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declared usually the rickety old concern ‘was late.’

Leon, however, made up his mind, and knocked at the

doctor’s door. Madame was in her room, and did not

come down for a quarter of an hour. The doctor seemed

delighted to see him, but he never stirred out that

evening, nor all the next day.

He saw her alone in the evening, very late, behind the

garden in the lane; in the lane, as she had the other one! It

was a stormy night, and they talked under an umbrella by

lightning flashes.

Their separation was becoming intolerable. ‘I would

rather die!’ said Emma. She was writhing in his arms,

weeping. ‘Adieu! adieu! When shall I see you again?’

They came back again to embrace once more, and it

was then that she promised him to find soon, by no matter

what means, a regular opportunity for seeing one another

in freedom at least once a week. Emma never doubted she

should be able to do this. Besides, she was full of hope.

Some money was coming to her.

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On the strength of it she bought a pair of yellow

curtains with large stripes for her room, whose cheapness

Monsieur Lheureux had commended; she dreamed of

getting a carpet, and Lheureux, declaring that it wasn’t

‘drinking the sea,’ politely undertook to supply her with

one. She could no longer do without his services. Twenty

times a day she sent for him, and he at once put by his

business without a murmur. People could not understand

either why Mere Rollet breakfasted with her every day,

and even paid her private visits.

It was about this time, that is to say, the beginning of

winter, that she seemed seized with great musical fervour.

One evening when Charles was listening to her, she

began the same piece four times over, each time with

much vexation, while he, not noticing any difference,

cried—

‘Bravo! very goodl You are wrong to stop. Go on!’

‘Oh, no; it is execrable! My fingers are quite rusty.’

The next day he begged her to play him something

again.

‘Very well; to please you!’

And Charles confessed she had gone off a little. She

played wrong notes and blundered; then, stopping short—

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‘Ah! it is no use. I ought to take some lessons; but—’

She bit her lips and added, ‘Twenty francs a lesson, that’s

too dear!’

‘Yes, so it is—rather,’ said Charles, giggling stupidly.

‘But it seems to me that one might be able to do it for less;

for there are artists of no reputation, and who are often

better than the celebrities.’

‘Find them!’ said Emma.

The next day when he came home he looked at her

shyly, and at last could no longer keep back the words.

‘How obstinate you are sometimes! I went to

Barfucheres to-day. Well, Madame Liegard assured me

that her three young ladies who are at La Misericorde have

lessons at fifty sous apiece, and that from an excellent

mistress!’

She shrugged her shoulders and did not open her piano

again. But when she passed by it (if Bovary were there),

she sighed—

‘Ah! my poor piano!’

And when anyone came to see her, she did not fail to

inform them she had given up music, and could not begin

again now for important reasons. Then people

commiserated her—

‘What a pity! she had so much talent!’

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They even spoke to Bovary about it. They put him to

shame, and especially the chemist.

‘You are wrong. One should never let any of the

faculties of nature lie fallow. Besides, just think, my good

friend, that by inducing madame to study; you are

economising on the subsequent musical education of your

child. For my own part, I think that mothers ought

themselves to instruct their children. That is an idea of

Rousseau’s, still rather new perhaps, but that will end by

triumphing, I am certain of it, like mothers nursing their

own children and vaccination.’

So Charles returned once more to this question of the

piano. Emma replied bitterly that it would be better to sell

it. This poor piano, that had given her vanity so much

satisfaction—to see it go was to Bovary like the indefinable

suicide of a part of herself.

‘If you liked,’ he said, ‘a lesson from time to time, that

wouldn’t after all be very ruinous.’

‘But lessons,’ she replied, ‘are only of use when

followed up.’

And thus it was she set about obtaining her husband’s

permission to go to town once a week to see her lover. At

the end of a month she was even considered to have made

considerable progress.

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CHAPTER FIVE

She went on Thursdays. She got up and dressed

silently, in order not to awaken Charles, who would have

made remarks about her getting ready too early. Next she

walked up and down, went to the windows, and looked

out at the Place. The early dawn was broadening between

the pillars of the market, and the chemist’s shop, with the

shutters still up, showed in the pale light of the dawn the

large letters of his signboard.

When the clock pointed to a quarter past seven, she

went off to the ‘Lion d’Or,’ whose door Artemise opened

yawning. The girl then made up the coals covered by the

cinders, and Emma remained alone in the kitchen. Now

and again she went out. Hivert was leisurely harnessing his

horses, listening, moreover, to Mere Lefrancois, who,

passing her head and nightcap through a grating, was

charging him with commissions and giving him

explanations that would have confused anyone else. Emma

kept beating the soles of her boots against the pavement of

the yard.

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At last, when he had eaten his soup, put on his cloak,

lighted his pipe, and grasped his whip, he calmly installed

himself on his seat.

The ‘Hirondelle’ started at a slow trot, and for about a

mile stopped here and there to pick up passengers who

waited for it, standing at the border of the road, in front of

their yard gates.

Those who had secured seats the evening before kept it

waiting; some even were still in bed in their houses.

Hivert called, shouted, swore; then he got down from his

seat and went and knocked loudly at the doors. The wind

blew through the cracked windows.

The four seats, however, filled up. The carriage rolled

off; rows of apple-trees followed one upon another, and

the road between its two long ditches, full of yellow

water, rose, constantly narrowing towards the horizon.

Emma knew it from end to end; she knew that after a

meadow there was a sign-post, next an elm, a barn, or the

hut of a lime-kiln tender. Sometimes even, in the hope of

getting some surprise, she shut her eyes, but she never lost

the clear perception of the distance to be traversed.

At last the brick houses began to follow one another

more closely, the earth resounded beneath the wheels, the

‘Hirondelle’ glided between the gardens, where through

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an opening one saw statues, a periwinkle plant, clipped

yews, and a swing. Then on a sudden the town appeared.

Sloping down like an amphitheatre, and drowned in the

fog, it widened out beyond the bridges confusedly. Then

the open country spread away with a monotonous

movement till it touched in the distance the vague line of

the pale sky. Seen thus from above, the whole landscape

looked immovable as a picture; the anchored ships were

massed in one corner, the river curved round the foot of

the green hills, and the isles, oblique in shape, lay on the

water, like large, motionless, black fishes. The factory

chimneys belched forth immense brown fumes that were

blown away at the top. One heard the rumbling of the

foundries, together with the clear chimes of the churches

that stood out in the mist. The leafless trees on the

boulevards made violet thickets in the midst of the houses,

and the roofs, all shining with the rain, threw back

unequal reflections, according to the height of the quarters

in which they were. Sometimes a gust of wind drove the

clouds towards the Saint Catherine hills, like aerial waves

that broke silently against a cliff.

A giddiness seemed to her to detach itself from this

mass of existence, and her heart swelled as if the hundred

and twenty thousand souls that palpitated there had all at

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once sent into it the vapour of the passions she fancied

theirs. Her love grew in the presence of this vastness, and

expanded with tumult to the vague murmurings that rose

towards her. She poured it out upon the square, on the

walks, on the streets, and the old Norman city outspread

before her eyes as an enormous capital, as a Babylon into

which she was entering. She leant with both hands against

the window, drinking in the breeze; the three horses

galloped, the stones grated in the mud, the diligence

rocked, and Hivert, from afar, hailed the carts on the road,

while the bourgeois who had spent the night at the

Guillaume woods came quietly down the hill in their little

family carriages.

They stopped at the barrier; Emma undid her

overshoes, put on other gloves, rearranged her shawl, and

some twenty paces farther she got down from the

‘Hirondelle.’

The town was then awakening. Shop-boys in caps

were cleaning up the shop-fronts, and women with

baskets against their hips, at intervals uttered sonorous cries

at the corners of streets. She walked with downcast eyes,

close to the walls, and smiling with pleasure under her

lowered black veil.

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For fear of being seen, she did not usually take the most

direct road. She plunged into dark alleys, and, all

perspiring, reached the bottom of the Rue Nationale, near

the fountain that stands there. It, is the quarter for theatres,

public-houses, and whores. Often a cart would pass near

her, bearing some shaking scenery. Waiters in aprons were

sprinkling sand on the flagstones between green shrubs. It

all smelt of absinthe, cigars, and oysters.

She turned down a street; she recognised him by his

curling hair that escaped from beneath his hat.

Leon walked along the pavement. She followed him to

the hotel. He went up, opened the door, entered—What

an embrace!

Then, after the kisses, the words gushed forth. They

told each other the sorrows of the week, the

presentiments, the anxiety for the letters; but now

everything was forgotten; they gazed into each other’s

faces with voluptuous laughs, and tender names.

The bed was large, of mahogany, in the shape of a boat.

The curtains were in red levantine, that hung from the

ceiling and bulged out too much towards the bell-shaped

bedside; and nothing in the world was so lovely as her

brown head and white skin standing out against this purple

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colour, when, with a movement of shame, she crossed her

bare arms, hiding her face in her hands.

The warm room, with its discreet carpet, its gay

ornaments, and its calm light, seemed made for the

intimacies of passion. The curtain-rods, ending in arrows,

their brass pegs, and the great balls of the fire-dogs shone

suddenly when the sun came in. On the chimney between

the candelabra there were two of those pink shells in

which one hears the murmur of the sea if one holds them

to the ear.

How they loved that dear room, so full of gaiety,

despite its rather faded splendour! They always found the

furniture in the same place, and sometimes hairpins, that

she had forgotten the Thursday before, under the pedestal

of the clock. They lunched by the fireside on a little round

table, inlaid with rosewood. Emma carved, put bits on his

plate with all sorts of coquettish ways, and she laughed

with a sonorous and libertine laugh when the froth of the

champagne ran over from the glass to the rings on her

fingers. They were so completely lost in the possession of

each other that they thought themselves in their own

house, and that they would live there till death, like two

spouses eternally young. They said ‘our room,’ ‘our

carpet,’ she even said ‘my slippers,’ a gift of Leon’s, a

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whim she had had. They were pink satin, bordered with

swansdown. When she sat on his knees, her leg, then too

short, hung in the air, and the dainty shoe, that had no

back to it, was held only by the toes to her bare foot.

He for the first time enjoyed the inexpressible delicacy

of feminine refinements. He had never met this grace of

language, this reserve of clothing, these poses of the weary

dove. He admired the exaltation of her soul and the lace

on her petticoat. Besides, was she not ‘a lady’ and a

married woman—a real mistress, in fine?

By the diversity of her humour, in turn mystical or

mirthful, talkative, taciturn, passionate, careless, she

awakened in him a thousand desires, called up instincts or

memories. She was the mistress of all the novels, the

heroine of all the dramas, the vague ‘she’ of all the

volumes of verse. He found again on her shoulder the

amber colouring of the ‘Odalisque Bathing"; she had the

long waist of feudal chatelaines, and she resembled the

‘Pale Woman of Barcelona.’ But above all she was the

Angel!

Often looking at her, it seemed to him that his soul,

escaping towards her, spread like a wave about the outline

of her head, and descended drawn down into the

whiteness of her breast. He knelt on the ground before

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her, and with both elbows on her knees looked at her

with a smile, his face upturned.

She bent over him, and murmured, as if choking with

intoxication—

‘Oh, do not move! do not speak! look at me!

Something so sweet comes from your eyes that helps me

so much!’

She called him ‘child.’ ‘Child, do you love me?’