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complaining to madame, with many civilities, that he

should have remained till that day without gaining her

confidence. A poor shop like his was not made to attract a

‘fashionable lady"; he emphasized the words; yet she had

only to command, and he would undertake to provide her

with anything she might wish, either in haberdashery or

linen, millinery or fancy goods, for he went to town

regularly four times a month. He was connected with the

best houses. You could speak of him at the ‘Trois Freres,’

at the ‘Barbe d’Or,’ or at the ‘Grand Sauvage"; all these

gentlemen knew him as well as the insides of their

pockets. To-day, then he had come to show madame, in

passing, various articles he happened to have, thanks to the

most rare opportunity. And he pulled out half-a-dozen

embroidered collars from the box.

Madame Bovary examined them. ‘I do not require

anything,’ she said.

Then Monsieur Lheureux delicately exhibited three

Algerian scarves, several packet of English needles, a pair

of straw slippers, and finally, four eggcups in cocoanut

wood, carved in open work by convicts. Then, with both

hands on the table, his neck stretched out, his figure bent

forward, open-mouthed, he watched Emma’s look, who

was walking up and down undecided amid these goods.

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From time to time, as if to remove some dust, he filliped

with his nail the silk of the scarves spread out at full

length, and they rustled with a little noise, making in the

green twilight the gold spangles of their tissue scintillate

like little stars.

‘How much are they?’

‘A mere nothing,’ he replied, ‘a mere nothing. But

there’s no hurry; whenever it’s convenient. We are not

Jews.’

She reflected for a few moments, and ended by again

declining Monsieur Lheureux’s offer. He replied quite

unconcernedly—

‘Very well. We shall understand one another by and by.

I have always got on with ladies—if I didn’t with my

own!’

Emma smiled.

‘I wanted to tell you,’ he went on good-naturedly, after

his joke, ‘that it isn’t the money I should trouble about.

Why, I could give you some, if need be.’

She made a gesture of surprise.

‘Ah!’ said he quickly and in a low voice, ‘I shouldn’t

have to go far to find you some, rely on that.’

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And he began asking after Pere Tellier, the proprietor

of the ‘Cafe Francais,’ whom Monsieur Bovary was then

attending.

‘What’s the matter with Pere Tellier? He coughs so

that he shakes his whole house, and I’m afraid he’ll soon

want a deal covering rather than a flannel vest. He was

such a rake as a young man! Those sort of people,

madame, have not the least regularity; he’s burnt up with

brandy. Still it’s sad, all the same, to see an acquaintance

go off.’

And while he fastened up his box he discoursed about

the doctor’s patients.

‘It’s the weather, no doubt,’ he said, looking

frowningly at the floor, ‘that causes these illnesses. I, too,

don’t feel the thing. One of these days I shall even have to

consult the doctor for a pain I have in my back. Well,

good-bye, Madame Bovary. At your service; your very

humble servant.’ And he closed the door gently.

Emma had her dinner served in her bedroom on a tray

by the fireside; she was a long time over it; everything was

well with her.

‘How good I was!’ she said to herself, thinking of the

scarves.

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She heard some steps on the stairs. It was Leon. She got

up and took from the chest of drawers the first pile of

dusters to be hemmed. When he came in she seemed very

busy.

The conversation languished; Madame Bovary gave it

up every few minutes, whilst he himself seemed quite

embarrassed. Seated on a low chair near the fire, he turned

round in his fingers the ivory thimble-case. She stitched

on, or from time to time turned down the hem of the

cloth with her nail. She did not speak; he was silent,

captivated by her silence, as he would have been by her

speech.

‘Poor fellow!’ she thought.

‘How have I displeased her?’ he asked himself.

At last, however, Leon said that he should have, one of

these days, to go to Rouen on some office business.

‘Your music subscription is out; am I to renew it?’

‘No,’ she replied.

‘Why?’

‘Because—‘

And pursing her lips she slowly drew a long stitch of

grey thread.

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This work irritated Leon. It seemed to roughen the

ends of her fingers. A gallant phrase came into his head,

but he did not risk it.

‘Then you are giving it up?’ he went on.

‘What?’ she asked hurriedly. ‘Music? Ah! yes! Have I

not my house to look after, my husband to attend to, a

thousand things, in fact, many duties that must be

considered first?’

She looked at the clock. Charles was late. Then, she

affected anxiety. Two or three times she even repeated,

‘He is so good!’

The clerk was fond of Monsieur Bovary. But this

tenderness on his behalf astonished him unpleasantly;

nevertheless he took up on his praises, which he said

everyone was singing, especially the chemist.

‘Ah! he is a good fellow,’ continued Emma.

‘Certainly,’ replied the clerk.

And he began talking of Madame Homais, whose very

untidy appearance generally made them laugh.

‘What does it matter?’ interrupted Emma. ‘A good

housewife does not trouble about her appearance.’

Then she relapsed into silence.

It was the same on the following days; her talks, her

manners, everything changed. She took interest in the

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housework, went to church regularly, and looked after her

servant with more severity.

She took Berthe from nurse. When visitors called,

Felicite brought her in, and Madame Bovary undressed

her to show off her limbs. She declared she adored

children; this was her consolation, her joy, her passion,

and she accompanied her caresses with lyrical outburst

which would have reminded anyone but the Yonville

people of Sachette in ‘Notre Dame de Paris.’

When Charles came home he found his slippers put to

warm near the fire. His waistcoat now never wanted

lining, nor his shirt buttons, and it was quite a pleasure to

see in the cupboard the night-caps arranged in piles of the

same height. She no longer grumbled as formerly at taking

a turn in the garden; what he proposed was always done,

although she did not understand the wishes to which she

submitted without a murmur; and when Leon saw him by

his fireside after dinner, his two hands on his stomach, his

two feet on the fender, his two cheeks red with feeding,

his eyes moist with happiness, the child crawling along the

carpet, and this woman with the slender waist who came

behind his arm-chair to kiss his forehead: ‘What madness!’

he said to himself. ‘And how to reach her!’

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And thus she seemed so virtuous and inaccessible to

him that he lost all hope, even the faintest. But by this

renunciation he placed her on an extraordinary pinnacle.

To him she stood outside those fleshly attributes from

which he had nothing to obtain, and in his heart she rose

ever, and became farther removed from him after the

magnificent manner of an apotheosis that is taking wing. It

was one of those pure feelings that do not interfere with

life, that are cultivated because they are rare, and whose

loss would afflict more than their passion rejoices.

Emma grew thinner, her cheeks paler, her face longer.

With her black hair, her large eyes, her aquiline nose, her

birdlike walk, and always silent now, did she not seem to

be passing through life scarcely touching it, and to bear on

her brow the vague impress of some divine destiny? She

was so sad and so calm, at once so gentle and so reserved,

that near her one felt oneself seized by an icy charm, as we

shudder in churches at the perfume of the flowers

mingling with the cold of the marble. The others even did

not escape from this seduction. The chemist said—

‘She is a woman of great parts, who wouldn’t be

misplaced in a sub-prefecture.’

The housewives admired her economy, the patients her

politeness, the poor her charity.

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But she was eaten up with desires, with rage, with hate.

That dress with the narrow folds hid a distracted fear, of

whose torment those chaste lips said nothing. She was in

love with Leon, and sought solitude that she might with

the more ease delight in his image. The sight of his form

troubled the voluptuousness of this mediation. Emma

thrilled at the sound of his step; then in his presence the

emotion subsided, and afterwards there remained to her

only an immense astonishment that ended in sorrow.

Leon did not know that when he left her in despair she

rose after he had gone to see him in the street. She

concerned herself about his comings and goings; she

watched his face; she invented quite a history to find an

excuse for going to his room. The chemist’s wife seemed

happy to her to sleep under the same roof, and her

thoughts constantly centered upon this house, like the

‘Lion d’Or’ pigeons, who came there to dip their red feet

and white wings in its gutters. But the more Emma

recognised her love, the more she crushed it down, that it

might not be evident, that she might make it less. She

would have liked Leon to guess it, and she imagined

chances, catastrophes that should facilitate this.

What restrained her was, no doubt, idleness and fear,

and a sense of shame also. She thought she had repulsed

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him too much, that the time was past, that all was lost.

Then, pride, and joy of being able to say to herself, ‘I am

virtuous,’ and to look at herself in the glass taking resigned

poses, consoled her a little for the sacrifice she believed she

was making.

Then the lusts of the flesh, the longing for money, and

the melancholy of passion all blended themselves into one

suffering, and instead of turning her thoughts from it, she

clave to it the more, urging herself to pain, and seeking

everywhere occasion for it. She was irritated by an ill-

served dish or by a half-open door; bewailed the velvets

she had not, the happiness she had missed, her too exalted

dreams, her narrow home.

What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to

notice her anguish. His conviction that he was making her

happy seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness

on this point ingratitude. For whose sake, then was she

virtuous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all felicity,

the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of

that complex strap that bucked her in on all sides.

On him alone, then, she concentrated all the various

hatreds that resulted from her boredom, and every effort

to diminish only augmented it; for this useless trouble was

added to the other reasons for despair, and contributed still

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more to the separation between them. Her own gentleness

to herself made her rebel against him. Domestic

mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness

to adulterous desires. She would have like Charles to beat

her, that she might have a better right to hate him, to

revenge herself upon him. She was surprised sometimes at

the atrocious conjectures that came into her thoughts, and

she had to go on smiling, to hear repeated to her at all

hours that she was happy, to pretend to be happy, to let it

be believed.

Yet she had loathing of this hypocrisy. She was seized

with the temptation to flee somewhere with Leon to try a

new life; but at once a vague chasm full of darkness

opened within her soul.

‘Besides, he no longer loves me,’ she thought. ‘What is

to become of me? What help is to be hoped for, what

consolation, what solace?’

She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in a low

voice, with flowing tears.

‘Why don’t you tell master?’ the servant asked her

when she came in during these crises.

‘It is the nerves,’ said Emma. ‘Do not speak to him of

it; it would worry him.’

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‘Ah! yes,’ Felicite went on, ‘you are just like La

Guerine, Pere Guerin’s daughter, the fisherman at Pollet,

that I used to know at Dieppe before I came to you. She

was so sad, so sad, to see her standing upright on the

threshold of her house, she seemed to you like a winding-

sheet spread out before the door. Her illness, it appears,

was a kind of fog that she had in her head, and the doctors

could not do anything, nor the priest either. When she

was taken too bad she went off quite alone to the seashore,

so that the customs officer, going his rounds, often

found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle.

Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say.’

‘But with me,’ replied Emma, ‘it was after marriage

that it began.’

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CHAPTER SIX

One evening when the window was open, and she,

sitting by it, had been watching Lestiboudois, the beadle,

trimming the box, she suddenly heard the Angelus

ringing.

It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are

in bloom, and a warm wind blows over the flower-beds

newly turned, and the gardens, like women, seem to be

getting ready for the summer fetes. Through the bars of

the arbour and away beyond, the river seen in the fields,

meandering through the grass in wandering curves. The

evening vapours rose between the leafless poplars,

touching their outlines with a violet tint, paler and more

transparent than a subtle gauze caught athwart their

branches. In the distance cattle moved about; neither their