up and down all day from the mairie to the

church, sombre and waiting for customers. When

Madame Bovary looked up, she always saw him there, like

a sentinel on duty, with his skullcap over his ears and his

vest of lasting.

Sometimes in the afternoon outside the window of her

room, the head of a man appeared, a swarthy head with

black whiskers, smiling slowly, with a broad, gentle smile

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that showed his white teeth. A waltz immediately began

and on the organ, in a little drawing room, dancers the

size of a finger, women in pink turbans, Tyrolians in

jackets, monkeys in frock coats, gentlemen in knee-

breeches, turned and turned between the sofas, the

consoles, multiplied in the bits of looking glass held

together at their corners by a piece of gold paper. The

man turned his handle, looking to the right and left, and

up at the windows. Now and again, while he shot out a

long squirt of brown saliva against the milestone, with his

knee raised his instrument, whose hard straps tired his

shoulder; and now, doleful and drawling, or gay and

hurried, the music escaped from the box, droning through

a curtain of pink taffeta under a brass claw in arabesque.

They were airs played in other places at the theatres, sung

in drawing rooms, danced to at night under lighted lustres,

echoes of the world that reached even to Emma. Endless

sarabands ran through her head, and, like an Indian

dancing girl on the flowers of a carpet, her thoughts leapt

with the notes, swung from dream to dream, from sadness

to sadness. When the man had caught some coppers in his

cap, he drew down an old cover of blue cloth, hitched his

organ on to his back, and went off with a heavy tread. She

watched him going.

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But it was above all the meal-times that were

unbearable to her, in this small room on the ground floor,

with its smoking stove, its creaking door, the walls that

sweated, the damp flags; all the bitterness in life seemed

served up on her plate, and with smoke of the boiled beef

there rose from her secret soul whiffs of sickliness. Charles

was a slow eater; she played with a few nuts, or, leaning

on her elbow, amused herself with drawing lines along the

oilcloth table cover with the point of her knife.

She now let everything in her household take care of

itself, and Madame Bovary senior, when she came to

spend part of Lent at Tostes, was much surprised at the

change. She who was formerly so careful, so dainty, now

passed whole days without dressing, wore grey cotton

stockings, and burnt tallow candles. She kept saying they

must be economical since they were not rich, adding that

she was very contented, very happy, that Tostes pleased

her very much, with other speeches that closed the mouth

of her mother-in-law. Besides, Emma no longer seemed

inclined to follow her advice; once even, Madame Bovary

having thought fit to maintain that mistresses ought to

keep an eye on the religion of their servants, she had

answered with so angry a look and so cold a smile that the

good woman did not interfere again.

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Emma was growing difficult, capricious. She ordered

dishes for herself, then she did not touch them; one day

drank only pure milk, the next cups of tea by the dozen.

Often she persisted in not going out, then, stifling, threw

open the windows and put on light dresses. After she had

well scolded her servant she gave her presents or sent her

out to see neighbours, just as she sometimes threw beggars

all the silver in her purse, although she was by no means

tender-hearted or easily accessible to the feelings of others,

like most country-bred people, who always retain in their

souls something of the horny hardness of the paternal

hands.

Towards the end of February old Rouault, in memory

of his cure, himself brought his son-in-law a superb

turkey, and stayed three days at Tostes. Charles being with

his patients, Emma kept him company. He smoked in the

room, spat on the firedogs, talked farming, calves, cows,

poultry, and municipal council, so that when he left she

closed the door on him with a feeling of satisfaction that

surprised even herself. Moreover she no longer concealed

her contempt for anything or anybody, and at times she

set herself to express singular opinions, finding fault with

that which others approved, and approving things perverse

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and immoral, all of which made her husband open his eyes

widely.

Would this misery last for ever? Would she never issue

from it? Yet she was as good as all the women who were

living happily. She had seen duchesses at Vaubyessard with

clumsier waists and commoner ways, and she execrated

the injustice of God. She leant her head against the walls

to weep; she envied lives of stir; longed for masked balls,

for violent pleasures, with all the wildness that she did not

know, but that these must surely yield.

She grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the

heart.

Charles prescribed valerian and camphor baths.

Everything that was tried only seemed to irritate her the

more.

On certain days she chatted with feverish rapidity, and

this over-excitement was suddenly followed by a state of

torpor, in which she remained without speaking, without

moving. What then revived her was pouring a bottle of

eau-de-cologne over her arms.

As she was constantly complaining about Tostes,

Charles fancied that her illness was no doubt due to some

local cause, and fixing on this idea, began to think

seriously of setting up elsewhere.

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From that moment she drank vinegar, contracted a

sharp little cough, and completely lost her appetite.

It cost Charles much to give up Tostes after living there

four years and ‘when he was beginning to get on there.’

Yet if it must be! He took her to Rouen to see his old

master. It was a nervous complaint: change of air was

needed.

After looking about him on this side and on that,

Charles learnt that in the Neufchatel arrondissement there

was a considerable market town called Yonville-l’Abbaye,

whose doctor, a Polish refugee, had decamped a week

before. Then he wrote to the chemist of the place to ask

the number of the population, the distance from the

nearest doctor, what his predecessor had made a year, and

so forth; and the answer being satisfactory, he made up his

mind to move towards the spring, if Emma’s health did

not improve.

One day when, in view of her departure, she was

tidying a drawer, something pricked her finger. It was a

wire of her wedding bouquet. The orange blossoms were

yellow with dust and the silver bordered satin ribbons

frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up

more quickly than dry straw. Then it was, like a red bush

in the cinders, slowly devoured. She watched it burn.

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The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the

gold lace melted; and the shriveled paper corollas,

fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at

least flew up the chimney.

When they left Tostes at the month of March, Madame

Bovary was pregnant.

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Part II

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CHAPTER ONE

Yonville-l’Abbaye (so called from an old Capuchin

abbey of which not even the ruins remain) is a market-

town twenty-four miles from Rouen, between the

Abbeville and Beauvais roads, at the foot of a valley

watered by the Rieule, a little river that runs into the

Andelle after turning three water-mills near its mouth,

where there are a few trout that the lads amuse themselves

by fishing for on Sundays.

We leave the highroad at La Boissiere and keep straight

on to the top of the Leux hill, whence the valley is seen.

The river that runs through it makes of it, as it were, two

regions with distinct physiognomies—all on the left is

pasture land, all of the right arable. The meadow stretches

under a bulge of low hills to join at the back with the

pasture land of the Bray country, while on the eastern