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blow of a pole-axe. He was walking up and down from

the window to the bureau, repeating all the while—

‘Ah! I’ll show him! I’ll show him!’ Then he approached

her, and in a soft voice said—

‘It isn’t pleasant, I know; but, after all, no bones are

broken, and, since that is the only way that is left for you

paying back my money—‘

‘But where am I to get any?’ said Emma, wringing her

hands.

‘Bah! when one has friends like you!’

And he looked at her in so keen, so terrible a fashion,

that she shuddered to her very heart.

‘I promise you,’ she said, ‘to sign—‘

‘I’ve enough of your signatures.’

‘I will sell something.’

‘Get along!’ he said, shrugging his shoulders; ‘you’ve

not got anything.’

And he called through the peep-hole that looked down

into the shop—

‘Annette, don’t forget the three coupons of No. 14.’

The servant appeared. Emma understood, and asked

how much money would be wanted to put a stop to the

proceedings.

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‘It is too late.’

‘But if I brought you several thousand francs—a quarter

of the sum—a third—perhaps the whole?’

‘No; it’s no use!’

And he pushed her gently towards the staircase.

‘I implore you, Monsieur Lheureux, just a few days

more!’ She was sobbing.

‘There! tears now!’

‘You are driving me to despair!’

‘What do I care?’ said he, shutting the door.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

She was stoical the next day when Maitre Hareng, the

bailiff, with two assistants, presented himself at her house

to draw up the inventory for the distraint.

They began with Bovary’s consulting-room, and did

not write down the phrenological head, which was

considered an ‘instrument of his profession"; but in the

kitchen they counted the plates; the saucepans, the chairs,

the candlesticks, and in the bedroom all the nick-nacks on

the whatnot. They examined her dresses, the linen, the

dressing-room; and her whole existence to its most

intimate details, was, like a corpse on whom a postmortem

is made, outspread before the eyes of these three

men.

Maitre Hareng, buttoned up in his thin black coat,

wearing a white choker and very tight foot-straps,

repeated from time to time—‘Allow me, madame. You

allow me?’ Often he uttered exclamations. ‘Charming!

very pretty.’ Then he began writing again, dipping his pen

into the horn inkstand in his left hand.

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When they had done with the rooms they went up to

the attic. She kept a desk there in which Rodolphe’s

letters were locked. It had to be opened.

‘Ah! a correspondence,’ said Maitre Hareng, with a

discreet smile. ‘But allow me, for I must make sure the

box contains nothing else.’ And he tipped up the papers

lightly, as if to shake out napoleons. Then she grew

angered to see this coarse hand, with fingers red and pulpy

like slugs, touching these pages against which her heart

had beaten.

They went at last. Felicite came back. Emma had sent

her out to watch for Bovary in order to keep him off, and

they hurriedly installed the man in possession under the

roof, where he swore he would remain.

During the evening Charles seemed to her careworn.

Emma watched him with a look of anguish, fancying she

saw an accusation in every line of his face. Then, when

her eyes wandered over the chimney-piece ornamented

with Chinese screens, over the large curtains, the

armchairs, all those things, in a word, that had, softened

the bitterness of her life, remorse seized her or rather an

immense regret, that, far from crushing, irritated her

passion. Charles placidly poked the fire, both his feet on

the fire-dogs.

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Once the man, no doubt bored in his hiding-place,

made a slight noise.

‘Is anyone walking upstairs?’ said Charles.

‘No,’ she replied; ‘it is a window that has been left

open, and is rattling in the wind.’

The next day, Sunday, she went to Rouen to call on all

the brokers whose names she knew. They were at their

country-places or on journeys. She was not discouraged;

and those whom she did manage to see she asked for

money, declaring she must have some, and that she would

pay it back. Some laughed in her face; all refused.

At two o’clock she hurried to Leon, and knocked at

the door. No one answered. At length he appeared.

‘What brings you here?’

‘Do I disturb you?’

‘No; but—’ And he admitted that his landlord didn’t

like his having ‘women’ there.

‘I must speak to you,’ she went on.

Then he took down the key, but she stopped him.

‘No, no! Down there, in our home!’

And they went to their room at the Hotel de

Boulogne.

On arriving she drank off a large glass of water. She was

very pale. She said to him—

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‘Leon, you will do me a service?’

And, shaking him by both hands that she grasped

tightly, she added

‘Listen, I want eight thousand francs.’

‘But you are mad!’

‘Not yet.’

And thereupon, telling him the story of the distraint,

she explained her distress to him; for Charles knew

nothing of it; her mother-in-law detested her; old Rouault

could do nothing; but he, Leon, he would set about

finding this indispensable sum.

‘How on earth can I?’

‘What a coward you are!’ she cried.

Then he said stupidly, ‘You are exaggerating the

difficulty. Perhaps, with a thousand crowns or so the

fellow could be stopped.’

All the greater reason to try and do something; it was

impossible that they could not find three thousand francs.

Besides, Leon, could be security instead of her.

‘Go, try, try! I will love you so!’

He went out, and came back at the end of an hour,

saying, with solemn face—

‘I have been to three people with no success.’

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Then they remained sitting face to face at the two

chimney corners, motionless, in silence. Emma shrugged

her shoulders as she stamped her feet. He heard her

murmuring—

‘If I were in your place I should soon get some.’

‘But where?’

‘At your office.’ And she looked at him.

An infernal boldness looked out from her burning eyes,

and their lids drew close together with a lascivious and

encouraging look, so that the young man felt himself

growing weak beneath the mute will of this woman who

was urging him to a crime. Then he was afraid, and to

avoid any explanation he smote his forehead, crying—

‘Morel is to come back to-night; he will not refuse me,

I hope’ (this was one of his friends, the son of a very rich

merchant); ‘and I will bring it you to-morrow,’ he added.

Emma did not seem to welcome this hope with all the

joy he had expected. Did she suspect the lie? He went on,

blushing—

‘However, if you don’t see me by three o’clock do not

wait for me, my darling. I must be off now; forgive me!

Goodbye!’

He pressed her hand, but it felt quite lifeless. Emma had

no strength left for any sentiment.

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Four o’clock struck, and she rose to return to Yonville,

mechanically obeying the force of old habits.

The weather was fine. It was one of those March days,

clear and sharp, when the sun shines in a perfectly white

sky. The Rouen folk, in Sunday-clothes, were walking

about with happy looks. She reached the Place du Parvis.

People were coming out after vespers; the crowd flowed

out through the three doors like a stream through the

three arches of a bridge, and in the middle one, more

motionless than a rock, stood the beadle.

Then she remembered the day when, all anxious and

full of hope, she had entered beneath this large nave, that

had opened out before her, less profound than her love;

and she walked on weeping beneath her veil, giddy,

staggering, almost fainting.

‘Take care!’ cried a voice issuing from the gate of a

courtyard that was thrown open.

She stopped to let pass a black horse, pawing the

ground between the shafts of a tilbury, driven by a

gentleman in sable furs. Who was it? She knew him. The

carriage darted by and disappeared.

Why, it was he—the Viscount. She turned away; the

street was empty. She was so overwhelmed, so sad, that

she had to lean against a wall to keep herself from falling.

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Then she thought she had been mistaken. Anyhow, she

did not know. All within her and around her was

abandoning her. She felt lost, sinking at random into

indefinable abysses, and it was almost with joy that, on

reaching the ‘Croix-Rouge,’ she saw the good Homais,

who was watching a large box full of pharmaceutical stores

being hoisted on to the ‘Hirondelle.’ In his hand he held

tied in a silk handkerchief six cheminots for his wife.

Madame Homais was very fond of these small, heavy

turban-shaped loaves, that are eaten in Lent with salt

butter; a last vestige of Gothic food that goes back,

perhaps, to the time of the Crusades, and with which the

robust Normans gorged themselves of yore, fancying they

saw on the table, in the light of the yellow torches,

between tankards of hippocras and huge boars’ heads, the

heads of Saracens to be devoured. The druggist’s wife

crunched them up as they had done—heroically, despite

her wretched teeth. And so whenever Homais journeyed

to town, he never failed to bring her home some that he

bought at the great baker’s in the Rue Massacre.

‘Charmed to see you,’ he said, offering Emma a hand

to help her into the ‘Hirondelle.’ Then he hung up his

cheminots to the cords of the netting, and remained bareheaded

in an attitude pensive and Napoleonic.

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But when the blind man appeared as usual at the foot

of the hill he exclaimed—

‘I can’t understand why the authorities tolerate such

culpable industries. Such unfortunates should be locked up

and forced to work. Progress, my word! creeps at a snail’s

pace. We are floundering about in mere barbarism.’

The blind man held out his hat, that flapped about at

the door, as if it were a bag in the lining that had come

unnailed.

‘This,’ said the chemist, ‘is a scrofulous affection.’

And though he knew the poor devil, he pretended to

see him for the first time, murmured something about

‘cornea,’ ‘opaque cornea,’ ‘sclerotic,’ ‘facies,’ then asked

him in a paternal tone—

‘My friend, have you long had this terrible infirmity?

Instead of getting drunk at the public, you’d do better to

die yourself.’

He advised him to take good wine, good beer, and

good joints. The blind man went on with his song; he

seemed, moreover, almost idiotic. At last Monsieur

Homais opened his purse—

‘Now there’s a sou; give me back two lairds, and don’t

forget my advice: you’ll be the better for it.’

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Hivert openly cast some doubt on the efficacy of it. But

the druggist said that he would cure himself with an

antiphlogistic pomade of his own composition, and he

gave his address—‘Monsieur Homais, near the market,

pretty well known.’

‘Now,’ said Hivert, ‘for all this trouble you’ll give us

your performance.’

The blind man sank down on his haunches, with his

head thrown back, whilst he rolled his greenish eyes,

lolled out his tongue, and rubbed his stomach with both

hands as he uttered a kind of hollow yell like a famished

dog. Emma, filled with disgust, threw him over her

shoulder a five-franc piece. It was all her fortune. It

seemed to her very fine thus to throw it away.

The coach had gone on again when suddenly Monsieur

Homais leant out through the window, crying—

‘No farinaceous or milk food, wear wool next the skin,

and expose the diseased parts to the smoke of juniper

berries.’

The sight of the well-known objects that defiled before

her eyes gradually diverted Emma from her present

trouble. An intolerable fatigue overwhelmed her, and she

reached her home stupefied, discouraged, almost asleep.

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‘Come what may come!’ she said to herself. ‘And then,

who knows? Why, at any moment could not some

extraordinary event occur? Lheureux even might die!’

At nine o’clock in the morning she was awakened by

the sound of voices in the Place. There was a crowd

round the market reading a large bill fixed to one of the

posts, and she saw Justin, who was climbing on to a stone

and tearing down the bill. But at this moment the rural

guard seized him by the collar. Monsieur Homais came

out of his shop, and Mere Lefrangois, in the midst of the

crowd, seemed to be perorating.

‘Madame! madame!’ cried Felicite, running in, ‘it’s

abominable!’

And the poor girl, deeply moved, handed her a yellow

paper that she had just torn off the door. Emma read with

a glance that all her furniture was for sale.

Then they looked at one another silently. The servant

and mistress had no secret one from the other. At last

Felicite sighed—

‘If I were you, madame, I should go to Monsieur

Guillaumin.’

‘Do you think—‘

And this question meant to say—

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‘You who know the house through the servant, has the

master spoken sometimes of me?’

‘Yes, you’d do well to go there.’

She dressed, put on her black gown, and her hood with

jet beads, and that she might not be seen (there was still a

crowd on the Place), she took the path by the river,

outside the village.

She reached the notary’s gate quite breathless. The sky

was sombre, and a little snow was falling. At the sound of

the bell, Theodore in a red waistcoat appeared on the

steps; he came to open the door almost familiarly, as to an

acquaintance, and showed her into the dining-room.

A large porcelain stove crackled beneath a cactus that