Madame Bovary - Page 71/262

They were talking of a troupe of Spanish dancers who were expected

shortly at the Rouen theatre.

"Are you going?" she asked.

"If I can," he answered.

Had they nothing else to say to one another? Yet their eyes were full

of more serious speech, and while they forced themselves to find trivial

phrases, they felt the same languor stealing over them both. It was the

whisper of the soul, deep, continuous, dominating that of their voices.

Surprised with wonder at this strange sweetness, they did not think of

speaking of the sensation or of seeking its cause. Coming joys, like

tropical shores, throw over the immensity before them their inborn

softness, an odorous wind, and we are lulled by this intoxication

without a thought of the horizon that we do not even know.

In one place the ground had been trodden down by the cattle; they had to

step on large green stones put here and there in the mud.

She often stopped a moment to look where to place her foot, and

tottering on a stone that shook, her arms outspread, her form bent

forward with a look of indecision, she would laugh, afraid of falling

into the puddles of water.

When they arrived in front of her garden, Madame Bovary opened the

little gate, ran up the steps and disappeared.

Leon returned to his office. His chief was away; he just glanced at the

briefs, then cut himself a pen, and at last took up his hat and went

out.

He went to La Pature at the top of the Argueil hills at the beginning of

the forest; he threw himself upon the ground under the pines and watched

the sky through his fingers.

"How bored I am!" he said to himself, "how bored I am!"

He thought he was to be pitied for living in this village, with Homais

for a friend and Monsieru Guillaumin for master. The latter, entirely

absorbed by his business, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and red

whiskers over a white cravat, understood nothing of mental refinements,

although he affected a stiff English manner, which in the beginning had

impressed the clerk.

As to the chemist's spouse, she was the best wife in Normandy, gentle

as a sheep, loving her children, her father, her mother, her cousins,

weeping for other's woes, letting everything go in her household, and

detesting corsets; but so slow of movement, such a bore to listen to, so

common in appearance, and of such restricted conversation, that although

she was thirty, he only twenty, although they slept in rooms next each

other and he spoke to her daily, he never thought that she might be a

woman for another, or that she possessed anything else of her sex than

the gown.