Soon, however, it seemed to her that someone was walking on the

pavement. It was he, no doubt. She went downstairs, crossed the yard. He

was there outside. She threw herself into his arms.

"Do take care!" he said.

"Ah! if you knew!" she replied.

And she began telling him everything, hurriedly, disjointedly,

exaggerating the facts, inventing many, and so prodigal of parentheses

that he understood nothing of it.

"Come, my poor angel, courage! Be comforted! be patient!"

"But I have been patient; I have suffered for four years. A love like

ours ought to show itself in the face of heaven. They torture me! I can

bear it no longer! Save me!"

She clung to Rodolphe. Her eyes, full of tears, flashed like flames

beneath a wave; her breast heaved; he had never loved her so much, so

that he lost his head and said "What is, it? What do you wish?"

"Take me away," she cried, "carry me off! Oh, I pray you!"

And she threw herself upon his mouth, as if to seize there the

unexpected consent if breathed forth in a kiss.

"But--" Rodolphe resumed.

"What?"

"Your little girl!"

She reflected a few moments, then replied-"We will take her! It can't be helped!"

"What a woman!" he said to himself, watching her as she went. For she

had run into the garden. Someone was calling her.

On the following days Madame Bovary senior was much surprised at the

change in her daughter-in-law. Emma, in fact, was showing herself more

docile, and even carried her deference so far as to ask for a recipe for

pickling gherkins.

Was it the better to deceive them both? Or did she wish by a sort of

voluptuous stoicism to feel the more profoundly the bitterness of the

things she was about to leave?

But she paid no heed to them; on the contrary, she lived as lost in the

anticipated delight of her coming happiness.

It was an eternal subject for conversation with Rodolphe. She leant on

his shoulder murmuring-"Ah! when we are in the mail-coach! Do you think about it? Can it be? It

seems to me that the moment I feel the carriage start, it will be as if

we were rising in a balloon, as if we were setting out for the clouds.

Do you know that I count the hours? And you?"

Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this period; she had

that indefinable beauty that results from joy, from enthusiasm, from

success, and that is only the harmony of temperament with circumstances.

Her desires, her sorrows, the experience of pleasure, and her ever-young

illusions, that had, as soil and rain and winds and the sun make flowers

grow, gradually developed her, and she at length blossomed forth in all

the plenitude of her nature. Her eyelids seemed chiselled expressly for

her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong

inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner

of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down. One would have

thought that an artist apt in conception had arranged the curls of hair

upon her neck; they fell in a thick mass, negligently, and with the

changing chances of their adultery, that unbound them every day. Her

voice now took more mellow infections, her figure also; something subtle

and penetrating escaped even from the folds of her gown and from the

line of her foot. Charles, as when they were first married, thought her

delicious and quite irresistible.




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