"Why, haven't you ever seen anything?" Felicite answered laughing. "As

if your mistress, Madame Homais, didn't wear the same."

"Oh, I daresay! Madame Homais!" And he added with a meditative air, "As

if she were a lady like madame!"

But Felicite grew impatient of seeing him hanging round her. She was six

years older than he, and Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's servant, was

beginning to pay court to her.

"Let me alone," she said, moving her pot of starch. "You'd better be

off and pound almonds; you are always dangling about women. Before you

meddle with such things, bad boy, wait till you've got a beard to your

chin."

"Oh, don't be cross! I'll go and clean her boots."

And he at once took down from the shelf Emma's boots, all coated with

mud, the mud of the rendezvous, that crumbled into powder beneath his

fingers, and that he watched as it gently rose in a ray of sunlight.

"How afraid you are of spoiling them!" said the servant, who wasn't so

particular when she cleaned them herself, because as soon as the stuff

of the boots was no longer fresh madame handed them over to her.

Emma had a number in her cupboard that she squandered one after the

other, without Charles allowing himself the slightest observation. So

also he disbursed three hundred francs for a wooden leg that she thought

proper to make a present of to Hippolyte. Its top was covered with cork,

and it had spring joints, a complicated mechanism, covered over by black

trousers ending in a patent-leather boot. But Hippolyte, not daring

to use such a handsome leg every day, begged Madame Bovary to get him

another more convenient one. The doctor, of course, had again to defray

the expense of this purchase.

So little by little the stable-man took up his work again. One saw him

running about the village as before, and when Charles heard from afar

the sharp noise of the wooden leg, he at once went in another direction.

It was Monsieur Lheureux, the shopkeeper, who had undertaken the order;

this provided him with an excuse for visiting Emma. He chatted with her

about the new goods from Paris, about a thousand feminine trifles, made

himself very obliging, and never asked for his money. Emma yielded to

this lazy mode of satisfying all her caprices. Thus she wanted to have

a very handsome ridding-whip that was at an umbrella-maker's at Rouen

to give to Rodolphe. The week after Monsieur Lheureux placed it on her

table.




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