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draped to the chin, gazed motionless on the room full of

life.

Madame Bovary noticed that many ladies had not put

their gloves in their glasses.

But at the upper end of the table, alone amongst all

these women, bent over his full plate, and his napkin tied

round his neck like a child, an old man sat eating, letting

drops of gravy drip from his mouth. His eyes were

bloodshot, and he wore a little queue tied with black

ribbon. He was the Marquis’s father-in-law, the old Duke

de Laverdiere, once on a time favourite of the Count

d’Artois, in the days of the Vaudreuil hunting-parties at

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the Marquis de Conflans’, and had been, it was said, the

lover of Queen Marie Antoinette, between Monsieur de

Coigny and Monsieur de Lauzun. He had lived a life of

noisy debauch, full of duels, bets, elopements; he had

squandered his fortune and frightened all his family. A

servant behind his chair named aloud to him in his ear the

dishes that he pointed to stammering, and constantly

Emma’s eyes turned involuntarily to this old man with

hanging lips, as to something extraordinary. He had lived

at court and slept in the bed of queens! Iced champagne

was poured out. Emma shivered all over as she felt it cold

in her mouth. She had never seen pomegranates nor tasted

pineapples. The powdered sugar even seemed to her

whiter and finer than elsewhere.

The ladies afterwards went to their rooms to prepare

for the ball.

Emma made her toilet with the fastidious care of an

actress on her debut. She did her hair according to the

directions of the hairdresser, and put on the barege dress

spread out upon the bed.

Charles’s trousers were tight across the belly.

‘My trouser-straps will be rather awkward for dancing,’

he said.

‘Dancing?’ repeated Emma.

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‘Yes!’

‘Why, you must be mad! They would make fun of

you; keep your place. Besides, it is more becoming for a

doctor,’ she added.

Charles was silent. He walked up and down waiting for

Emma to finish dressing.

He saw her from behind in the glass between two

lights. Her black eyes seemed blacker than ever. Her hair,

undulating towards the ears, shone with a blue lustre; a

rose in her chignon trembled on its mobile stalk, with

artificial dewdrops on the tip of the leaves. She wore a

gown of pale saffron trimmed with three bouquets of

pompon roses mixed with green.

Charles came and kissed her on her shoulder.

‘Let me alone!’ she said; ‘you are tumbling me.’

One could hear the flourish of the violin and the notes

of a horn. She went downstairs restraining herself from

running.

Dancing had begun. Guests were arriving. There was

some crushing.

She sat down on a form near the door.

The quadrille over, the floor was occupied by groups of

men standing up and talking and servants in livery bearing

large trays. Along the line of seated women painted fans

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were fluttering, bouquets half hid smiling faces, and gold

stoppered scent-bottles were turned in partly-closed hands,

whose white gloves outlined the nails and tightened on

the flesh at the wrists. Lace trimmings, diamond brooches,

medallion bracelets trembled on bodices, gleamed on

breasts, clinked on bare arms.

The hair, well-smoothed over the temples and knotted

at the nape, bore crowns, or bunches, or sprays of

mytosotis, jasmine, pomegranate blossoms, ears of corn,

and corn-flowers. Calmly seated in their places, mothers

with forbidding countenances were wearing red turbans.

Emma’s heart beat rather faster when, her partner

holding her by the tips of the fingers, she took her place in

a line with the dancers, and waited for the first note to

start. But her emotion soon vanished, and, swaying to the

rhythm of the orchestra, she glided forward with slight

movements of the neck. A smile rose to her lips at certain

delicate phrases of the violin, that sometimes played alone

while the other instruments were silent; one could hear

the clear clink of the louis d’or that were being thrown

down upon the card tables in the next room; then all

struck again, the cornet-a-piston uttered its sonorous note,

feet marked time, skirts swelled and rustled, hands touched

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and parted; the same eyes falling before you met yours

again.

A few men (some fifteen or so), of twenty-five to forty,

scattered here and there among the dancers or talking at

the doorways, distinguished themselves from the crowd by

a certain air of breeding, whatever their differences in age,

dress, or face.

Their clothes, better made, seemed of finer cloth, and

their hair, brought forward in curls towards the temples,

glossy with more delicate pomades. They had the

complexion of wealth—that clear complexion that is

heightened by the pallor of porcelain, the shimmer of

satin, the veneer of old furniture, and that an ordered

regimen of exquisite nurture maintains at its best. Their

necks moved easily in their low cravats, their long

whiskers fell over their turned-down collars, they wiped

their lips upon handkerchiefs with embroidered initials

that gave forth a subtle perfume. Those who were

beginning to grow old had an air of youth, while there

was something mature in the faces of the young. In their

unconcerned looks was the calm of passions daily satiated,

and through all their gentleness of manner pierced that

peculiar brutality, the result of a command of half-easy

things, in which force is exercised and vanity amused—the

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management of thoroughbred horses and the society of

loose women.

A few steps from Emma a gentleman in a blue coat was

talking of Italy with a pale young woman wearing a parure

of pearls.

They were praising the breadth of the columns of St.

Peter’s, Tivoly, Vesuvius, Castellamare, and Cassines, the

roses of Genoa, the Coliseum by moonlight. With her

other ear Emma was listening to a conversation full of

words she did not understand. A circle gathered round a

very young man who the week before had beaten ‘Miss

Arabella’ and ‘Romolus,’ and won two thousand louis

jumping a ditch in England. One complained that his

racehorses were growing fat; another of the printers’ errors

that had disfigured the name of his horse.

The atmosphere of the ball was heavy; the lamps were

growing dim.

Guests were flocking to the billiard room. A servant got

upon a chair and broke the window-panes. At the crash of

the glass Madame Bovary turned her head and saw in the

garden the faces of peasants pressed against the window

looking in at them. Then the memory of the Bertaux

came back to her. She saw the farm again, the muddy

pond, her father in a blouse under the apple trees, and she

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saw herself again as formerly, skimming with her finger

the cream off the milk-pans in the dairy. But in the

refulgence of the present hour her past life, so distinct

until then, faded away completely, and she almost doubted

having lived it. She was there; beyond the ball was only

shadow overspreading all the rest. She was just eating a

maraschino ice that she held with her left hand in a silver-

gilt cup, her eyes half-closed, and the spoon between her

teeth.

A lady near her dropped her fan. A gentlemen was

passing.

‘Would you be so good,’ said the lady, ‘as to pick up

my fan that has fallen behind the sofa?’

The gentleman bowed, and as he moved to stretch out

his arm, Emma saw the hand of a young woman throw

something white, folded in a triangle, into his hat. The

gentleman, picking up the fan, offered it to the lady

respectfully; she thanked him with an inclination of the

head, and began smelling her bouquet.

After supper, where were plenty of Spanish and Rhine

wines, soups a la bisque and au lait d’amandes*, puddings a

la Trafalgar, and all sorts of cold meats with jellies that

trembled in the dishes, the carriages one after the other

began to drive off. Raising the corners of the muslin

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curtain, one could see the light of their lanterns

glimmering through the darkness. The seats began to

empty, some card-players were still left; the musicians

were cooling the tips of their fingers on their tongues.

Charles was half asleep, his back propped against a door.

*With almond milk

At three o’clock the cotillion began. Emma did not

know how to waltz. Everyone was waltzing,

Mademoiselle d’Andervilliers herself and the Marquis; only

the guests staying at the castle were still there, about a

dozen persons.

One of the waltzers, however, who was familiarly

called Viscount, and whose low cut waistcoat seemed

moulded to his chest, came a second time to ask Madame

Bovary to dance, assuring her that he would guide her,

and that she would get through it very well.

They began slowly, then went more rapidly. They

turned; all around them was turning—the lamps, the

furniture, the wainscoting, the floor, like a disc on a pivot.

On passing near the doors the bottom of Emma’s dress

caught against his trousers.

Their legs commingled; he looked down at her; she

raised her eyes to his. A torpor seized her; she stopped.

They started again, and with a more rapid movement; the

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Viscount, dragging her along disappeared with her to the

end of the gallery, where panting, she almost fell, and for a

moment rested her head upon his breast. And then, still

turning, but more slowly, he guided her back to her seat.

She leaned back against the wall and covered her eyes with

her hands.

When she opened them again, in the middle of the

drawing room three waltzers were kneeling before a lady

sitting on a stool.

She chose the Viscount, and the violin struck up once

more.

Everyone looked at them. They passed and re-passed,

she with rigid body, her chin bent down, and he always in

the same pose, his figure curved, his elbow rounded, his

chin thrown forward. That woman knew how to waltz!

They kept up a long time, and tired out all the others.

Then they talked a few moments longer, and after the

goodnights, or rather good mornings, the guests of the

chateau retired to bed.

Charles dragged himself up by the balusters. His ‘knees

were going up into his body.’ He had spent five

consecutive hours standing bolt upright at the card tables,

watching them play whist, without understanding

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anything about it, and it was with a deep sigh of relief that

he pulled off his boots.

Emma threw a shawl over her shoulders, opened the

window, and leant out.

The night was dark; some drops of rain were falling.

She breathed in the damp wind that refreshed her eyelids.

The music of the ball was still murmuring in her ears. And

she tried to keep herself awake in order to prolong the

illusion that this luxurious life that she would soon have to

give up.

Day began to break. She looked long at the windows

of the chateau, trying to guess which were the rooms of all

those she had noticed the evening before. She would fain

have known their lives, have penetrated, blended with

them. But she was shivering with cold. She undressed, and

cowered down between the sheets against Charles, who

was asleep.

There were a great many people to luncheon. The

repast lasted ten minutes; no liqueurs were served, which

astonished the doctor.

Next, Mademoiselle d’Andervilliers collected some

pieces of roll in a small basket to take them to the swans

on the ornamental waters, and they went to walk in the

hot-houses, where strange plants, bristling with hairs, rose

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in pyramids under hanging vases, whence, as from overfilled

nests of serpents, fell long green cords interlacing.

The orangery, which was at the other end, led by a

covered way to the outhouses of the chateau. The

Marquis, to amuse the young woman, took her to see the

stables.

Above the basket-shaped racks porcelain slabs bore the

names of the horses in black letters. Each animal in its stall

whisked its tail when anyone went near and said ‘Tchk!

tchk!’ The boards of the harness room shone like the

flooring of a drawing room. The carriage harness was piled

up in the middle against two twisted columns, and the

bits, the whips, the spurs, the curbs, were ranged in a line

all along the wall.

Charles, meanwhile, went to ask a groom to put his

horse to. The dog-cart was brought to the foot of the

steps, and, all the parcels being crammed in, the Bovarys

paid their respects to the Marquis and Marchioness and set

out again for Tostes.

Emma watched the turning wheels in silence. Charles,

on the extreme edge of the seat, held the reins with his

two arms wide apart, and the little horse ambled along in

the shafts that were too big for him. The loose reins

hanging over his crupper were wet with foam, and the

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box fastened on behind the chaise gave great regular

bumps against it.

They were on the heights of Thibourville when

suddenly some horsemen with cigars between their lips

passed laughing. Emma thought she recognized the

Viscount, turned back, and caught on the horizon only

the movement of the heads rising or falling with the

unequal cadence of the trot or gallop.

A mile farther on they had to stop to mend with some

string the traces that had broken.

But Charles, giving a last look to the harness, saw

something on the ground between his horse’s legs, and he

picked up a cigar-case with a green silk border and

beblazoned in the centre like the door of a carriage.