Emma, opposite, watched him; she did not share his humiliation; she felt

another--that of having supposed such a man was worth anything. As if

twenty times already she had not sufficiently perceived his mediocrity.

Charles was walking up and down the room; his boots creaked on the

floor.

"Sit down," she said; "you fidget me."

He sat down again.

How was it that she--she, who was so intelligent--could have allowed

herself to be deceived again? and through what deplorable madness had

she thus ruined her life by continual sacrifices? She recalled all her

instincts of luxury, all the privations of her soul, the sordidness of

marriage, of the household, her dream sinking into the mire like wounded

swallows; all that she had longed for, all that she had denied herself,

all that she might have had! And for what? for what?

In the midst of the silence that hung over the village a heart-rending

cry rose on the air. Bovary turned white to fainting. She knit her

brows with a nervous gesture, then went on. And it was for him, for this

creature, for this man, who understood nothing, who felt nothing! For he

was there quite quiet, not even suspecting that the ridicule of his name

would henceforth sully hers as well as his. She had made efforts to love

him, and she had repented with tears for having yielded to another!

"But it was perhaps a valgus!" suddenly exclaimed Bovary, who was

meditating.

At the unexpected shock of this phrase falling on her thought like a

leaden bullet on a silver plate, Emma, shuddering, raised her head in

order to find out what he meant to say; and they looked at the other in

silence, almost amazed to see each other, so far sundered were they

by their inner thoughts. Charles gazed at her with the dull look of

a drunken man, while he listened motionless to the last cries of the

sufferer, that followed each other in long-drawn modulations, broken by

sharp spasms like the far-off howling of some beast being slaughtered.

Emma bit her wan lips, and rolling between her fingers a piece of coral

that she had broken, fixed on Charles the burning glance of her eyes

like two arrows of fire about to dart forth. Everything in him irritated

her now; his face, his dress, what he did not say, his whole person, his

existence, in fine. She repented of her past virtue as of a crime, and

what still remained of it rumbled away beneath the furious blows of her

pride. She revelled in all the evil ironies of triumphant adultery.

The memory of her lover came back to her with dazzling attractions; she

threw her whole soul into it, borne away towards this image with a fresh

enthusiasm; and Charles seemed to her as much removed from her life, as

absent forever, as impossible and annihilated, as if he had been about

to die and were passing under her eyes.




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